If you have any experience in Lead Generation, then you are familiar with “BANT”. Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame are commonly used criteria for qualifying leads. If all four criteria are confirmed, then the lead is considered “qualified” and it enters the sales pipeline.

The Common Challenge:
Here’s the challenge that many companies will admit: “If I hold to all four criteria, then I will not qualify enough leads. But if I remove any one criterion, then I will qualify too many leads. Either way, I can’t win!” Yes, you can win. There is another way…

The Simple Solution:

The following lead qualification methodology is easy to deploy and can be quickly configured in most SFA or CRM systems.  I call it the “Weighted BANT” methodology:

Apply a weighting to each of the BANT criteria (0, 1, 2, 3 or 4) and define each weighting. Below is a sample set of definitions for Authority:

0 = Has no authority and has no access to the decision maker(s).
1 = Has no authority, but has direct access to the decision maker(s).
2 = Has influence and has access to the decision maker(s).
3 = Is one of several decision makers.
4 = Has complete authority as the sole decision maker.

Define a similar scale for Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame.

Now qualify your leads based on the sum of all four scores. For example:

0-4 = Unqualified (don’t waste your time).
5-8 = Slightly Qualified (nurture it).
9-12 = Qualified (follow-up).
13-16 = Highly Qualified (follow-up immediately).

The “Weighted BANT” methodology provides enough flexibility to customize for your sales organization and enough simplicity to deploy and train quickly and easily.

If you choose to adopt this methodology, please share your results with me.

Enjoy!