Once you’ve determined whether the demographics and behavioral signals are a good fit, you can move on to qualifying questions. Sometimes called discovery questions, these are designed to uncover more information about how interested the prospect really is.
Discovery Questions
Discovery questions typically determine a few specific things about a prospect:
Authority : Are they the ones making the decisions controlling directors email list Or can they connect you with someone in charge of the decision-making process?
Need : Do they really need your product or service? Are their pain points in line with your solution?
Timeline : How urgently do they need a solution? Are they motivated to purchase in the near future?
This is commonly referred to as the BANT framework, which is a way of scoring leads. We'll go over this framework and others later in this article.
You can ask discovery and other qualifying questions on a cold call, via email, or during a sales presentation. Examples of qualifying questions include:
What challenges do you have in your business? What are you specifically looking to solve?
And what has stood in the way of trying to solve this problem before now?
What is your budget or financing like?
What is your top priority in solving this problem?
What will success look like for you once this problem is solved?
You'll notice that all of these questions are open-ended; yes or no questions tend to stall conversations. Try to leave opportunities for your prospects to elaborate whenever possible.
BANT, Lead Scoring and Other Lead Scoring Frameworks
There are a number of lead qualification frameworks that will help sales reps frame their conversations and qualify leads efficiently.
You'll notice that each of these frameworks are acronyms, with many different components. This is because buyers make decisions based on a combination of factors. No purchase is made based solely on price or timeline; all factors must be considered holistically.
BANT
As described above, the acronym BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Within this framework, salespeople work to understand these four aspects of a prospect’s buying process.
The top priorities in the BANT framework are budget and authority: BANT discourages reps from wasting time talking to prospects who don’t have the money or authority to make purchasing decisions.
