BANT vs MEDDIC: Why BANT is From a Bygone Era

So, you may be asking yourself why BANT is being labeled as a sales framework for a time gone by.

It is quite simple for most sellers - those who have fully understood and adjusted to the hyper-modernizing sales industry we operate in today.

BANT is old, outdated, inefficient, and lacks effectiveness.

The main problem with BANT is the way it looks past the whole focal point of a sales process - the customer. It gives them little to no value during the process, but also creates a framework for a seller where the potential customer has to justify to the seller why they should be in the deal - now ask yourself if a framework like this can ever give you long-term success, especially on the highest stage. 

Ask yourself internally how you would feel if a salesperson was grilling you on how qualified you are to be buying from them. How would you react if they ultimately decided that you were a complete waste of time? Many buyers have found buying from a BANT-focused seller incredibly tedious and frustrating (thankfully they are becoming dinosaurs in the modern sales world).

BANT is becoming quickly outdated in a world where the customer is put first and the seller must work around them at every turn.

BANT is bygone because of what it stands for just as much as how it is applied:

• Budget - BANT looks at whether your potential buyer has the money to make the purchase, and if they do not they are not worth the time. There is a terrible motif behind this, as trying to qualify a prospect based on this theorem before you have gone into any reasonable depth of qualification is terrible selling, pure and simple. Budgets can adapt, disappear, grow, and duplicate on the whims of so many people from within an organization - to judge a buyer based on the ‘B’ of BANT is a huge error.

• Authority - If you are putting on your binoculars during a sales process and only taking note of those with authority, you are putting yourself on a one-way sales train to lose a deal. In the modern sales world, there is very rarely just one buyer with the ultimate authority. You are often dealing with big groups, multiple influential decision-makers within an organization, and more. There may be one person who does the contract but you may often see a huge amount of stakeholders depending on the scale of the deal, so just looking for something like ‘authority’ is foolish.

• Need - If you are trying to qualify a prospect based on their need for your product, that is incredibly foolhardy. Imagine qualifying potential customers for your product based on whether they genuinely need it or not. Does the customer always know they need your product at the beginning of a sales process? Is it not possible for pain points to be developed, and the product to be an ailment to said pain? Quite often, you will find customers that do not know they need your product, and that they have Metrics that are underlying that can turn the tables on the urgency that they need your product. 

• Timing - Similarly to the way budget is used, this is incredibly tenuous as timings can change fast in a sales world which is rapid and unpredictable. Timings in a deal can change for an unlimited number of reasons, whether it is internal movings in a company, external factors that are changing the landscapes of an industry, it can be the economy or it can be something as simple as the customer taking their time to make a decision. Timing is an important factor in selling, but it has to be accepted as something fluid and shifting, not something static that BANT approaches it as. 

After you have addressed BANT for what it is, the dinosaur framework for conducting sales, you may be asking what the modern, dynamic, and data-driven approach is in sales: introducing MEDDIC. 

MEDDIC is a much more accurate and dynamic approach to qualifying and assessing your sales game and how your leads or deals are moving. 

MEDDIC is broken down into Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion, all of which help buyers become more measured, effective, and focused when it comes to making the most qualified and accurate decisions during the sales process.

• Metrics - This is usually the time, money, or people factors that concern a business when you are approaching a deal. These things can be condensed into an ROI metric, allowing you to apply this to your solution, giving your potential customer a tangible, real number that they can use internally for your business.

• Economic Buyer - This is the closest one to ‘authority’ but looks at the chain of command or approval, and also looks at who is in control of the budget. 

• Decision Criteria - From your end, do you have everything in place that aligns with how the customer makes decisions? Do you fulfill the things they value or place importance on the most?

• Decision Process - How does the customer organization make decisions and what happens if they do not perceive your business as a front runner? 

• Identify Pain - This is the most straightforward one, looking at how you can spot pain for the customer organization. 

• Champion - The most important one in the deal, the Champion can be someone who sells your deal internally but can also give you key information relating to the progress of a deal. 

Whilst MEDDIC can seem more complex and difficult to learn, it is so much more rewarding than BANT. BANT seems easy because it lacks the complexity and depth needed to navigate the dynamic sales world that you encounter today. 

BANT is comfort, and nothing good is ever achieved from comfort. By realizing that MEDDIC can allow you to enhance and level up your sales game, the best thing you can do is begin the steps today to become MEDDIC-qualified and be the best salesperson you can be.