by Paul Cherry
•Describe for me what an ideal customer looks like.
•What’s it going to take to get more of these types of customers?
•What do your customers expect from you as a vendor or supplier? What’s the one area where you shine in meeting and/or exceeding their expectations? Where do you see room for improvement?
•How have your customers’ expectations changed over the last few years? What changes do you see moving forward?
•What steps will you need to take in order to adapt to those changing expectations?
•Customers have a lot of choices today. What would you say is the #1 reason why they buy from you and not elsewhere?
Be selective to whom you ask these questions. For example, if you asked these questions of a purchasing agent, you would get a blank stare. That’s because purchasing has little, if any, interaction with external customers. So, when you ask these questions, make sure they are directed to people who have significant contact with external customers. In addition, people whose jobs are more removed from external customers can have personal or political agendas that conflict with the company’s overall goals. That’s because they are typically competing with other internal agendas, departments, and budgets.
Questions to Disrupt Existing Vendor Relationships
Nearly every prospect will tell you, “We already have someone who does that for us.” After all, if a need exists, the buyer must have some type of solution in place already. (In fact, if they don’t, you should ask yourself whether you really have an opportunity.) Sooner or later, you’ll have to disrupt these relationships.
Sometimes it’s easy—if the buyer is dissatisfied with the current vendor or thinks they might get a better deal with you. Often, though, it’s more challenging. You’re asking buyers to admit that they might have made a mistake when they chose their current vendor. And you have to be careful not to disparage an existing relationship, while simultaneously planting the seed that there might be something better out there.
Phrase your questions in ways that won’t end up undermining your efforts to win your customer’s business. For example, don’t just ask your customer, “What do you like about your current supplier?” If she’s fairly content with the status quo, she just might start talking about all the positive qualities of that relationship. And if things are going just dandy between them, what does she need you for?
Here are better ways to get that information without undermining what you have to offer:
•Would you share with me the ideal qualities you look for in a vendor?
•How’s that compare with your current situation?
•When you originally selected this vendor, what were your selection criteria? In what ways have your criteria changed as you evaluate your needs today? What would you like to see happen in the future?
•If you could enhance one thing about your vendor’s qualities, what would that be?
•I understand that you have a good relationship with__________. However, different suppliers have different strengths. Could you help me understand where they seem to be meeting your needs and one area they can improve on?
•How would you rate your current vendor relationship on a scale of 1 to 10? (When your customer states a number, urge her to elaborate.) All right, when you say 7, what would you want your vendor to do to move it to a 10?
Questions About Competition and Trends
No business can survive without periodically assessing its competition. Similarly, no business can thrive without a keen awareness of the trends affecting its industry. As you serve your customers, you should ask questions about these two very important aspects of business.
These questions will force your customers to focus on the future while critically analyzing their present situation. They will have to ask themselves, “Can I get where I want to go with what I have now?” No matter what the answer, you will have provided them a valuable service by getting them to answer the questions.
Here are some great questions about competition and trends:
•How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
•In the next three years, who do you think will emerge as your biggest threat?
•In the next three years, what do you think your greatest opportunity will be?
•Which of your product’s or service’s strengths will allow you to continue your success?
•How do you picture the direction of your industry in three years? Five years? Ten years?
•What change could cut into your share of the market?
•How does the aging of the baby boomer generation (for example) affect your share of the market? (You could use any applicable trend for this example.)
•How does your company see itself today? How has it changed over the last five years? Where would it like to be in the next five years?
•How does your company approach change?
•What pending legislation (or market conditions, competitive threats, demographic trends, organizational changes, etc.) could change the way you do business?
•What are the market forces you are most concerned about?
•How is your company addressing the competitive pressures of the market?
•What issues do you think your company must address or overcome in order to be more successful? What specific steps or actions will you need to take?
•Tell me what you’ll need to be doing differently to overcome some of the challenges in your market.
•Tell me what’s keeping you from dominating your competition.
Questions About Company Culture
“Company culture” can refer to many things, including how the employees feel about the company; what the relationships are between different departments or between headquarters and its subsidiaries; the relationships your contact has with others on her team, with her boss, and with all of the other departments in the company; and how changes are proposed and implemented.
Questions about company culture allow you to become a “fly on the wall” in your customer’s boardroom. They give you access to the inner workings of the organization, and help you anticipate problems, obstacles, and objections before they occur.
