420: Still Using Bant? It Might Be Costing You the Sale!

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library.  Enjoy the show!

0:00:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Sales is still about people and humans and relationships and conversations. The goal of AI Done Well is to help you amplify your own voice and your own perspective. And part of that is, where’s your mindset? So is your mindset in I need to make my number, or is your mindset I need to help more people? Do I need to make a bigger impact?

0:00:30 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson Jr., and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show. Hey there. Welcome everyone, and thanks for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live.

0:01:05 – (Bob Woods): Coming to you live from the Social Sales Link virtual studios and brought to you by AskSSL AI. I’m Bob Woods and I’m joined by Stan Robinson Jr. and Brynne Tillman. How y’all doing today?

0:01:21 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Excellent, thanks, Bob.

0:01:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, really great. Excited for this conversation today because it’s well overdue.

0:01:29 – (Bob Woods): Yes, it is. So y’all probably heard, or maybe you haven’t, but when it comes to qualifying sales leads, there’s something out there called the BANT framework, which stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline. There’s a problem with Bant, though. It starts off with or the entire kind of mindset behind it is which starts off with what you, the seller, want and not what your buyer needs. That’s why Brynne has come up with a framework that’s buyer-centric. Imagine that coming from us.

0:02:10 – (Bob Woods): And it is designed for sellers who want to have real trust-based conversations. It’s called chirp. I love that acronym, and it stands for challenges, history, impact, risk, and priority. Now Bryn’s going to get into the nitty-gritty on that in just a second. But before we get rolling on all this, we have an ebook on the Chirp framework. You can download it at socialsaleslink.com Bantebook. So, Brynne, what got your thought process started on doing this? Essentially, yeah.

0:02:47 – (Brynne Tillman): So I so appreciate it. And really, it came out of so much discussion around this legacy framework, this old 60s, 70s, 80s framework around. As a salesperson, our responsibility is to go in and use discovery questions to identify if they are qualified to be in our pipeline and if we can sell to them, like literally we are. We’re taught to go in and identify what matters to me in order to make the sale. And in that same mentality was, you know, a fast no is second to a yes.

0:03:37 – (Brynne Tillman): And I’m going to push back on that and say, absolutely disagree. I would rather invest an extra 15 minutes or 30 minutes with the risk of it being a no for the reward of I get to learn more about them, connect with them as a human being, identify if there may be an opportunity down the road or maybe, you know, when they go to another company, they can see how we can bring them in a fat or how they could bring us in.

0:04:06 – (Brynne Tillman): So a fast no is not a good thing, you know, and banned. Although we need to understand budget authority, needs, and timing, that should not be our first priority. That should be after we’ve earned the right for them to. When they say, yes, there’s an opportunity here and they’ve earned that right, we’ve earned that right. Then we could probably go into Bant, and something Stan said earlier today when we were talking about this, he goes, most of that’s going to come out naturally in a conversation anyway.

0:04:39 – (Brynne Tillman): So let’s talk about that for a minute. Let’s talk about what we replace bandwidth with? Well, obviously, if we are shifting our mindset from what we need to about what they need, let’s go through the chirp that Bob talked about. So, challenge. What is the challenge that they are going through right now? That should be where we start every single time. What’s going on in their environment? Why are they even having this conversation?

0:05:10 – (Brynne Tillman): What’s happening? And that’s about what they’re experiencing. Once we’ve really identified the challenge, the next thing is history. And this is something that most salespeople never even touch on, which is, what have you done before to overcome this challenge? Or is this the very first time you’ve ever faced this challenge? Or what solutions have you put in place, and did they work or did they not work?

0:05:37 – (Brynne Tillman): What resources did you use in order to put that solution in place? Right, so the history is, here’s my challenge. What is the history that the company, the buyer, has gone through to solve the challenge? Clearly unsuccessfully, because it’s still a challenge. Right, the next one is impact. So, in chirp chi impact, what impact is this challenge having on the business as a whole? Is it having a financial impact?

0:06:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Is it having a client turnover impact? Does it have an employee turnover impact? What impact is this challenge ultimately costing the company as a whole? The next one is risk, and this is risk to the person sitting in front of you. What is the risk of not making a change for them? Is their job at stake? Does it mean that they might have turnover in their team? That might be difficult. Does it mean there’s a revenue risk for them?

