00:00:00 James Bissell: I think we try to do everything in the first call with the customer. So we'd go into a discovery call and try to answer everything — the whole framework — really deepen metrics, try to identify and quantify whether they're actually a champion. Every time we do close a deal, there's one thing that's absolutely obvious: we've always got a champion. We've got somebody who's always fighting for us when we're not around, and that definitely helps us out. Any deal you've ever closed in your sales career — I can 100% agree with this — they all had a champion. Because nobody just has contracts floating onto desks for no reason and being signed. Somebody is driving that internally, and they have something to gain as a result of signing that paperwork, or asking somebody else to sign it. So if anyone's listening to this and wondering where to start, personally — and I always thought you had to pick one area and only one — I would definitely say champion. Because it gives you confidence in the rest of the process. And when push comes to shove, if you've got somebody fighting your corner, or multiple people fighting your corner, it can definitely help you have a better outcome. 00:01:14 Pim Roelofsen: Hey everyone, this is Pim at MEDDICC, and this is another episode of Elite Dealers — with today a little bit of a special one. We have James Bissell here on the call. He's been selling with and leading with MEDDICC in a couple of different organizations, and has seen three MEDDICC initiatives, which we will pick apart in this conversation today. Without further ado, James, welcome. Can you briefly introduce yourself? 00:01:34 James Bissell: Yeah, thanks, Pim. Great to be here — big fan of the work that you guys are doing. I've been in sales for just over 13 years. Started out for the first seven or eight years as an individual contributor, then moved into sales leadership as a two-time VP at technology startups. 00:02:00 Pim Roelofsen: Absolutely. And James, what are you doing today? What's your day to day? 00:02:04 James Bissell: So I recently started doing some consulting work, helping B2B technology companies solve two problems: one is to build qualified pipeline consistently, and the other is to convert those opportunities into closed-won deals and then expand them into larger customers and strong advocates for the organizations they work with. 00:02:28 Pim Roelofsen: So you're all about helping your customers sell more, bigger, faster and better. That's what we love. Alright — three MEDDICC initiatives. Can we go through them one by one and get an idea of the differences and the learnings from your point of view? 00:02:47 James Bissell: Yeah, 100%. The first one took some time to work through — it was a proper train wreck, if I'm honest. But I think with any significant change, you're going to learn a lot. For me, I want to fail fast. I usually move really quickly on these things. And I think that was part of the challenge: I tried to implement the whole framework, the whole methodology, in one go, as a first implementation, without much support. So I basically rolled out the full framework across the entire sales process. And at the time, as a VP, I was still selling quite a lot as well — my diary was full with discovery, demo, and business case meetings, plus prospecting, plus everything you need to do as a leader. So I said to the team: "We need to win faster, we need to win bigger, we need to win more — that's how we're going to hit our revenue goal. And one of the things we need to do is get closer to our customers." We were selling to HR teams — a really important function, but one that doesn't usually have a seat at the table. So they can't walk into a board meeting and say, "We're going to do this." And in most cases they don't have their own budget — they need to request it. Which meant we were doing a fantastic job in the demo and sharing insights, but we were never really enabling our champion — if they even were a champion — and actually helping them go get internal approval. So the main driver became: how do we help someone in that organization quickly get money approved for something that wasn't mission critical at that moment, but that we knew could have a big impact? 00:04:26 Pim Roelofsen: James, if I may interject — starting off by calling it a train wreck has added to my vocabulary. But something you said after that was "failing fast." What do you mean by that? 00:04:55 James Bissell: Yeah — so I wanted to make sure that if we were going to implement something, I knew quickly whether it was the right or wrong thing to do. In a scrappy startup, I don't have a lot of time. I have maybe 12 months to implement something and see what happens. So whenever I was driving change, I'd build a hypothesis, implement it, then quickly test: is this helping us? If yes, how do we do more of it, how do we double down? If not, how do we get rid of it and try something else? I knew I needed to do something. I wasn't 100% sure MEDDICC was the right thing for us at that stage, but I knew it was worth testing. So I said: let's implement it quickly, figure out if it's going to add value, and if not, we can find something else. 00:05:43 Pim Roelofsen: James, we often talk about this in the context of how not all MEDDICC is equal to begin with. Sometimes organizations use it as a checklist — an after-the-fact audit: do we have these things? What we like to see is it becoming a proactive mindset, second nature for the seller. That's a bit of a sliding scale. With that first initiative, where do you feel you and the team were on that scale? 