00:00:00 Andy Whyte: Producer Nick tells me we have some new questions, and I’m excited to answer them. Let’s get stuck in. Question number one, from Producer Nick. 00:00:12 Nick: My question to you, sir: what’s one thing that you know now that you wish you’d known back when you first started on this crazy startup journey with MEDDICC? 00:00:21 Andy Whyte: What’s one thing I wish I’d known? I’ve been reflecting on this lately. In terms of answering this question with the most value for everybody, not just people starting businesses but everybody who’s considering working with any business, I think we naturally give much more credit to businesses for how far along they are and how well they do things. In the context of a startup, and in the context of the people we sell to, I just assumed that everyone else had it all figured out. And the further we go, the more people you talk to, the more you realize that nobody is anywhere near having it figured out. So if you’re looking at any journey, whether it’s a customer journey, a business journey, anything like that, and you’re holding yourself back because you think everybody else is here and you’re going to be there, that’s not how it is. Everybody is probably right there with you, and you’re all doing a damn good job. Understand that nobody has it figured out. Even those doing brilliant things, running at 100 miles an hour, still have another million things they want to do that they haven’t got round to even starting yet. 00:01:30 Andy Whyte: So question number two is a mystery external guest. 00:01:34 Adam: Hi Andy, Adam here. I’ve got a question for you. Recently we’ve seen our win rates skyrocket when we’ve got a champion in place. What advice would you give to any AE who’s got a contact or coach and is trying to turn them into a champion? Let me know. Thanks. 00:01:53 Andy Whyte: Good question, Adam. So, they’ve seen win rates skyrocket, good word, because of having a champion, which would be everybody’s experience. So how do they turn more contacts and coaches into champions? For those who don’t know our definitions, we say that anybody you meet is a contact, and what we want to do is evolve them, if we can, into champions. The difference between a contact and a champion is that a champion has three traits: they have power and influence, they’re selling internally for you, and they have a vested interest in your success. A coach is somebody who has one or two of those traits. With a contact, we haven’t discovered whether they have any. If we discover they have one or two, they can be a coach, and if they have all three, they’re a champion. So what we’re trying to do is evolve people into being champions. Now, the one thing to say is that there’s a kind of non-negotiable here, which is power and influence. If we deem the person we meet not to have power and influence, it’s unlikely we can change that, because it’s how they’re seen in the organization. 00:02:51 Andy Whyte: It’s the power and influence they have inside their own organization. The only caveat is if we have some really, really powerful angles on value that can inspire that person to become, in a sense, powerful and influential. But it’s unlikely. So we want to quickly identify, in any situation, whether the person we’re working with has power and influence. As for the other two, it really goes vested interest first, and then they can sell internally for us. They’re not going to sell internally for us unless they have a vested interest. So that’s where it all comes back to working with your coach or contact and really understanding what their personal goals are, what their corporate goals are. What are the goals they’re trying to achieve? What are the strategies and initiatives they have in place to support those goals, and how can we support them in those initiatives, by removing some of the obstacles that may be in the way, to get them further toward their goals? So for me, it’s always about finding the vested interest they have. 00:03:52 Andy Whyte: You can do that by working closely with them, obviously, but also by bringing to the table all the value you can bring them. Talk to them about success stories of their peers, people in their role or in similar roles, who you’ve made successful, who you’ve made look brilliant inside their own organizations. Those are the stories that will pique that person’s interest. They’ll want to be your champion. That’s what will inspire them to have a vested interest in your success. And then they’ll start selling internally for you, and using that power and influence to make it even more effective. Question number three, from Olivia Dean [unclear]. 00:04:24 Nick: So this one came up in what I thought was an absolutely brilliant webinar that we did, MEDDICC for CS. In a deal, if stakeholders are changing or your champion moves on, where do you go from there? 00:04:39 Andy Whyte: If you have a true champion and they move on? Well, the first thing to say, in the context of the question, whether it’s an existing customer or a prospective customer, is that if they’re your champion, it shouldn’t be a surprise to you. You shouldn’t just get a bounce-back on their email or something like that, because by nature of being a champion, they should have that relationship with you. So in that instance, if we’re taking the question in its true form, you should be working with your champion to find the path to continue the relationship. You need to understand who their replacement is. Are they on board yet? Are they going to look for them? Is somebody getting promoted? In the meantime, who’s picking up their work? If it’s an opportunity, a new customer, who’s picking up the evaluation, who’s picking up the deal? If it’s an existing customer, who’s going to be responsible for the relationship in the meantime? And this is why it’s so, so important to have stakeholders mapped out, but also, of course, to have that engagement with the economic buyer. 00:05:41 Andy Whyte: Because in the absence of your champion, you actually have a great reason to engage the economic buyer. And this comes back to the power of having experience and tenure in your role, where you can actually approach that economic buyer and say, “I heard that Sara is leaving. Very sad. Obviously, she was great, blah, blah, blah. I’d love to introduce you to some people, if you haven’t already found somebody,” or whatever value-add you think you can bring to that conversation. That can be a good reason to bring value to your re-engagement with the economic buyer, to make sure there’s no gap in engagement. [unclear] Okay, so it’s sad you’ve lost a champion, but potentially the new person coming in is not only going to be somebody you recommended for the role, who by virtue is probably another champion for you, but they’re also going to have advocacy for you, because you’re the person who introduced them into their new role. So it’s a good way of turning a challenge into a positive. Now, so much of what I’ve just said is in an ideal world, where things go that way. But what if it isn’t that way? 00:06:47 Andy Whyte: It all comes back to the importance of having more than one contact, more than one stakeholder, and having them mapped out, so that if somebody is unwell, if somebody leaves the company, if anything happens, you’ve got other stakeholders you can engage with. Yeah. Next question is from Lewis, where I think, Nick, you’re going to read this one out. 00:07:13 Nick: So the question from Lewis was: what would you do if a solution solves a problem that is difficult to quantify? 