Knowledge
How to qualify clients in B2B sales
Client qualification in B2B sales
From what I see, as many as 30% of open sales opportunities in B2B companies should be thrown out of the sales process. They are not bad in themselves, only they never had a chance of closing from the start, and nobody checked that, because there were no criteria by which it could be assessed.
You have three salespeople and you fix this one parameter? You will be able to offer one of them an external career path. Unless, after cleaning the pipeline, enough promising opportunities remain that there is work for them too, because that happens as well. Companies that start qualifying often discover that there were not too few leads at all. Simply nobody separated the promising deals from those that only took up space in the CRM.
Where does this come from? There was no qualification, or it came down to the client saying they were interested. And interest is not yet qualification.
Why qualify at all
Qualification is the decision whether this contact is worth my selling time. Someone who got in touch does not have to be a potential client at all. It is similar with enquiries: some should never reach a salesperson, and quite a few conversations should not end with a proposal.
It sounds obvious, and yet companies do not do it, because they are afraid to reject anyone. They reason like this: since someone got in touch, they are interested, and since they are interested, we have to talk to them. It ends with the salesperson having fifty deals and trouble closing even one.
Qualification protects the most valuable resource in sales, which is time. A salesperson talking to the right people closes more deals, even though they do not have to be any better than the colleague next to them. They simply do not waste energy on conversations without potential.
In the sales process, qualification sits between identification and diagnosis. A contact appears, you check whether it fits, and if so, you go into needs discovery. If not, you say thank you, refer them to a more suitable place and move on.
It has little to do with being picky, rather with respect for time, your own and the client’s.
BANT, the classic from IBM
BANT is among the oldest qualification frameworks. It was devised at IBM over half a century ago and for many years was the standard in corporate sales. The acronym stands for four criteria: Budget, Authority (thedecision-maker), Need and Timeline.
The logic is simple: before you get involved in a deal, you check four things. Does the client have money for what you sell, are you talking to someone who can make the decision, is there a real need that your solution answers, and does the client have some deadline by which they want to decide.
Four yes answers mean a qualified deal. Otherwise you let it go or come back to it later.
BANT’s greatest advantage is simplicity. Every salesperson understands it; it needs no certification, training or special process. Four questions, four answers, a decision.
The trouble is that BANT assumes the client has a budget before they even talk to you. In old corporate sales that really was the case, because budgets were planned a year ahead. Today in B2B, and especially in service companies, the client often has no dedicated budget at all. What they have is a problem, and they are wondering how much they would be willing to pay to solve it. By starting with the budget question, you filter out people who would buy if you helped them see the value.
The second limitation is linearity. The four criteria in BANT work like a checklist: met or not. Meanwhile a decision process is rarely binary. A client without a budget today may have one in three months. The operational person you are talking to may have a direct influence on the board’s decision. BANT does not account for that.
The third limitation is, from the perspective of smaller B2B companies, the most serious, because BANT assumes volume. You have a hundred leads and you need to quickly pick the twenty worth talking to. If you run a software house with five new enquiries a month, a mass filtering tool will not give you much. What you need is something that helps assess whether this specific person who wrote to you is your client.
MEDDICC as a corporate combine harvester
At the other end of the scale lies MEDDICC. It was created in the nineties at PTC and gained popularity in corporate technology sales. It is much more elaborate than BANT and has seven (sometimes eight) elements.
Metrics mean the measurable impact of your solution on the client’s business. Instead of “it will be better” you have “it will cut costs by 20%” or “it will shorten implementation by three months”.
Economic Buyer is the one who actually signs the contract, so not necessarily the person you talk to every day. They have the power to say “yes” and move the budget.
Decision Criteria are the criteria by which the client evaluates vendors. Price, experience, speed, technology? Without that knowledge you are shooting in the dark.
Decision Process describes the path of the decision in the client’s organization: who gives opinions, who approves, how long it takes and what documents have to be prepared.
Identify Pain is recognizing the pain the client feels themselves and wants to solve. The one you attribute to them does not count.
Champion is your ally on the client’s side. They want you to win and will fight for your solution once you leave the room.
Competition is knowing whom you are up against. Besides other vendors, the competition also includes the options “we do nothing” and “we do it in-house”.
Sometimes one more C is added, Compelling Event: an event that forces the client to act by a specific date.
MEDDICC is a powerful tool, though it is hard to call it a qualification framework in the traditional sense. It is closer to a sales opportunity management system. The salesperson gets a map of what they need to know to win the deal, so an answer both to “is it worth talking” and to “how to win this conversation”.
In smaller B2B companies the problem with MEDDICC is fairly simple. It was designed for sales in which the cycle lasts six months or longer, many people are involved in the decision, and the contract value is counted in hundreds of thousands or millions. There every element makes sense, because each can decide a win or a loss.
It looks different in a marketing agency or a technical company, where a typical contract is 15 to 80 thousand zlotys, the cycle lasts four to eight weeks, and the decision is made by the owner or the operations director. Here MEDDICC is a cannon to shoot sparrows. For every deal you fill in seven categories, most of which do not give you the information you actually need. Champion? In a twenty-person company you will not find any “champion”. There is an owner who either wants to buy or does not.
