Sales Qualification Frameworks
This 4-letter framework helps sales teams quickly assess whether a prospect has Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.
What is BANT?
A person who has the power to influence buying decisions, believes in Retool, and has a vested interest in your success.
What is a Champion?
This massive hyperscaler is Retool's focus for strategic partnerships and has committed to a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA).
What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
This type of evaluation has an 82.7% Q2 2025 win rate when properly executed with POC scoping, kickoff, office hours, debrief, and readout.
What is a POC/POV (Proof of Concept/Proof of Value)?
These are the four main value drivers that explain why customers typically take action and purchase Retool.
What are Make Money, Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Move Faster?
According to Retool's qualification criteria, a prospect must confirm a timeline to evaluate and implement a solution within this many months.
What is 9 months?
This person has final authority to approve or block a Retool purchase and controls discretionary budget, but may not always sign the contract.
What is an Economic Buyer (EB)?
AWS provides these three types of funding programs to support Retool partnerships: Co-Marketing dollars, Marketplace Rebates, and these credits to reduce customer costs.
What are Cloud Spend Credits (or AWS Credits)?
These three highlighted evaluation tools are specifically used during the "Evaluate" phase of the customer lifecycle to prove Retool's fit and demonstrate value.
What are Demo, Custom Demo, and POC/POV?
In the value framework, this is what you must uncover first by understanding the customer's current challenges, frustrations, and roadblocks before discussing solutions.
What are Pains (or Afflictions/Current State/Negative Consequences)?
This more detailed 8-letter framework is used by AEs to assess deal health and includes Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, and Champion.
What is MEDDPICC?
Champions are evaluated across these three dimensions: Scope, Advocacy, and this third measure of what they're saying about Retool.
What is Sentiment?
When working with AWS on co-sell opportunities, you should engage at this early stage of the sales process, not waiting until later stages.
What is Discovery (or Qualification stage)?
According to the presentation, this is the ideal criteria that must be confirmed from the Economic Buyer before starting a POC to ensure the use case is a priority to solve.
What is alignment from the EB (Economic Buyer confirmation that this use case is a priority)?
According to the Colgate example, this was the quantified benefit #1 value that resulted in $112.2M impact from increasing capacity utilization by 5%.
What is "Increase capacity utilization" (through capacity planning optimization)?
In the BANT framework, this criterion requires that the prospect has confirmed one or more functional use cases or a project/initiative for AI or internal tooling.
What is Need?
This type of person provides helpful feedback but lacks the power to influence stakeholders or change scope if strategy needs to be modified.
What is a Coach?
These three indicators suggest a good opportunity to engage AWS: customer interest in this marketplace, plans to self-host in AWS, or plans to leverage these AWS data services.
What are AWS Marketplace, AWS infrastructure, and AWS integrations (like Redshift, DynamoDB, Athena, Bedrock)?
These are the five phases in the structured POC flow that lead to the 82.7% win rate, spanning from PLAN through EXECUTE to CONCLUDE.
What are POC Scoping, POC Kickoff, Office Hours, Debrief/Dry Run, and POC Readout?
These are the three levels of value in the PBO pyramid, from top (strategic) to bottom (operational), representing different audience types from Executive Leadership to Manager.
What are Strategic (Market share & size, EBIT & Margin), Functional (Increase revenue, Cut cost, Development Cost, Rev per User), and Operational (User adoption, % Engagement rate, Support tickets, User experience, Solution benefits)?
Retool uses BANT for leads with this characteristic, while MEDDPICC is used when you're doing this to intent.
What is "have intent" (for BANT) or "creating intent" (for MEDDPICC)?
These four "tests" can help validate a true champion: the Internal Map Test, the Action Test, the Bad News Test, and this test that proves they'll fight for you when you're not there.
What is the "No-Show" Test (or multi-threading test)?
In AWS's organization structure, account teams include an Account Manager, a Solutions Architect, and this person from the AWS Partner Organization who acts as a bridge to partners like Retool.
What is a Partner Success Manager (PSM)?
This Solutions Engineering team member role focuses on structured topics to deep dive into Retool basic or advanced technical concepts during POC support.
What are Tailored Technical Topics (offered during Build Sessions/Office Hours)?
According to the presentation, these are the "2 things that break business partnerships" when conducting discovery and value conversations.
What are "They don't listen" and "They don't understand my business" (or No Need, No Value)?