Richard Dufty on MEDDPICC Across GTM | Masters of MEDDICC

01:06 Andy Whyte: All right. Welcome to a new episode of Masters of MEDDICC. I'm here with Richard Dufty, CRO of Arcus Labs. Welcome to the show, Richard. 01:06 Richard Dufty: Hi Andy, great to be here. Thank you. 01:06 Andy Whyte: Now, for our lovely audience — why don't you introduce yourself and let us know how you got into this wonderful world of sales? 01:27 Richard Dufty: Yeah, I'd love to. I think, like most people, I didn't plan it. I wasn't a little boy who said "when I grow up I want to be a salesperson" — but I'm so glad I did. I came out of university, originally from Sydney, Australia. Went to the UK for a year with Aldi, realised I didn't want to be in the supermarket or FMCG game, flew back to Australia. Amazing time back home — I actually got to run with the Olympic torch during the Sydney Olympics. And after that crazy couple of weeks, I realised I needed a job. When I was talking to people about what I'd be good at, someone said they thought I'd be good in sales. Introduced me to a guy at the same local surf club. He said: "Yeah, OK, let's give you a shot." And that was my entry into sales. From there, I'd say I got most of my early learnings at a company called Front Range, which was later acquired. The VP there, who I learned a lot from — Archie Wilson — went over to Veritas. So I joined Veritas. This was around 2004 or 2005. I'd been there just a few months when Symantec acquired Veritas, and I then spent the next eight years with Symantec. 02:37 Richard Dufty: A couple of years after that — and this is actually my 15th year in America now — I was at Symantec and we'd had some really great success in Australia with the team down there. We'd built and created some of Symantec's first really large deals. A couple of people from HQ came down to engage with the customers and understand what we were doing. One of them was a guy called Stephen Chang, who was an SVP in the US at the time. He came down and said he wanted to meet the team — Telstra was the big deal we were working on in Australia. I remember him taking me out for dinner on the last night, ostensibly to thank me. And then lo and behold, he said: "I'd like to offer you a job. Do you want to come back to the States with me?" And I said: "OK, yeah. A couple of years sounds good. Let's go to California and play in the big leagues." That was 2007, Andy — and here I am now in 2022, still in the US. A phenomenal experience and ride with Symantec. I think most people should get some time in a big company like that — phenomenal training, great mentorship. 03:25 Richard Dufty: Stephen was a phenomenal leader and mentor, and there were a bunch of other greats there at the time — John Thompson, Enrique Salem. Just a fantastic period. And a lot of those Symantec people, a bit like the PTC crew, went on to do some pretty amazing things. Then after Symantec, I'd been working with a company called Adapt as a partner and got to know the founders really well — including Daniel Sachs, who I think you know quite well. And I was just really intrigued by what they were doing. One night over dinner, Daniel said: "We're raising our first round. Would you be interested in coming over and running worldwide sales?" It was a little scary at the time, I'll admit — I was running a $1 billion business at Symantec, and going from that to a company that wasn't even doing $1 million in revenue was frightening. But it was funny — I was at a point in my career at Symantec where I was about to go off and do an executive MBA at Stanford. And I sat back and thought: OK, I can do this startup and get a real-world MBA, or I can do the Stanford MBA. 04:18 Richard Dufty: Both are phenomenal options. But I'm so glad I took the direct route. We worked with Dan and Nick and the whole team, and we scaled Adapt from zero to $100 million in four years. We became a unicorn. It was a phenomenal ride — a lot of very passionate, entrepreneurial spirit. And again, when I look back, just as I look at Symantec as where I cut my teeth and had a lot of my early foundational learning — Adapt was where I really picked up the entrepreneurial spirit. The "let's go build something." Yeah. So that was fantastic. Went to a couple of other things in between. 05:13 Andy Whyte: Did someone take you out to dinner first? Because I'm spotting a trend here. 05:13 Richard Dufty: Ha — pretty much, yeah. I was just listening, right? They say salespeople are the easiest people to sell to. You've just made me realise people have been using my superpower of "let's go out for a nice dinner and get a deal done" against me. For me. I'm not sure. But funnily enough here at Arcus, Kevin took me out for lunch — and then we went out for dinner that same night in downtown San Francisco. So I'm going to be very wary from now on when someone invites me out for dinner, Andy. 05:45 Andy Whyte: Yes indeed. I love that. But you know, that's the way to your heart. So — you went through a number of sales leadership and CRO roles after that. Any that really stand out?. 05:45 Richard Dufty: I think when you're in startup land, you know, I've got a bunch of buddies in the VC world. You ask the VCs and you'll get different answers, but they'll tell you they need a certain number of things to align for a startup to work. You need a lot of ingredients as a leader to work at a startup too. Not only does the company need product-market fit, but you really need a strong cultural and leadership fit. People often ask what I put Adapt's success down to — and it's very similar to my comments about Symantec. It was the people. It's always the people. There was just this camaraderie, everyone on the same page. I use war analogies and sporting analogies — and when you go to battle, you've got to be on the same page. You've got to want to enjoy staying late in the office, going out for dinner afterwards, strategising. I see photos pop up on social media now of late nights around a boardroom, Chinese food all over the table, bottles of red wine open, back in the day still wearing suits and ties with the ties pulled down. And I look at that and I remember those nights with such fondness. 