Mastering Modern Sales Objections: The BANTR Framework Explained

Hi, this is Megan Killian. If you've been following me for a while, you may have heard of BANTER, which is Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline, which is a qualifying framework that was invented by IBM way back in the day. I have since added the R of risk, and I'm here to talk to you about how you can jump into that in a qualifying call that's 15 minutes or less. Okay, so we have just arrived at our Our qualifying call, you're my prospect that I've been emailing back and forth and I'm opening up and I'm saying, hey, I'm Megan. I'm the chief consultant here at MKC. Obviously something about my messaging was appealing to you because your time is highly valuable and you're spending some of it with me. So can you let me know a little bit about what it is I said that made you wanna spend some time with me? And they're gonna answer me. Let's use like our lead generation packages as an example for this. Right? So they're gonna say, we've been having this issue with lead generation and we'd like to get more money in the pipeline. And I'm gonna follow up and I'm gonna say, okay, can you tell me a little bit about what's been tried? What, what you've done so far to try to solve for this? They're gonna tell me, we may uncover a problem there, we may not. If we don't uncover a problem there, usually I wanna dive a little bit deeper and say, hey, well, if they haven't tried anything, why haven't they tried anything? If they have tried something, you know, what went wrong? What's missing? How can we help? Now let's give a specific scenario, right, that is gonna allow me to go from that need. This is where we're qualifying need, right? Why are you talking to me? They're gonna tell me why. That's gonna let me know if they have a need. So we're gonna shift a little bit. We're gonna try to go from need to timeline. Okay. If they say, you know, they, they were using a lead generation vendor, but they never gave them any qualified appointments, it was all crap, right? I'm gonna say, okay, I understand. When, when is your contract up with that vendor? Okay, that's gonna gimme a little bit more about the timeline. And then I'm gonna say, what's your revenue goal for this year? They're gonna tell me what their revenue goal is for this year, and I'm gonna ask where they are in, in terms of achieving that. 60, 70, 80%. How much time is left? How much do they have to make up? Right? And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what makes us different. I'm gonna say, hey, you know, I understand that you've been having trouble with XYZ vendor. MKC Agency scores all the leads before we start going after them for you. It's highly manual and it makes us cost a little bit more. But you know, that's, that's how we're, that's how we're different. If I told you we could solve your problem, right? Like we could get you that extra 30, 20, whatever percent. That you need, would you be able to pull the trigger on that by this date? Right? So then we're setting up, we're setting up a timeline. Is that contract over? Could we take action to try to make up the difference? That's gonna help me qualify timeline. It's also gonna help me start qualifying that authority. Could you pull the trigger? If they couldn't, who else needs to be involved in that conversation? What's preventing us from getting to that timeline, right? We know we have a lot to make up here. When are we gonna fit that in? And it's also gonna start to clarify that budget. So as we're talking about that specific budget, right, and we're saying, if I could do this, then could we pull the trigger by this date? Then I'm just gonna frame it, and I'm gonna say, hey, I understand this is what's missing. I understand this is when you wanna get rolling by. I understand this is the impact that we need to make. And you, Mr. Buyer, you have the authority to make it, or we have to loop other people in, whatever. I'm gonna sort of— I am going to summarize all the other pieces, right? Authority, need, timeline. And then I'm gonna say, if I told you it's gonna most— it's gonna cost $4,000 a month for us to do what you need, is that gonna be worth another discussion? Are we in the ballpark of what you can spend? Right? Or you can give a range. You can say like, like I could, instead of really diving deep on the authority need and timeline first, I could just ask about budget and say, hey, our clients usually start by spending $1,500 to $4,000 a month with us. Is that gonna be in the realm of possibility for you? Okay. Or which end of that do you think you'd be on? So I can, I can build something custom for your needs. When it comes to risk, okay, you have to start asking questions about how this impacts other departments, right? Like, what happens if you do nothing? What happens if we fail, right? Like, what's the risk to you? So in terms of framing this as an actual question, let's say Hey, Mr. Prospect, you've told me that you need to get something in place by October. You need to do another $500,000 in new revenue this year. And right now you only have $200,000 in the pipe. So we need to make up $300,000 in revenue for you. And we can start as soon as October, but that revenue needs to be in by December. So you're giving us basically 2 months. To solve a $300,000 problem. What happens to the company if, if we don't solve it? Let them, let them sit with it. Let them tell you the worst case scenario. Okay. Because regardless of what you do during qualifying, during discovery, during whatever other steps exist in your process, the time to close will come. And if you did not uncover risk, it's going to sideswipe you in the end. And we've all known for a long time that we need to know if there's a budget, we need to know if they have authority, we need to know if they have a need, we need to know if there's a timeline in place. That's all been well established for a long time. But what people aren't talking about is the risk of— in my case, revenue is the biggest risk for companies I talk to because of the nature of what I do. But let's say you're an MSP, okay, and you're a managed