What qualification is for
Deciding, early and deliberately, whether to keep spending time on a deal. That is all. A framework is not a script and it is not a form to fill in — it is a list of things you would regret not knowing before you wrote a proposal.
BANT
| Letter | Question | What you are checking |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Can they pay? | Money exists, roughly at your price |
| Authority | Can this person decide? | You are talking to a decision-maker or their route to one |
| Need | Do they have the problem? | The problem is real and they know it |
| Timing | When? | There is a reason to act this quarter, not eventually |
BANT is old and gets sneered at, mostly for leading with budget. The criticism is fair — asking a stranger about money in the first conversation reads as qualifying them out rather than helping them — but the four questions themselves are sound, and for a transactional sale with a short cycle it is the fastest way to find out whether a deal is real.
MEDDIC
| Letter | Question |
|---|---|
| Metrics | What number improves, and by how much? |
| Economic buyer | Who signs, and have you met them? |
| Decision criteria | What are they comparing on? |
| Decision process | What steps happen between yes and signature? |
| Identify pain | What breaks if they do nothing? |
| Champion | Who inside argues for you when you are not there? |
Built for long, expensive, multi-stakeholder sales. Two parts do most of the work. Decision process is the one teams skip and then lose deals to — knowing that a signature requires security review, procurement and a board meeting changes your timeline honestly, whereas discovering it in week ten does not. Champion is the one that decides most enterprise deals, because you are not in the room when the decision is made.
MEDDIC on a £3,000 deal is malpractice. The qualification would cost more than the sale.
CHAMP
Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation. Deliberately BANT reordered so the conversation starts with the buyer's problem and reaches money later, once there is a reason to discuss it. Same information, better sequence, and a more natural first call.
Which to use
| Your sale | Use |
|---|---|
| Small, fast, one decision-maker | BANT or CHAMP |
| Mid-market, a few stakeholders | CHAMP |
| Enterprise, long cycle, procurement | MEDDIC |
The framework is worth far less than the habit. A team that asks four questions consistently beats a team that asks six inconsistently, and the second team is more common.
The failure mode to watch for
Qualification turning into an interrogation. The buyer notices when they are being processed, and a call that runs down a checklist gets short answers to every item on it.
The information is the point, not the order. Most of it can be gathered from a conversation about their problem, if you are listening for it. What matters is that afterwards you can write down the answers — and that you record *unknown* as unknown rather than filling it in with hope.
Where the answers live matters too. Keeping CRM data clean covers the fields that go stale first.