0:06:50 – (Brynne Tillman): So the impact is company-driven, the risk is person-driven, and then P is priority. So this could be a high challenge with a high impact and a high risk, but it could be low on the totem pole, it could be very low on priorities, and what matters. So it might say, but there are seven other things we have to focus on before we can even touch this. And that’s all about what they need. So challenge, history, impact, risk, and priority.

0:07:27 – (Brynne Tillman): Once we’ve identified those things, we will. And Stan, I’m going to toss this to you about how that pretty much leads into bans, and how we can get budget authority needs and timing simply by starting with chirp?

0:07:44 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, that’s a question I had too, Stan, go ahead.

0:07:48 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yeah, and the way I see it in part is by the time you’ve gone through chirp, you’ve built a relationship with the person that you’re talking to. They trust you because you’re talking to them about what’s closest to their heart, so to speak, which is how things affect them. Whereas other sales professionals may have come at them by starting to talk about, okay, what have you budgeted for this? And so forth, which is a whole different Brynne mentioned.

0:08:21 – (Stan Robinson Jr): So when they’re talking about history, it’s a natural place. They may bring up how much money they’ve already spent trying other solutions, what they’ve already started to look at, maybe what their role was in the process of looking at other solutions, which will give you a sense of their authority in this. All they need. If they’ve tried a whole bunch of things, there’s a need. No one wastes their time trying to solve problems that they don’t have.

0:08:51 – (Stan Robinson Jr): So right off the bat, you know, if there’s a need, if this is something that is brand new, well then, the priority is you’ll get a real quick sense. Okay, how strong is the need? How urgent is it? Or is it just a nice-to-have? So those are some thoughts that came to mind just in terms of how this conversation naturally, I love it.

0:09:13 – (Brynne Tillman): So let’s, let’s bridge that. I’m just. Because that was brilliant. So you know, CHIRP is a challenge, and history has not touched at all with Band. But impact and risk start to cover some of those budget authority needs and timing. So I really, really love the way you’re thinking about this is it’s just going to naturally come out in the conversation. If it doesn’t get to your point, at this point, they know that we’re there for them, and it’s about what they want.

0:09:50 – (Brynne Tillman): So if we have now questions that we need answered, we can ask them. And I’m going to share. Years ago, when I was riding along with a sales manager, I made an appointment with a huge company that I was so excited about. And I was told, watch and listen. Right? So I was new, so I went, I made this appointment, we’ve got the right people in the room. And the first question my manager asked was so, you know, after, like, hey, if I say anything you don’t like, let me know. If you say something I don’t like, I’ll let you know. If there’s not a fit, we should let each other know so we don’t waste each other’s time.

0:10:35 – (Brynne Tillman): And then I went, oh my gosh. They we. I spent days and days, hours and hours trying to get this appointment. The last thing I want them to start thinking about is how do I get out of it. Which is what that invitation did. So that already started the conversation in a very uncomfortable place for me. And I could even see with them, they’re like, okay, this is like they’re going through a process, right?

0:11:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Not a conversation. So the first question that the manager asked was, So tell me, what have you budgeted for this? And they both looked at each other, they’re two fabulous executives, looked at each other and said, For what? And then who other than yourself will be responsible for this decision? For what? So I recognized, over, I mean, this is probably going on 15 years ago when this happened, that this was all about what my sales manager wanted to know in order to see if they qualified.

0:11:42 – (Brynne Tillman): Now I will state, simply because they are a Fortune 1000 company with a sales team, they were qualified if, in fact, we had a solution that met their needs. So we have. But if we don’t know their needs, what are we selling to? If we don’t know their challenge, what are we selling to? And so that was this huge aha moment where I went, Bant is bad when you lead with it. You have to get those things. But it’s not always.

0:12:18 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s what you’ll get there when the time is right.

0:12:21 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. So that’s all really fascinating. For some reason, we’re not seeing a couple of comments come in from LinkedIn into our chat in our third-party thing that we use here. But. But I did want to bring one up. Liz Hyman, a good friend of ours, and I’ve actually got it in our private chat here so that we could read it, yeah, but. But just for everyone else, Liz says. I agree. Bant is a helpful measure when you are trying to figure out which leads to continue pursuing, but you are assuming their buying process matches your selling process.

0:12:57 – (Bob Woods): If they are early in their process and don’t have all the answers, you will qualify them out, and someone will take the time to walk them through their buying process. Remember too, that if you are outbound selling and you are introducing the idea to them, they don’t have Bant and won’t have it until you help them to find a possible solution and the buying process. You don’t want to strike out because you never took the swing.

