00:00:00 Adam Clarke: I think truly understanding what's driving the success and the failures would be something I'd ingrain in my previous self. I was seeing the success, but I didn't truly know why. So if I could have seen it through a lens like MEDDICC — and at that speed — I could have scaled that not only for myself but for my peers and my team. That would have been incredible. 00:00:36 Pim Roelofsen: Hey everyone, this is Pim with another episode of Elite Dealers. And today my next guest is Adam Clarke. He's a Global Senior Director at Oyster. So, Adam — welcome to the show. 00:00:47 Adam Clarke: Thanks, Pim. Yeah, happy to be here. 00:00:49 Pim Roelofsen: So, to set the agenda for today — we're going to talk about a number of things, because you and your company have embarked on a big journey and we're proud to say we get to play a role in it. But we're also going to reflect on some of your learnings over the past ten years: a deal from ten years ago where you weren't necessarily selling with MEDDICC, but can now retrospectively see how it would underpin professional selling; a deal you won; a deal you lost; and some learnings from the initiatives you are running today. Yeah — so why don't we start by going back in time, say ten years ago, and talking a little bit about some of the insights you now have reflecting on that? 00:01:31 Adam Clarke: Yeah, absolutely. I've only been officially trained on MEDDICC in the last six months or so. So when I reflect back on some of the deals I worked and won, it's interesting using the MEDDICC lens to understand why I was winning or losing. Retrospectively, the deal I've got in mind is with a global research and consulting organization. I worked with this company for about five years — started off with a small deal, around 20K ARR, and after five years it was around 300 to 400K ARR. My reflection at the time, not knowing MEDDICC, was that I had a great relationship with them. That's what I put the success down to: I built a great relationship, I networked well, I created trust, and that helped grow the account. That was about as deep as my understanding of the methodology and the qualification of that account. But as I look back with a MEDDICC lens, what I realize I had was a champion in that company. The individual I worked with — we had a relationship, we'd text each other, we'd call each other. She would sell for me internally. She'd proactively introduce me to new individuals who had joined. We would problem-solve things together, outside the remit of what my company's solution was. And as I reflect on this, the word it brings to mind is access — she gave me access and introductions to everyone I needed to grow that business. 00:03:36 Adam Clarke: So I had access to the economic buyer. I didn't know what an economic buyer was back then — it was the person who just put the pen on paper. But actually being able to meet that economic buyer changed the game for me. She introduced me to twelve people in total when I look back. And having that champion made everything else work: understanding the decision-making criteria, the process, what metrics we were using to evaluate success. I remember in one session, when I think about the metrics, she had all of the metrics we were producing for them and what the competition were doing as well — so that visibility to help co-create the mutual action plan was something we did together. At the time I had no framework or understanding of why this was working. And consequently, we didn't really have a way of scaling that success. This was our most successful client, and my understanding was: hey, I had a good relationship with them. That would have been my advice to other people. But being able to slot it into a framework and understand why it was successful — it fits into the MEDDICC framework I've now been opened to. 00:04:55 Pim Roelofsen: That's such a good example, Adam. And I'll go back to something you'll hear us say often: no champion, no deal. In this example — and I think it extends to a question for anyone tuning in — if you think about some of your best deals, even if you didn't sell with MEDDICC at the time, you will typically find that there was a person in that deal who was your champion, reflecting back on it. Every single example people tend to come up with — they're able to see: yes, I did have a champion there. And then as a next step, no champion, no deal. Unless a customer figures out what they need to solve for on their own — which is professional buying and typically doesn't end up being the case — you're just an order taker. So if you think about professional selling, finding someone who can be your potential champion and building them up is effectively what you did, without necessarily using it as a framework or methodology. It's a great example of using MEDDICC retroactively. 00:06:28 Adam Clarke: Yeah. And it works both ways. Having the champion gives you the confidence that you can scale. But the other way around — I've had it, we've had it, everybody's had it — where you think you have a champion but you don't. Maybe you haven't tested them. You've got a happy user, you assume somebody is your champion, you work the deal, you invest time, you invest your organization's resources. And for some reason, at the end of the cycle, the close is lost. And you look back and realize this person wasn't a champion. They weren't selling for me. They didn't give me access. I made assumptions because what I thought was a champion was telling me things. We had it in our organization at the end of last year — a deal with a huge amount of resources invested. And it's not just sales time; it's all the cross-functional stakeholders investing time as well. It crumbled at the end because what our assumed champion had been telling us was not true. And I actually love that, because the lesson we all learned from it was the importance of champions. It's built into everything we do now — it's part of our onboarding, part of our interviewing, part of our deal reviews. I love those failures where you can pinpoint the exact criteria: I missed this, I know why. You can use it, you can learn from it, you can scale it. So it's really interesting talking about those wins and losses and having a framework where you can identify the reason. 