How Pre-Sales Techies can use BANT to qualify opportunities effectively

When you’re a pre-sales technical engineer who joins meetings with customers, you're often there to demo a product, answer technical questions, or validate that a proposed solution is the right fit.  But there’s another layer to these meetings.  The sales person needs to understand if this is a real opportunity worth pursuing. 

And that’s where BANT comes in. 

Even if you’re the technical expert in the room, knowing how BANT works lets you partner more effectively with the salesperson. You’ll notice key details, ask the right questions, and help move the project forward successfully.

What is BANT?

BANT is a simple framework used in sales to qualify opportunities. It stands for:

• Budget – Does the customer have money allocated to solve this problem?
• Authority – Are we speaking to the people who can make the decision?
• Need – What is the actual business problem we’re solving?
• Timeline – When does the customer want to move forward?

For the sales person, it’s about knowing whether an opportunity is real. For techies, it’s about listening for clues and helping your sales person gather this information in a natural way.

How Techies can help with BANT

Budget

Customers often raise cost concerns when discussing technical options. As a techie, you might hear things like:

• “We already have Microsoft 365 E5 licenses, can we make use of any of that existing licensing? 
• “We’ve got a lot of tools, so we’re looking to consolidate, not add more..”

These are comments techies genuinely hear and signal whether money exists, whether cost savings matter, or whether the customer expects re-use of existing investments.

Authority

You can often tell who has influence by the types of questions they ask. If someone digs into integration, security, or long-term support, they might be a decision maker or key influencer. 

To help techies spot influencers vs decision-makers, use clearer cues:

• People asking things like “How will this integrate with our existing identity platform?” or “What impact will this have on our security posture?” often hold technical authority.
• Someone asking “Will this meet our compliance requirements?” or “How does this align with our wider IT strategy?” is usually a senior stakeholder.

These help the reader understand that authority isn’t always “the boss”, sometimes it’s the architect who holds the keys. Need

This is where techies shine. When customers describe their current challenges, you can validate them and tie them back to outcomes. For example:

• Customer: “We’re spending too much time checking logs manually”
• Techie: “That’s driving up operational overhead, automation could free up your team for more valuable work.

This is an example of a techie listening, and translating issues into solutions or outcomes. 

Timeline

Customers drop hints about timing all the time:

• “We need to present options to the CIO next month.”
• “Year-end change freeze starts soon - can this be implemented before then?”

When you hear these, take note. They are important details that you need to understand in order to help pull together a quote and understand how to prioritise this opportunity.

Tips for keeping it natural

You don’t need to sound like a salesperson to help with BANT. A few approaches that work well:

• Ask clarifying questions – e.g., “What’s driving that timeline?” or “Who else will need to be involved in this project?”
• Summarise back to the customer – “So the main issue is downtime, and that’s affecting customer orders?”
• Share observations with your sales person afterwards – If something feels important in the conversation, mention it.

The customer might come to the meeting and give you all the information on budget, authority, need and timeline and you won’t have to ask.  But if they don’t then make sure you do ask.  These are important pieces of information to have so you can provide the correct quote or information for a customer in order to win the deal or sale. 

Conclusion

BANT isn’t just a sales tool — it’s a framework that helps technical experts understand the bigger picture. When you listen for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline, you’re not selling,  you’re helping the customer get to the right outcome faster. You make the conversation smoother, and you help shape solutions that genuinely solve problems.

So next time you’re in a meeting, tune into the subtle hints customers drop. You’ll be surprised how much influence you have simply by noticing the details that others miss.