0:13:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, it worked with Kevin. Kevin. Yeah, it worked with Kevin.

0:13:25 – (Bob Woods): I don’t know what’s going on there. So anyhow.

0:13:29 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So the bottom line is, is. And this is not just in the first sales conversation. In every single solitary interaction, the buyer needs to know that we are there to help them solve their problem. The moment they know we’re there to make a sale, we lose all credibility, we lose all trust, because this is not about us making a commission. If you are in sales and you are going to be successful at it, then your mindset needs to be around solving problems, solving challenges that you are in there, and knowing that the sale will come when the time is right.

0:14:18 – (Stan Robinson Jr): That is so true. And oftentimes, the first challenge that comes up in a conversation, if you take the time to build the relationship, you may find that that is not the real challenge, and it’s only a symptom of another, probably bigger and more important challenge. But if you haven’t had the conversation to suss that out, you will never know.

0:14:46 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s a really important point. I have a question, actually, and it’s one that we haven’t discussed yet or haven’t brought up yet or anything like that. So I’m truly going to throw it out there, not knowing what the answer is going to be. They say that even in and. And I feel like a true podcast host right now. They say that in true B2B sales, emotion still drives a lot of sales, and especially the ultimate decision to buy.

0:15:14 – (Bob Woods): Where does. It seems to me that emotion doesn’t fall nearly as much in band as it does in chirp. And that you can get a lot more emotion out of chirp. Is that something that you would agree with?

0:15:28 – (Brynne Tillman): So, yes, and this is a little tongue in cheek. There’s a lot of emotion in the band. Frustration, annoyance. When you’re being banded, you’re like, I know I’m being banded, I have. There’s a lot of negative emotion in that. So. So, yes, but you’re right. In Chirp, you’re getting. You know, you’re helping them to articulate, maybe even things they didn’t think about. Maybe they weren’t thinking about what a priority this was or where it landed. Maybe they weren’t thinking about the risk to themselves. Maybe they thought about the impact on the company, but not how it would land on their desk. Right. Or what would happen to them?

0:16:14 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that question. And with all the AI in the world, this is still a relationship. Sales is still about people and humans and relationships and conversations. The goal of AI Done Well is to help you amplify your own voice and your own perspective. And part of that is, where’s your mindset? So is your mindset, I need to make my number? I. Or is your mindset that I need to help more people? I need to make a bigger impact?

0:16:49 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that.

0:16:50 – (Bob Woods): Okay, good. I’m glad we got a little bit more meat on the bone, as they say, off of that. And I just. I really want to encourage people to download the ebook@SocialSalesLink.com Bantebook. That’s all one word. Bant ebook. Because one of the things that we have in there is a crispy prompt. And boy, do we love our acronyms here, don’t we? A crispy prompt for chirp. There’s got to be some jokes. I can’t think of any right now.

0:17:19 – (Bob Woods): But we do have a prompt that actually you can develop CHIRP questions and use the crispy prompt to do those. So we were just talking about AI, so I thought that it was a perfect opportunity. Perfect opportunity to bring that up. I don’t know if we want to read through that just because it’s. It’s in the book, and download the ebook. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too. I mean, it’s actually really difficult to just talk about a pro or to actually give you the words to the prompt. And everybody’s like, okay, what am I supposed to do with that now? So download the ebook.

0:17:55 – (Bob Woods): You can copy it directly out of that and be well on your way to that new kind of mindset. To switch you over, hopefully, from Bant over to Chirp.

0:18:08 – (Brynne Tillman): So, yeah, I love that, and I love what Kevin Walsh is saying right now. AI can never replace 18 months after signature. It’s the relationship that’s the glue. So 100% there. But we do have a crispy prompt to help you reframe, you are stuck in. These are the discovery questions I’ve been asking for years, and I need to reframe them from budget, authority, needs, and timing to challenge history, impact, risk, and priority.

0:18:39 – (Brynne Tillman): The prompt can help you do that. The great thing is that all of our crispy prompts, we have the book there, book here. All of our crispy prompts are written to interview you. So we’re not saying AI just write this, but it will interview you. So your voice and your perspective are included in everything that you do.

0:19:00 – (Bob Woods): It’s a very important point. Very important point.