00:06:01 James Bissell: I think we tried to do everything in the first call with the customer. We'd go into a discovery call and try to answer everything in the whole framework. We didn't really use paper process, but we would try to get really deep on metrics, try to identify and quantify whether someone was actually a champion — which, as we know, you can't always do on the first call; you need to test them in other situations. So I think we got obsessed with trying to do everything with very little learning after just reading the book and doing a little bit of role play. We tried to cover everything in the first conversation, and then we'd be like, "Cool — satisfied, let's move on to the rest of the sales process," and never go back to it again. 00:06:45 Pim Roelofsen: James, when you say "the book" — what book do you mean? 00:06:49 James Bissell: The fantastically written book that you guys produce! That's Andy's work, right? That's one of the founding foundations of this organization. Am I wrong in saying it's somewhere up on your shelf there? 00:07:05 Pim Roelofsen: It is somewhere up there in that stack. Yeah, absolutely — goes everywhere with me. I've actually bought a couple of copies because it gets battered in my backpack all the time. Anyway, back to what we were talking about — can you tell us how that first experience led into the second? What's the big difference, and what did you take from one into the other? 00:07:46 James Bissell: Yeah. So I got with the team, gathered some feedback, and they said: "This feels really complicated. We're trying to do too much at once." And I totally agreed with them. This was the same company, same team — really coachable people who wanted to move the needle, hungry to do better. They liked the concept; they just felt we were running too fast with it, which I completely agreed with. And the feedback that came back was: "Every time we do close a deal, there's one thing that's absolutely obvious — we've always got a champion. We've got somebody who's always fighting for us when we're not around." So they said: "If we do this a second time round, we should strip some of this out and just focus on a couple of areas of the framework first. Then, as we feel comfortable and we're getting good feedback, we can start to add different parts at different stages." And that made so much more sense. In a scrappy startup with a small team, you don't have an army of sales and admin people to help implement everything. And you're executing in the trenches as well as leading the team. Sometimes you have to make that choice: keep it simple. Our job as sales leaders is to take the complex and make it simple so the team can execute. So the massive learning was: take a couple of elements of MEDDICC, implement there, go deep, pause, reflect, add a couple more, rinse and repeat. 00:09:14 Pim Roelofsen: So it sounds like you focused on champion to begin with. And it makes sense — if you have a champion, if you have that person working with you, coaching you on how to win, selling on your behalf when you're not there — the lights go on. You're no longer selling in the dark. Is that the story? The difference between scenario one — trying to do everything at once in a fast-paced, scrappy environment — and scenario two, really doubling down on something specific, doing less but better? 00:09:47 James Bissell: Yeah, totally. We needed to increase conversion rates, win bigger deals, win faster. We couldn't just keep adding headcount. So one of the things we knew was that if we had someone on the other side who was equally motivated — if not more motivated — to get the software bought, implemented, and generating value, so they could get promoted or increase their brand internally, whatever it might be — that was going to increase our odds of winning. So we started with champion because we knew that even if we couldn't always shape everything the way we wanted, if we had somebody fighting for us on the other side, we were going to win more deals. We found that balance and it worked quite well. 00:10:51 Pim Roelofsen: Were you measuring this at the time? 00:10:53 James Bissell: Yes. Outside of pipeline reviews and one-to-ones, we had a weekly session on a Friday afternoon — usually quiet at that time. We'd isolate a couple of deals and pick one or two areas of the framework that we were really focused on. We'd look at deals moving quickly based on time spent in stage, or look at reps who had good conversion through the funnel, and we'd ask: what did the champion look like? Who were they? When was the last time they met? How were they tested? Why are they qualified to be a champion? We'd isolate different parts and then move on to decision criteria or other areas in subsequent sessions. In the pipeline reviews and forecast meetings we still talked about it, but we also had a dedicated hour or 90 minutes a week where we just dived into that one area. And I found that was one of the big factors of success in the second time round — because we actually stopped and paused to reflect on a regular basis, rather than just saying: "Here's a really complex framework, go run with it, let me know in six weeks." That doesn't work. You need to guide your sellers on the journey, help them make it their own, and get better because of it. 00:12:31 Pim Roelofsen: Gotcha. Okay — and then scenario three. This is the next company for you, right? 00:12:35 James Bissell: Yeah. Moving into a new organization — pure enterprise play, been around ten years, fantastic customers like Amazon and Vodafone. MEDDICC was the first thing we implemented. And this time round I got to work with you guys, which made a huge difference. You're a small company, and you and the team were always available to jump on a call and help us out as we were implementing it. I felt like this was way better than the second time, because of the support from you guys. We had the learning platform — so it wasn't just the book and listening to my voice every couple of hours. We'd put dedicated learning into the calendar once a week: an hour going back through the program. They could pick any topic, any section of the framework and go deep. Sometimes that was driven by a pipeline inspection or one-to-one where we were looking at a key deal closing that quarter and weren't 100% confident in, say, decision criteria. So we'd say: "Let's build an action plan to get that validated. But first, before you reach out, I want you to spend 30 minutes on the MEDDICC learning program on this area, get some reinforcement, and then go and execute your plan." 00:14:02 Pim Roelofsen: That makes a lot of sense. And specifically with regards to decision criteria — a lot of that revolves around consistency and repeatability. When you ask one team member "how do we win this?" and you get a consistent answer with the next person — still in their own style, their own wording, but aligned — what can you tell us about the consistency you saw off the back of this initiative, and how that played into increasing success? 