00:08:28 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. You gave a couple of examples of the champion you had in that deal ten years ago: coaching you on how to win, introducing you to new stakeholders, really being your partner on the other side. And then some examples of someone who wasn't. But what I think is interesting to talk about here is that at the beginning you said this partnership with this customer evolved across multiple years — from 20K to ten or twenty times that size. So was the champion, the individual domain champion, the same person throughout the lifespan of your engagement? Or were there changes along the way? 00:09:12 Adam Clarke: They did remain — and they became a stronger and stronger champion, with exponential value the longer we had that relationship. Actually, a question for you: when I reflect back on it, I think I had more than one champion by the end. I had multiple individuals giving me access, with power and authority. How in terms of MEDDICC do you look at multiple champions? Is that part of the framework, or should people just be looking for one person? 00:10:03 Pim Roelofsen: Both of those statements are true. You don't think about champions as something singular — it's definitely something to consider as plural. Multiple champions across your deal. The more complex a deal gets and the bigger the organization, the more champions you'd look for. But you do typically have one main champion. I always think about the days when I used to be paired with an SE — we'd always make sure to identify the technical champion on the customer side as well, as a secondary thread. So if your primary champion went dark for a few days, or left, you'd always have an open line of communication you could rely on. When you start building multiple champions you can do a better job at triangulation — aligning with value, stakeholders, and process. It will definitely pay off. Best practice: think about it in the plural, with one main champion as your key persona to work with. 00:11:36 Adam Clarke: Yeah, that's really helpful. We often talk now about the brittle nature of having just one strong champion and trying to build additional ones. 00:11:48 Pim Roelofsen: Exactly. The interesting thing with your deal is that person stayed with the business throughout. But people change companies and roles all the time. If you've been building a singular champion and your sales cycle is nine to twelve months, and somewhere along the way they change roles — then the pain you've identified and implicated with that champion is no longer relevant to them. A new person comes in, things change, and you're suddenly open to all this risk that wasn't there before. Being proactive about covering multiple bases from a champion perspective is never a bad idea. So — in terms of other elements, reflecting back on that initial deal: is there anything else besides champion that stands out to you? 00:12:58 Adam Clarke: The champion is the foundation of everything else — it opened up the right information for all the other elements of MEDDICC. I was always clear on the decision-making criteria, always had access to the economic buyer, the decision-making process was always clear, I knew the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Having confidence in all those criteria enabled me to be confident in my forecasting — to quantify effectively, give confidence and linearity to the revenue operations team, the sales team, and the leadership team. And that deal was a springboard for my career. It ultimately helped me gain promotion and accelerated my career trajectory. It's interesting thinking back on it: the importance of getting something right, and the impact it can have on your future. 00:14:27 Pim Roelofsen: Absolutely. I agree — it's a foundation. It opens up insight into all the other elements. I often think about it this way: if you asked me what my favorite element is, a year ago I might have said champion. Now I'd probably say decision criteria — because that's where you make the big difference, where you win. That's where you differentiate yourself against the competition, not just rivals but anything competing for the same resources from your customer. But it's true: as soon as you find a person attached to the identified pain and start building them up, and you keep executing your process, the rest of the elements build up and you'll be in a better position. So — on the flip side of this great example, there was also a deal you lost. Can we get into that? 00:15:35 Adam Clarke: Yeah, definitely. So one of the deals we worked at Oyster, at the end of last year, we invested a huge amount of time, resource and effort into an opportunity. It was three or four months — maybe longer, actually, longer than our typical sales cycle. And at the end the deal crumbled. We didn't even really get a validated answer on why we lost it. It just dissipated. We lost momentum and couldn't build it back. When we had a deal review and looked through it through the MEDDICC criteria — which we weren't fully using at the time — what it ultimately came down to was: we thought we had a champion, but we didn't. We believed what the champion was saying. We didn't validate it, we didn't test it, we made assumptions. We based our business case, our action plans, and all the resources we put in on assumptions. The pain that cost us — the hours of effort, the incorrect forecasting — it was a really painful loss. And what I love about this example is that we have actually now won this deal, early this year. Three months later, having analyzed why we lost it, we were able to re-qualify the opportunity, build a champion who could introduce us to the economic buyer, actually have the conversation with the people signing off on the deal. All of the other elements started to make more sense. We started getting different information than we'd been getting previously. And having lost it before, we were extra vigilant on testing and not assuming any information. Anything where you can take a learning, make a change, and try for a different result off the back of it — that's what I love as a sales leader. 