06:22 Richard Dufty: And I'll text Dan and Nick and the whole original team, and we all feel that warm glow. That's really what you need to find. So I went to a couple of things in the middle where I didn't find that — and maybe they didn't find it in me. And I've got to a point where I've realised that's OK. It teaches you something over time. You start getting a better feel for what you need to look for. Just as you do as a hiring manager, you also get a better feel for your own superpowers, your strengths, your weaknesses, and what you need. My coaches and mentors had been telling me, and I'd say "oh yeah, you're right" — but it's funny when you try to fight the universe. It just throws you back down. One of my coaches said: "Richard, sometimes you've got to go up the mountain and come back down to really appreciate it and learn from it." And I think if anyone listening thinks that anyone just has a meteoric rise with no issues along the way — it's just not true. People are either not being truthful, or they won a million-to-one lottery. 07:54 Richard Dufty: I've learned just as much from the ones that didn't work out as the ones that did. When I came out of those experiences, one of the things that really attracted me to Arcus was Kevin, the founder, and the board members. I knew what had worked in the past and I knew what hadn't. When I met these guys, I thought: OK, this is the one. And back to the sports analogies — find me one great coach, one GOAT in any sport, who has never had a hard season, never been let go against their will. I will admit it caused me so much anxiety growing up as an SVP and CRO, thinking I had to make every single one work. And when a couple of them didn't, I thought: what's wrong with me? People don't fail, right? Now I look back and think: Richard, you were just being ridiculous. But you've got to climb up the mountain, come back down, and then start going back up — and you do it differently. There's a great five-part series on Netflix right now called The Playbook, with five different coaches. And watching that — not one of them came from greatness and ended on greatness. 07:54 Richard Dufty: Most of them came from nowhere, came from nothing. Built up, got knocked down, then hopefully the Hollywood ending. And I was watching it thinking: this feels like when I went here, or when I did that, or when we thought we were going to get acquired. It happens to everyone. So I've kind of now focused on the journey. I was on the phone last night with my mentor — Stephen Chang, the guy who sat me down for dinner in Sydney all those years ago. Stephen has crushed it — SVP at Salesforce, built Demandware, PagerDuty, now President at Dell. And he just said: "Richard, I've seen this movie before. You're not the first person to deal with issues. It's how you deal with them." And that's where — having a network, having people to talk to who've been there, coaches and mentors — it makes such a difference. We go back to the sporting analogy. The best players in the world all have coaches. Why do they need a coach? They're world number one. And yet in sales we invariably don't have coaches. That's one of the biggest things I try to address. Recently we brought on an absolute GOAT from the sales world — Jim, of BMC and Lithium fame, part of the original crew under PTC and John McMahon. 07:54 Richard Dufty: He doesn't just work with me — he works with my direct reports and coaches them. And the shift I've seen in my team and myself from having that outside coach come in has been dramatic. 15:35 Andy Whyte: Yeah. That's one of the things I really appreciated about you when we first got to work together. The audience will hear it straight away just from listening to you for the last ten minutes — you're so open-minded, so coachable. And I meet a lot of coachable managers, but someone at CRO level who genuinely has that? That's awesome. And you've said it yourself — you're seeing the difference from having Jim engage with the team. I've been lucky enough to sit in some sessions with him and your team, and that perspective he brings — and just you and him riffing about deals together — it sends the whole team a message: we haven't completed this game yet. We've still got a lot to learn. And that's cool. 16:14 Richard Dufty: Yeah, you're spot on, Andy. There was a period where I don't think I thought I didn't need a coach — I just didn't think about it at all. I was caught up in executing. And one of the downsides of being a VP or CRO at an early-stage startup is that you're no longer reporting to someone who has more experience than you in your specific domain. Your CEO may be a phenomenal entrepreneur, an incredible culture builder — but they haven't been through the sales journey longer than you, and can't give you that perspective. So my only regret — if I'd call it that — is I wish I'd done this sooner. Because then the question becomes: how do I talk to my team about it? We have three big things we talk about in our go-to-market team at Arcus. One: extreme ownership. Two: growth mindset. Three — wrapping around both — belief. If we don't believe in ourselves, each other, and the company, forget about it. But how do you talk about values like growth mindset and coachability if you're not personally open to coaching and being vulnerable and transparent? Because at the end of the day it's about the journey together. 