BANT For Freelancers | The Secret BS Detector For Bad Leads

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 368

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Have you ever been on a discovery call with a potential client, and then you realize about halfway through the conversation that they aren't gonna need your services for like another six months? They can't really afford you, and they're probably just trying to milk you for free advice. So not only did you get your hopes up getting on this call thinking you've got a new client, you also wasted your time talking to this person in the first place. Yes, that sucks, and today we're gonna talk about fixing that. Freelancers have the habit of just jumping on a discovery call with pretty much anyone with a pulse. You're desperate for clients, you want to get on a call, you want to potentially close somebody, you've listened to this podcast long enough to know that, hey, Brian says get on discovery calls, don't just try to close through email or just proposals. And so you're like, yes, I'm gonna talk to anyone, but you have no idea how serious they are. You have no idea what their budget might be. You have no idea what other stakeholders could kill this project, even if you sold this one person. And you have no idea how long it's gonna take them to get their shit together anyways. And so you end up wasting time on calls, or worse, you end up wasting even more time with worthless proposals that you'll never close. You get burnt out feeling like you're bombing call after call after call, which can be really common once you actually start taking marketing seriously and you're having to talk to actual strangers versus just referrals, very common. You're way undercharging your services because you price at a fraction of what their actual budget was, and then you spend months trying to chase down the leads because they weren't ready when you first talked to them, and you listen to my advice and said, follow up until they say yes, until they say no, until they die, which again is true. It's just a waste of time if you're talking to the right people. As a creative freelancer, your time is your product. So every time you jump on a discovery call with an unqualified lead, you're missing out twice, you're losing out twice for two different things. One is the unpaid time you just wasted talking to somebody who wasn't ready and will maybe never be, or maybe could never afford your services. And then again, for the opportunity cost of what you could have done during that past hour, working on your business, fixing something, actually working with a client who is paying you, finally wrapping up that project, finally getting ahead on something. So your time has to be protected as much as possible without missing out on qualified opportunities. Again, we obviously don't want to miss out on discovery calls with a great potential client here. So if you don't already have this, you need a lead qualification system, something that's easy to follow. And that's what BANT is, B-A-N-T. It's an old ass framework created by IBM in the 1960s, but it can easily be adapted to freelance businesses in 2025 and beyond. So I'll walk you through how to assess all four things in BANT. And just in case you don't already know this, BANT stands for budget, authority, need and timing. So you can think of it like a BS detective for bad leads, in other words. And the whole point of this, if you implement it correctly, is to potentially save hours each week by not chasing down dead-end leads. You'll feel more confident on sales calls because you're the one leading the conversation and you know you're talking to the right people, and you'll close more high quality projects because again, you're talking to the right people. The key here is don't talk to the wrong people, do talk to the right people, and that's what BANT is. If this is your first time listening to the podcast or you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood, this is 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls. We take lots of outside influence, not only from different parts of the freelance and creative world, but also the greater business world, and pull them in so that you, the common freelancer, can make more money without selling your soul. Again, if that sounds appealing, you're in the right place. So BANT, what is BANT? Again, I talked about it a second ago, so it's budget, authority, need, timing. It's basically budget. Do they have the budget to work with you? Authority, do they actually have the authority to make the final decision? Need, do they actually need your service at all? And timing is now the right time. And we can build questions around all four of these things and weave them in your sales process and your pre-call questionnaire. But in this episode, I really want to focus on the pre-call questionnaire because the best thing to do is to weed out unqualified leads before you ever get on a call with them. Sometimes it's impossible to get all of this stuff figured out in a pre-call questionnaire. But the pre-call questionnaire is the best way to do this. Now, if you're wondering what a pre-call questionnaire is, if you're new here or you just don't really listen to that mention of this show, my favorite way to close clients, and this is what we consult most of our freelancers on, is a sales process that is hinged around a discovery call. And the discovery call is a way you figure out where they are now, where they want to be, what's missing, and can you actually bridge that gap or not. But before you do that discovery call, we send them to a pre-call questionnaire. And this pre-call questionnaire has a series of questions in it that they're answering so that you know if you can actually help them before you get on the phone with them. Not only that, but it also gives you ammo for the close when you get on a call with them. But the pre-call questionnaire is very important to make sure you're only talking to qualified leads. Because nothing is worse than having a low close rate only to realize the people that you're not closing are all unqualified leads, which shouldn't count towards your close rate anyways. So with my own team or the clients that we consult with, we look at what is your qualified lead close rate. Like of the leads that you're talking to are actually qualified to work with you, what percentage of those do you actually close? And a pre-call questionnaire is the place to do it. So that's what this episode is gonna really be focused on here, so let's start with B, budget. Can they afford you? Big thing here is try to figure out if they're expecting Fiverr prices or if they're serious about actually hiring quality help. Some freelancers or some projects are just doomed to Fiverr pricing, and that's just the nature of some projects. For example, I do this all the time. I hire on Fiverr all the time. For small little projects, there are just little nickel and dime things. For example, if I film 10 new ads, I'm probably gonna just send them to a Fiverr editor. And this goes back to a completely different conversation of just saying if you want to have premium pricing, you need to have premium services, something that's transformational, something that's actually hard to find or hard to find high quality. So the bigger the transformation you offer, the more you can charge, the less likely you're gonna be doomed to Fiverr pricing. But most freelancers can't just straight up ask about budget. In my opinion, if you are a freelancer working with the types of clients where you have really large scopes, or you have vague, uncertain scopes of work where you're trying to figure it out together with the client, if that is you, if you're in a niche like that, you can actually just straight up ask budget. You can ask questions like, have you set aside a budget for this project? Or what's your investment range for this work? And the reason this is important is because when you are shaping scope, you have to know budget. On the flip side, if it's a really well-defined scope of work, especially for your productized services out there, then in these cases, you're generally not gonna ask budget because you generally know what you're gonna charge and they're going to just have to fit into that budget. In these cases, we look for proxy questions. A proxy question is just a more clever way of asking something that they're willing to answer truthfully and not just put a fake number into a budget line item so that you can figure out this is a good proxy for them having a budget. I'll give you some examples. In the B2B world, the business to business world, this is a much more obvious place to ask proxy questions. So if you're a freelancer, let's say you're a web designer, you're working with businesses, one of those proxy questions could be team size. If you're working with solo prenuers, the team size is one. Chances of them having actual budget are pretty small. If they have a team of 10 or more, 10 to 15, 10 to 20, 50 or more, obviously they're gonna have some sort of budget for a website at that point. So you can ask questions like how many full-time employees or you can even ask how many people are on your marketing team if you're working with larger organizations. But in this case, the size of the team likely gives you an idea of what their budget will be. Or really, it's not even necessary budget, it's their willingness to pay. Solo prenuers' willingness to pay for a $10,000 website is probably pretty low, but a 10, 20, 30 person organization willingness to pay a $10,000 website, likely very high, because they're gonna be a multi-million dollar organization at that point. Another proxy question could be around ad spend. You could just ask, roughly, how much do you invest in paid ads each month? Now, this is, again, good if you're working directly with marketing teams. You're doing something like funnel build out. You're doing something really where their website is tied to paid advertising. But this is off-putting if you're not really working in that world. So we got to make sure that your question is not a weird question to have in a pre-call questionnaire. For a web designer to ask about team size, it's not a really weird question. That's a very common thing for businesses to answer when they're filling out lead forms. For example, go try to sign up for a lead magnet from HubSpot, and you'll see what I mean.