00:14:21 James Bissell: It helped that we were a fairly small team. But it also helped that we brought Customer Success into that play as well. So we created a common language across the full customer lifecycle, and we'd meet regularly to play back what sales were working on — the pros and cons, the pinch points we were hitting — and CS would do the same. That made it quite engaging, and it also helped us move faster because we were learning from both sides: what it took to get a customer to the finish line, and what happened after they crossed it. With a small team we were able to get a lot more intimate with a smaller set of accounts — because this was true enterprise rather than the mid-market or SMB focus of the previous company, where we were managing a much higher volume of opportunities at any one time. 00:15:58 Pim Roelofsen: You touched on two points there that I think are massive: MEDDICC spanning the full customer lifecycle rather than just selling and closing, and spreading it across the whole go-to-market team rather than just sales. Compared to initiatives one and two, was that like a big transformation, or was it already starting to happen in scenario two as well? 00:16:28 James Bissell: I think there's still a lot of work to be done, but people outside of sales — SEs, CS — were starting to talk about champions, economic buyers, and decision criteria. When we were releasing new capability, it wasn't just "here are some features." It was: these are the problems we're going to solve, these are the proof points supporting that, these are the outcomes it will drive, and here's how we uniquely differentiate — so that we could try to get into decision criteria early on with customers. We started to all talk the same language. There's still a long way to go, as with anything. But people were starting to see that positive things were happening, which made it make sense to take it seriously. Marketing, when they were writing new case studies, were writing them around metrics and positive outcomes that we could then leverage throughout a new sales motion. 00:17:34 Pim Roelofsen: And that's quite big, right? As soon as marketing can do a better job at articulating the value impact you've had for existing customers — how much more confident did you feel going into the forecast? 00:17:55 James Bissell: We just felt so much more confident about the accounts we were talking about and whether they were going to close. And the reality is, they did end up moving into closed-won. We no longer had deals sitting in the pipeline where we didn't know what was happening next because we didn't really have a champion backing us. We'd qualify that — asking questions like: "When was the last time my name came up in conversation? What were the actions? Who else are you talking to in this organization about this?" When they could clearly articulate back to us who they'd spoken to, when, and about what — we felt really confident. And I think one of the challenges with MEDDICC specifically — and I say this reflecting on the first time — is that it's about the who, not just the what. It's not enough to have what's in the CRM fields. I'd be looking at an opportunity, see really detailed notes and decision criteria, and think, "Cool, we're satisfied." But the reality is: who gave us that information? Where did it come from? Has it come from a champion, from the economic buyer — someone with power — or has it just come from a fairly junior person in the team who said, "Yeah, when we evaluate software we look at A, B and C"? Getting obsessed with champions meant that when we were satisfying the other parts of the framework, we knew the information was coming from a position of power and influence rather than just anyone saying anything. 00:19:52 Pim Roelofsen: That makes a lot of sense. And it plays into the fact that we shouldn't be thinking about decision criteria as something the customer already has and we just need to find. As professional sellers, we should help customers craft decision criteria that puts them in the best possible position to solve the pain that's important enough to solve. 00:20:10 James Bissell: Exactly. And I think early on in any MEDDICC initiative, it makes sense to double down on champion if you want to single out one element. If you start seeing that they are coaching you on how to win, giving you access to authority, selling on your behalf when you're not there — then you can retrospectively look at a closed quarter and see: these are the deals where we had qualified champions, and these are the deals where we didn't. What's the difference in average selling price? In discounting? In average time to close? In whether they were ultimately won or lost? 00:20:55 Pim Roelofsen: We like to say: if you don't have a qualified champion and you win the deal, you've been taking an order. 00:20:59 James Bissell: Totally. I couldn't agree more. And I think if you look at any deal you've ever closed in your sales career, 100% of them had a champion — because contracts don't just float onto desks and get signed. Somebody is driving that internally and has something to gain as a result. So if anyone's listening and wondering where to start, I'd always pick champion. It gives you confidence in the rest of the process, and when push comes to shove, if you've got somebody — or multiple people — fighting your corner, you can have a much better outcome. 