16:14 Richard Dufty: It's not about trying to be all things right now. 17:08 Andy Whyte: Oh, I love this. I'm trying to write it all down and keep up. The extreme ownership, growth mindset, belief — that last one in particular. How much it crosses over into the energy your team brings to prospective customers. The "I believe in this mission" — that obsession. The feeling that you're only there because you've got the best news for them. And at Arcus that's real — you're solving big, big problems and you can see it from the growth you're doing. How do you communicate that belief piece to the team? Because you can't make someone believe. It's a bit like trust, isn't it?. 17:08 Richard Dufty: Yeah, I agree you can't make someone believe. But what you can do is demonstrate perspective and help them see. For example, at our sales kickoff last January in San Diego — Jim was there, his first engagement with us as an advisor. What we'd done was put up these pull-up banner stands — my Head of Revenue Julie's idea — covered in all our customer logos. We put them on stage for all three days. Jim walked in on day two, went over to Kevin, our CEO, and said: "Kevin, Richard had told me how great this was. But when you've been around four years and I look at these logos and start to understand the stories behind them — because a lot of companies will show logos from pilots or minor back-room engagements — what you've built here is real." And one of the things — as an example — is helping people remember. I think I may have coined the word "velocitisation," and I'd like to think there's some proof of that, but that's a story for another day. The concept is this: when you're on a plane flying over the United States, looking down, the plane feels like it's nearly paused. 17:08 Richard Dufty: You think you could drive faster. I think sometimes in startups — and in life, candidly — we forget how fast we're going. We forget how much we're achieving. We forget what we do as a team. And one of the things every leader needs to do is pause, call time out, and remind people: "Guys, two years ago we weren't in this vertical. Two years ago, 80% of the people in this room weren't here. A year ago, we weren't doing this. Here's what we've achieved together — here's how we did it. Now here's where we're going, and here's how we're going to do it. And I need you to remember — you've already done it." I don't think you can make someone believe, but I think we've got to continue doing a better job as leaders of reminding people how great they already are. 17:08 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I was with you there in the plane — and I actually believed you by the end of that story, because there's something about perspective and how far you've come. And I'm lucky enough now to see many of those stories you're talking about — at sales kickoffs, at annual events. And I love what they do at the start: ask everyone who was here last year to put their hands up, then see how many new hands go up. You see, I believe it. Believe! I mean, we all loved Ted Lasso for a reason. That simple concept of believe is so powerful — and it's not just believing in Arcus or your company. It's believing in yourself and in your team. Because the second we lose belief, things fall apart. I coach my daughters' football team — 10, 11, 12-year-olds. And you can tell the days they don't believe they can win. And guess what? They don't. When you build them up, remind them — "We lost to this team last season two-one, but we didn't have Ashley or Sarah back then, and we've got better" — you see their faces change. Those ten and eleven-year-old young women go out completely differently. 17:08 Andy Whyte: The trick is: how do you keep that going to the next sales kickoff? That's the hard part. And that reminded me of one of my favourite quotes — I think I've got it right — the Henry Ford one: "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.". 17:08 Richard Dufty: That's exactly what you're talking about. Great quote. Yeah. And I was actually looking through my photo album on my phone this morning. You can use the search now — type a word and it brings up all matching photos. I found pictures I'd taken of my journal, my notebook. I have this habit — a bit like Bart Simpson writing on the whiteboard in The Simpsons intro — where I'll write something over and over and over. The most recent one I found was from when we ran a MEDDICC event — and I think you were up at about five in the morning for it. Thank you for that. And I had written "MEDDICC will be a huge success" over and over again. But what I found via this search was all the things I'd written across years of journals. And let me tell you — there was not one thing I'd written over and over every single day that didn't come true. I don't believe anything cosmic is going on there. I think what's happening is belief. I was cultivating belief inside myself, which was working in parallel with my subconscious to say: "This really matters. Focus on this.". 