With competition rising fiercely, organisations cannot afford to waste internal capabilities pursuing the wrong prospects. In fact, what this often leads to is sales reps thinking that their pipeline is full of great opportunities, only to be surprised at the end of the month when nothing closes. For this reason, it is essential to be able to assess which leads are actually worth investing time and energy on. Something that can help a lot with this is utilising reliable and effective qualification methodologies. Some of the most widely used by organisations around the world are BANT and MEDDIC, and today we will analyse both to assess which one could deliver higher results to your organisation, so you don’t have to!
But before getting into details, let’s understand what these acronyms actually stand for.
While BANT focuses on:
B: Budget: Does the customer have the capital to purchase your service?
A: Authority: Are you talking with the decision maker within the company?
N: Need: Have you identified the customer’s issue and that you have the solution?
T: Timing: Can the deal get done in a reasonable amount of time?
MEDDIC assesses prospects on the basis of 6 underlying factors, which are:
M: Metrics: What is the potential customer’s quantitative expectation following adoption?
E: Economic Decision Maker: Are you talking to the company’s decision-maker?
D: Decision Criteria: What are the company's decision-making criteria? Examples could be ROI requirements, integration requirements, etc.
D: Decision Process: What is the company's decision-making process and how are those decisions made and in what time frame?
I: Identified Pain: What is the pain (both quantitatively and qualitatively) and can you solve it?
C: Champion: Do you have someone internally that is fighting to implement your solution?
While both qualification methodologies have some obvious commonalities (identification of the need to be solved for the prospect and importance of dealing with the decision-maker within the organisation just to name a few), the key distinction between BANT and MEDDIC is that once you have completed the BANT requirements, it is uncommon for it to be mentioned again during the deal. In contrast, MEDDICC not only assists sellers in determining if they should invest their time in a specific prospect from the outset but also enables them to continually determine whether they should continue being in the deal as well as whether they are ahead of or behind.
While it is difficult to contest the idea that two sales qualification frameworks are comparable, comparing BANT to MEDDICC is like equating a car ride to a plane ride. Both transport you from one location to another and have their perks, but they differ greatly in terms of the depth of information.
In fact, just by looking at the acronyms, we can clearly see that MEDDIC goes much deeper. Due to this, highly qualified leads tend to only check 4 of the 6 requirements presented above. All six covered, and you’re probably going to get the deal across the finish line.
On the other hand, it is not uncommon to lose deals even if they check all 4 of BANT boxes and it might be too dumbed down for large enterprises.
BANT simplicity, of course, has its downsides but also some upsides. In fact, BANT has been identified as a great tool to empower SDRs and Inside Sellers to obtain an early assessment of an opportunity. Furthermore, it was found to be easier to utilise for junior salespeople and early-stage companies with little to no experience in the sales process.
In conclusion, we can confidently state that both methods are valid. While BANT finds its point of strength in its simplicity to be utilised during the early stages of a deal, MEDDIC power derives from its in-depth framework that enables salespeople to efficiently evaluate the value of a prospect during the whole extent of the deal. For this reason, MEDDIC has been found to yield more long-term benefits to organisations, thus allowing them to scale faster and better allocate internal capabilities.
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