Podcast episode
Staying ahead with MEDDICC (Andy Whyte, Founder MEDDICC™)
30 Minutes to President's Club16 Feb 202231 min
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Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Ask about the last time they bought something before asking for buying process. Don’t be afraid to call out when a deal doesn’t appear to be a top priority anymore. Get your execs involved when dealing with the buyer’s executive team. Demonstrate the research you’ve done EARLY in the sales cycle. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB Founder MEDDICC™ RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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weeks to do. It's going to take our team three weeks to review when you get back and all of a sudden, just from that one little hack, you found out something that's going to give you insight into something that if you'd asked them outright, you'd never normally find out. So that's the first one. Second one is the qualify out for two reasons. The first is if you go to qualify out, and by the way, when I'm talking about qualifying “out, I'm talking about having a polite conversation with the customer that says, hey, this doesn't” feel like this is a priority for you guys right now. It's as simple as that. We're not doing anything other than just kind of calling that out. One of two things happens. The first is the customer will agree with you. They'll say, actually, you know what, Armand, you're right. This is not top of our priority list right now, but we've really felt this has been a great engagement.
weeks to do. It's going to take our team three weeks to review when you get back and all of a sudden, just from that one little hack, you found out something that's going to give you insight into something that if you'd asked them outright, you'd never normally find out. So that's the first one. Second one is the qualify out for two reasons. The first is if you go to qualify out, and by the way, when I'm talking about qualifying “out, I'm talking about having a polite conversation with the customer that says, hey, this doesn't” feel like this is a priority for you guys right now. It's as simple as that. We're not doing anything other than just kind of calling that out. One of two things happens. The first is the customer will agree with you. They'll say, actually, you know what, Armand, you're right. This is not top of our priority list right now, but we've really felt this has been a great engagement.
feel like this is a priority for you guys right now. It's as simple as that. We're not doing anything other than just kind of calling that out. One of two things happens. The first is the customer will agree with you. They'll say, actually, you know what, Armand, you're right. This is not top of our priority list right now, but we've really felt this has been a great engagement. “Let's touch base in six months, which is a good outcome, right?” It's a good outcome. It's saved you a load of heartache, both yourself and then reporting up the chain with forecasting and all that sort of stuff. The second thing that happens is the customer won't let you qualify out. They'll turn around and say, whoa, whoa, hang on a minute, no, no, don't, no. We are genuinely interested. We're sorry if we gave you the impression we weren't.
is a generally known philosophy around forecasting, qualification, and just generally a deal dynamic so that you make sure that if you think a deal is going to come through, you really know it's going to come through. The eight letters in MEDDICC are metrics, economic “buyer, so someone who can approve the budget, decision criteria, which is what are the technical” and business requirements, the decision process, right? How did they actually go about making a decision internally, the paper process, think red lines, things of that sort, the identified pain, the champion, and then the competition. So those are your eight letters.
really important we sell about value. It's really important we think about all the stakeholders and what value they care about. And then also when it's right, we think about the process in which the customers go to. You kind of see it from a different lens where you don't actually have to check off like all of the letters. And you actually think about the letters from a perspective of, “okay, I'm engaging with this customer. It's really important I find pain. When I find the pain,” I want to align that pain to value. And then, of course, not everyone has the same pains. Not everyone cares about the same values. So let's start to think about which stakeholders are relevant here. But that's kind of the zoomed out version. The really short answer to your question is that you don't have to kind of go through every letter. In fact, there's some letters
wants to know about their solution. So it's almost like a crossroad you go to. And it's like option A is we get into pitching. We hope that there's something in my slide deck that appeals to the customer that they'll go, Oh yes, let's talk about that. Or option B is we go, well, we know we shouldn't go straight into pitching, so we should do some discovery and we go, right. Thanks for coming to the meeting, man. What's keeping you awake “at night? And what does that mean if you don't solve that? And who else cares about this?” And the customers they're going like, what? Is this an interrogation? Right. So that's the problem. I think your question kind of comes from a position where like that could have been the case where like either I've done the pitch and it's not resonated or I've kind of not won the credibility or the right to ask those questions yet. And so that's why
time ahead of that meeting to kind of research the customer, research their business, look on Google, you know, all the good stuff we know that, you know, some of your great guests before have have really done a great job of of giving us like really good ways of preparing for a meeting. You go into that meeting and you can say not just like based on the research I've done. So straight away, the customer's like, you did some research. OK, I'm listening “now. I was looking at customers that we work with that I think are similar to your business” because what I was looking to do was I'm trying to come here today to to show you how our solution I think could help you. What I found was this is one company, right? You're Adidas. So this one company, Nike, we've helped before Nike worked with us. They had these problems
seconds for a page to load. What's that all about? Like, yeah, that's really bad. You know, that's costing you 4% conversions, which would probably lead to a million dollars lost a year and stuff like that. We don't do that because the customer's like, well, who's this like guy coming in, giving me this? So we talk about somebody else's ugly baby. They look at it and they can say, “well, there's someone here that can actually help me with this.” So oftentimes you might say, oh, with Nike, we reduced X by Y or whatever it might be, but let's say I'm selling a tool where the ROI is a little bit more challenging to quantify. So a good example would be a tool like Asana. It's a task management software.
you know, it comes back down the chain and then all of a sudden the customer comes back to life again. So I would just say that in those instances, of course we can't win them all and there's always going to be situations where customers just, you know, they're gone and that's fine. But if you've got an opportunity that you're really excited about and it's worth the while of “the wider team getting involved in it, then I'd be trying to line up other stakeholders to take” ownership as well. Andy, what do you have your C-suite people say when they do that reach out with no ask? Is it just, hey, meeting with Arman next week, just wanted to let you know, like what are they saying? Yeah, it's super simple. And again, it goes back to that aura of being
like, hey, you'd be really pleased because we work with all these companies and we chose you to work with next. Like that's the impression that the whole proposition should come with. And so it's like, and by the way, secret here, like when I was a sales leader, I would adjust “my email signature title to match the person that I'm writing to just to make sure I felt like” on par with them, which is, you know, not so much. I'm not like, I wasn't calling myself the CEO or anything like that. But like, if it was like a regional leadership thing, you know, in some, like in Europe, direct is a really high title, but in the US, like the equivalent is like VP. So I would adjust it accordingly. I'd reach out and I'd say something like this. I'd say, hey, Nick,
to the CEO founder who had replied back, been very friendly. And we thought we got nothing left to lose here. Let's do it. It reignited the opportunity. Not only did it reignite the opportunity, he introduced us to a CCO in their business. And that person took ownership of the project. Whereas before we were a couple of levels down, got the deal done. So that deal was, “in our mind, we were like about to close, lost it. But it reignited because we already had the” line open. Just last week, CRO and president of a company, that exact template I just gave you, his email. This, by the way, this is a legend in our industry. This is like one of the top five CROs out there. No word of a lie. There's a book not too far away from me who this guy wrote.