How's Your Prospect's BANTZ?

BANT is an old and famed acronym from the selling culture heyday of IBM.

The qualification template stood for;

Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe.

From it, comes the instruction to find ‘The MAN‘ on each deal. As in, the person with Money, Authority & Need.

As well as later variants which swap out the T of Timeframe for, or completely add a U of Urgency, or slightly reconfigure (eg ANUM & NEAT).

This has happened in the world of objection handling training too. A ‘C’ added to LAER, shuffled to form LAARC. A similar Dale Carnegie Training quintet here, a refashioned backronym such as SOLVE there.

The power of the remix.

They can make adaptations stick.

I myself worked with one solution salesteam who successfully remixed the global SPIN call framework to better suit them. An evolution termed NPINS.

Not only a winner back then for them, but their switch-around also allowed them to be free from restriction of putting their process in someone else’s concrete.

I once created my own qualification format for the acrostic, WINNER.

So maybe you could gain greater buy-in, suitability to your unique selling or promotion of new methods by creating your own.

One way could be to adapt the well-trodden Bant.

In the spirit of our times, why not try the suffix of Z?

After all, who wouldn’t want witty repartee or badinage with rejoinders and bonhomie bouncing back and forth with our prospects?

What could your ‘Z’ stand for? From zone and zen, all the way to zest or zero-interest,. There’s surely a word beginning with the final letter of the alphabet (in itself a metaphor) to match your extra angle.

A way to help talk in terms your prospect understands and shape the conversation towards success.