Company-culture questions are especially useful in three situations.
The first is when you’re trying to figure out how your contact fits into the big picture. In this case, the contact’s perception of the company culture can tell you a lot about how much influence they wield. Do they project a sense of ownership, or do they describe the culture as something external that comes down from the higher-ups, and over which they feel little control? Do people feel valued, empowered, and respected? If your contact sees company culture as something that’s imposed on them, versus something they help create, you’re probably not talking to a person with a lot of influence.
The second situation is when you’re trying to evaluate the quality of the sales opportunity. Unless you’re selling a transactional, one-call-and-close product, you’re going to be investing time and effort with this organization, and you want to know that your time is well spent. If you’re trying to sell into a dysfunctional organization, you’ll probably be frustrated. Or if you’re selling to a buyer whose values aren’t aligned with what you sell—for example, a company that focuses on price when your value proposition is all about long-term value—you need to consider whether this misalignment will lead to a lot of wheel-spinning with not much to show for it. So your questions about culture should be designed to tell you something about the quality of the organization. Do they attract and retain top talent? Is it a place people want to work? Do they take pride in their products? Do they sell on value and not price?
The third area where you want to dig deep into culture is when you’re talking to top executives. Their number-one job is to get results through other people, and company culture is one of the tools they use to get their teams pulling in the right direction.
Here are some examples of questions about company cult
ure:
•Tell me how you are trying to create and drive change in order to achieve your goals.
•How would you describe your culture today and how are you looking to enhance it moving forward?
•How would people working for your company describe the atmosphere to outsiders?
•When making a change, how do you introduce it to your employees?
•What plans does your organization have for ______ in the future?
•How do the departments in your company interact?
•Tell me about some of the recent changes in your company’s organizational structure.
•How would you describe the relationship between your corporate headquarters and your subsidiaries?
•Which departments (for example, marketing, personnel, or research and development) lead the way in innovation or have a significant impact on the bottom line?
•Is there a single department that makes more of the company’s decisions than any other?
•How does your company deal with issues of _______?
Questions About Goals
These questions are designed to assess a buyer’s aspirations and desires. Where do they want to go? How fast do they want to grow? What do they want to achieve, improve, enhance, fix, resolve, etc., and by when? These questions will help you find out whether buyers are truly open to change and whether you can help them get there.
Here are some examples:
•Share with me your long-term goals . . . short-term goals.
•Can you prioritize your goals?
•Tell me how your goals align with your (team, department, corporate, etc.) goals.
•Help me understand what’s driving you and your team to achieve these goals.
•What concerns do you have if you don’t achieve them?
•How do this year’s goals differ from last year’s goals?
•If you could achieve these goals, what would it mean to you?
•Share with me what you see is the biggest opportunity for you to leverage success.
•Describe your goals to increase market share. What’s working well for you? What’s not?
•How do you envision success ___ years from now?
Questions About Action Steps
A good way to get clarity on goals is to follow up with questions about what actions will need to occur in order to achieve the goals.
When the prospect can provide clarity to action questions, you know that he or she has given some thought to how the goal will be achieved—which is a strong sign that the buyer is motivated.
The action question is all about, “How are you going to achieve this goal?” Think of someone who wants to start an exercise program to get in shape. A goal question would be, “How much weight do you want to lose and by when?” An action question would be, “How are you going to do it?” When the response provides clarity—for example, “I will eliminate saturated and trans fats, restrict my calorie intake to fifteen hundred calories per day, exercise daily for thirty minutes, and get eight hours of sleep per night,” you know this person has a good game plan. If the answer is, “Eat less and exercise more,” you have to wonder: If they haven’t put any energy into designing an action plan, how much energy will they put into actually doing something?
The same goes for prospects. If they haven’t identified action steps, they probably won’t have much impetus to move forward.
And, by the way, don’t be fooled by an answer like this: “You’re the expert. You tell me what we have to do.” Of course you want to work hard to solve your customers’ problems, but they have to work, too. If they don’t have some skin in the game, they’ll bail the minute things get tough.
Here are some questions you can ask:
•Based on the goals you shared with me, what has to happen to get there?
•What actions will you need to take between now and _____ months from now to achieve your goals?
•What have you tried in the past to achieve this type of goal? What worked, what didn’t, and why?
•Share with me what others on your team will need to do in order to achieve these goals.
•What do you anticipate might get in the way, and how will you address this hurdle?
