#which Bant is founder and CEO of

[swhurtcomfort]

I don’t know if you guys are comfortable with this topic, but could you write something where Obi-Wan starts self-harming after the events of the phantom menace, and Anakin walks in on him?

Hi anon, this is a grey area of my comfort zone as a writer but I gave it a try. If this fic isn’t what you were hoping for, try submitting another prompt when Leslie comes back so maybe she can write you something.

tw non-graphic self-destructive behavior (not cutting) under the readmore; tw complicated grief

Be brave don’t look back be brave don’t look back

Master Kenobi comes home from his mission. He’s limping a bit and hides his face from Anakin, disappearing into the sonic without a word.

When he emerges, he is walking more normally, and he has something smeared on his face to cover up the black eye.

“Get dressed—casual robes will do,” he says to Anakin. “We are going downtown for supper.”

Master Kenobi gets injured on more missions than not. In lieu of the six-month solo assignment that a newly-made knight would traditionally be given, the Council sends him on shorter, more frequent missions so that he can be in the Temple with Anakin most of the time. Anakin hates that things have to be done differently to accommodate him, just another problem he’s created.

Anakin isn’t sure what to tell his classmates when they ask him about Master Kenobi, their eyes full of jealousy and sometimes malice. What’s it like being trained by the Sith-Slayer? He doesn’t think he’s supposed to tell them that Master Kenobi is unpredictable, sometimes friendly, sometimes aloof. And he knows he’s not supposed to tell them about the constant injuries, or the bloodstained robes that he tries to scrub clean in the sink rather than take them to the quartermaster. Or the fact that four months after the funeral, Master Kenobi still sleeps on the sofa rather than in the bed that was previously Master Qui-Gon’s.

Anakin gets dressed and follows Master Kenobi down to the hovertrain platform in silence. Anakin is painfully aware that Master Kenobi hadn’t really wanted a padawan in the first place, but he likes to think that things are improving between them. Master Kenobi is teaching him Shii-Cho so he doesn’t have to take Master Yoda’s class in a room full of 4-year-olds. They laugh and kid around sometimes. It’s just that other times, Master Kenobi comes home bloodied and bruised and they can’t seem to talk about it. Time passes painfully slow on the tram ride.

When they arrive at the diner, Dexter Jettster isn’t fooled by whatever he’s painted his face with. “Quite the shiner you’ve got there, my boy,” he thunders, grabbing Master Kenobi’s shoulder roughly and offering Anakin a smile.

“You know which booth. I’ll come and join ‘ya if I can catch a break.”

Obi-Wan leads the way to their usual seats. He’s still too quiet and seems distracted, even though Dex’s food is his favorite treat. At the end of their meal Dex asks Anakin into the back kitchen under some pretext about some spare parts from old kitchen droids.

“Listen, kiddo,” the Besalisk says once the kitchen door swings shut behind them. “Your master, he’s not acting right. Even considering all that’s happened.”Anakin averts his eyes and takes a half a step back, just another instinct he hasn’t unlearned from his previous life. He doesn’t want to get in trouble. He’s still very aware that Obi-Wan is the only thing standing between him and the Council, so he can’t screw things up between them.“It’s alright, you don’t have to tell me nothin’. But Anakin?”

Anakin’s head snaps up.

“There’s a healer at the Temple, sweet girl, goes by Bant. If our Ben needs help—even if he tells you he don’t—give her a call, alright? It’s alright to tell somebody if he’s worryin’ you. Go to your healer’s wing and ask for Bant.”

“I know Healer Eerin,” says Anakin quietly.

“Well, there you go.” Dex’s gentle smile reaches the corners of his eyes. He claps Anakin on the shoulder a little too hard. “It’s a bad job, poor Jinn, poor Kenobi. Shouldn’t be for someone your age to worry about, but somebody oughta keep an eye on him.”

Anakin agrees, shoulders this silent and awkward responsibility that he doesn’t quite understand.

Dex’s warning is timely; the following week is a rough one. Obi-Wan sleeps too much and eats too little, and barely pays attention to Anakin at all. It makes Anakin dreadfully homesick, mixed with a guilty wish that Qui-Gon were here to train him. He’s pretty sure Qui-Gon wouldn’t have stood him up for sparring practice and left him waiting in the dojo for hours.

Anakin comes home and lets himself in, crabby and feeling sorry for himself. A drop of blood on the hallway floor catches his eye.

Anakin treads lightly to the open ‘fresher door, and sees Obi-Wan kneeling on the floor in front of the med kit. He is dabbing bacta on the corner of his blackened eye.

Obi-Wan leans forward and shrugs out of his shirt, and it’s all Anakin can do not to gasp.

Obi-Wan carefully examines the mottled flesh that spans from his hip halfway up his rib cage in a rainbow of colors. The horrendous bruise sprawls at the edges into the outlines of blood vessels. Obi-Wan lays a hand over the injury and presses experimentally.

He grimaces while applying more pressure. There’s a sudden hitch of his breath.

Anakin swallows hard, sickened by what he is watching. He feels a wave of guilt for intruding on something so intimate and private, watching Obi-Wan explore the hurts all over his body with cruel fingertips, prodding and picking at the injuries as though the pain of them were a relief.

Anakin starts to suspect that some of these injuries were avoidable. He’s known slaves who possessed the same tendencies. They weren’t as easy to spot as those who inflicted wounds by their own hand, but they were the dejected folks who disobeyed and acted out, and didn’t seem to mind the beatings it earned them. An outsider might think they were simply strong-willed or foolish, but Anakin could recognize hopelessness when he saw it.

He sees the same look on Obi-Wan’s face, as if the pain is deserved, as if it brings him some sense of rightness. A wave of repulsion crashes over Anakin. He slips back through the hallway and out the front door. He thinks about Dex’s advice again.

His feet take him to the healer’s wing, but by the time he gets there he still hasn’t decided what to say. A padawan greets him in the lobby.

“I need to see Healer Eerin, please,” he squeaks.

“She’s in an appointment. Do you need medical attention?”

Anakin swallows hard. He is starting to feel like this was a bad idea. What if he gets Obi-Wan in trouble? What if Obi-Wan gets angry with him?

“It has to be Healer Eerin,” he stammers. “Master Kenobi—he—well, Dex said…”

Anakin is starting to panic. The junior healer leans over the desk. “Take a deep breath. If Knight Kenobi is injured, he might have asked you to fetch Bant because she is his friend, but another healer will still be able to help him. Is that what happened, padawan?”

“No!” Anakin’s stomach churns. He’s not sure if Master Kenobi is going to get in trouble for what he’s doing, but he’s obviously been trying to hide it. Anakin’s not a tattletale…but Dex said it was okay to tell Bant even if Obi-Wan said no. He doesn’t think Dex would have told him to do something bad, but then again, Dex isn’t a Jedi so maybe he doesn’t understand the rules. Everything is too confusing.

“Does anyone need a healer right now?” the boy behind the desk tries to get his attention again.

“No!” Anakin says quickly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, don’t, please,”

“Alright,” the junior healer looks thoroughly confused. “How about I just leave Bant a note, and have her comm Knight Kenobi in an hour?”

Anakin agrees before he takes off at a run.

Jacosta Nu is not particularly happy to see him sprinting through her doors, so he slows his pace to a respectable walk. He weaves through rows and rows of archived datafiles and finds his preferred hiding spot, a narrow cranny between two tall shelves, hidden by a row of force-sensitive ferns. It’s just right for someone his size, and impenetrable to anyone bigger. He used to come here a lot in the first few weeks, to avoid the mutual embarrassment of overhearing Master Kenobi’s crying. It’s comforting to have a place in the Temple that no one else knows about.

Anakin pulls his knees up to his chest and braces his feet against the flat side of a shelf. It’s oddly comforting to be so snug. He takes deep breaths. Be brave don’t look back be brave don’t look back

He lets out a few silent tears, and contemplates his options. Weighs the likelihood that Master Kenobi will find out he almost told and be cross with him. Weighs the likelihood that the Council will find out anyway and take Anakin away from him, or something equally horrifying. Wonders if Master Kenobi is going to be okay.

Anakin’s not sure how long he stays there, taking deep breaths. Probably a few hours at least. He falls asleep there and wakes up feeling worse.

The fronds of the oversized plant rustle. “Hi, Anakin,” whispers a voice.

Anakin’s head shoots up as he wipes the tear tracks from his face. “Master Siri?”

“It’s alright, Anakin,” Siri Tachi assures him. “Come on out of there, it’s past your bedtime.”

Anakin obeys, wondering suddenly why Master Kenobi wasn’t the one to fetch him.

“Is—”

“Everything’s fine,” says Siri quietly. “You’ll see.”

Anakin thinks a bit as he walks. “Master Siri, how did you find me?”

Siri laughs. “Jacosta said you weren’t the first little padawan she’s known to take a liking to those ferns.”

Anakin almost says something when they reach the level where he and Obi-Wan live. Master Kenobi never entertains and Anakin isn’t allowed to invite people over either – he suspects it’s to hide the fact that Master Kenobi still hasn’t cleaned out Qui-Gon’s room.

Obi-Wan’s not going to like it if Siri barges in, but before Anakin can say anything, the door is sliding open.

The scene that greets him inside is a complete shock. Master Kenobi sits in the center of the sofa, flanked on either side by Bant Eerin and Mace Windu, each with a hand at his back. Dexter is hovering near an armchair beside a green-eyed woman whom Anakin has never met.

Anakin and Obi-Wan make eye contact, then look away. Anakin can tell that he knows—knows what Anakin saw. That he’s wondering what Anakin thinks of him now. That a childish part deep down in Anakin isn’t sure of the answer.

“Anakin, it’s alright,” Obi-Wan manages hoarsely.

“You’re not angry, Master?” Anakin barely whispers.

“What?” he asks. Mace’s hand shifts higher on Obi-Wan’s back. Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Anakin, I’m sorry.”

Anakin nods and presses himself up against the wall.

“I’ll make you a deal, Obi-Wan,” says Bant quietly. “I’ll sneak some supplies from the Halls and patch you up here if you let me set you up an appointment with Raina.”