17:08 Richard Dufty: And so many of those things were: "We're going to hit our Q4 target. We're going to hit X million by June. I'm going to close this specific account by this date." And it worked. Whether you want to use words like manifestation, positive visualisation, goal setting, goal theory — it doesn't matter which one. The simple point is: if you don't put those goals down in the first place and truly, truly believe — and then go back to them and keep repeating them, like a rally cry — the years where you go "we're going to do X million by X date" and come up with a fun team cliche like "five by four"... Rob, one of my leads in the West, has a goal in Q4 that's well above plan — and now the whole team talks about it by its nickname. Everyone's driving towards it. It becomes real. I love that. I did the same thing at a sales kickoff once. We were looking at our best-ever quarter being less than half of what we needed to achieve in Q4 to make up a shortfall. It was insane. And we were like: "This is Everest." So we had the whole mountain theme — printed out an outline of Mount Kilimanjaro along the wall of the office. 29:21 Richard Dufty: At the top: our target. Below it: pipeline stages, and every deal had its company logo printed out on a piece of paper sitting in the relevant stage, like a Kanban board. It visualised everything. And a logo did not deserve to be on that wall if they weren't buying from us that quarter. If a deal wasn't closing that quarter, it was gone — and we took great pleasure in screwing up the paper and throwing it away. We even had a little cartoon mountaineer figure, and when someone closed a deal, we'd ceremoniously move the mountaineer up the mountain proportionately to how far the new revenue took us towards target. We played the opening of The Lion King. And everyone was bought in. We've got a video of it — nine o'clock at night, people still in the office hustling. Sales engineers there doing their bit. Everyone together. And we hit the target, which is insane. And funnily enough — the deal that put us over the line was from a big UK retailer with connections to Tottenham. So yes — very much from your homeland. And the best bit: my Head of Professional Services, Rob Steel, and I were on speakerphone with our champion — who was actually the economic buyer — at 11pm, because he was in Australia on his way into work. 29:21 Richard Dufty: He said: "Yep, cool. When I get to the office I'll sign the DocuSign." We said: "Great, thank you," hung up, looked at each other, and just went absolutely crazy. And I had Spotify cued up with Men at Work's "Down Under." It was the deal that put us over. Those are the things you remember. 32:40 Andy Whyte: That's an awesome story. The Aussie coming in clutch!. 32:40 Richard Dufty: Look — it's a tough time of year right now. I've got one of my guys, Mark, who ran the table in Q4 last year. We're working on a massive multi-million dollar deal, and the other day it was a down day — as these deals always have. He said: "Oh man, I don't think this is going to happen." I let him talk for a bit, then said: "Mark, remember this time last year? Remember that deal? You said the same thing. Did we get it?" — "Yeah, yeah, yeah." That's it. Helping people remember: we've been here, we've got this, we'll get it again. 33:32 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. So we've been talking a lot about teams and great analogies. Your team obviously focuses on sales, but as Chief Revenue Officer you've got a much wider remit. One thing I know you're really passionate about — and something I know you're taking big steps forward on — is thinking about MEDDIC as extending beyond just the sales team. I'd love to hear some of your insights on what you're doing to broaden it internally. 34:14 Richard Dufty: Yeah. It's funny — there's a guy on my team, our Global Head of Solution Consulting, Ed Gallup — awesome guy, we worked together at Adapt. He kind of calls me the "born-again MEDDIC guy." And I'll be honest — early in my career, I was probably in that camp of "sales is about relationships, people buy from people, I've got this." And then, as you mature and see the empirical evidence and realise how buying is changing, I've kind of shifted. I'd like to think it's a blend of both now. What I started realising was: a lot of people look at MEDDIC as a sales tool or a qualification framework. I get it — there are lots of different ways people use it. But what we've started doing a little differently at Arcus is using MEDDPICC as a common language and framework across a much broader group. Inside and outside the organisation. I'll give you an example. We were sitting down with the marketing team a few months ago, talking about ICP, buyer personas, the usual. I was walking them through the value pyramid concept — strategic imperatives down to operational down to tactical — trying to map messaging for different people. 