00:21:38 Pim Roelofsen: Absolutely. And the other point you made about decision criteria — that's the "how" for the customer. Without a champion, you won't be able to influence it. And customers typically aren't professional buyers for the solution you sell, so you really need to help them build the understanding, correlating back to the pain they're looking to solve. Putting the emphasis on champion will just accelerate the utilization and proficiency across all the other elements too — rather than a forced approach where you try to cover everything, which shouldn't be the goal anyway. MEDDICC is a guiding light for where to spend your time doubling down in a particular deal. Or qualifying out if it's not the right deal to be in at all. 00:22:39 James Bissell: Yeah. And just to add to that — the last few weeks I've been selling again to the HR persona, which in most cases doesn't have a seat at the table or a budget to just go and move money around. You really don't understand the true power of champion until you've sold to a persona that is in that situation. When I was selling to sales leaders, marketing leaders, or IT leaders — they usually have a bucket of budget, they can move money around more freely unless it's a really big deal. But when you move into roles where you're selling to someone who can't just execute whenever they want — that's when you really start to realize the power of having a qualified champion. I think if I went back to selling to those other personas, I'd have an even better outcome, because I'm so attuned now to wanting genuine confidence in our champion, not just surface-level confidence. And another thing to think about: a lot of people see a contact leave one organization and join another, and immediately call them saying, "Congrats on the new role — do you want to buy some more stuff?" But that company is completely different. They buy differently, operate differently, maybe they're stricter on spending or budgets. So a lot of reps lose those deals, because yes, they might be a champion — but they haven't qualified them or helped them go and get the order. They assume it's going to happen because that person bought from somewhere else before. It makes you think much more carefully about the opportunity. 00:24:26 Pim Roelofsen: And what you're talking about there are the process elements in MEDDICC. And you need a champion in order to uncover those and act on them together — so that the process elements don't stop you in your tracks when end of quarter is approaching and a deal slips out of the forecast. Especially if your champion hasn't done this before at their new company, because they haven't been there long enough — those are the questions you need to get ahead of, so you can coach your champion on overcoming those gaps. 00:25:11 Pim Roelofsen: So James, let's get into some of the results you've seen, especially with your last initiative. We like to measure success through the lens of sales velocity. I understand there's a specific story with comparable accounts where you've seen a massive difference in the length of sales cycles. Can you talk to us about that? 00:25:35 James Bissell: Yeah, absolutely. So, without going into names — one of the things we were able to do really early in the third implementation was see a big jump in attainment. In the first quarter working together, we went from reps getting to around 40–50% of their number, to everyone hitting 100% or above — the lowest at 120%, the highest at 240%. There were some legacy deals I'd inherited that helped with that, but we got really deep into them quickly because of MEDDICC, and found a load of quick wins. And I think that created a platform of momentum and confidence — "We're winning, and we're winning because of this framework." Getting quick wins matters, and it doesn't have to be closed-won deals either. If you bake MEDDICC into your exit criteria so that moving from stage two to stage three requires satisfying certain conditions — those are wins worth celebrating. But one of the things I knew I needed to do was win faster. We were selling to large technology companies and large banks around the world, and I inherited a deal with a bank the organization had been working on for around 18 months. 00:27:20 Pim Roelofsen: Over two years, 18 months and counting — is that what you're saying? 00:27:24 James Bissell: Yeah — as of when I joined in early 2024, it was around 18 months in and still going. So now we're looking at 24 months, a global bank, and a fantastic potential customer. But when I inherited it, the organization hadn't used MEDDICC on that account. They were close to forecasting and committing that deal for the year — but when we finally sent our paperwork after finishing the legal process, we found out we didn't know what was coming next: they came back and said, "You need to hit the brakes — we now need eight or nine months of IT due diligence and infosec reviews." That was a big learning for the organization, and it validated the need for MEDDICC. We didn't know the paper process or the decision process. Someone had said, "Hey, you've got the money allocated — go and spend it." But as we know, that doesn't mean they can put pen to paper. There were still significant risks. That deal may well still get there — I have no doubt it will. They just had no visibility on how long was left when I joined. 