service provider, you're managing a client's Tail end to end, everything that they do in terms of technology, you manage it. What's the risk if you're replacing another vendor and onboarding goes wrong? What's the risk if there's downtime? What is the risk if there's a cybersecurity attack? And I don't mean necessarily the risk that they're up against for doing nothing, although it's great to dive into that and Understand it. I'm talking about what's the risk of going with you? What risk are they taking by giving you their money in exchange for a product or service? What happens if you fuck it up? Because the the level of that, right? Like, I consider marketing to be a relatively low risk industry to be in compared to some others. Okay. Brand. So that's the number one thing that I can fuck up for my clients. What happens if my cold callers call someone who's already a client and they annoy them? What's that risk like for you? You know, what happens if, uh, we build a list of 200 contacts and we burn them for whatever reason? You know, we got a junior cold caller, they make some mistakes. What's that risk like for you? Because it's also going to help you justify your budget and As well, because for those of us that are in service-based industry, whether we're doing IT services, marketing services, sales services, whatever, the risk is that human risk, right? Like we make mistakes, people make mistakes, and the cost of people is this whole wide range based on experience, skill set, how proven they are. And a lot of clients, and you guys see this in the MSP space as much as I do in the sales space. Like they want the premier for the cost of the entry level, right? So my cheapest lead generation outbound engine generating package starts like $800 a month. And that's, we use your copy. We don't do copywriting, which means like if your unique value proposition sucks, it's gonna continue to suck. And we put junior Philippine cold callers on it. That is not a premium service. Those aren't people who are super tech educated. Yes, they get daily cold calling training. Yes, they're good. And we do add pipeline for people, but like, that's not premium. You want someone US-based. Do you want someone who has B2B tech experience? You want someone who has proven themselves to be good at getting meetings on your calendar that are highly qualified. Those people are expensive because they want a lot of money. Not— they are not going to be willing to take crap pay. And you guys know that for IT services too. So if someone wants tier 3 support included in their plan, they need to pay for that. So you have to dig into that risk. I think a lot of times we're very afraid to do that as salespeople because we think that if we, if we talk about risk, if we talk about what could be a failure on our part, the possibility that things might not go well, then our client's gonna get scared and they're gonna run away. And, you know, some people are that flighty that it will scare them, but more often than not, we all know shit goes wrong. What's more important is like, what happens when it does? If this is fucked up, what happens? How do you, how do you fix it internally? And also like, how do we mitigate that risk? And for clients that are coming to me looking for lead gen, it's like, okay, well, what are your priorities here? Is, is your TAM, your total addressable market, really big or is it really small? If it's small, then you should be investing in very good cold callers who are experienced, who have sold into MSPs, for MSPs before, who understand your tech, who understand the businesses that you're talking to, that speak their language, that aren't gonna burn your brand. If you have a huge total addressable market, then it maybe doesn't matter as much, and we can just kind of do volume. You gotta figure out if you want quality or volume. So anyways, so for budget, the best question, the best way to frame questions, I think, is to ask them basically like, if, if I give you this price, can we still be friends? You can frame it however you want. But the question needs to be like, if it's this expensive, are we still gonna— is it still worth us continuing to talk? Don't be afraid to tell them your price early on, because you don't want to have 6-hour-long calls with a client that's never gonna buy anything from you because they don't have the money in the bank. We can talk another time about how this kind of turns into like diffusing objections. Authority. I think you want to kind of tailor it into your other questions, and then at the end of the call, just be like, so to be clear, you're a signer for this type of contract, and there's no one else that we need to loop into the next call. Then need— that should be the thing that you qualify earliest, right? Is like, is there a need? And the best way to do that is honestly ask the why are we here question. Again, you can frame that however you want, but basically, like, your time's valuable. Why are you giving it to me? And where they came from should impact that. So if it's like, you know, you scheduled this meeting off of a LinkedIn post of mine, what about that post was interesting to you? Or, you know, if you took this meeting from a cold email, what did I say in that email that got you interested in chatting with me? Whatever. Um. Timeline. Again, weave it into your other questions like, are you using someone else? What's been tried? When do you need this fixed by? What are the problems? But then at the end, you do— you want to recap and say like, you need a solution in place by this date. These are the things that need to happen in the meantime. If you do implementation plans for your business, they should start being built on the qualifying call. Okay? Don't wait until you're in discovery or needs analysis or way into like demoing tech. Early on, figure out what implementation looks like and what it looks like on both sides, that you're very clear on accountabilities throughout the process. And then risk. For risk, you just— what happens if things go wrong? How does that impact your business? I hope this has been helpful, and let me know if you have any questions.