“I don’t think I need a Mind Healer,” Obi-Wan mumbles.

Bant shrugs.

“I’d take that deal if I were you, Obi-Wan,” says Mace with a rare note of humor. “If you make us take you to the Halls, Vokara will have some choice words about those bruises.”

“There’s no shame in it, kiddo,” says Dex sagely.

Anakin doesn’t know whose face to look at. He’s thankful no one seems to be paying attention to him.

“Okay,” Obi-Wan sighs.

Bant nods and rises to go fetch her medical supplies.

“We all miss him too,” says the girl sitting next to Dex. “If you want our help tomorrow, all you have to do is comm.”

“Thanks, Astri.”

“But if not, that’s alright too,” Dex adds. “Sometimes you gotta have your space. But we’ll just be here in a few clicks if you ever need.”

As they begin to take their leave, Obi-Wan beckons Anakin to him.

“Mace and Bant are coming over tomorrow morning,” he says slowly, as if the words were a great effort. “And we’re going to clean Qui-Gon’s room.”

Anakin glances towards the bedroom door, the one that they never open. He realizes he can’t remember the last time he heard Master Kenobi say Qui-Gon’s name out loud.

“If you would like to help, you can skip your morning class. It’s up to you,” he continues. He lays a hand on Anakin’s arm, almost gingerly.

Anakin doesn’t react either way, still watching nervously.

“I haven’t been myself,” Obi-Wan half-whispers. “Things are going to get better. I’ll be a better master to you.”

“You’re a good master,” says Anakin quickly.

Bant returns with her pockets full of bacta, gauze and painkillers. “Let’s try the kitchen table, Obi,” she says in a business-like tone. “Wouldn’t want to get blood on your sofa.”

Mace takes that as his cue to leave. Obi-Wan politely indicates that Anakin should go get ready for bed.

As he’s brushing his teeth, Anakin can hear the muffled sound of their lowered voices in the kitchen. It’s somehow a weight off his back, knowing that there’s a grown-up taking care of Master Kenobi. He hadn’t realized how heavy those secrets were while he was carrying them.

Master Qui-Gon’s presence is still missing in their home, something that should be there but isn’t, an empty hole that aches. And perhaps he always will be. But Anakin falls asleep with Obi-Wan’s promise echoing in his ears, that things are going to get better.

[ncmagroup]

Written by Leslie Ye

One of the most important conversations salespeople have with their prospects is the discovery call. Here lies the proverbial fork in the road for you and your prospect. Either they’re a good fit for your product or service and you can move forward with the relationship, or it’s time to part ways.

But it’s not always immediately obvious which path to take. That’s where sales qualification comes in. By asking the right questions, you’ll be able to determine whether the relationship should continue, and if so, what next steps are appropriate. This guide will walk you through the fundamentals of sales qualification, five different frameworks you can use, and provide pointers on disqualification and conversational tip-offs to listen for.

Use the table of contents below to navigate through the guide:

What Is a Qualified Prospect?

When to Disqualify

Why Disqualifying Isn’t a Bad Thing

What Is a Qualifying Question?

What Is BANT?

MEDDIC, CHAMP Sales, & 3 More Qualification Frameworks

Qualifying Leads: The Qualification Process

What Is a Qualified Prospect?

  A discovery call is where you might do the bulk of your qualification, but it certainly isn’t where qualification starts or ends. At every step of the sales process, you’ll continuously evaluate prospects for more and more specific characteristics.

According to Bob Apollo, the founder of sales consulting group Inflexion Point, there’s a hierarchy to qualification. That is, sales reps must qualify prospects at three different levels — what Apollo terms “organization-level,” “opportunity-level,” and “stakeholder-level” sales qualification.

Organization-Level Qualification

This is the most basic level of qualification and doesn’t tell you much other than whether you should do more research. If your company has buyer personas, reference them when qualifying a prospect. Does the buyer match the demographics of a given persona?

Questions you should ask at this stage include:

Is the prospect in your territory?

Do you sell to their industry?

What’s the company size?

Does the account fit your company’s buyer persona?

Opportunity-Level Qualification

This form of qualification is probably what you thought of when you read the title of this post. Opportunity-level sales qualification is where you determine whether your prospect has a specific need or challenge you can satisfy and whether it’s feasible for them to implement your particular product or service. The other half of a good buyer persona, opportunity-level characteristics give insight into whether a prospect could benefit from your offering.

For suggestions of questions, you can ask to qualify at the opportunity level, see below.

Stakeholder-Level Qualification

Let’s say you’ve determined that your prospect’s company is a good match for your solution and fits your ideal buyer persona. It’s time to get into the nitty-gritty — can your point of contact actually pull the trigger on a purchase decision?

To determine this, ask the following:

Will this purchase come out of your budget?

Who else is involved in the decision?

Do you have criteria for this purchase decision? Who defined them?

When to Disqualify

  These three levels are listed in the order you should use them to disqualify.

For instance, if your prospect is a complete departure from your company’s buyer persona, it’s safe to disqualify them right then and there on an organizational level. Maybe one day, you’ll serve their type of buyer, but right now you don’t — so don’t waste time trying to shoehorn your offering into their business.

Similarly, you could be speaking with the CEO of an organization with complete budget authority who passes stakeholder-level qualification with flying colors. But if there’s no problem, there’s no need for your solution. Qualify for business pain first.

Also keep in mind that unless a prospect can be qualified on all three levels, you shouldn’t advance them in the sales process. For example, if you ask your prospect about the company’s strategic goals and they’re unable to answer, it’s a good sign they’re not close enough to the decision process and lack influence.

You should disqualify this contact at the stakeholder level, even though they pass at the opportunity level.

Why Disqualifying Isn’t a Bad Thing

  Many salespeople are loath to disqualify prospects and shrink their pipelines.

Their natural instinct is trying to work as many leads as possible, but this isn’t the best approach. The quality of your leads matters more than the quantity.

As a salesperson, your most precious asset is your time, and it’s far better to spend it on a handful of your best prospects than spreading yourself thin across dozens of leads. Trying to close every deal that comes along is only going to result in dead ends with poor fit prospects, while you neglect prospects likely to buy.

What Is a Qualifying Question?

  A qualifying question helps the salesperson determine their prospect’s fit for one criteria. That might be need, budget, authority, sense of urgency, or another factor.

A good qualifying question is typically open-ended. Asking a close-ended question, like “Is this a priority right now?” boxes the buyer into an answer. The better version would be “Where does this fall on your list of business priorities?” Because you’re not leading the prospect to an answer, the response will usually be more honest and revealing.

What Is BANT?

  A qualification framework is essentially a rubric that salespeople can use to determine whether a prospect is likely to become a successful customer. Every customer and every sale is different, but all closed-won deals share commonalities. Sales qualification frameworks distill those shared characteristics into general traits reps can look for when qualifying.

The BANT Qualification Framework

The Old Faithful of sales qualification frameworks, BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) is used at a variety of companies and in a variety of markets.

Originally developed by IBM, BANT covers all the broad strokes of opportunity and stakeholder-level qualification.

BANT seeks to uncover the following four pieces of information:

Budget: Is the prospect capable of buying?

Authority: Does your contact have adequate authority to sign off on a purchase?

Need: Does the prospect have a business pain you can solve?

Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?

Here are a few examples of BANT questions in the context of a prospect conversation:

Budget

Do you have a budget set aside for this purchase? What is it?

Is this an important enough priority to allocate funds toward?

What other initiatives are you spending money on?

Does seasonality affect your funding?

Authority

Whose budget does this purchase come out of?

Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?

How have you made purchasing decisions for products similar to ours in the past?

What objections to this purchase do you anticipate encountering? How do you think we can best handle them?

Need

What challenges are you struggling with?

What’s the source of that pain, and why do you feel it’s worth spending time on?

Why hasn’t it been addressed before?

What do you think could solve this problem? Why?

Timeline

How quickly do you need to solve your problem?

What else is a priority for you?

Are you evaluating any other similar products or services?

Do you have the capacity to implement this product right now?

While BANT addresses many opportunity-level requirements, it misses the mark on others. According to research from CEB, it now takes an average of 5.4 people to make a buying decision so the “ultimate” buying authority could be more than one person. Make sure you engage all relevant stakeholders early on in the process and secure each individual’s buy-in.

“Timeline” is another area where BANT falls short today. A strict BANT qualification might tell you to cycle a lead who won’t be ready to buy until next year into a closed-lost queue. But you might be acting prematurely — send over educational resources and offer to help until they’re ready to buy if you can.

MEDDIC, CHAMP Sales, & 3 More Qualification Frameworks

  BANT might be the most popular, but it’s far from the only sales qualification framework out there. Here are five alternate frameworks that sales reps can use if BANT just doesn’t cut it.

MEDDIC

MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) was pioneered by Jack Napoli when he was at technology company PTC. MEDDIC requires sales reps to understand every aspect of a target company’s purchase process, down to whether you have an internal champion — an employee at a prospective company who will internally sell your product.

MEDDIC was incredibly valuable for increasing forecasting accuracy, something that’s crucial for companies that sell to enterprise companies — after all, losing just one deal can be crippling when each is worth several million dollars.

“From $0 to $100 million, [PTC was] successful because we sold a better widget,” HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan said. “From $100 million to $1 billion, we sold a shift in technology. MEDDIC became important because it’s not just any old purchase — it’s a transformation of the business.”

You should consider using MEDDIC as a qualification framework if your company sells a product that requires a transformation in behavior or average sales price is incredibly high, as understanding exactly how a prospect buys, why they would buy, and who’s championing you internally is crucial to maintaining an accurate pipeline.

CHAMP Sales

CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization) is similar to ANUM but places Challenges ahead of Authority.

“Your prospect buys things because they have a challenge,” Atiim, Inc. founder Zorian Rotenberg writes in a blog post. “[Challenges] are the first fundamental part of sales qualification.”

