00:00:00 Andy Whyte: Hey, friends. The producers tell me that we have some new questions. Question number one says this one’s coming from you, Ali, behind the camera. 00:00:14 Producer: It is, it is. It’s me. Have you ever lost a deal where you were certain you were going to win? 00:00:19 Andy Whyte: I feel like I’m going to sound big-headed if I say this, but no. And it’s not because I think I’m brilliant or anything like that. It’s actually because I think most salespeople are very paranoid, especially about opportunities. So I’ve never, ever felt certain I’m going to win any deal, even deals I’ve won. I don’t think I’ve ever felt certain, so I don’t think that’s a thing. And the other thing I’d say is that since I’ve had MEDDICC in my life, I’ve been much, much more confident about where I stand. Something we always say is that salespeople should never lose an opportunity. You should always qualify out. What I mean by that is, if we’re losing and we’re qualifying correctly, we should know that we’re losing, and it should surface the reason to us. Are we losing because we’re not carrying enough value, relating to the pain, relating to the metrics? Perhaps we’ve not differentiated enough in the decision criteria. Or is it a stakeholder thing? We haven’t got access to the right people, the right influence. 00:01:19 Andy Whyte: Or is it just the process? The customer’s just not in a position to move forward. MEDDICC basically keeps you on the front foot with all of those things. So if you’re losing, as it were, you can either double down and try to fix those things, or save your time, qualify out, and come back to the customer when they’re in a better position to work with you. So no, I’ve never felt certain about any deal, and I’ve definitely not felt certain I was going to win a deal and then lost it. Okay. Question number two. It says this is a voice note from Producer Nick, so I’m going to hit play here. 00:01:44 Nick: Hey Andy, here’s a question we’ve had through on LinkedIn. So we say that good salespeople influence and inspire the customer’s decision criteria toward their strengths. But does that potentially cause a moral issue? Let me know your thoughts. 00:01:58 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I remember this question. I had this one a couple of weeks ago, and it comes from a place where the salesperson had heard us say that decision criteria is best applied proactively. The idea is that customers don’t have strong decision criteria. They’re getting it from their own research, or from an analyst, or, worst-case scenario, from your competition. So our view is to use decision criteria proactively, as the framework to go and inspire the customer to see the world the same way you do. Because the solution you’re selling, you should believe is the best for that customer. Full stop. You shouldn’t be selling a solution you don’t believe is the best for the customer. At the micro level, for that particular customer in their particular circumstances, if through your discovery and your work with the customer you figure out, “Actually, I love our solution, but it’s not the right one for you right now,” then you shouldn’t continue trying to sell to that customer. You’re fighting a losing battle. So yes, it would be immoral if you continued trying to inspire the decision criteria away from what’s best for the customer. 00:03:07 Andy Whyte: But we would never say that. You should never, ever be selling a solution you don’t think is best for the customer. So that’s the micro level. At a macro level, if you don’t believe the solution you’re selling is the best-value solution for the market, then you’re in the wrong role. We have to be passionate, to truly believe. To be a great salesperson, you have to believe in your product. If you haven’t got that, there’s no amount of inspiring the decision criteria that’s going to make you successful, because you’re always going to be trying to sell the second-best product at best, or probably third, fourth, fifth, something like that. And yes, if you’re trying to persuade customers that your solution is the best and you know it’s not, that’s immoral. But what we’re talking about is going forward with what we think is the best solution for the customer, and inspiring based on our expertise, our opinion, and the proof we’ve seen with our customers. Question number three. This one is back to you, Producer Ali. 00:03:58 Producer: So this is a question from Devon. “My team uses a success plan template that’s aligned with the decision criteria, and I think we can refine it further based on some of the takeaways from the DC section of the MEDDICC class. From your experience, what have you seen drive the most impact in other customer success teams when it comes to decision criteria?” 00:04:20 Andy Whyte: Good question, and I like this one. Yes. Decision criteria, when it gets to customer success, typically means we’ve won a new customer or have expanded our relationship with an existing customer. Therefore, the decision criteria has become much like the specification of the solution we’re delivering. So building it into handover documents and all that kind of thing is tremendous, because quite often there are many ways to deliver the use cases in your solution. It’s also going to tell the customer success team what was important to the customer, what really stood out and helped us win this customer, and what was important to them, not just from a technical perspective, but from a relationship and economic perspective as well. So carrying the decision criteria across and making it part of the handover really helps. The salesperson tells the story: which things were there from the beginning, which things we inspired into the decision criteria, and where we really had to challenge the customer on what was going to be of value to them. That’s really going to enrich the handover, so the team can hit the ground running with the new customer relationship. 00:05:21 Andy Whyte: So all good. But one thing I’ll say here, to take this a step further, is that in the MEDDICC Value Framework, which of course is a value framework that empowers the entire go-to-market team across the entire customer lifecycle to embed MEDDICC as a common language and talk value to your customers, we have M1, which is about positioning value, M2, which is about selling value, and M3, which is about delivering value. In that process of going from positioning to selling to delivering, you’re going to get much more than just the decision criteria. An M3 is basically the encapsulated vision of what pain you’re solving with a particular use case, what value we’ve promised by solving that pain, and how we’re going to do it, with decision criteria. So even better than carrying the decision criteria across into those handover documents, we would implore you to embed MEDDICC Value, and therefore capture all of those beautiful use cases, full of value, from the customer in M3s, and then start to unpack them with the customer. 