BANT
A four-question filter, Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline, for triaging a high volume of leads fast.
How it sounds
- You Do you have budget set aside for this, and who else needs to sign off?
- Buyer Answers place them somewhere between hot lead and just browsing
- You What's driving the timeline, is there a date this needs to be solved by?
- Result You spend your limited hours on the leads worth the time
The full entry
BANT is a four-question filter for sorting leads fast: does the prospect have Budget, do you have the right Authority on the call, is there a real Need, and is there a Timeline pushing them to act. It is widely attributed to IBM, said to have been built for a sales force that needed a quick way to triage huge volumes of inbound interest, but no single named originator or exact year is documented, so treat that attribution as common industry lore rather than a confirmed source.
To use it, work the four questions into normal conversation instead of reading them off a list. “Do you have budget set aside for this, and who else needs to sign off?” covers Budget and Authority in one line. “What’s driving the timeline, is there a date this needs to be solved by?” gets at urgency without sounding like an interrogation.
It works well for high-volume, shorter sales cycles where speed matters more than depth. The common mistake is using it as a rigid gate on a complex deal, where a prospect can fail one letter early (no confirmed budget yet) and still be worth pursuing once the need is established.