0:19:03 – (Stan Robinson Jr): And one other area where AI can help is just to help you come into a discovery call or sales conversation later. Much more prepared. Sales Navigator is already starting to do that with features like account IQ and lead IQ, just to give you more data points about the people that you’re talking to, because they do notice when you’ve done your homework about them beforehand.

0:19:27 – (Bob Woods): Yes.

0:19:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr): So rather than just generally asking what the challenge is, you can come into the conversation saying that, well, based on what I’ve been reading, it looks to me like you may be having this challenge and this challenge, am I on track or are there other challenges that you’re seeing that we need to talk about?

0:19:50 – (Brynne Tillman): So you know what I love about that, Stan, because I love that you’re not coming in with, you know, like that old-fashioned yellow tablet and a pen saying what keeps you up at night, right? You’re going in saying, Hey, I know what’s going on in the industry. This is what I’m hearing out there. These are the challenges that folks like you, I am hearing every single day. Are you facing those too? And then you are coming across. You’re the expert, right? You’re the expert. If they have other challenges, we’ve just opened it up for them to share.

0:20:27 – (Brynne Tillman): But by positioning it the way you just did, Stan, it is not like we don’t know what we’re talking about. And it also shows that we have value to bring. And there are even, there is even the possibility, as I think about this, where they’ll say, Oh, what else are you hearing out there? Or right. Like so we’re, we’ll even open up the opportunity to have a conversation about the trends that are out there. And then we, I, you could say, then what are you hearing?

0:21:01 – (Brynne Tillman): What are you feeling? What are you experiencing? And now it becomes a real conversation, not just a, you know, a checklist, a discovery checklist.

0:21:10 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. And the other thing that comes out of that is something that we mentioned earlier already, but I think it’s important to reiterate it here. When you are asking those questions, you know, we’re seeing 1, 2, and 3. Are you seeing that as that type of thing? You could also be giving them other things to think about. You know, it’s like, oh yeah, I didn’t even consider that. You know, let’s, you know, let’s talk more about that. Especially if your list is kind of different from their list, but they’re on the call with you.

0:21:39 – (Bob Woods): They are already talking. As you’re going through more questions, you are building up your credibility as an expert with them. More and more people love talking to experts because they more often than not want to learn more. So, you know, you can, there are, there are just so many different ways to, to really continue that conversation in a truly value-added way. And it’s just, it’s all great, and thank you, Karen.

0:22:05 – (Brynne Tillman): This is great. She, Kim, parents, thank you so much. Great tip. Thanks. Was just thinking about how to rewrite how I use the chirp from the band. Yep. Don’t download that ebook, and loved this. Thank you. We’ll try to get some of this chirp into the talk. Love it.

0:22:22 – (Bob Woods): There you go.

0:22:23 – (Brynne Tillman): We’d love to hear your successes with it.

0:22:26 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’d be great.

0:22:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. All right. Well, I think we are around that time when we start to.

0:22:34 – (Bob Woods): Time to. It’s time to come in for the end of we music.

0:22:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Time to light the light. Sorry.

0:22:43 – (Bob Woods): That’s okay. What’s. What’s. It’s. I’m so glad we’ve had this time together. I mean, you know, since we’re bringing in old, old closing songs, might as well bring that one in too. So whether you’ve been.

0:22:57 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Sorry. I’m glad two of us can sing.

0:23:00 – (Brynne Tillman): No, no, I can’t sing. I just do. Anyway.

0:23:05 – (Bob Woods): I used to be able to sing, and then I had throat surgery, and I don’t. I can’t sing nearly as well as I used to. So whenever, or I’m sorry, whether you’ve been with us live or recorded via our podcast. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social live sponsored by askssl.AI. We do these live sessions every week, so please feel free to join us. If you’re listening to us on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button, and you know, drop us a like and a comment too. We love those as well.

0:23:38 – (Bob Woods): Besides these LinkedIn lives, we also interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas, so be sure to catch those episodes as well. The SocialSalesLink podcast is where you’re gonna wanna go to find out more about our podcast. And one more time, if you would like to download the ebook that’s available at socialsaleslink.com, Bant E Ebook B A N T E B O O K All one word, and we will have that link as well.

0:24:12 – (Bob Woods): So when you are out and about this week and every week, be sure your questions are chirpy and make sure that your sales are social, Buddy. Have a great have a great week. Bye-bye. 

Outro:

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