On top of that comes the cost of implementation: training, regular pipeline reviews according to this methodology, discipline in filling in data. With a three-person sales department (or none, when the owner sells), this cost is disproportionately high relative to the gains.
BANT versus MEDDICC. A comparison against reality
Each of these methodologies has its application. BANT works well as a quick filter at an early stage, when you want to know whether a deal deserves more attention. MEDDICC is useful in complex sales, where you have to navigate the client’s organizational politics, manage many stakeholders and build support for your solution.
Neither is worse than the other. What differs is the type of sales they were designed for.
You take BANT when you need to decide go/no-go quickly. You reach for MEDDICC when go/no-go alone is not enough and you need a detailed map of the terrain to win.
The common problem of both: neither was created with a B2B service company employing 5 to 50 people in mind. BANT simplifies too much, reducing qualification to a checklist that does not reflect the complexity of even simpler sales cycles. MEDDICC overdoes it in the other direction and requires an apparatus for which a small company has neither the time, nor the people, nor the processes.
Both frameworks also hide the assumption that you sell to large organizations, where on the other side sits a buying committee, procurement and internal policies. Among small and medium-sized B2B companies the decision often happens in one person’s head after three meetings, and neither BANT nor MEDDICC is prepared for that.
How I approach qualification
In SalesMachine the qualification model is one of the pillars of the sales system and is deliberately simple, because in the companies I work with elaborate frameworks do not survive contact with reality. The fashion for simplicity had nothing to do with it.
The model rests on four questions the salesperson (or the owner) asks themselves during the first conversation with a potential client. No form, scoring or matrix.
Does the client have a problem we can solve? I mean a problem our company is good at, not any problem. One that fits our specialization, experience and the kind of work we do best. The answer “not quite, but we could try” means a risk, not a positively qualified deal.
Do they have a budget adequate to our offer? I do not ask “how much do you have”. I look at whether the size of the company, the scale of the problem and the way the client talks about it indicate that they will be able to pay appropriately for the solution. Someone is looking for an agency for two thousand a month, and my minimum engagement starts at ten? No conversation will change that.
Are they ready to make a decision in a reasonable time? “Reasonable” depends on context; in the companies I work with it means four to eight weeks. A client who in March says “we will come back to it around the turn of the year” is not an active deal, just wishful thinking recorded in the CRM.
And am I talking to a person who can make that decision? In SMEs that is usually the owner or co-owner, less often the operations director, and a manager really rarely. When your interlocutor has to “consult it further”, ask with whom and how quickly that consultation will happen. A vague answer usually means your deal is not a priority for them. It is worth talking to non-decision-makers only when they lead to decision-makers.
When the answers do not fit, the deal drops out. Without guilt and without “maybe it will still pick up”, without keeping it in the CRM by force in the hope that something will come of it.
In spirit this approach is closer to BANT than to MEDDICC, though it differs from it on one fundamental point. Instead of a checklist to tick off at a meeting, you get a filter through which you look at every deal to answer one question for yourself: is this company my client?
There is also something that neither BANT nor MEDDICC provides, namely the context of the Value Triangle. The first question of my qualification is “does the client have a problem that we solve”, and “does the client have a problem” on its own is a completely different matter. This fundamental difference requires you to know what you do and what you do not, and to have a clearly defined value proposition. Otherwise qualification has nothing to rest on, because there are no criteria by which you could disqualify anyone.
What qualification will not predict
No qualification model will protect you from a client who says “yes” to all the questions and then disappears. It happens and it cannot be eliminated, because people sometimes do not know what they want themselves, or change their mind under circumstances you do not control.
Qualification does not guarantee closing; it only increases the probability that the time devoted to a deal will be well invested. A company that qualifies also loses deals, only early and cheaply. One that does not loses them late and expensively.
If I were to leave one thought, it would be this: qualification protects more than it filters. It protects your time, energy and resources from deals that look promising but lack the foundations to come to fruition.
How to start if you have not qualified so far
Neither a framework nor training is needed here. It is enough to answer two questions for yourself.
First: who is your client? I am asking about the one you work best with, who pays on time, comes back for more and with whom projects go smoothly, not about everyone who could buy. If you cannot describe them in a few sentences, the problem lies in the definition of the ideal client profile, and qualification is only next in line.
Second: how do you recognize that a lead is not your client? Mind the order, because I am asking how you recognize that they are not. That is the harder question; it requires you to say outright whom you do not want to work with.
With these two answers the rest goes smoothly. At the first meeting you listen and ask, and after it you answer four questions for yourself: problem, budget, time, decision-making power. If it fits, you move on. If it does not, you politely say thank you and make room for a deal that has a chance of being finalized.
It is not complicated, but in sales simple rarely means easy, and here that is exceptionally visible. Rejecting a potential client requires self-confidence and the conviction that your time has value, and that an hour of your attention is not owed to everyone who gets in touch.
Companies that qualify have fewer deals in the pipeline, but of those they have, they close more.