35:07 Richard Dufty: And I started realising: this maps really well to MEDDIC. Most organisations look at buyer personas as a role title — so your manager type, your director type. And what we started riffing on was: wait, there's an intersection here across the MEDDIC framework, the buyer persona concept, and the value pyramid. Because if 70-80% of buyers have already started researching a product before they engage with a vendor — which we all know the stats — how can you have one single value prop message going out to the world when you've got different roles and different buyers in the prospect organisation? And then I said: I don't think we in sales have done a great job helping marketing understand who we're actually selling to on a day-to-day basis. We often expect a lot from marketing without providing the feedback loop, without thinking about things as a whole. So I started framing it around: OK, we have this concept of an economic buyer. And on a value pyramid, the economic buyer is high up — they care about the big things. As John McMahon talks about: big pain, big prize, big dollars. That person doesn't care about latency metrics or cache rates. 36:58 Richard Dufty: So the marketing message to them has to be entirely different. Then at the bottom there's someone we call a coach, who is often the way in — they're focused on solving tactical and operational issues, and they actually do want to know about specific features and day-to-day improvements. And then in the middle — the person we love most — our champion. And here's what they need to hear: what's the win for them? How have we helped other champions? How have we helped people in the same role at similar companies go from A to B with a demonstrable outcome that helped them become a hero? I heard you on one of your podcasts talk about the stat — I think at Sprinklr it was originally 65%, which over time became 85% — of people who championed the deal getting promoted. We used to use that at Adapt all the time. And it was invariably true. The same thing is starting to happen here at Arcus. And what I said to the marketing team was: we've got to help champions see that, and see it clearly. We all started realising these things are intertwined. We have to think about buyer personas and ICP not just as generic labels, but as genuinely different audiences who need different messages — because an EB, a champion, and a coach each need to hear something different. 38:31 Richard Dufty: And once everyone in that room got it from their respective roles, you could see the penny drop: OK, this is going to make our messaging so much easier. Because when sales makes that first call, or marketing nurtures that first touch, the message has already been delivered correctly for whoever they're talking to. And then we took that to the customer success side of the house as well. Because the whole concept of pre-sales and post-sales, in my mind, is gone. That's yesterday. In a subscription economy, the single most important metric for defining the success of a company is net retention rate. Retaining and expanding your customers is everything. How do you do that? You're constantly reminding the customer of the pain, implicating the pain. We can't just stop when we've closed the deal. We have to continually revisit it — and work with the coaches, the champions, the economic buyers, mapping the organisation and constantly showing value in those monthly or quarterly business reviews. But it has to be metrics-based. We've all been in QBRs where you can see the eyes start to drift — because most companies get up and talk about what they've done, not through the lens of the champion or the coach. 39:48 Richard Dufty: Not: "Remember we agreed the decision criteria was this. We implemented against this pain you shared. Here's the news: we did it, and we keep getting better together." And what I like to put together is a PDF the champion can take out across the organisation themselves. Let's work on it together. They should own it. One of the best champions I've ever worked with is a guy called Nick Gray over at Snap. We built the business case together — and what we've done since isn't just building the case, but sitting down together and constantly going back to the baseline metrics and assumptions, holding each other accountable. Are we still there? Are we doing better? And the results have been even better than what we both originally projected. And one piece of personal advice I give to the people I coach: when you're lucky enough to find a great champion, don't let them go. So many salespeople build these great, trusted, authentic relationships — dinners, events, whiteboarding sessions, late nights — deal's done, on to the next one. What I love about the subscription economy is my thesis that, until you get really large and can divide hunters from account managers, having the person who closed the initial deal also responsible for realising the value is so powerful. 41:38 Richard Dufty: Because if you've genuinely helped your champion be successful in that account, they will eventually move to a new organisation — and you can work together there too. Champions are moving around much more than they used to. And in that scenario, that salesperson has won the deal, got the commission, hit the target. But if you're using value-based selling with MEDDIC as the enabler for how you articulate value to your customers — using what I call M1s, our existing proof points and reference stories — then what you're also doing is building another M1 in the making. If you can deliver on the promises to this customer, you'll get the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell — but more importantly, you'll be building a future reference story you can tell in the most authentic way possible. And that drives belief. When a rep has done that authentically with a champion, it creates the confidence to take that story to the next prospect. Because that champion will help you — they'll talk to other prospects — because you've genuinely, truly tried to help them and delivered. That's why compensation is such an interesting challenge. It still hasn't really kept up with the subscription economy. 