Last Week, Chris Penn @cspenn, wrote a great post on BANT and what it can mean for projects and productivity.  BANT is a long used sales term that stands for

• Budget
• Authority
• Need
• Time frame 

Chris re-worked it for projects and an internal measure (read his whole post here).  He rephrased it as:

“Suppose you had a project management system that looked like this?

• Budget: What is the revenue impact of this project?
• Authority: Is this project needed by a superior, a peer, or a subordinate?
• Need: How important is this project?
• Time frame: How urgent is this project?”

I’d like to turn the crank one more time, and suggest what BANT would look like when you look at it through a marketing lens.

• Budget: What is the revenue impact of this campaign
• Authority: How much expert Authority can we express on the topic
• Need: How do we match this campaign to the prospects "need" trigger
• Time frame: How much time do we need to do this campaign the right way

In this frame, we are trying to make our marketing accountable, actionable and executable.

By looking at revenue impact, we can clearly establish the goals we want to put in place. Yes, they will be estimates, but if you have been tracking your historic rates, you can come up with a reasonable estimate.

By considering your expert authority, you are moving beyond just thinking about a product or service and its features – you are getting at the expertise you really bring to your customer or client in solving their problem with your product or service. Think of it this way and you move beyond just telling the world what you have, and instead move into the realm of telling folks what they get by working with you.

Marketing is most effective when we market to a need, and most needs have a trigger. It could the termites in your house, the bad reports from your accounting system that make you work late to close the books or the gasoline spill that puts your business in environmental jeopardy.  Some needs are long fuse – they take a while to build, and some are short, but if you market to the triggers, you are more likely to create action from the prospect receiving your message.

And finally Time frame.  The opposite of quality, in most small and mid-sized company marketing is not shoddy, it is time.  Most businesses we experience working with underestimate the time it takes to execute a well thought-out and track-able campaign.  They do not build in time to test messages and headlines. They don’t leave enough time to make sure all the right infrastructure is in place to track the results.

So as you plan your next marketing activity or campaign, consider the marketing BANT.  You’ll likely see better results.

What do you think?  Would you use BANT differently?