The Customer-Centric Approach: When BANT Elevates Your Sales

Hello and welcome. My name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm focused on solving sales and marketing challenges through business education. And I'm making today's recording in church because the kids are having cat kism classes, so I expect to hear some noise in the background. Now, if you're impressed by the time we're done with this podcast, make sure you spread the word so that your friends and family members in Nigeria and abroad can benefit from the questions that we tackle.

They can do that by subscribing on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, or any player of their choice. And if you'd love to connect with me, you can call SMS or send me a WhatsApp on 08064662140. Now today on the podcast is also going to be another diary episode series of conversations that I've been having with Rudolph, LC and Shell, who are sales people that sell solar installations, inverter batteries, you know, all that good stuff.

Now for those of you who've been listening for the last 2-3 weeks, you know you're already familiar with the diary session. So let's just get into it. If this your first time listening to one, don't worry, you get caught up to speed. It's just me talking to people who are who make up the sales team for one of my clients. And then I come over here once in a while and I share some of the things that we talk about in the hope that some of you listening to the podcast will be able to pick out one or two helpful things from it.

And also so that there's some audio or less in audio footprints, audio recording audio, something so that they can listen members of the team can listen back to later on. So this is one of the meetings that we had. Let's see. Let me see. OK, this was meeting on the first day. OK. Yeah. So we have been talking a lot about qualification and discovery. Now these are very technical sounding terms when it comes to sales and business development,

but in a very, very simple sense, qualification and discovery just means one thing. OK, Well, a few things. It refers to the part of the business relationship where you're trying to have simple convos, simple conversations with the potential customer that you're talking to at the moment and you're trying to figure out a few things. Who is this person? What are they about? What are they interested in? What are they running away from?

What are they running towards? What's the problem? What's the vision? Is this something that I can fulfill myself? Do I have to bring in an extra squad? You know, whatever it is, Shah But you just ask questions. You try and figure out the extent of the problem and who they are. And that is important because this is where you will get all the information to be able to give an appropriate quote. So that's one of the reasons why we do it.

However, I'm trying to get the sales team to understand that share Go LC and Rudolph that if you do this part of the sales process very well, you'll find out that you you will shorten your call times as your conversations will be sharp, sharp, sharp because you quickly get to the point. And also because you find out that you're spending more time with people who are likely to end up becoming customers at the end of the day.

Because one of the demoralized, demoralizing things in business is that you're talking to so many people. You make like 50 phone calls in one week. At the end of the day, only, you know, 5 people buy now five people buying. You know, that's all right. But The thing is that remaining 45, you just feel as if you are wasting your time. So if you get into the habit of handling qualification and discovery very well, you find that you are now spending less time with all these all serious people work up as people.

I was just curious people, you know, people chat, you'll spend time with people who are going to be wasting your time. So you shorten call times, you will remove curious people quick, quick or people you have no time, no reason to spend time with and you're not going to privatize people who are likely to become customers. So that's the reason why this is important. Now I had introduced them to a qualification method I think the week prior called band, which is a budget authority need and timeline, and I made a podcast episode about that.

Now Budget authority, need and timeline band. What that means is you need to be engaging people, excuse me, engaging people early to try and figure out what their money expectations are. Because some of you wait until the end and it's absolute BS to spend 4 weeks talking to somebody and then at the end of the four weeks they will say, ah, your price is on the high side. Now The thing is, if the price is on the high side, it is best to find out in week 1 after you've had one or two conversations with the person rather than you wasting time relationship building, you, you say you're, you know, trying to build rapport, everything.

Then in week 4, they will now say you're too expensive. The thing is, if you're too expensive, excuse me, you've always been too expensive, you are better at finding out in week 1 than wasting 5 weeks talking with somebody. So I believe in getting straight to the point. Now for some of you, it's a little too direct, but that's not a problem. Just keep listening to the podcast. You'll find out the different methods that I try and teach people about how to broach the conversation quickly.

But either way, money conversations, budget conversations, let's have this early authority conversations that's all about trying to figure out decision making. Who is responsible for making the decision? Because there's no point in spending five weeks talking to somebody only to discover that you are talking to the houseboy and the houseboy has no authority to write a check or that you are talking to the PA and the PA has no authority to write a check.