CHAMP also defines authority as a “call-to-action,” not a roadblock. If your initial contact is a low-level employee, you can safely assume they won’t be the decision maker. That doesn’t mean you should hang up the phone. Instead, “ask your prospect questions that help you map out their company’s organizational structure” to determine who to reach out to next, according to Rotenberg.

GPCTBA/C&I

Yes, it’s a long acronym, but a useful one. Developed at HubSpot the qualification framework, GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences and Positive Implications) is a response to changes in buyer behavior. Buyers come to the sales process increasingly informed, so salespeople need to add value on top of product knowledge to be worth speaking with.

But value isn’t something sales reps can just “add” — to truly act as an advisor, you must explore beyond the scope of the discrete problem that your product or service could solve. This means understanding a prospect’s strategic goals, their company’s business model, and how the specific issue you’re discussing fits into the larger picture of their professional life.

Here are some of the questions you should ask at each step:

Goals

The purpose of the following questions is to find out your prospect’s quantitative goals. You can help clarify or set goals with your prospect if their response isn’t well-defined.

What is your top priority this year?

Do you have specific company goals?

Do you have published revenue goals for this quarter/year?

Plans

Once you understand your prospect’s goals, find out what work they’ve already done to achieve them. Determine what’s worked and what hasn’t, and make suggestions for improvement.

What are you planning to do to achieve your goals?

What did you do last year? What worked and what didn’t? What are you going to do differently this year?

Do you think XYZ might make it hard to implement your plan?

Do you have the right resources available to implement this plan?

Challenges

Defining your prospect’s challenges — and reinforcing that what they’ve already tried isn’t working — is crucial. Unless they understand that they need help, a prospect won’t become a customer.

Why do you think you’ll be able to eliminate this challenge now, even though you’ve tried in the past and you’re still dealing with it?

Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?

If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn’t fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Timeline

Your most important asset is your time. So while a prospect that doesn’t want to buy now or in the near future isn’t necessarily a lost cause, they should move down your priority list.

When will you begin implementing this plan?

Do you have bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?

Would you like help thinking through the steps involved in executing this plan, so you can figure out when you should implement each piece?

Budget

Just asking “What’s your budget?”, isn’t a question likely to get you valuable insight, according to HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre.

Instead, try asking:

Are we in agreement on the potential ROI of [product or service]?

Are you spending money on another product to solve the problem we’ve discussed?

Then, go in for the kill. Databox CEO and former HubSpot VP of sales Pete Caputa suggest phrasing the budget question this way:

“We’ve established that your goal is X and that you’re spending Y now to try and achieve X. But it’s not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you’re more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?”

Authority

Unlike in BANT, qualifying for authority under this framework isn’t necessarily trying to determine whether your contact is a decision maker. Your contact might be an influencer or a coach, two types of internal champions who can give you insight into the decision maker’s thought process.

If your contact isn’t the economic buyer, ask them:

Are the goals we’ve discussed important to the economic buyer?

Amongst their priorities, where does this fall?

What concerns do you anticipate they’ll raise?

How should we go about getting the economic buyer on board?

Negative Consequences and Positive Implications

In this part of the qualification process, you’re finding out what happens if your prospect does or does not achieve their goals.

“If your product can significantly help them avoid consequences and further aid in achieving even bigger follow-up goals, you’ve got a very strong value proposition,” Caputa says.

Here are some C&I questions to ask prospects:

What happens if you do or don’t reach your goals? Does the outcome affect you on a personal level?

When you overcome this challenge, what will you do next?

Do you stand to get promoted or get more resources if you can hit your goal? Would you lose responsibility or be demoted if you don’t?

The benefit of GPCTBA/C&I is that is allows salespeople to gather a huge amount of information. If your product is complex, highly differentiated, and stands to become an integral part of your prospect’s business strategy, having these insights is incredibly valuable. Sales reps selling these kinds of products need to step into their prospects’ world to be effective advisors and business partners.

However, GPCTBA/C&I might not be right for every sales force. Depending on what you sell, such thorough qualification may not be necessary.

ANUM

ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) is an alternative spin on BANT. When qualifying using ANUM, a sales rep’s first priority should be to determine whether they’re speaking with a decision maker.

Need functions the same way as it does in BANT, but has been moved up in priority. Urgency correlates with Timing, while Money replaces Budget, but with subtle distinctions. David Garcia explains:

“With Urgency, we want to know how high up [the prospect’s] priority list this particular business pain is. Budget has been updated to Money to reflect the fact that we have to only find out if they potentially have the money to purchase our solution. Then it is our job to prove our value and why [the prospect] should apply to get the fixed budget for this purchase.”

FAINT

The RAIN Group advocates using FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing) to qualify sales leads. FAINT is designed to reflect the fact that many purchase decisions are unplanned and thus won’t be associated with a set budget.

Like ANUM, reps using FAINT should look for organizations with the capacity to buy, regardless of whether a discrete budget has been set aside. FAINT also adds Interest to the mix. According to RAIN Group’s John Doerr and Mike Schultz, Interest is defined as “[generating] interest from the buyer in learning what’s possible and how to achieve a new and better reality than the one they have today.”

Qualifying Leads: The Qualification Process

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.”

This phrase is the root of countless arguments, but it’s as good as gold when it comes to sales qualification. Your prospect will provide you as much information via their tone of voice and delivery as the words they actually speak.

Here are some tip-offs (both good and bad) to listen for when qualifying a prospect that can help you determine whether to advance the sales process or disqualify ASAP.

Good Signs to Move a Prospect Forward

Excuses

Wait. How can excuses be a good thing?

According to Psychology Today, we make excuses to resolve cognitive dissonance — mental stress caused by holding conflicting beliefs. Excuses help resolve our actions with who we want to be.

During a sales conversation, your ears should perk up if your prospect tries to explain away previous inaction regarding business pain. This indicates one of two things: either the excuse is legitimate, or your prospect wishes they had done something about it earlier and is trying to rationalize why they didn’t. Either way, it confirms their pain is real.

Specificity

Prospects who can give specific answers to questions such as “What are your goals?” and “When do you need to see results?” have thought carefully about their problem. Listen for sequential plans, thought-out explanations, and statistics. Specifics also indicate that your prospect feels real pain. After all, people without real problems don’t spend time thinking about why they exist and how to address them.

Of course, the caveat is that specifics must be accompanied by reality. A prospect who says, “I want to quadruple revenue in the next two weeks,” is using specifics to demonstrate that they don’t have strong business acumen.

Knowledge

Specificity’s partner is knowledge. A knowledge check is your best bet for qualifying at the stakeholder level. True decision makers will have intimate knowledge of company goals, challenges, and needs. A contact who doesn’t have access to this information likely isn’t going to be valuable in the sales process.

Red Flags in the Sales Process

Inconsistency

A prospect whose answers contradict each other is likely one who wants to be helpful, but can’t because they don’t possess adequate knowledge. However, this isn’t a dealbreaker — prod them to tell you who does know the answers, and continue qualifying the opportunity with another contact.

Short answers

True business pain permeates an organization — executives lose sleep over it and employees have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. If you give the impression that you can help alleviate the pain, prospects will want to talk to you.

A prospect who’s giving you one-word answers isn’t someone who feels there’s basis for a conversation. It could be that the problem is a non-issue, or the contact isn’t clued in enough to feel its severity. Depending on what you think is going on, disqualify or try reaching out to another member of the organization.

Sales success rests on effective qualification. Your ability to find good fit prospects will make or break your business. Prospects who turn into happy customers mean not only revenue, but increased word-of-mouth, referrals, and the possibility of cross- or upselling. So it’s imperative that you get it right.

Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

The Ultimate Guide to Sales Qualification Written by Leslie Ye One of the most important conversations salespeople have with their prospects is the discovery call.

[canadastartupblog]

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine.

JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded 5 million times, and the company was doing about $1m a year in revenues, selling training, documentation and consulting. Around that time, Bob Bickel joined the company, and initiated a process to raise venture capital. The raising of VC funds was a trigger that was needed to hire a professional management team, and to enter a new growth phase. Together with Bob, the company had figured out that once an application migrated from development to production, they could charge their customers for a subscription based initially around support, that should result in a better monetization than the other revenue streams.

I joined the board, and we immediately started working together as a team to build their sales and marketing machine. The photo below shows the two whiteboards after the first brainstorming session.

JBoss were extremely successful in building their sales and marketing machine, and went on to reach an annualized bookings run rate of about $65 million a year within two and a half years after starting the process. At that time they were acquired by Red Hat for $350 million plus an earnout of $70 million.

While I take a tiny amount of credit for introducing the methodology and helping to hire the management team, it should be made totally clear that the real credit belongs to the outstanding team who did the work to make this all happen. There were many players involved, but to give credit to some of the main people involved, I would like to highlight Marc Fleury, the founder and CEO; Sacha Labourey, co-founder and CTO; Bob Bickel, who brought professional business thinking and great management skills; Joe McGonnell who ran marketing; Rob Bearden, who ran sales; Brad Murdoch, who was responsible for the products and services that were used for monetization; Nathalie Fleury, responsible for PR, and working the blogosphere; Tom Leonard, head of business development; and Ben Sabrin. (My apologies for those left off this list. There were many other great individuals involved, and the full list would be very long.) They were not only great strategic thinkers, but they also executed flawlessly.

Starting the lead flow

The first question we looked at was: Did they know the names of the people that had downloaded their software 5 million times? The sad answer was no. Not only did SourceForge not allow them to collect names, but even if they did allow it, there was clear evidence that developers would simply not go through with the download if they were asked to provide their name.

Following one of the key principles of Building a Sales & Marketing Machine, we immediately realized that they needed to find a motivation to get the customers to provide the company with their contact information. The best motivation appeared to be the documentation, that they were currently selling. There was one big problem: selling the documentation was resulting in $27,000 per month in revenue, which was paying the rent and several peoples’ salaries. To me it was obvious that this was a small price to pay to get the names, but to the JBoss team, who had battled their way to get every dollar of revenue, that was less obvious. We debated this issue over the next three months, but finally they gave in and switched on the offer. It turned out to be a huge success: over 10,000 leads started pouring in every month. Over time this grew to 16,000 leads per month.

