BANTist or Bandit: What’s Your Sales Team’s Mentality and Does It Work for Your Market?

The meaning of BANT is sales and marketing slang and an acronym for a particular way of qualifying deals. It stands for:

• Budget – Does the prospect have available funds for the purchase?
• Authority – Does the prospect have the authority to make the purchase?
• Need – Does the prospect actually need it?
• Timing – Can the prospect use it soon and is urgent for them to get it?

Imagining you have a deal pipe full of opportunities, BANT would help you determine which are most likely to move to closed-won first and thus, where a particular salesperson should focus if we’re taking a lowest-hanging fruit approach.

What Is a Bandit?

Whether in Medieval folklore or Wild West history, a bandit is someone who builds a reputation for identifying opportunities to win money and successfully getting paid over and over.

Think Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, etc. Yes, what they were doing was illegal but that’s not the point. The point is that they made many scores and paid their way in the world while being able to handle ambiguity in unpredictable scenarios where the other party absolutely did not want to give them money.

How Do Market and Team Composition Favor a More BANTist or Bandit Approach?

We looked at a bandit approach as being more quintessential hunter. Let’s redefine BANT as order taking. We’ll use opening bank accounts at the local bank branch as an example.

In typical bank marketing, the corporate entity has a distinct marketing team that builds a brand, awareness, a website, purchases billboards, etc. to get strangers’ attention with the hopes that they’ll start a relationship with the bank (often by opening a deposit account).

Now let’s imagine your typical branch banker. This is the person that has a mini-office, not the teller who is taking care of actual deposits.

Our branch banker gets a steady stream of people that come in, are asked what they need, answer they want to open a bank account, and are directed to sit with our branch banker. Awesome. Those folks have BANT.

Dynamics that Favor BANT

It would be irrational for our branch banker to turn off their lights and start going door to door trying to find people who might need a deposit account (that would be hunting) while ignoring people that are already in the bank due to effective marketing.

We would advise any branch bankers with this dynamic to stay at their desk and if wait times are too high, advise the bank to add staff at that location.

Dynamics that Favor a Mixed Approach

Many branch bankers have empty desks. Creative marketing ideas for banks (without Sales Funnel Professor) are hard to come by and the US market is ultra-fragmented with credit union competition for deposit accounts as well.

So many branch bankers would be staring at a wall if they took a philosophical BANTist approach: nobody in front of them, no orders to take.

So they don’t. Branch bankers often network like crazy. They join a BNI and might be active in charities or a church or both. They attend public events, sponsor, parades, engage with chambers of commerce, etc.

More sophisticated bank marketing strategies include looking at who has high balances in checking accounts and doing targeted outreach to see if there’s an opportunity to sell an interest-bearing account or if a loan might be needed (cash is on hand for a down payment).

Dynamics that Favor a Bandit Approach

Startups need to be breaking new ground, especially if an influential venture-capitalist is in the mix. It’s just too hard to have huge gains with a “me, too” product.

But if the problem the product solves isn’t clearly articulated or the solution isn’t a known commodity, there just won’t be very many orders to take.

Meetings with people who are interested won’t appear to have BANT, in large part because they don’t really get it yet.

But good sales people create their own BANT by educating potential clients.

Case Study: Creating a Bandit Approach Creating BANT

With many things SaaS, there’s a 10X argument to be made for a new class of software, but there’s also a lack of “order taking” to do.

There are 1.2M Google searches per month for the term “CRM,” a well-known class of software in B2B sales. If you offer a differentiated CRM and can fill your pipeline with people requesting sales meetings who already know what the software does and what it can achieve for them. They’ve likely used them in the past.

But for a new class of software like apprenticeship management software, there are only 200 searches per month. But there are 28000 apprenticeship programs (all of which have multiple managers) just in the United States and guess what: they’re struggling with inefficiencies that great software can solve. But in large part, the market hasn’t come to the realization that SaaS software can solve it. And for those that think there might be a software solution, they don’t really know what the features might be.

And yet people request meetings with GoSprout all the time off of both an ABM sales funnel and their organic and paid search funnels.

Do they have BANT at the start of the calls? Hardly any.

Do they end up purchasing (sometimes after a single meeting)? Yes.

BANT for a New, Unknown Class of Software (Apprenticeship Management as an example):

	BANTist	Bandit
Budget	Only someone who already knows what apprenticeship management software is can have a budget for it. Don’t accept meetings with companies that don’t indicate they already have budget approval.	Full-time employees are more expensive than apprentices, who earn less and are largely subsidized by government programs and grants. The revenue cost of not being able to staff for client demand is huge. The cost of hiring inadequately trained or “bad fit” hire is huge. Apprenticeships graduate with the required skills and the employer gets to cherry pick the best ones for the full-time workforce. Thus, any hiring company in an industry that supports registered apprenticeships has budget.
Authority	Only someone who knows what the software is and can make HR technology provisioning decisions is worth meeting with. Don’t accept meetings with people with the wrong titles.	All employees who propose cost-saving solutions are rewarded. Getting sign-off from a boss to save money is not challenging.
Need	Only someone who says they need apprenticeship management software is worthy of a meeting.	Everyone within an industry that supports apprenticeships and has hiring challenges has need. Knowing that a class of software exists or not does have anything to with having need to be more efficient.
Timing	Only someone who says they are ready to purchase apprenticeship management software is ready to meet with.	All companies with logical management will take hugely profitable decisions as soon as they can. Not being able to say they’re ready to purchase something they don’t understand doesn’t mean they won’t purchase immediately once they do understand.

How Should Senior Sales Executives Be Wired?

With great marketing, it’s possible to temporarily drown a company from both a sales and operational perspective. At Sales Funnel Professor, we’ve had to pause paid acquisition and help companies fix internal operations a number of times (and we’re not even a two-year-old company yet).

In those scenarios, it’s perfectly reasonable to work an overflowing deal pipeline with BANT in mind temporarily.

But that’s not normal and companies need to service the higher hanging fruit quickly if they can. If they don’t, someone else will and marketing is just educating the market about competitor solutions.

The challenge with hiring a senior sales executive that can only ever be a BANTist is the rest of the team will only see that example. When the pipe is not overflowing with BANT qualified deals, money still needs to be made.

So if at all possible, find a senior sales executive that can run the most efficient funnel within both abundant and scarce situations.

To use the professional athlete analogy, your senior sales executive should be able to “make something out of nothing” when play breaks down and inspire junior sales folks to work their deals, not just be available to take an order from a tiny segment of the addressable market.