00:18:11 Pim Roelofsen: That's a great example. It's so interesting that you used a deal review to understand why you lost, in order to empower yourself and the team to turn it around and ultimately win it. Everybody loves a comeback story and this is a good one. Something specific in there: deal reviews — and MEDDICC to a degree — are sometimes considered to be a bit after the fact. A checklist. This is a good example of applying them to a deal in progress or a deal you have lost, which I think is a good habit more companies should adopt, because there are so many learnings in losses as well. But deal reviews really want to be proactive too — you want to run one with your team every single week to make sure the mindshare is there to infuse insights and value into ongoing cycles so you can get ahead of things. If there's one thing I'd urge every sales leader to do when they have a MEDDICC initiative going on and want to get it to a true second-nature stage: embed reviews into your cadence, because it creates a flywheel for learning, builds the common language you're after, and immediately creates the opportunity for the team to collaborate and enhance the actual opportunity — and therefore your revenue output. My question: if it went closed-lost at the end of last year and you got it back on track early this year, how did you go about re-engaging? What made the now-customer say yes, let's get back into this evaluation? 00:20:07 Adam Clarke: Good question. We had really lost momentum into the latter end of last year. It culminated with not getting access to the economic buyer. At the start of this year, we went back to the pain — the pain was still there. We tried to implicate that pain with our contacts, who we'd essentially downgraded from champion back to contact at that point. We revisited and implicated the pain, because that hadn't gone away. What we lacked was our ability as a company and as a sales team to implicate the pain in the right way and create momentum. We then started building our contacts back into a champion — testing the assumptions, testing the information we were getting. That started to give us more access to the wider organization. 00:21:25 Pim Roelofsen: So the same contact did ultimately become a qualified champion, whereas they'd failed to reach that level previously? 00:21:34 Adam Clarke: Yes. And talking about it now, it shows the impact you can have as a salesperson — the difference you can make in your own sales process. You have the power to create a champion. It's in the decisions, the behaviors, the activities you make. Last year when we tried to do that, we weren't using MEDDICC, we didn't fully understand what a champion was. We were unable to make that impact. As we started to understand more about what a champion is and how to test them, you realize it's in your own ability as a sales professional to create the champion yourself. 00:22:16 Pim Roelofsen: Absolutely — a champion just starts out as a contact. And then you build them up. They become a coach, and they seem to have got to that level the first time around in this deal, but then ultimately became a champion as well. They won't be able to sell on your behalf if you don't build them up. And they won't do that either if you don't align to their vested interests. There's a massive learning in that. Now — you're a senior director working with your team and the broader business on this MEDDICC initiative, bringing it into the day-to-day of how the team works and engages with customers. In this still early-stage initiative: what are some of the key insights you've gathered over the last couple of months? 00:23:23 Adam Clarke: MEDDICC is ingrained in everything we do — it's the bedrock of our sales methodology, our sales process, and our approach for this year. If I think about all the important things in my life as a sales leader now, starting with hiring: we have headcount to fill, and I've worked with the TA team to re-evaluate what our hiring profile looks like. As part of opportunity progression, all of the questions we ask are MEDDICC-related. Do people have the ability and skill to take a deal from discovery and early stage all the way through to close? That's what we want to understand from new starters — we're bringing in the right people. We're using MEDDICC to help onboard reps and set the understanding that this is how we do things at Oyster. And then it's ingrained in our day-to-day and weekly operating rhythms. In one-to-ones, we've talked about deal reviews — and I'll pause on deal reviews for a moment, because that's probably been the most transformative thing since implementing MEDDICC. Previously, when we ran deal reviews, we would talk about a deal without much structure — it could go any way. The value we were gaining from those deal reviews was minimal in truth. Now there's a real structure to how we run them. We open up Gong, we look through all the MEDDICC fields we've implemented in Gong, and we talk about what we know and what the actions are — not what we think or assume. And that environment is great because it's a universal language. Everybody knows what we're looking for across the full spectrum of MEDDICC, and it's been transformational. We now have reps putting their hand up on a Monday morning saying, "Please can I bring this opportunity to a deal review?" — because they know there's value coming from it. Whereas previously, honestly, deal reviews were a bit of a chore because nobody really saw the value we were trying to get out of it. In addition to that, it's transformed how we forecast, and how we quantify and qualify our opportunities. When I look at the sales pipeline now, I can be confident about where reps are placing their opportunities. So it's really transformed everything: who we hire, why we hire them, how we onboard, how we upskill, and how we measure pipeline. 