Dealing with an overflow of leads: Lead Scoring

Most companies suffer from not having enough leads. We had the opposite problem. As any salesperson will tell you, 10,000 leads is a huge problem. No one has the time to contact that number of people.  – We needed an automated way to solve the problem.

Given my interest in marketing automation, I had recently taken a look at investing in Eloqua. (I had passed on the investment, for a very specific reason, but still really liked what they were doing.) JBoss took a look at Eloqua, and realized they could use the software to automate the first stage of the qualification process. They did this by tracking what each customer was doing on the web site, and how they were responding to email campaigns. Certain parts of the web site clearly indicated an interest in support, or other paid services, which were a good indicator of likelihood to purchase. When the customer looked at one of those pages, or viewed an email and clicked on the links, JBoss would mark that prospect as a qualified lead. (Eloqua dropped a cookie into the customer’s browser at the time of them registering their contact information, which made this tracking and scoring possible.) Since that time, several other players have emerged that can provide this exact same functionality that may be simpler to use and less expensive than Eloqua.

This resulted in a significant reduction in the leads. (Approx. 4:1 reduction, or a 25% conversion rate).

Later on the process, JBoss was able to look back at the customers who had actually bought the product and close the loop, by testing whether they had predicted the right events as qualification events. They did a lot of analysis to refine the events based on this information. Several of the original assumptions, based on common sense, turned out not to be true. For example, the amount of time that a lead spent on the website had little impact on their likelihood of becoming an opportunity or a closed deal. The same was true for time spent using the Wiki or the Forums.

From Joe McGonnell, VP of Marketing: “One of the other important benefits of Eloqua is that it provided us with a lot of valuable insight into what companies were using JBoss, even if we didn’t have qualified leads. It helped the inside sales team identify where to spend their time beyond just lead follow-up. For example, let’s say that we knew that we had 8 unique visitors from Hershey Foods during a given month. Even if none of these individuals had registered on our site or met the qualified lead pre-requisites, using common sense we could identify that they were probably working on a JBoss project. We also armed our sales team with contact discovery tools (e.g. One Source, Hoovers, Jigsaw) to then find the appropriate contacts to call into these accounts to find out if there was an opportunity brewing. Obviously inbound leads are more valuable, but this Eloqua data was very important as we scaled up the team and the number of leads per sales rep dropped.”

Further qualification needed: Telemarketing & BANT

Those leads still needed more work to make sure they were really a true “opportunity”. Sales got together with marketing and defined what they were looking for from a lead: did the buyer have the Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (sense of urgency to get something done in the near future) – often referred to as BANT.

This work was initially done by the inside sales group, but later was handed over to a lower cost telemarketing group. However the really well qualified leads were handed directly to inside sales.

This resulted in approximately a further 3:1 reduction in the leads (33% conversion rate).

Final stage selling: Inside Sales

JBoss then set about building an inside sales organization to close the qualified leads. The profile was people recently out of college with some sales experience and a lot of hunger. We discovered that an inside sales person could be fully productive in their 4th month, could generate revenues of about $140k per month.  We also discovered that they needed about 4 opportunities for every one closed deal (25% conversion rate), and that the average selling price was $10,000.

With these conversion rates, and the average deal size, we had the numbers we needed to  understand the complete model.

Handling the less qualified leads: Lead Nurturing

You might ask what happened to all the leads that weren’t qualified? Many of these were customers that had just downloaded the software for the first time, and still needed to develop their application before they would be ready to put it into production (when they would be most likely to purchase a support contract). These leads needed nurturing to keep them aware of JBoss’s service offerings. To do this, we constructed a series of campaigns using Eloqua, that sent them regular emails with a newsletter, invited them to various webinars, etc.

As they went through these stages, we would monitor their progress using the scoring techniques built into Eloqua to tell us if they visited the parts of website that indicated a likelihood to purchase. If they hit the appropriate score, they would immediately be thrown back into the telemarketing queue for direct contact and further qualification.

Blockage Points

Following the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology, we set out to identify the blockage points in the sales process. It turns out there were two:

JBoss had gained its initial traction with developers who loved it’s much faster development cycle compared to competing products like BEA’s WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere. However there was a strong perception that when you went to put an application into production, JBoss wouldn’t scale, and didn’t have the reliability that these other products had, and you couldn’t get an appropriate level of support needed to run mission critical applications.Since we got most of our monetization from customers putting JBoss into production, this was a very big problem that we had to address head on. One part of this was putting the appropriate features into the product to address scalability and fault tolerance. The other part was creating the appropriate support offerings.

Although customers were very aware of the JBoss brand name, and free software, they were not aware that there was also a company of the same name, that could provide them with the appropriate level of support that they needed to feel comfortable to run mission critical applications on the product.

Blockage Points Diagram

Using the methodology, we worked to understand the customers’ mindset and motivations at these key steps in the sales cycle, and looked at the tools available to motivate them to do what we wanted.

Concerns and Motivations Diagram

Tools to move customers through specific stages

If you are interested in learning more about how the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology works

Next focus: Growth

Now that we understood the model, we could focus on what levers we could pull to optimize the model and create growth.  The team soon realized that if they could keep the conversion rates the same, but increase the average selling price, they would have a great lever to create growth.

The Subscription

To do that they introduced the concept of a Subscription. What is a subscription, you might ask. The answer, in JBoss’s case, was that it represented a very powerful marketing concept where they packaged together a series of different services, and charged the customer a recurring fee. The trick was to group several things together, and not allow the customer to unbundle the package and examine the value for each individual component.

Monetizing free software turns out to be hard. The customer already has the software, and has no need to pay you. So you have to find associated “things” that they will value, and persuade them to pay for them. Support turned out to be great for a while, but the problem was that the product was so good that at the end of the first year, the customer would look back and see that they had made only two calls, and paid $40k for that. JBoss needed something more. The subscription was the solution, but even the subscription would need something very substantial to make it appealing. Enter the JBoss Operations Network…

JBoss Operations Network

JBoss was not the first Open Source company to figure out how to monetize free software. There was a very successful predecessor: Red Hat. Red Hat had created a subscription, and most importantly had invented something called Red Hat Network as a powerful value added capability. Red Hat Network was essentially proprietary software, delivered as SaaS (Software as a Service) to help their customers manage their many Red Had instances.

JBoss realized they needed something similar. The opportunity lay in the fact that JBoss’s application server shipped with very rudimentary operational management tools. So they set out to create the JBoss Operations Network, which was management software to provide visual management and monitoring for multiple JBoss application servers, and delivered to the customer as a SaaS service.

Bundling this into the Subscription provided the key value element that allowed JBoss to raise prices.

Scalable pricing:  The Pricing Matrix

Another major problem the team faced: JBoss was selling to some very large customers, who kept telling us that our prices were too cheap. Our pricing was very simple, and did not scale in any way to capture the full amount that they were willing to pay.

The team set out to create a scalable pricing matrix. To do this, they created multiple dimensions that would scale pricing: different JBoss products covered (we kept expanding the product line), number of servers, number of locations, number of named support people, etc.

The final result: ASP goes from $10k to $50k

The final result of all these initiatives: JBoss was able to move the average selling price (ASP) from $10k to $50k, while still maintaining the same conversion rates as before. This was key to the extremely rapid growth that got the company from a $2m run rate to a $65m run rate in just two and half years.

JBoss: a classic illustration of the Power of Free

JBoss is a great example of the the Power of Free. It perfectly illustrates several important principles of the model:

By giving away a really great product for free, JBoss developed a loyal following and active community that virally spread the word to other developers.

This led to an incredible adoption of the product, which could be converted into leads that flowed in at a rate that was many times higher than that experienced by most traditional software companies.

JBoss realized that they would never monetize their entire user base. When we reached the $65m run rate level, we calculated that we had only monetized about 3% of the customer base. However that 3% represented a very attractive, and fast growing recurring revenue stream, that was worth a lot of money to several acquirers that bid on the company at the same time as Red Hat.

One of the key points to understand about this model: instead of building a very expensive marketing process like their competitors BEA and IBM, JBoss used their R&D resources to build a free product that achieved the same goal: widespread product awareness, and high customer demand – all for zero marketing costs.

INVEST IN CANADA DO BUSINESS WITH THE WORLD

Ecompanies Canada offers Information, Knowledge & Expert Advice to Help You Start, Grow, Market and Expand a Strong Successful Business in Canada.

Company Registration services for Canadian residents.

To incorporate a new company in Canada., one or more persons(called “the incorporators”) may form a company by filing articles of incorporation, notice of address and notice of directors with the Corporate Registry Office of its jurisdiction of incorporation.

We offer fast & easy Canada incorporation and business registration services anywhere in Canada. At Ecompanies we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your new business:

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service/

Canada Incorporation Service for Non Canadian Residents.

Throughout Canada, corporations are the most widely used legal vehicle for operating a business. A corporation has the same rights and obligations under Canadian law as a natural person. Among other things, this means it can acquire assets, go into debt, enter into contracts, sue or be sued,.

and even be found guilty of committing a crime.

To incorporate a new company in Canada., one or more persons(called “the incorporators”) may form a company by filing articles of incorporation, notice of address and notice of directors with the Corporate Registry Office of the desired jurisdiction of registration.

Ecompanies Canada offers fast & easy Canada online incorporation and business registration services to non-Canadian residents interested in doing business in Canada. At Ecompanies Canada we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your company in Canada as a Non-Canadian resident

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service-non-canadian-residents/

Incorporation Service for Foreign Companies in Canada

Ecompanies Canada offers fast & easy Canada online incorporation and business registration services to foreign companies interested in doing business in Canada. At Ecompanies Canada we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your foreign company in Canada

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service-foreign-companies-canada/

This Article first appeared in for entrepreneurs

The post How JBoss Rose to the Top appeared first on Ecompanies Canada.

from Ecompanies Canada http://bit.ly/31G0pg8

shared from http://bit.ly/2D3D5y1

[ecompaniesusa]

How JBoss Rose to the Top

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine.

JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded 5 million times, and the company was doing about $1m a year in revenues, selling training, documentation and consulting. Around that time, Bob Bickel joined the company, and initiated a process to raise venture capital. The raising of VC funds was a trigger that was needed to hire a professional management team, and to enter a new growth phase. Together with Bob, the company had figured out that once an application migrated from development to production, they could charge their customers for a subscription based initially around support, that should result in a better monetization than the other revenue streams.

I joined the board, and we immediately started working together as a team to build their sales and marketing machine. The photo below shows the two whiteboards after the first brainstorming session.

JBoss were extremely successful in building their sales and marketing machine, and went on to reach an annualized bookings run rate of about $65 million a year within two and a half years after starting the process. At that time they were acquired by Red Hat for $350 million plus an earnout of $70 million.

While I take a tiny amount of credit for introducing the methodology and helping to hire the management team, it should be made totally clear that the real credit belongs to the outstanding team who did the work to make this all happen. There were many players involved, but to give credit to some of the main people involved, I would like to highlight Marc Fleury, the founder and CEO; Sacha Labourey, co-founder and CTO; Bob Bickel, who brought professional business thinking and great management skills; Joe McGonnell who ran marketing; Rob Bearden, who ran sales; Brad Murdoch, who was responsible for the products and services that were used for monetization; Nathalie Fleury, responsible for PR, and working the blogosphere; Tom Leonard, head of business development; and Ben Sabrin. (My apologies for those left off this list. There were many other great individuals involved, and the full list would be very long.) They were not only great strategic thinkers, but they also executed flawlessly.

Starting the lead flow

The first question we looked at was: Did they know the names of the people that had downloaded their software 5 million times? The sad answer was no. Not only did SourceForge not allow them to collect names, but even if they did allow it, there was clear evidence that developers would simply not go through with the download if they were asked to provide their name.

Following one of the key principles of Building a Sales & Marketing Machine, we immediately realized that they needed to find a motivation to get the customers to provide the company with their contact information. The best motivation appeared to be the documentation, that they were currently selling. There was one big problem: selling the documentation was resulting in $27,000 per month in revenue, which was paying the rent and several peoples’ salaries. To me it was obvious that this was a small price to pay to get the names, but to the JBoss team, who had battled their way to get every dollar of revenue, that was less obvious. We debated this issue over the next three months, but finally they gave in and switched on the offer. It turned out to be a huge success: over 10,000 leads started pouring in every month. Over time this grew to 16,000 leads per month.

Dealing with an overflow of leads: Lead Scoring

Most companies suffer from not having enough leads. We had the opposite problem. As any salesperson will tell you, 10,000 leads is a huge problem. No one has the time to contact that number of people.  – We needed an automated way to solve the problem.

Given my interest in marketing automation, I had recently taken a look at investing in Eloqua. (I had passed on the investment, for a very specific reason, but still really liked what they were doing.) JBoss took a look at Eloqua, and realized they could use the software to automate the first stage of the qualification process. They did this by tracking what each customer was doing on the web site, and how they were responding to email campaigns. Certain parts of the web site clearly indicated an interest in support, or other paid services, which were a good indicator of likelihood to purchase. When the customer looked at one of those pages, or viewed an email and clicked on the links, JBoss would mark that prospect as a qualified lead. (Eloqua dropped a cookie into the customer’s browser at the time of them registering their contact information, which made this tracking and scoring possible.) Since that time, several other players have emerged that can provide this exact same functionality that may be simpler to use and less expensive than Eloqua.

This resulted in a significant reduction in the leads. (Approx. 4:1 reduction, or a 25% conversion rate).

Later on the process, JBoss was able to look back at the customers who had actually bought the product and close the loop, by testing whether they had predicted the right events as qualification events. They did a lot of analysis to refine the events based on this information. Several of the original assumptions, based on common sense, turned out not to be true. For example, the amount of time that a lead spent on the website had little impact on their likelihood of becoming an opportunity or a closed deal. The same was true for time spent using the Wiki or the Forums.

From Joe McGonnell, VP of Marketing: “One of the other important benefits of Eloqua is that it provided us with a lot of valuable insight into what companies were using JBoss, even if we didn’t have qualified leads. It helped the inside sales team identify where to spend their time beyond just lead follow-up. For example, let’s say that we knew that we had 8 unique visitors from Hershey Foods during a given month. Even if none of these individuals had registered on our site or met the qualified lead pre-requisites, using common sense we could identify that they were probably working on a JBoss project. We also armed our sales team with contact discovery tools (e.g. One Source, Hoovers, Jigsaw) to then find the appropriate contacts to call into these accounts to find out if there was an opportunity brewing. Obviously inbound leads are more valuable, but this Eloqua data was very important as we scaled up the team and the number of leads per sales rep dropped.”

Further qualification needed: Telemarketing & BANT

Those leads still needed more work to make sure they were really a true “opportunity”. Sales got together with marketing and defined what they were looking for from a lead: did the buyer have the Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (sense of urgency to get something done in the near future) – often referred to as BANT.

This work was initially done by the inside sales group, but later was handed over to a lower cost telemarketing group. However the really well qualified leads were handed directly to inside sales.

This resulted in approximately a further 3:1 reduction in the leads (33% conversion rate).

Final stage selling: Inside Sales

JBoss then set about building an inside sales organization to close the qualified leads. The profile was people recently out of college with some sales experience and a lot of hunger. We discovered that an inside sales person could be fully productive in their 4th month, could generate revenues of about $140k per month.  We also discovered that they needed about 4 opportunities for every one closed deal (25% conversion rate), and that the average selling price was $10,000.

With these conversion rates, and the average deal size, we had the numbers we needed to  understand the complete model.

Handling the less qualified leads: Lead Nurturing

You might ask what happened to all the leads that weren’t qualified? Many of these were customers that had just downloaded the software for the first time, and still needed to develop their application before they would be ready to put it into production (when they would be most likely to purchase a support contract). These leads needed nurturing to keep them aware of JBoss’s service offerings. To do this, we constructed a series of campaigns using Eloqua, that sent them regular emails with a newsletter, invited them to various webinars, etc.

As they went through these stages, we would monitor their progress using the scoring techniques built into Eloqua to tell us if they visited the parts of website that indicated a likelihood to purchase. If they hit the appropriate score, they would immediately be thrown back into the telemarketing queue for direct contact and further qualification.

Blockage Points

Following the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology, we set out to identify the blockage points in the sales process. It turns out there were two:

JBoss had gained its initial traction with developers who loved it’s much faster development cycle compared to competing products like BEA’s WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere. However there was a strong perception that when you went to put an application into production, JBoss wouldn’t scale, and didn’t have the reliability that these other products had, and you couldn’t get an appropriate level of support needed to run mission critical applications.Since we got most of our monetization from customers putting JBoss into production, this was a very big problem that we had to address head on. One part of this was putting the appropriate features into the product to address scalability and fault tolerance. The other part was creating the appropriate support offerings.

Although customers were very aware of the JBoss brand name, and free software, they were not aware that there was also a company of the same name, that could provide them with the appropriate level of support that they needed to feel comfortable to run mission critical applications on the product.

Blockage Points Diagram

Using the methodology, we worked to understand the customers’ mindset and motivations at these key steps in the sales cycle, and looked at the tools available to motivate them to do what we wanted.

Concerns and Motivations Diagram

Tools to move customers through specific stages

If you are interested in learning more about how the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology works

Next focus: Growth

Now that we understood the model, we could focus on what levers we could pull to optimize the model and create growth.  The team soon realized that if they could keep the conversion rates the same, but increase the average selling price, they would have a great lever to create growth.

The Subscription

To do that they introduced the concept of a Subscription. What is a subscription, you might ask. The answer, in JBoss’s case, was that it represented a very powerful marketing concept where they packaged together a series of different services, and charged the customer a recurring fee. The trick was to group several things together, and not allow the customer to unbundle the package and examine the value for each individual component.

Monetizing free software turns out to be hard. The customer already has the software, and has no need to pay you. So you have to find associated “things” that they will value, and persuade them to pay for them. Support turned out to be great for a while, but the problem was that the product was so good that at the end of the first year, the customer would look back and see that they had made only two calls, and paid $40k for that. JBoss needed something more. The subscription was the solution, but even the subscription would need something very substantial to make it appealing. Enter the JBoss Operations Network…

JBoss Operations Network

JBoss was not the first Open Source company to figure out how to monetize free software. There was a very successful predecessor: Red Hat. Red Hat had created a subscription, and most importantly had invented something called Red Hat Network as a powerful value added capability. Red Hat Network was essentially proprietary software, delivered as SaaS (Software as a Service) to help their customers manage their many Red Had instances.

JBoss realized they needed something similar. The opportunity lay in the fact that JBoss’s application server shipped with very rudimentary operational management tools. So they set out to create the JBoss Operations Network, which was management software to provide visual management and monitoring for multiple JBoss application servers, and delivered to the customer as a SaaS service.

Bundling this into the Subscription provided the key value element that allowed JBoss to raise prices.

Scalable pricing:  The Pricing Matrix

Another major problem the team faced: JBoss was selling to some very large customers, who kept telling us that our prices were too cheap. Our pricing was very simple, and did not scale in any way to capture the full amount that they were willing to pay.

The team set out to create a scalable pricing matrix. To do this, they created multiple dimensions that would scale pricing: different JBoss products covered (we kept expanding the product line), number of servers, number of locations, number of named support people, etc.

The final result: ASP goes from $10k to $50k

The final result of all these initiatives: JBoss was able to move the average selling price (ASP) from $10k to $50k, while still maintaining the same conversion rates as before. This was key to the extremely rapid growth that got the company from a $2m run rate to a $65m run rate in just two and half years.

JBoss: a classic illustration of the Power of Free

JBoss is a great example of the the Power of Free. It perfectly illustrates several important principles of the model:

By giving away a really great product for free, JBoss developed a loyal following and active community that virally spread the word to other developers.

