BAMFAM: One of my favorite sales terms

Because I spend a lot of my time thinking and talking about sales (best) practices, I’ve come across a lot of monikers that are super useful.

I also get a lot of questions about them, and sometimes I am amazed when a sales professional doesn’t know them.

Today I want to tell you about one of my favorites.

That term is BAMFAM.

Book
A
Meeting
From
A
Meeting

Basically, this is a way for you to keep the sales conversation moving along to another call without giving the prospect a chance to ghost you.

Too many sales people follow this process:

  • Discovery call
  • Send email about another meeting
  • Send another email about another meeting
  • Get that meeting scheduled, or get ghosted
  • Keep trying
  • Drag to Lost column in CRM

Instead, the process I teach (my DSSP Framework) goes:

  • Discovery call
  • Second call because you BAMFAM’d it at the end of the Discovery
  • Scope email
  • Proposal
  • Signed contract

How I phrase it

As you can tell, BAMFAM is when you book a follow on meeting when you’re still on the preceding call. In my agency sales framework, you’re booking a longer strategy call from your initial discovery call.

I use this script:

Sounds to me like what you are looking for is right in line with what we do. I’d love to do a longer call in a few days so we can dive deeper, and in the meantime my time and I can do a deeper dive so we come prepared to talk about your problems and see about working together. How does that sound?

They’ll say “Sounds good!” or throw up an objection, in which case see below.

Assuming they say “Sounds good”, do not say you’ll send them an email to find a time.

You need to have your calendar pulled up so that you can, right then and there, propose a time.

Great. How’s next Tuesday at 2pm Mountain time?

They’ll pull up their calendar because they weren’t expecting it, and if that time doesn’t work they’ll suggest another. You find a time, send them the meeting request, and then say:

Awesome, we’re looking forward to it! If you remember anything else that would be helpful for us to know before our next call, feel free to send it over via email. Otherwise, we’ll speak with you then!

Boom. BAMFAM. Done and done and process moved forward.

Overcoming the objection

One of the things I love most about using the BAMFAM tactic is that you can hear objections to continuing in real time and get past them.

Too many of you are afraid to poke for objections, and you’re leaving a ton of opportunity on the table because of it.

You’re afraid to hear no.

I LOVE hearing no and objections, because I either get closure or a chance to move them past their objections towards a close.

The objection is usually:

“Well, I’m not sure it makes sense because of X, Y, Z…”

To which I go:

“Great! Let’s discuss those things.”

Sometimes the objections are totally fair and it means I’m not the right fit for them. That also means I shouldn’t have been trying to close the work! I can move on and focus on closing those that I am the right fit for.

But what you’ll usually find is that their “objection” is really just that they haven’t asked you enough questions yet. The good news is that you’ve opened up the conversation now and can answer those questions, whereas otherwise they may not have asked them and you would have lost the deal without knowing why.

One thought on “BAMFAM: One of my favorite sales terms

  1. Great Post, John. BAMFAM will be my second favorite acronym after ABC(always be closing) BTW.. can you write about your favorite sales movie slogans? Will be fun to read, A.K.A… Glengarry Glen Ross style?

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