00:26:12 Pim Roelofsen: Using MEDDICC as a lens for hiring is such a powerful thing. I love hearing that. And I know you have a background in coaching as well. Something you just shared around deal reviews — reps fighting for the spot to get their deal in — that goes back to culture, and creating an environment where people feel trusted and can see the value of a session like that. From that background in coaching, what are your insights on creating a culture where that works? Because a deal review can feel scrutinizing for some reps. What did you do to make it what it is now, where the penny has dropped and people see the value? 00:27:10 Adam Clarke: I'm probably biased, because I think we've got a phenomenal culture. And by that I don't just mean we want people to be happy — of course we do. We want to create an environment where people can thrive and be successful. What that means is setting expectations early on: we have really high standards, and everyone who is part of our sales team needs to continually develop themselves to meet those standards, because we want to create a world-class sales team. And because we want to do that, we want to use world-class tools, world-class processes and methodologies. So the first thing is setting the expectation that motivation and success isn't just about delivering numbers and revenue — it's about focusing on your personal growth and development as well. I often ask: if you picture yourself at the end of the year, looking back at your progression, what are the activities and behaviors that have led to your growth? Having a tool like MEDDICC is a scalable, structured process that we can all relate to. And I truly feel I'm still in my infancy in terms of learning about MEDDICC. I love it — I've read books on it, the course is amazing, we're implementing it — but I know there's still so much more to get from it. That's what's exciting: the potential for additional learning and development throughout the year. Getting everyone bought into that creates a motivated sales team of people who genuinely want to keep improving. 00:29:16 Pim Roelofsen: That is so true. It's everything but a one-and-done. I've been working with MEDDICC for quite a few years now and I'm immersed in it every single day — but I don't for a single second have the feeling that I'm done learning. You consciously level up, and that goes back to mindset: it empowers you to constantly innovate. There are new ideas every single year and every single month that add value to what is already the most powerful common language for the full go-to-market. If you think about it from an initiative perspective — with a team or an entire company — it's about getting 1% better every day, and that pays massive dividends in the end, from a commercial perspective and from the value you deliver to customers. 00:30:05 Adam Clarke: One thing you said there reminded me of the Amazon way of working — working backwards. You envision where you are in six months or a year, and then build an actionable plan toward it. I think that's something we could all do better at in sales and in all GTM roles — having a vision, and then MEDDICC can underpin your path toward achieving it. 00:30:34 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, I really love that you called that out. So in summary — we've definitely touched on some heavy-hitting topics here. The no-champion, no-deal philosophy. The importance of deal reviews and having a common language so everybody understands the gaps and the action items. MEDDICC retrospectively — looking at a deal from ten years ago still provides value and insights you can replicate at large with your team. And using it for hiring as well, so as you build out the business you're getting the right people on board who think the same way. That's the summary of this amazing conversation. Thank you, Adam. And the last question: tied to the ten-year story you told us — if you could give your ten-years-younger self one piece of advice, what would it be? 00:32:15 Adam Clarke: I think it would be to really reflect and understand what was driving the success, so I could scale it quicker. Because I was seeing the success but I didn't truly know why. If I could have seen it through a lens like MEDDICC — at that speed — I could have scaled it not only for myself but for my peers and my team. That would have been incredible. Truly understanding what's driving your successes and your failures — that's what I'd ingrain in my previous self. 00:32:44 Pim Roelofsen: That is so good. And this is actually tied to the very creation of MEDDICC — understanding why we win, why we lose, why we slip. The good news is everybody can do this today. MEDDICC as a common language gives you the opportunity to make it scalable, to make it work for you at large. So if anyone listening thinks, hey, I want some guidance on how to run this and make it scalable for my team — reach out, and we'll make sure you get on your way. Adam, thank you so much for being here with us today. I absolutely loved having you on the show. And I will say — if you're open to it, come back in a year to see how much impact you've been able to create with the team. 00:33:58 Adam Clarke: I would love that. Thanks for having me, Pim. 00:34:02 Pim Roelofsen: Alright, thanks so much. Have a great day. This was another episode of Elite Dealers — thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.