This led to an incredible adoption of the product, which could be converted into leads that flowed in at a rate that was many times higher than that experienced by most traditional software companies.

JBoss realized that they would never monetize their entire user base. When we reached the $65m run rate level, we calculated that we had only monetized about 3% of the customer base. However that 3% represented a very attractive, and fast growing recurring revenue stream, that was worth a lot of money to several acquirers that bid on the company at the same time as Red Hat.

One of the key points to understand about this model: instead of building a very expensive marketing process like their competitors BEA and IBM, JBoss used their R&D resources to build a free product that achieved the same goal: widespread product awareness, and high customer demand – all for zero marketing costs.

US Incorporation Service for Domestic Entrepreneurs

Incorporate your business today for only $99 plus government fees.

https://www.ecompaniesusa.com/incorporation-service/

USA LLC Registration Form a Limited Liability Company today.

Gain limited liability protection for yourself, and added credibility for your business. Forming a limited liability company (LLC) provides liability protection for any type of business. Starting your business as an LLC can help you protect your personal assets while adding legitimacy to your company. We’re the LLC experts – with us it’s fast, easy, affordable and done right. Ecompanies US offers fast & easy LLC Registration service for only $99 plus government fees.

https://www.ecompaniesusa.com/llc-registration/

US Incorporation Service for Foreign Companies

Throughout the USA corporations are the most widely used legal vehicle for operating a business. A corporation has the same rights and obligations under US law as a natural person. Among other things, this means it can acquire assets, go into debt, enter into contracts, sue or be sued, and even be found guilty of committing a crime.

To incorporate a new company in the USA., one or more persons(called “the incorporators”) may form a company by filing articles of incorporation, notice of address and notice of directors with the Corporations Division Office of the desired jurisdiction of registration.

Ecompanies USA offers fast & easy US online incorporation and business registration services to foreign companies interested in doing business in Canada. At Ecompanies Canada we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your foreign company in any U.S. State, fast, easy, Online.

https://www.ecompaniesusa.com/us-incorporation-service-for-foreign-companies/

This Article first appeared in entrepreneur

The post How JBoss Rose to the Top appeared first on Ecompanies USA.

from Ecompanies USA http://bit.ly/2MUGgzF

[canadastartupblog]

How JBoss Rose to the Top

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine.

JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded 5 million times, and the company was doing about $1m a year in revenues, selling training, documentation and consulting. Around that time, Bob Bickel joined the company, and initiated a process to raise venture capital. The raising of VC funds was a trigger that was needed to hire a professional management team, and to enter a new growth phase. Together with Bob, the company had figured out that once an application migrated from development to production, they could charge their customers for a subscription based initially around support, that should result in a better monetization than the other revenue streams.

I joined the board, and we immediately started working together as a team to build their sales and marketing machine. The photo below shows the two whiteboards after the first brainstorming session.

JBoss were extremely successful in building their sales and marketing machine, and went on to reach an annualized bookings run rate of about $65 million a year within two and a half years after starting the process. At that time they were acquired by Red Hat for $350 million plus an earnout of $70 million.

While I take a tiny amount of credit for introducing the methodology and helping to hire the management team, it should be made totally clear that the real credit belongs to the outstanding team who did the work to make this all happen. There were many players involved, but to give credit to some of the main people involved, I would like to highlight Marc Fleury, the founder and CEO; Sacha Labourey, co-founder and CTO; Bob Bickel, who brought professional business thinking and great management skills; Joe McGonnell who ran marketing; Rob Bearden, who ran sales; Brad Murdoch, who was responsible for the products and services that were used for monetization; Nathalie Fleury, responsible for PR, and working the blogosphere; Tom Leonard, head of business development; and Ben Sabrin. (My apologies for those left off this list. There were many other great individuals involved, and the full list would be very long.) They were not only great strategic thinkers, but they also executed flawlessly.

Starting the lead flow

The first question we looked at was: Did they know the names of the people that had downloaded their software 5 million times? The sad answer was no. Not only did SourceForge not allow them to collect names, but even if they did allow it, there was clear evidence that developers would simply not go through with the download if they were asked to provide their name.

Following one of the key principles of Building a Sales & Marketing Machine, we immediately realized that they needed to find a motivation to get the customers to provide the company with their contact information. The best motivation appeared to be the documentation, that they were currently selling. There was one big problem: selling the documentation was resulting in $27,000 per month in revenue, which was paying the rent and several peoples’ salaries. To me it was obvious that this was a small price to pay to get the names, but to the JBoss team, who had battled their way to get every dollar of revenue, that was less obvious. We debated this issue over the next three months, but finally they gave in and switched on the offer. It turned out to be a huge success: over 10,000 leads started pouring in every month. Over time this grew to 16,000 leads per month.

Dealing with an overflow of leads: Lead Scoring

Most companies suffer from not having enough leads. We had the opposite problem. As any salesperson will tell you, 10,000 leads is a huge problem. No one has the time to contact that number of people.  – We needed an automated way to solve the problem.

Given my interest in marketing automation, I had recently taken a look at investing in Eloqua. (I had passed on the investment, for a very specific reason, but still really liked what they were doing.) JBoss took a look at Eloqua, and realized they could use the software to automate the first stage of the qualification process. They did this by tracking what each customer was doing on the web site, and how they were responding to email campaigns. Certain parts of the web site clearly indicated an interest in support, or other paid services, which were a good indicator of likelihood to purchase. When the customer looked at one of those pages, or viewed an email and clicked on the links, JBoss would mark that prospect as a qualified lead. (Eloqua dropped a cookie into the customer’s browser at the time of them registering their contact information, which made this tracking and scoring possible.) Since that time, several other players have emerged that can provide this exact same functionality that may be simpler to use and less expensive than Eloqua.

This resulted in a significant reduction in the leads. (Approx. 4:1 reduction, or a 25% conversion rate).

Later on the process, JBoss was able to look back at the customers who had actually bought the product and close the loop, by testing whether they had predicted the right events as qualification events. They did a lot of analysis to refine the events based on this information. Several of the original assumptions, based on common sense, turned out not to be true. For example, the amount of time that a lead spent on the website had little impact on their likelihood of becoming an opportunity or a closed deal. The same was true for time spent using the Wiki or the Forums.

From Joe McGonnell, VP of Marketing: “One of the other important benefits of Eloqua is that it provided us with a lot of valuable insight into what companies were using JBoss, even if we didn’t have qualified leads. It helped the inside sales team identify where to spend their time beyond just lead follow-up. For example, let’s say that we knew that we had 8 unique visitors from Hershey Foods during a given month. Even if none of these individuals had registered on our site or met the qualified lead pre-requisites, using common sense we could identify that they were probably working on a JBoss project. We also armed our sales team with contact discovery tools (e.g. One Source, Hoovers, Jigsaw) to then find the appropriate contacts to call into these accounts to find out if there was an opportunity brewing. Obviously inbound leads are more valuable, but this Eloqua data was very important as we scaled up the team and the number of leads per sales rep dropped.”

Further qualification needed: Telemarketing & BANT

Those leads still needed more work to make sure they were really a true “opportunity”. Sales got together with marketing and defined what they were looking for from a lead: did the buyer have the Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (sense of urgency to get something done in the near future) – often referred to as BANT.

This work was initially done by the inside sales group, but later was handed over to a lower cost telemarketing group. However the really well qualified leads were handed directly to inside sales.

This resulted in approximately a further 3:1 reduction in the leads (33% conversion rate).

Final stage selling: Inside Sales

JBoss then set about building an inside sales organization to close the qualified leads. The profile was people recently out of college with some sales experience and a lot of hunger. We discovered that an inside sales person could be fully productive in their 4th month, could generate revenues of about $140k per month.  We also discovered that they needed about 4 opportunities for every one closed deal (25% conversion rate), and that the average selling price was $10,000.

With these conversion rates, and the average deal size, we had the numbers we needed to  understand the complete model.

Handling the less qualified leads: Lead Nurturing

You might ask what happened to all the leads that weren’t qualified? Many of these were customers that had just downloaded the software for the first time, and still needed to develop their application before they would be ready to put it into production (when they would be most likely to purchase a support contract). These leads needed nurturing to keep them aware of JBoss’s service offerings. To do this, we constructed a series of campaigns using Eloqua, that sent them regular emails with a newsletter, invited them to various webinars, etc.

As they went through these stages, we would monitor their progress using the scoring techniques built into Eloqua to tell us if they visited the parts of website that indicated a likelihood to purchase. If they hit the appropriate score, they would immediately be thrown back into the telemarketing queue for direct contact and further qualification.

Blockage Points

Following the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology, we set out to identify the blockage points in the sales process. It turns out there were two:

JBoss had gained its initial traction with developers who loved it’s much faster development cycle compared to competing products like BEA’s WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere. However there was a strong perception that when you went to put an application into production, JBoss wouldn’t scale, and didn’t have the reliability that these other products had, and you couldn’t get an appropriate level of support needed to run mission critical applications.Since we got most of our monetization from customers putting JBoss into production, this was a very big problem that we had to address head on. One part of this was putting the appropriate features into the product to address scalability and fault tolerance. The other part was creating the appropriate support offerings.

Although customers were very aware of the JBoss brand name, and free software, they were not aware that there was also a company of the same name, that could provide them with the appropriate level of support that they needed to feel comfortable to run mission critical applications on the product.

Blockage Points Diagram

Using the methodology, we worked to understand the customers’ mindset and motivations at these key steps in the sales cycle, and looked at the tools available to motivate them to do what we wanted.

Concerns and Motivations Diagram

Tools to move customers through specific stages

If you are interested in learning more about how the Building a Sales and Marketing Machine methodology works

Next focus: Growth

Now that we understood the model, we could focus on what levers we could pull to optimize the model and create growth.  The team soon realized that if they could keep the conversion rates the same, but increase the average selling price, they would have a great lever to create growth.

The Subscription

To do that they introduced the concept of a Subscription. What is a subscription, you might ask. The answer, in JBoss’s case, was that it represented a very powerful marketing concept where they packaged together a series of different services, and charged the customer a recurring fee. The trick was to group several things together, and not allow the customer to unbundle the package and examine the value for each individual component.

