Issue 09: BANT vs. MEDDPICC?

Recently I’ve been working with several clients looking to revamp their discovery process and framing. Many of them start with MEDDPICC because it feels more comprehensive than BANT. After all, BANT only has 4 qualification criteria (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) whereas MEDDPICC has you going deep into Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identifying Pain, Champion, and Competition. However, the problem with MEDDPICC is that many reps learning this framework feel boxed in and feel like they are going through a checklist that turns off potential buyers. Going through a laundry list of generic discovery questions is not a great way to build trust.

And so for early stage startups just beginning the journey of putting structure around their qualification process, I’ve been suggesting starting with a variation of BANT while ensuring there is focus on the delivery and phrasing of how discovery questions are asked. Having a bank of authentic phrases and questions for discovery is critical to preparing for a productive intro call. Discovery should also serve as a way to build trust with your prospects while providing them a strong sense for your product’s unique differentiators. The prospect is also coming to learn and gain value from the conversation.

Finally, effective discovery also serves as a way to qualify good fit leads and disqualify leads that likely shouldn’t be in your pipeline. But too often sellers ask a question and move on vs. understanding whether or not the answer has implications around the prospect being a good or bad fit.

To summarize 💻

Goals for discovery should be to:

🗣️ Unlock authentic back and forth conversation with the prospect to make them feel comfortable and open

✅ Qualify leads to ensure the right ones are moving on to receive a custom demo

📈 Understand which leads are likely and which are not to land within the forecast for this quarter and beyond

And Effective discovery:

• Happens throughout the call vs. being crammed at the beginning or end of the discussion

• Feels natural vs. forced

• Is as informative to the prospect as it is to us sellers

To help frame what this might looks like for your startup, I’ve created a template (access through the “resources” section of my Zero to Hero community that you can join here) that I’ve been using recently with my clients that walks you through a framework for discovery. The framework calls for starting with just a few opener questions, transitioning to an informative, opinionated deck and then a closing with next steps that allow you to do even more discovery after building trust throughout the conversation. The template starts with a section where I have my clients identify good fit vs. bad fit leads so that the team is on the same page with regards to how to gauge prospect answers with an eye towards qualifying them in or out of the pipeline.

Finally, for more of my thoughts on BANT & MEDDPICC you can listen to Episode 32 of Decoding Sales, where my co-host Alex and I dive into tips on how best to execute & implement either framework. Happy qualifying folks!

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