00:28:31 Pim Roelofsen: Let's look at a more recent deal, then. Another bank? 00:28:34 James Bissell: Yes. A rep on the team — super coachable, grabbed it with both hands and ran with it — managed to close a deal with a bank in the US. Similar size. And that one closed in four to five months end to end. So if we look at the nutshell difference: 24 months and counting versus four to five months. Where does that sit, in your view? 00:28:58 Pim Roelofsen: Where does that sit mostly in your view? 00:29:00 James Bissell: For me personally, I think the main thing is champion — and I'll tell you why in a moment. But I think it also came down to the preparation going into every conversation. Before and after every call, the rep was looking at MEDDICC: what do I know, what don't I know? Building a clear plan around those gaps. What do I know about decision criteria? What don't I know about decision process? Coming up with the right questions to fill those gaps so that when they walk away, they walk away with what they need — and the customer feels well served. One analogy I love: I think about MEDDICC like a GPS. If I was going to drive somewhere new right now, I would never get in my car without Google Maps. My partner calls me TomTom because once I've been somewhere I remember it — but getting somewhere new, I need it. And if I took the wrong exit on a roundabout, it's not a disaster, because Google Maps just says, "No worries — turn right here and we'll get you back on track." That's what the framework is for. It's not saying you can't win this deal without knowing A, B and C. It just means you're going to have a better chance of winning — or qualifying out faster — if you get close to it. So this rep was really good at reviewing the framework before and after every call: "I'm happy here, not happy here, this needs to be requalified because we haven't spoken about it in two or three weeks" — and as we know, things change a lot in business. But to come back to champion specifically: we found a champion pretty early in this deal with the bank. And one thing that gave us real confidence we were onto something was that with our price point — something like £2–3 million deals — it's very rare you're going to get to C-suite executives directly. So we had to work really closely with these champions, build a really solid business case, and coach and enable them to go and have that conversation without us. And this rep did a stellar job of getting to the economic buyer — there were actually two people who controlled the budget between them, both from different parts of the business, and they got both of them into the conversation. We ended up spending the majority of our time with those two people for the rest of the deal. That's what helped us win quickly: doing such a good job finding and qualifying a champion, building their confidence to take us to the economic buyer — and then, when it came to procurement, having the right people involved to help move things forward. 00:31:56 Pim Roelofsen: James, the TomTom analogy really resonates. And typically when we think about big initiatives like this, we think about enablement and embedding learnings — but also about operationalizing them into our systems. Can you talk to us about how you went about that from a systems point of view? 00:32:19 James Bissell: Yeah. The platform you offer customers is fantastic — I see it almost like an execution platform. It shines a light on where you're strong and where you're not, like a heat map. The book is fantastic, the learning programs are fantastic, but to access them I have to stop, pause, and go in. When I'm back to back and preparing for my next meeting with Amazon, being able to say, "Okay, give me the reality check on my pipeline — give me the brutally honest picture of how I'm shaping up" is incredibly powerful. And it's okay if you're scoring low on metrics in a particular deal — you can do something about it. But unless you're getting those insights to act on, what ends up happening is people operate blind. They run around like headless chickens, becoming very cookie-cutter in their approach. So having the right systems in place — yes, enablement, yes, training and reinforcement, yes, the learning platform — but also having technology that surfaces insights and says, "You need to spend the majority of your time here, right now" — that's what gets you from stage three to stage four and closes the deal. 00:33:36 Pim Roelofsen: What you're describing to me is a closed loop — the learning never stops. But to make that work, you need a culture that combines with the right cadences. People need to be comfortable putting their pipeline forward as it really is, so you can strategize around the gaps. That empowers you as a leader to see where you need to coach your team, and empowers sellers to focus on the right things in the right deals — and level up continuously. Because if I can recap this conversation: across the different MEDDICC initiatives you've been driving over the last couple of years — especially in initiatives two and three — you were able to take a team from underachieving to overachieving. There was a massive decrease in time to close, and therefore the time to value of your initiatives was felt almost immediately. And the thing that made that happen was the integrated approach: it's not just about learning the framework and you're good to go. It's everything you do to ultimately get MEDDICC to a second-nature stage. 00:35:01 Pim Roelofsen: You've done a great job with that, James, and it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. And I do know that for customers who are on similar journeys — getting the right leads, closing more deals, winning faster, anything GTM or sales excellence related — you're a great partner to help them level up. So I would encourage anyone who thinks it might be interesting to give you a call, or hit you up on LinkedIn. 00:35:30 James Bissell: Yeah, I think there are a lot of areas where we overlap and where customers might get real value from the combination. I appreciate the kind words. 00:35:38 Pim Roelofsen: Alright, James — thank you so much for coming on. This has been another episode of Elite Dealers, and we'll see you next time.