•You have an ambitious goal. Where can you focus your resources to ensure success?
•Tell me what you’ll need to do more of . . . less of . . . to achieve the results you’re looking for.
•Walk me through the implementation phase.
•How will you measure progress?
The Question of Why
“Why” questions are among the most powerful of all questions. They allow you to understand the motives of your customers—what they want and why they want it. Some customers act out of fear, others out of self-interest, and still others out of a desire to increase profits. Being able to uncover motives brings you invaluable insight into how your customers operate. This knowledge then allows you to provide individualized service for your customers.
Getting information on motives is tricky. If you simply ask, “Why?” over and over again, your customers will probably get annoyed or be offended.
Here are some examples that might help you probe deeper and to better understand what’s motivating your customers:
•Tell me, what is prompting your interest in . . . ?
•What’s causing this to happen?
•What’s driving the need for change?
•What originally led you to this decision?
•Walk me through the steps that led you to this conclusion.
•What do you hope to accomplish?
•Share with me what is motivating your decision to . . . ?
•Why is this important to you?
•What is prompting you to consider taking action?
•What’s in it for you to implement this?
•If you can achieve this result, what will it mean to you?
•If you are not able to achieve this result, what concerns do you have? And how might not achieving it personally affect you?
CHAPTER
13
Questions About BANT
Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing
MANY YEARS AGO, the big sales brains at IBM came up with a way to evaluate the quality of sales leads. The idea was to establish a short list of questions that every sales rep had to be able to answer—at least tentatively—before a lead could go into their pipeline. These questions focused on four key areas. Leads were considered “validated” if they met at least three of the four criteria.
IBM, being IBM, converted the system into an acronym: BANT. It stands for:
B—Budget. Is there money available? Is it sufficient for whatever solution you’re likely to propose?
A—Authority. Does the person or people I’m working with have the power to make a deal happen?
N—Need. Is there an urgent need for what I’m selling?
T—Time frame. Is the buyer ready to move forward immediately? If not, is there an agreed-upon timetable for implementation?
BANT is a deceptively simple concept that has withstood the test of time. In various versions, it’s become a key metric that many, if not most, sales organizations use to qualify sales leads. Sometimes it’s called ANUM—Authority, Need, Urgency, and Money. Another version is CHAMP—Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization. Others have developed different variants. But the basic idea is the same.
BANT is powerful because it gives salespeople a consistent scorecard, along with a way to structure their questions and gather the information needed for qualifying in one encounter. Nothing is more frustrating than spending time with a prospect and walking away wondering, “Is this a real opportunity or not?” BANT can tell you. If you don’t have answers to all four questions, you haven’t dug enough.
These questions won’t put off real buyers. Many prospects are aware of the concept and know why you’re asking. These are widely accepted as legitimate questions that any competent sal
esperson should be asking. (In fact, if your prospect is unwilling or unable to answer them, that’s a pretty strong indication that you’re wasting your time.)
That said, you must lay the groundwork first. Imagine if you got a call from a salesperson who asks a few cursory questions about your business and then starts badgering you about your budget, your decisionmaking authority, and so on. You’d end that call pretty quickly. So these questions come after you establish some rapport with a prospect and both of you agree that you’d like to see if there’s a basis for doing business together.
Of course, the information you collect at the beginning of the sales process will be tentative and incomplete. For example, buyers may have budget allocated or at least a commitment from management to spend the money. But as company finances change, so do budgets. For that reason, you’ll want to return to BANT throughout the sales process to make sure the opportunity remains viable.
You’re not looking for certainty. You’re looking for commitment. Yes, a budget may change. Authority may shift. Needs may evolve. Timetables may slip. But what you really want to know is whether, at this point in time, you’re talking to someone who is willing and able to buy from you.
As you consider BANT, keep in mind that you don’t have to address these in the order presented here. In fact, my preferred approach is usually to cover Needs first, followed by Time frame, then Budget, and finally Authority. I find that the conversation flows much more naturally that way. When you start with Needs, it’s all about them. You’re much more likely to build rapport and get them to open up than if you start the conversation with Budget or Authority. (However, it does make for an awkward acronym: NTBA!)
Need
For the purposes of BANT, “need” is about two things.
The first is urgency. People “need” all sorts of things. What you want to find out is whether there is a need that is sufficiently compelling, at this point in time, to overcome the buyer’s inertia and lead to a purchase.