Early Stage Enterprise Deal Qualification and Management
Co-founders and early stage team members often find themselves having to step into fairly advanced enterprise sales roles in order to move their business forward. Not only do you have to navigate the surprisingly complex waters of enterprise sales, you have no brand, few (if any) customers, unproven business processes, yet-to-be-proven hypotheses. This is chess, not checkers. Professional sales executives usually have 8 to 10 years of experience by the time they tackle deals of this sophistication.
Having a framework that encapsulates the standard factors that go into why an organization buys something as the foundation of your organization’s sales methodology can be very helpful. Over time, you can bolt-on additional methods and processes that are custom to your specific engagement model.
Below is an adaptation of BMANTR (aka BANT) for early stage, B2B, venture-backed tech startups. It assists with deal qualification, deal management, forecasting, and understanding common friction points between you and the market. Successfully adopting it can increase your probability of close, shorten your sales cycle, drive up your average deal size, and help you better understand your customer.
Early Stage BMANTR Defined
BMANTR Deep Dive Articles
B is for Budget | M is for Mandate | A is for Access
Implementation Tips
Level of Detail: Condense to BANT for more transactional deals and expand to BMANTR blown out into a presentation deck for large strategic deals. For $30K to $700K early adopter deals, track a presentation slide’s worth of BMANTR in a table.
Discipline and Rigor: BMANTR is not a “one and done” exercise. Individuals with limited sales experience usually struggle to understand how much discipline and rigor BMANTR requires. Not going all the way with it is a waste of time; BMANTR is not a reporting exercise. Assess a deal’s BMANTR before every email, phone call, and meeting. Update it after every prospect interaction and continue to do so until the deal is signed. Use BMANTR as the common language with which you discuss deals in your organization.
Expose to Prospect: While you’ll have to translate the language to be prospect-friendly, it is smart to expose most of your BMANTR to the prospect to create goal alignment.
Second Set of Eyes: It can be very helpful to have a second set of eyes (e.g., board member) review your BMANTR. When having these conversations, spend time talking about how to move the deal forward and playing devil’s advocate.
Systems and Reporting: BMANTR is mostly qualitative. That means you will want to find easy ways to write, read, and present it. Grouping text fields on a BMANTR section of your CRM’s opportunity record or tables on presentation slides are easy ways to capture and communicate this information. Expose a few of the BMANTR fields on pipeline reports to provide additional context. For example, add the Need column to a trailing 30-day opportunities created report to understand the quality of deals coming into the pipeline. Leverage the Risk and Timing columns when managing end-of-quarter deals.
