BANT vs MEDDIC: How to Qualify Leads More Effectively

In any industry, a sales team lives and dies by its qualification framework. But, even the best marketing teams can only provide limited qualification data for the leads they generate. According to Hubspot, only 56% of B2B companies provide their sales team with marketing qualified leads (MQLs). The other 44% are leaving their salespeople to sift through leads and determine what might be viable.

There are many different qualification frameworks, each with varying degrees of complexity. In this article, we’ve chosen two very different frameworks, BANT and MEDDIC, which can help you improve your sales performance if applied under the right conditions. Both frameworks have something valuable to offer - even if you take them as a starting point that you can optimize to meet your qualification needs.

Key takeaways

1. If you’re looking to make more sales, use BANT. If you’re hoping to increase your average deal value, use MEDDIC.
2. MEDDIC is best suited to enterprise sales; BANT can be used to sell to small and medium businesses (SMBs).
3. Some sales operations might benefit from using both frameworks in a two-stage process.

What is the BANT sales framework?

BANT is the grandfather of qualification frameworks. IBM designed it in the 1950s. So, it's remarkable that we’re still talking about BANT 70 years later—in a business and sales environment that would have been almost unimaginable to its creators.

BANT’s staying power is undoubtedly due to its simplicity. The idea of using a predetermined set of criteria to assess potential prospects was revolutionary in the 1950s. Since then, ever-more complicated and prescriptive iterations of this basic idea have made BANT seem almost fresh in its broad relevance to a wide range of sales contexts.

The acronym BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline. Each area allows sales teams to formulate inquiries that help them understand whether a sales lead should be pursued or abandoned.

Budget

Establish whether your prospect can afford the sale to lay the foundations for an honest sales conversation. If you’re in a position to explore further, understanding how your offerings fit into their broader budget will help. Will the purchase stretch them? Are they likely to need a payment schedule?

Authority

Understanding who’s making the decisions will help you prioritize your communications and address your sales strategies to the key individual or individuals concerned.

Need

When using BANT (as with many other sales strategies and techniques), communication around the client’s needs is a two-way street. In addition to finding out their most pressing pain points, you should communicate to them that you understand the specific challenges they face.

Timeline

What factors influence them to purchase now rather than in six months? What potential hurdles might delay the sale? Build an understanding of their time frame.

What is the MEDDIC sales framework?

MEDDIC was devised in the 1990s by sales professionals Jack Napoli and Dick Dunkel while working at U.S. software giant PTC.

Foreshadowing the digital revolution that was to come, MEDDIC involves the creation of a comprehensive dataset that creates a picture of the prospect’s internal environment - helping you understand the complex factors that will ultimately determine the sale.

The MEDDIC acronym stands for:

• Metrics: Or how value is measured.
• Economic Buyer: The person with the purchasing authority in your client or prospect’s organization.
• Decision Criteria: The benchmarks, features, or other criteria used to make a purchase decision.
• Decision Process: The process the organization goes through to make the decision. This could be how (and when) a prospect will evaluate a product or service.
• Identify Pain: What pain point is the prospect looking to address with your solution?
• Champion: The person (or group of people) internally advocating for you and your product or service.

How to decide between BANT vs. MEDDIC sales frameworks

As you can see, these two frameworks offer two distinctly different approaches. They’re both suited to different situations.

To figure out which methodology is relevant to your sales organization, it’s useful to think about the issues you’re trying to solve, by asking yourself the following questions.

Do I have too many unqualified leads?

If your SDRs are facing a backlog of unqualified leads, a time-intensive framework like MEDDIC will not solve your problem. The simpler, faster processes of BANT will be more useful.

Am I consistently losing prospects and sales after they’ve been qualified?

If so, there may be friction in the sales process that you’re unaware of. There could be a few different explanations for this, but a deeper exploration at the qualification stage - using MEDDIC - will likely provide at least some of the answers.

Do I need to increase the volume or the value of our sales?

If you’re looking to streamline your sales processes, increase sales velocity, and close more deals, BANT is a good place to start.

If you’re hoping to concentrate your sales efforts on your brightest prospects, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and reduce churn, MEDDIC will help you narrow down to the audience you need.

Use case #1: Auditing services

Audit providers are no strangers to longer sales cycles - invitations to tender are commonly sent more than 18 months ahead of schedule to a small and carefully curated list of auditors.

Consequently, sales teams for audit companies can concentrate their qualification efforts on prospects who are openly ready to buy. Enterprises procuring these sensitive and essential services will usually rely on a buying team that represents the interests of a range of different departments and interested parties within the organization.

🏆 Verdict: MEDDIC

These high-value deals and epic sales cycles perfectly align with MEDDIC’s thorough, data-driven methods. With large, complicated buying teams that may have differing priorities and agendas, your qualification framework needs to provide as much information as possible about how decisions are made - and by whom.

Use case #2: EPoS till systems for independent retailers and small businesses

Owners of proprietary EPoS till systems need to upgrade and maintain the infrastructure - software, storage, etc. - that their systems are built around. The cost per installation of this maintenance work goes down as they add more customers, so volume of sales (and hopefully, widespread adoption) is essential to EPoS businesses.

With over 31 million small businesses registered in the U.S. alone, EPoS companies often have many potential leads to qualify.

🏆 Verdict: BANT.

With lead generation potential that can easily outstrip the capacity of the SDR team, a streamlined qualification process will help EPoS vendors identify a greater number of qualified leads in a shorter period of time.

Use case #3: Financial services

Financial advisors work with a broad spectrum of clients, ranging from wealthy entrepreneurs to large corporations. They provide specialized services such as risk management or investment solutions, as well as advice that changes significantly according to constantly evolving market conditions.

Due to the breadth and variety of the market for financial services, clients might not necessarily need or use a large buying team.

🏆Verdict: Neither

A trusted advisor is expected to provide a level of expertise that the client simply can’t provide for themselves. A consultative selling approach is key here to help ascertain the client’s most pressing needs across various financial contexts.

🏆 Verdict: Both.

While BANT might not offer the perfect all-in-one qualification solution for modern sales environments, it’s important to remember that the same criticism can be aimed at almost any framework or methodology - including MEDDIC. The secret lies in adapting BANT (or any other sales approach) to the conditions of your sales environment.

No matter how comprehensive or flexible a selling system might appear, they work best when treated as a starting point for your own tailored methodology and strategies.

About the author

Dan Lever | Brand Consultant and Copywriter

Dan Lever is an experienced brand consultant and copywriter. He brings over 7 years experience in marketing and sales development, across a range of industries including B2B SaaS, third sector and higher education.

Frequently asked questions

What are the alternatives to BANT?

In addition to BANT-adjacent frameworks such as FAINT or ANUM, there is a range of more involved qualification frameworks, such as MEDDIC, CHAMP, or GCPTBA/C&I. These are more buyer-focused and suitable for consultative selling approaches.

Is BANT a sales methodology?

Strictly speaking, BANT is a sales qualification framework, not a methodology. It’s most useful as a guide to help sales reps quickly disqualify unsuitable leads.

Why don’t IT companies use BANT?

Although some IT and software companies may use BANT in combination with more involved qualification frameworks, the idea of a single decision-maker with the ‘Authority’ doesn’t mirror most organizational structures in the IT industry.