Monetizing free software turns out to be hard. The customer already has the software, and has no need to pay you. So you have to find associated “things” that they will value, and persuade them to pay for them. Support turned out to be great for a while, but the problem was that the product was so good that at the end of the first year, the customer would look back and see that they had made only two calls, and paid $40k for that. JBoss needed something more. The subscription was the solution, but even the subscription would need something very substantial to make it appealing. Enter the JBoss Operations Network…

JBoss Operations Network

JBoss was not the first Open Source company to figure out how to monetize free software. There was a very successful predecessor: Red Hat. Red Hat had created a subscription, and most importantly had invented something called Red Hat Network as a powerful value added capability. Red Hat Network was essentially proprietary software, delivered as SaaS (Software as a Service) to help their customers manage their many Red Had instances.

JBoss realized they needed something similar. The opportunity lay in the fact that JBoss’s application server shipped with very rudimentary operational management tools. So they set out to create the JBoss Operations Network, which was management software to provide visual management and monitoring for multiple JBoss application servers, and delivered to the customer as a SaaS service.

Bundling this into the Subscription provided the key value element that allowed JBoss to raise prices.

Scalable pricing:  The Pricing Matrix

Another major problem the team faced: JBoss was selling to some very large customers, who kept telling us that our prices were too cheap. Our pricing was very simple, and did not scale in any way to capture the full amount that they were willing to pay.

The team set out to create a scalable pricing matrix. To do this, they created multiple dimensions that would scale pricing: different JBoss products covered (we kept expanding the product line), number of servers, number of locations, number of named support people, etc.

The final result: ASP goes from $10k to $50k

The final result of all these initiatives: JBoss was able to move the average selling price (ASP) from $10k to $50k, while still maintaining the same conversion rates as before. This was key to the extremely rapid growth that got the company from a $2m run rate to a $65m run rate in just two and half years.

JBoss: a classic illustration of the Power of Free

JBoss is a great example of the the Power of Free. It perfectly illustrates several important principles of the model:

By giving away a really great product for free, JBoss developed a loyal following and active community that virally spread the word to other developers.

This led to an incredible adoption of the product, which could be converted into leads that flowed in at a rate that was many times higher than that experienced by most traditional software companies.

JBoss realized that they would never monetize their entire user base. When we reached the $65m run rate level, we calculated that we had only monetized about 3% of the customer base. However that 3% represented a very attractive, and fast growing recurring revenue stream, that was worth a lot of money to several acquirers that bid on the company at the same time as Red Hat.

One of the key points to understand about this model: instead of building a very expensive marketing process like their competitors BEA and IBM, JBoss used their R&D resources to build a free product that achieved the same goal: widespread product awareness, and high customer demand – all for zero marketing costs.

INVEST IN CANADA DO BUSINESS WITH THE WORLD

Ecompanies Canada offers Information, Knowledge & Expert Advice to Help You Start, Grow, Market and Expand a Strong Successful Business in Canada.

Company Registration services for Canadian residents.

To incorporate a new company in Canada., one or more persons(called “the incorporators”) may form a company by filing articles of incorporation, notice of address and notice of directors with the Corporate Registry Office of its jurisdiction of incorporation.

We offer fast & easy Canada incorporation and business registration services anywhere in Canada. At Ecompanies we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your new business:

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service/

Canada Incorporation Service for Non Canadian Residents.

Throughout Canada, corporations are the most widely used legal vehicle for operating a business. A corporation has the same rights and obligations under Canadian law as a natural person. Among other things, this means it can acquire assets, go into debt, enter into contracts, sue or be sued,.

and even be found guilty of committing a crime.

To incorporate a new company in Canada., one or more persons(called “the incorporators”) may form a company by filing articles of incorporation, notice of address and notice of directors with the Corporate Registry Office of the desired jurisdiction of registration.

Ecompanies Canada offers fast & easy Canada online incorporation and business registration services to non-Canadian residents interested in doing business in Canada. At Ecompanies Canada we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your company in Canada as a Non-Canadian resident

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service-non-canadian-residents/

Incorporation Service for Foreign Companies in Canada

Ecompanies Canada offers fast & easy Canada online incorporation and business registration services to foreign companies interested in doing business in Canada. At Ecompanies Canada we help you step-by-step and take care of the entire business registration process from start to finish. Incorporating a business with us is fast, easy and takes just minutes.

Register today your foreign company in Canada

https://www.ecompaniescanada.com/incorporation-service-foreign-companies-canada/

This Article first appeared in for entrepreneurs

The post How JBoss Rose to the Top appeared first on Ecompanies Canada.

from Ecompanies Canada http://bit.ly/31G0pg8 via ECOMPANIES CANADA

[ncmagroup]

Written by Leslie Ye

One of the most important conversations salespeople have with their prospects is the discovery call. Here lies the proverbial fork in the road for you and your prospect. Either they’re a good fit for your product or service and you can move forward with the relationship, or it’s time to part ways.

But it’s not always immediately obvious which path to take. That’s where sales qualification comes in. By asking the right questions, you’ll be able to determine whether the relationship should continue, and if so, what next steps are appropriate. This guide will walk you through the fundamentals of sales qualification, five different frameworks you can use, and provide pointers on disqualification and conversational tip-offs to listen for.

Use the table of contents below to navigate through the guide:

What Is a Qualified Prospect?

When to Disqualify

Why Disqualifying Isn’t a Bad Thing

What Is a Qualifying Question?

What Is BANT?

MEDDIC, CHAMP Sales, & 3 More Qualification Frameworks

Qualifying Leads: The Qualification Process

What Is a Qualified Prospect?

(back to top)

A discovery call is where you might do the bulk of your qualification, but it certainly isn’t where qualification starts or ends. At every step of the sales process, you’ll continuously evaluate prospects for more and more specific characteristics.

According to Bob Apollo, the founder of sales consulting group Inflexion Point, there’s a hierarchy to qualification. That is, sales reps must qualify prospects at three different levels — what Apollo terms “organization-level,” “opportunity-level,” and “stakeholder-level” sales qualification.

Organization-Level Qualification

This is the most basic level of qualification and doesn’t tell you much other than whether you should do more research. If your company has buyer personas, reference them when qualifying a prospect. Does the buyer match the demographics of a given persona?

Questions you should ask at this stage include:

Is the prospect in your territory?

Do you sell to their industry?

What’s the company size?

Does the account fit your company’s buyer persona?

Opportunity-Level Qualification

This form of qualification is probably what you thought of when you read the title of this post. Opportunity-level sales qualification is where you determine whether your prospect has a specific need or challenge you can satisfy and whether it’s feasible for them to implement your particular product or service. The other half of a good buyer persona, opportunity-level characteristics give insight into whether a prospect could benefit from your offering.

For suggestions of questions, you can ask to qualify at the opportunity level, see below.

Stakeholder-Level Qualification

Let’s say you’ve determined that your prospect’s company is a good match for your solution and fits your ideal buyer persona. It’s time to get into the nitty-gritty — can your point of contact actually pull the trigger on a purchase decision?

To determine this, ask the following:

Will this purchase come out of your budget?

Who else is involved in the decision?

Do you have criteria for this purchase decision? Who defined them?

When to Disqualify

These three levels are listed in the order you should use them to disqualify.

For instance, if your prospect is a complete departure from your company’s buyer persona, it’s safe to disqualify them right then and there on an organizational level. Maybe one day, you’ll serve their type of buyer, but right now you don’t — so don’t waste time trying to shoehorn your offering into their business.

Similarly, you could be speaking with the CEO of an organization with complete budget authority who passes stakeholder-level qualification with flying colors. But if there’s no problem, there’s no need for your solution. Qualify for business pain first.

Also keep in mind that unless a prospect can be qualified on all three levels, you shouldn’t advance them in the sales process. For example, if you ask your prospect about the company’s strategic goals and they’re unable to answer, it’s a good sign they’re not close enough to the decision process and lack influence.

You should disqualify this contact at the stakeholder level, even though they pass at the opportunity level.

Why Disqualifying Isn’t a Bad Thing

Many salespeople are loath to disqualify prospects and shrink their pipelines.

Their natural instinct is trying to work as many leads as possible, but this isn’t the best approach. The quality of your leads matters more than the quantity.

As a salesperson, your most precious asset is your time, and it’s far better to spend it on a handful of your best prospects than spreading yourself thin across dozens of leads. Trying to close every deal that comes along is only going to result in dead ends with poor fit prospects, while you neglect prospects likely to buy.

What Is a Qualifying Question?

A qualifying question helps the salesperson determine their prospect’s fit for one criterion. That might be a need, budget, authority, sense of urgency, or another factor.

A good qualifying question is typically open-ended. Asking a close-ended question, like “Is this a priority right now?” boxes the buyer into an answer. The better version would be “Where does this fall on your list of business priorities?” Because you’re not leading the prospect to an answer, the response will usually be more honest and revealing.

What Is BANT?

A qualification framework is essentially a rubric that salespeople can use to determine whether a prospect is likely to become a successful customer. Every customer and every sale is different, but all closed-won deals share commonalities. Sales qualification frameworks distill those shared characteristics into general traits reps can look for when qualifying.

The BANT Qualification Framework

The Old Faithful of sales qualification frameworks, BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) is used at a variety of companies and in a variety of markets.

Originally developed by IBM, BANT covers all the broad strokes of opportunity and stakeholder-level qualification.

BANT seeks to uncover the following four pieces of information:

Budget: Is the prospect capable of buying?

Authority: Does your contact have adequate authority to sign off on a purchase?

Need: Does the prospect have a business pain you can solve?

Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?

Here are a few examples of BANT questions in the context of a prospect conversation:

Budget

Do you have a budget set aside for this purchase? What is it?

Is this an important enough priority to allocate funds toward?

What other initiatives are you spending money on?

Does seasonality affect your funding?

Authority

Whose budget does this purchase come out of?

Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?

How have you made purchasing decisions for products similar to ours in the past?