00:07:19 Andy Whyte: Yes. And that’s more common than I think we like to admit in sales. In B2B sales, we all know the importance of metrics. We know the importance of quantifying the value our solution can bring. And there’s almost this expectation for everybody to have metrics, and if they don’t, it’s almost like they’re saying they haven’t done a good enough job. So you end up in this daft situation where people embellish the metrics, rather than just saying, “Hey, we haven’t got the metrics here.” And if you’re a good salesperson who’s trying to quantify value and can’t, then it’s probably because the customer hasn’t walked the path to uncover those metrics to help you with what you’re trying to do. And that’s an opportunity, because most salespeople at that point will go, “Well, the customer doesn’t know, so I need to just move on from this.” But if we really think about consultative selling, this is where the huge opportunity is for you as a salesperson. You’ve found the problem. It’s difficult to quantify. You can’t quantify the value you can bring. So you double down. You do the hard yards. You do the extra work, the real head-scratching. 00:08:21 Andy Whyte: Let’s not pretend it’s easy to really work with a champion to uncover what pain they have, what that pain is costing them, and the quantified value of solving it. And by the way, this is the same thing that Bain and McKinsey charge literally millions of dollars to do. We’re doing it free of charge for our customers. This is the true definition of consultative selling. So it’s about working with the customer to really do what you can to quantify. A couple of things will happen. The first is that the more you create penciled-in numbers, using hypotheses, or maybe benchmarks from other customers, or industry benchmarks, the more you’ll notice your customer losing the amnesia they formerly had, because you’re provoking them by giving them data that seems relevant. So you might say, “Well, normally we see X is about 50%.” And they’ll say, “Well, actually, no, it’s not. We’re probably more like 30%.” And that’s a good start. It may not be perfect, but it’s better than where you were with no numbers whatsoever. So my advice is to persevere. 00:09:27 Andy Whyte: I always say this: anything we really think of in our industry as good selling is not easy. It’s not easy. And I’m glad about that, because I don’t want the things the best salespeople do to be easy, because then everybody would do it. And it wouldn’t give the great salespeople, the ones who put the work in, do the prep and follow best practice, the chance to really shine and stand out from the rest. So for me, it’s about hunkering down. It’s not going to be easy. Sometimes you just might not get the information, and the important thing to do in that situation is to make sure you’re showing your customer that you’re trying as best you can. You’re trying to be consultative, so you’re focusing on the value. You’re not just reverting to features and benefits or any of that nonsense. And they’ll see you, as best they can in that situation, as a consultative seller, as a partner that’s interested in what you can deliver, not how it gets delivered. And the next question is from a mystery internal guest. I like the internal guest one, because I always like the surprise of who it is. Oh, I know that handsome face. 00:10:25 Mystery Internal Guest: Hey, [unclear]. Question for you, Andy. Between first learning it and now, what is the biggest difference in how you see MEDDICC? Looking forward to the answer. 00:10:38 Andy Whyte: What’s the biggest difference between first using MEDDICC and now? When I first learned it, and this is the case with probably thousands of companies, if I’m honest, it was a 30- or 60-minute session in an onboarding where I spent a week, jet-lagged, in another country, learning about the company: everything from how to submit my expenses, to the personas, to the product, the company history, the values, the culture. It was a week of learning, of which MEDDICC was an acronym I learned about for an hour. So obviously, as you can imagine, it was quite broadly different. As I remember it, I just remember thinking, “Yeah, this all makes sense. This all makes complete sense.” I didn’t really understand that it would become such a crucial part of my success as a salesperson from that point on. That was the initial learning, and then there was a second learning, where we were all, again, flown out to a massive hotel in the US. Even then, it was very much pitched as a diagnostic tool for forecasting. It wasn’t a common language. It wasn’t a methodology. 00:11:46 Andy Whyte: I could talk about the differences for hours, but I’ll keep it to one. I think the real point here probably refers back to what we talk about with [unclear]: not all MEDDICC is equal. Version one of Andy’s MEDDICC to version two was quite a lot different. But version two to version three now is like comparing somebody on a bicycle to somebody in a rocket ship. They’re so far apart. If I think about the versions of Andy: if you took three identical versions of me and gave them what was in the brain of version one, version two and version three, I wouldn’t like version one or version two to have to compete against version three. And again, it’s the same person, same DNA. All the difference is the deeper understanding, deeper utility and deeper common language of MEDDICC. And that is it for episode number four. Thank you very much, as always, for your brilliant questions. I’d love to see even more questions. Nick tells me, again, top five an episode. Well, I think we should be rebels and try to have six an episode. How about that? 00:12:44 Andy Whyte: The best place to ask questions is in the comments just down below. So I look forward to reading them and hearing from you very soon. And if you’re a little bit shy about that, you can always get me on LinkedIn. See you soon, and may your champions be strong.
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