What is BANT?
BANT is a lead qualification framework that checks four things: Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline. A lead that has money set aside, the power to decide, a real problem and a date to solve it is treated as sales-ready.
BANT came out of IBM and is still the most common shorthand for qualification calls. Its weakness is order and rigidity: asking about budget in the first minute of a cold call rarely gets a straight answer, and in larger deals no single person holds all four. Many teams keep BANT for transactional sales and use variants such as MEDDIC or CHAMP for complex ones.
Whatever the framework, turn each letter into a specific question and a pass condition, for example "Are you replacing a system in the next 90 days?" That makes the framework usable on every call, by every rep or agent.