00:06:27 Andy Whyte: What will probably happen, as is often the case, is that in the sales process we’ve sold, let’s say, ten use cases, which by this point are M2s, where we’ve personalized that value to the customer. And then by the time we actually go live, not only are those ten maybe not all important anymore, with a few that have become less important, so you’re prioritizing a smaller number for implementation, but there may also be some new use cases that come in as well. So the M3s are a great way, I think, if you’re looking to level this up, to define how you can do that. And if you folks haven’t implemented MEDDICC Value yet, you should get in touch. The team would be, I’m sure, delighted to help you get started with that. Okay. Question number four says it’s a question from a CRO, Mike. Welcome back, Mike. Good to see you, Mike. 00:07:12 Mike: Hey Andy, I have a question for you. We’re in the early stages of our MEDDICC journey, and our team is learning that it’s much easier to apply the principles of MEDDICC and do the heavy lifting early on newly created opportunities than it is to retrofit the thinking into older, active deals. We know there aren’t any shortcuts to success; however, do you have any pearls of wisdom you can share? 00:07:31 Andy Whyte: I don’t know about pearls of wisdom, Mike, but this is a great question, and something we see a lot. Like you say, when you’re applying a new methodology, a new common language, new opportunities are much easier to approach, because you’ve got a fresh interaction. But existing opportunities that were already live pre-implementation of MEDDICC can be harder. So my advice here is to use the Three Whys: the first being “why change,” the second “why you,” and the third “why now.” The reason they’re so useful is that you want to make sure you’ve covered off each of those questions before you start to think about doing anything else. The first one is first for a reason: why change. When you look at these opportunities, how confident do you feel that your champion, or the main stakeholders inside that business, are able to answer the question of why they should change? Not necessarily to your solution, but why they should change to a solution like yours. Only once you feel confident about that, about the pain you’ve implicated there and the value of solving it, can you start to think about why they should choose you. 00:08:47 Andy Whyte: Because it doesn’t matter how great they think you are. If they haven’t been convinced why they should change, it doesn’t matter. So then you can get into the “why you.” The “why change” bit is really about pain. It’s about making sure you implicate and quantify that pain. And the “why you” bit is where decision process and decision criteria start to come in. You want to make sure your differentiation stands out, so that the value found in the “why change” is set up to be unique to you. Your differentiation gets built into the customer’s mind: “If we’re going to do this, this is the only way to do it.” Likewise, the decision process comes in at this stage, because you want to be helping that customer on their journey, on that roadmap from not changing to changing. So it’s really important you think about the two D elements in that regard. And then, once you’ve got those completely locked in and you feel confident the customer sees why they should change and why they should change to you, you can move on to the “why now.” 00:09:46 Andy Whyte: And that ties back to the “why change,” because if you’ve done a good job of implicating pain, you’ll have built time-based value into it. So the customer can see not only the implications of not changing, but also what those implications are for every day, every week, every month that goes by without that change. That will drive the urgency as to why they should change now. So if you look at it through that lens, I think it’s going to help you a lot in figuring out what you should be doing with each of those opportunities, and in applying the MEDDICC elements appropriately to existing opportunities. Question number five. This one’s back to you, Producer Annie. 00:10:25 Producer: So this is a question from Hector. “What is the most important thing when doing deal reviews? I want to implement this with a MEDDICC mindset, but it isn’t a common practice where I work.” 00:10:38 Andy Whyte: Okay. Good question, Hector. The answer you’re looking for comes down to trust. Trust is the most important thing you have to have in your sales team to make any kind of deal review, or anything around MEDDICC, work. Because if you don’t have trust, if your team don’t trust you and you don’t trust them, the reviews are going to be ineffective. People keep the bad stuff, the gaps in their opportunities, close to their chest. They don’t want to surface them, because they don’t feel trusted to be doing the job. They feel like it’s going to be used against them, and all this sort of bad stuff happens. So it’s critical, absolutely critical, that trust runs throughout your team. The best way of doing that as a leader is to be right there in the trenches with your team. When they find gaps, when they come to you and say, “Look, I’ve got this great opportunity, but I just don’t think this person I’m working with is a champion,” you need to say, “Great work.” That is good work, because that is good selling. Great salespeople find the gaps early on. 00:11:36 Andy Whyte: So that’s the most important thing. It doesn’t matter what you do, what tactics you have, how regularly you hold the reviews, or how great everyone is at MEDDICC. If you haven’t got the trust, it won’t work. It’ll be ineffective. So that’s the caveat, the disclaimer, the safe harbor statement out of the way. Invite input from everyone in that room. One of the beautiful things about deal reviews is that a sales team typically has different flavors of experience and character. You might have someone with lots of deal experience, lots of craft. Maybe someone in the room is a product expert, maybe someone in the room is an industry expert. Getting all of those inputs and perspectives can lead to richer points of view. So I’d say create that kind of environment, where people are brainstorming. We call it dealstorming as well. We even changed the name recently to a Deal Trust, based on how Pixar reviews its movies when they’re coming up with them, so you can imagine the crossover we’re trying to bring in there. Create environments that invite input and opinions from all different places. So that’s the thing there. 00:12:39 Andy Whyte: If you’re looking for something a little bit more tactical, I always like to start by talking about the pain, and then reflecting on how it impacts different stakeholders. That way you can start to get a feel for how many stakeholders we’re considering here. A common mistake people make is to consider pain, and the value of solving that pain, company-wide, when we know pain is specific to stakeholders. So I always like to start with pain, but I’m always a little bit careful not to be too prescriptive, because I don’t think there’s a best way to go through it letter by letter. But if you start with pain, it can usually inspire the conversation, so you really start to understand how you can help the customer and the lay of the land of the opportunity. I love this question. Good luck out there, and let me know how it goes. That’s five questions. If you want to ask a question, you know where I am: LinkedIn. Reach out and ask the questions on LinkedIn. It’s the fastest way to get onto the show. Or you can leave us some comments down there. Leave some comments below, and we’ll be sure to pick them up. Till the next time, may your champions be strong.
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