What objections to this purchase do you anticipate encountering? How do you think we can best handle them?

Need

What challenges are you struggling with?

What’s the source of that pain, and why do you feel it’s worth spending time on?

Why hasn’t it been addressed before?

What do you think could solve this problem? Why?

Timeline

How quickly do you need to solve your problem?

What else is a priority for you?

Are you evaluating any other similar products or services?

Do you have the capacity to implement this product right now?

While BANT addresses many opportunity-level requirements, it misses the mark on others. According to research from CEB, it now takes an average of 5.4 people to make a buying decision so the “ultimate” buying authority could be more than one person. Make sure you engage all relevant stakeholders early on in the process and secure each individual’s buy-in.

“Timeline” is another area where BANT falls short today. A strict BANT qualification might tell you to cycle a lead who won’t be ready to buy until next year into a closed-lost queue. But you might be acting prematurely — send over educational resources and offer to help until they’re ready to buy if you can.

MEDDIC, CHAMP Sales, & 3 More Qualification Frameworks

  BANT might be the most popular, but it’s far from the only sales qualification framework out there. Here are five alternate frameworks that sales reps can use if BANT just doesn’t cut it.

MEDDIC

MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) was pioneered by Jack Napoli when he was at technology company PTC. MEDDIC requires sales reps to understand every aspect of a target company’s purchase process, down to whether you have an internal champion — an employee at a prospective company who will internally sell your product.

MEDDIC was incredibly valuable for increasing forecasting accuracy, something that’s crucial for companies that sell to enterprise companies — after all, losing just one deal can be crippling when each is worth several million dollars.

“From $0 to $100 million, [PTC was] successful because we sold a better widget,” HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan said. “From $100 million to $1 billion, we sold a shift in technology. MEDDIC became important because it’s not just any old purchase — it’s a transformation of the business.”

You should consider using MEDDIC as a qualification framework if your company sells a product that requires a transformation in behavior or average sales price is incredibly high, as understanding exactly how a prospect buys, why they would buy, and who’s championing you internally is crucial to maintaining an accurate pipeline.

CHAMP Sales

CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization) is similar to ANUM but places Challenges ahead of Authority.

“Your prospect buys things because they have a challenge,” Atiim, Inc. founder Zorian Rotenberg writes in a blog post. “[Challenges] are the first fundamental part of sales qualification.”

CHAMP also defines authority as a “call-to-action,” not a roadblock. If your initial contact is a low-level employee, you can safely assume they won’t be the decision maker. That doesn’t mean you should hang up the phone. Instead, “ask the prospect questions that help you map out their company’s organizational structure” to determine who to reach out to next, according to Rotenberg.

GPCTBA/C&I

Yes, it’s a long acronym, but a useful one. Developed at HubSpot the qualification framework, GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences, and Positive Implications) is a response to changes in buyer behavior. Buyers come to the sales process increasingly informed, so salespeople need to add value on top of product knowledge to be worth speaking with.

But value isn’t something sales reps can just “add” — to truly act as an advisor, you must explore beyond the scope of the discrete problem that your product or service could solve. This means understanding a prospect’s strategic goals, their company’s business model, and how the specific issue you’re discussing fits into the larger picture of their professional life.

Here are some of the questions you should ask at each step:

Goals

The purpose of the following questions is to find out your prospect’s quantitative goals. You can help clarify or set goals with your prospect if their response isn’t well-defined.

What is your top priority this year?

Do you have specific company goals?

Do you have published revenue goals for this quarter/year?

Plans

Once you understand your prospect’s goals, find out what work they’ve already done to achieve them. Determine what’s worked and what hasn’t, and make suggestions for improvement.

What are you planning to do to achieve your goals?

What did you do last year? What worked and what didn’t? What are you going to do differently this year?

Do you think XYZ might make it hard to implement your plan?

Do you have the right resources available to implement this plan?

Challenges

Defining your prospect’s challenges — and reinforcing that what they’ve already tried isn’t working — is crucial. Unless they understand that they need help, a prospect won’t become a customer.

Why do you think you’ll be able to eliminate this challenge now, even though you’ve tried in the past and you’re still dealing with it?

Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?

If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn’t fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Timeline

Your most important asset is your time. So while a prospect that doesn’t want to buy now or in the near future isn’t necessarily a lost cause, they should move down your priority list.

When will you begin implementing this plan?

Do you have bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?

Would you like help thinking through the steps involved in executing this plan, so you can figure out when you should implement each piece?

Budget

Just asking “What’s your budget?”, isn’t a question likely to get you valuable insight, according to HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre.

Instead, try asking:

Are we in agreement on the potential ROI of [product or service]?

Are you spending money on another product to solve the problem we’ve discussed?

Then, go in for the kill. Databox CEO and former HubSpot VP of sales Pete Caputa suggest phrasing the budget question this way:

“We’ve established that your goal is X and that you’re spending Y now to try and achieve X. But it’s not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you’re more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?”

Authority

Unlike in BANT, qualifying for authority under this framework isn’t necessarily trying to determine whether your contact is a decision maker. Your contact might be an influencer or a coach, two types of internal champions who can give you insight into the decision maker’s thought process.

If your contact isn’t the economic buyer, ask them:

Are the goals we’ve discussed important to the economic buyer?

Amongst their priorities, where does this fall?

What concerns do you anticipate they’ll raise?

How should we go about getting the economic buyer on board?

Negative Consequences and Positive Implications

In this part of the qualification process, you’re finding out what happens if your prospect does or does not achieve their goals.

“If your product can significantly help them avoid consequences and further aid in achieving even bigger follow-up goals, you’ve got a very strong value proposition,” Caputa says.

Here are some C&I questions to ask prospects:

What happens if you do or don’t reach your goals? Does the outcome affect you on a personal level?

When you overcome this challenge, what will you do next?

Do you stand to get promoted or get more resources if you can hit your goal? Would you lose responsibility or be demoted if you don’t?

The benefit of GPCTBA/C&I is that allows salespeople to gather a huge amount of information. If your product is complex, highly differentiated, and stands to become an integral part of your prospect’s business strategy, having these insights is incredibly valuable. Sales reps selling these kinds of products need to step into their prospects’ world to be effective advisors and business partners.

However, GPCTBA/C&I might not be right for every sales force. Depending on what you sell, such thorough qualification may not be necessary.

ANUM

ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) is an alternative spin on BANT. When qualifying using ANUM, a sales rep’s first priority should be to determine whether they’re speaking with a decision maker.

Need functions the same way as it does in BANT, but has been moved up in priority. Urgency correlates with Timing, while Money replaces Budget, but with subtle distinctions. David Garcia explains:

“With Urgency, we want to know how high up [the prospect’s] priority list this particular business pain is. The budget has been updated to Money to reflect the fact that we have to only find out if they potentially have the money to purchase our solution. Then it is our job to prove our value and why [the prospect] should apply to get a fixed budget for this purchase.”

FAINT

The RAIN Group advocates using FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing) to qualify sales leads. FAINT is designed to reflect the fact that many purchase decisions are unplanned and thus won’t be associated with a set budget.

Like ANUM, reps using FAINT should look for organizations with the capacity to buy, regardless of whether a discrete budget has been set aside. FAINT also adds Interest into the mix. According to RAIN Group’s John Doerr and Mike Schultz, Interest is defined as “[generating] interest from the buyer in learning what’s possible and how to achieve a new and better reality than the one they have today.”

Qualifying Leads: The Qualification Process

(back to top)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.”

This phrase is the root of countless arguments, but it’s as good as gold when it comes to sales qualification. Your prospect will provide you as much information via their tone of voice and delivery as the words they actually speak.

Here are some tip-offs (both good and bad) to listen for when qualifying a prospect that can help you determine whether to advance the sales process or disqualify ASAP.

Good Signs to Move a Prospect Forward

Excuses

Wait. How can excuses be a good thing?

According to Psychology Today, we make excuses to resolve cognitive dissonance — mental stress caused by holding conflicting beliefs. Excuses help resolve our actions with who we want to be.

During a sales conversation, your ears should perk up if your prospect tries to explain away the previous inaction regarding business pain. This indicates one of two things: either the excuse is legitimate, or your prospect wishes they had done something about it earlier and is trying to rationalize why they didn’t. Either way, it confirms their pain is real.

Specificity

Prospects who can give specific answers to questions such as “What are your goals?” and “When do you need to see results?” have thought carefully about their problem. Listen for sequential plans, thought-out explanations, and statistics. Specifics also indicate that your prospect feels real pain. After all, people without real problems don’t spend time thinking about why they exist and how to address them.

Of course, the caveat is that specifics must be accompanied by reality. A prospect who says, “I want to quadruple revenue in the next two weeks,” is using specifics to demonstrate that they don’t have strong business acumen.

Knowledge

Specificity’s partner is knowledge. A knowledge check is your best bet for qualifying at the stakeholder level. True decision makers will have intimate knowledge of company goals, challenges, and needs. A contact who doesn’t have access to this information likely isn’t going to be valuable in the sales process.

Red Flags in the Sales Process

Inconsistency

A prospect whose answers contradict each other is likely one who wants to be helpful, but can’t because they don’t possess adequate knowledge. However, this isn’t a dealbreaker — prod them to tell you who does know the answers, and continue qualifying the opportunity with another contact.

Short answers

True business pain permeates an organization — executives lose sleep over it and employees have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. If you give the impression that you can help alleviate the pain, prospects will want to talk to you.

A prospect who’s giving you one-word answers isn’t someone who feels there’s the basis for a conversation. It could be that the problem is a non-issue, or the contact isn’t clued in enough to feel its severity. Depending on what you think is going on, disqualify or try reaching out to another member of the organization.

Sales success rests on effective qualification. Your ability to find good fit prospects will make or break your business. Prospects who turn into happy customers mean not only revenue, but increased word-of-mouth, referrals, and the possibility of cross- or upselling. So it’s imperative that you get it right.

  Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

The Ultimate Guide to Sales Qualification Written by Leslie Ye One of the most important conversations salespeople have with their prospects is the discovery call.