Now, there are some organizations where the PA has a spending limit, like, you know, for every single purchase that is below 150,000, go ahead and pay before anything that costs, you know, 200K OP, you know, reported to Olga. But The thing is we need to be having those conversations early before we invest time into the process. So that's what authority conversations are about also so that we make sure that we're speaking to the right number of people because sometimes 2345

people are required to make a decision. If you don't believe me, for those of you who are selling highly complex sales, or even if it's even if you think it's a simple something, but let's say now, OK, because I'm here in church, let's say you want to sell into church and you think no problem, so long as I speak to the parish priest is OK. That might not be the case. There are some churches where so long as you speak to the parish priest, you're good to go.

But there's some other parishes where you need to speak to the parish priest. The parish priest would need approval from finance. The finance guy is going to receive instructions from the parish pastoral committee. So you need to figure this thing out early so that you now know that OK, in the beginning you're coming up with a strategy for talking to the parish priest and make sure that you have a hook up with one or two people in the parish pastoral council.

That way you will get your deal closed. So it's the same thing. You know, in highly complex sales, let's say like now you want to win government contract. If you want to win government contract, you can't say because you're talking to the governor that the deal will close. You know, it would be nice to be talking to governor, it would be nice to be talking to somebody in Ministry of Works, another person in Ministry of Finance,

no one or two people in their house. That is essentially what authority is about. Who is going to cut the cheque? How is payment going to be made? Who are the relevant parties? How can I bring them into the conversation? Then what else? Budget authority and need. So of course, that's the part where, you know, most of us do OK, because you're trying to figure out what the person needs so you can deliver adequately. So let's not dwell on that.

And then timeline, that is one place where most Nigerians stroke. And in fact, when I brought up timeline questions, it's something that Shell in the team particularly liked because you realize that if you're asking questions about timeline, you are going to be able to weave out people who are serious, some people who are unserious. And for me, this is one of the things that I do. So I ask, OK, if I understand you correctly, you wanted this,

this, this, this, and you want that, that, that. By the way, how soon do you need this? The person who says, oh, we need it for next week Thursday. I now know that I have a serious client on my hand. If somebody says, oh, no, no, no, it's not like I needed to. I was just asking then, you know, at least now I know. And I'm not going to be following up endlessly with people. So lots of people don't get into the habit of asking timeline conversations.

And you should be having these sorts of conversations. You know, how soon do you need this by? When do you like us to? Would you like us to go ahead? How soon do you want us to start? Who are we going to deliver to? Can I have the phone number for the person who's going to be accepting delivery? You know, is from asking things like that, that somebody say, Oh, no, no, no, I was just asking you. My cousin's sisters aunty is getting married in two years time.

So I said, let me just do some research. That kind of person. There's no point hanging around that sort of person for too long. So that's the band criteria that I introduced them to. And I suspect I made a podcast recording about that before. If I didn't, then this is just sort of like a recap now, since I've already spent close to 10 minutes on bands, let me just stop here because I've noticed that a whole bunch of you who listen to the podcast, a lot of you stop at like minute 10 or so.

Now there's some diehards who listen all the way to the end and the diehards. I really, really appreciate you guys. But I figure, you know, let me relax. Let me stop being so hardcore because I guess it's a lot to take in for the other people. So I'm going to stop here now on band because the summary that I want to share with you guys today actually was not about that. It's about spin. And spin is another qualification framework.

So if you enjoyed listening to this episode, just hang on. The next one that we're going to move into is going to be about spin selling. Now spin selling is not not spin. You know, like when Americans say spin, you know, they mean you don't like Fabu. Like you go on, you know, you sharp mouth, you sweet mouth, you know, you dazzle somebody, you just spin the thing you understand. So it is not about Fabu, it's not about lying, it's not about tweaking the truth and none of that.

So just hang on. And in the future episode, in the next episode, the very next episode, we'll get into spin selling. So that's it for now. Yeah. So that's it. And that's all for today. Now remember, if you'd love to connect with me, you can call, you can SMS, you can WhatsApp me on 08064662140. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you next time. Same place in your headphones and in your speakers.