43:28 Richard Dufty: We're still often comping people on the old model — close the deal, collect, come back in three years. But if you could tie compensation to close, to value realisation, to adoption, to renewal, to expansion — you'd be driving exactly the behaviours you want. We're exploring ways to do that at Arcus. Because a dollar retained is a lot easier than a dollar that falls off the boat in churn — and in the current market environment, that's going to surprise a lot of companies who've been able to look sideways on this for the last decade. 48:31 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I want to take you back to something you said a moment ago — working with the marketing team, getting them thinking about different personas. Something I found really interesting — a new customer we recently onboarded said they were already using MEDDIC. They'd had consultants in a year earlier for a day or two's training. Best intentions, moved forward with it. But coming up to the anniversary, they felt there were gains still to be made. Ahead of onboarding with us, they sent a survey to their whole revenue team. One of the questions was: how do you define the economic buyer? They shared the data with us — and there weren't two answers the same. One person in the US said it was the person who signs the contract. Someone in the UK said it was the person who owns the budget. Someone in Europe gave a completely different answer. And someone in APAC said they don't really encounter the economic buyer at all in their deals. So how on earth, to your point, would they be able to use MEDDIC as a common language with marketing? We talk about MEDDIC being a common language — but languages have dialects. 48:31 Andy Whyte: You've got to make sure not just that everyone's speaking the same language, but that they're speaking the same dialect. Another example: a customer I worked with reviewed their Q4. They found that 85% of their won deals had a champion from a specific persona. And not only were they not marketing to that persona — they had actually been discouraging their sales team from engaging with that person. 48:31 Richard Dufty: When we did the same exercise at Arcus after my first 12 months, we sat down and said: here are our current buyer personas — now let's go back and look at who we've actually been winning with. And we found we weren't targeting most of those people at all. And the message has to be consistent. Who is the economic buyer? I was reading a great piece by Joe Sexton the other day — and he was asking exactly that: how do you identify an economic buyer today when it varies so much? Because at a Fortune 100 bank versus a social media or tech company, the economic buyer can be completely different. In a tech company, engineering drives a lot of the strategy and accountability — so the economic buyer might sit there. At a bank, it's very different. So being able to say "our economic buyer looks like this" is getting really hard. What I think we can say is: continue to be cognisant of it, and iterate every quarter. Look at your cohort of deals and ask: what did our economic buyer look like? What did our champion look like? And if you're not capturing this — we've implemented MEDDIC into our Salesforce instance, so we can report on it. 51:44 Richard Dufty: My CMO and I sit down, look at the data, and tune as we go. One change doesn't make a trend — but over the last 12 months, we did see a clear trend towards engineering and product outside of the traditional security organisation. That became a very strong pattern. And now we've been able to shift our messaging to address that audience. 53:27 Andy Whyte: And the interesting thing about the economic buyer is: we cascade its importance to the people working on deals — which is good, people are conscious and looking. But the great point you make is that the economic buyer can vary enormously even within the same industry. I'd say you can be selling to two different social networks and the economic buyer could be in a completely different part of the organisation in each one. And the champion — who I still believe is the most important — changes even more drastically. This is the fun part for me. This is where it's like a strategic game. Like chess. 54:30 Richard Dufty: And it's funny — coming from Australia to the US, I always used to dismiss American football. You know, not a real sport, too many stops. What I've come to love about it is the strategy. The nuances — when a timeout is called, how a play shifts. It's a little different from the free-flowing nature of football, rugby, rugby league. Not to say those don't have strategy — they absolutely do. But the part I love about sales is that it's not just "wake up and see what happens." We're in control. And it's genuinely fun when you get the right people in a room, leverage frameworks like MEDDIC, and strategise. We're going through 2023 planning right now, and it's so enjoyable to sit down and think about what we want next year to look like. Because the best reps, the best leaders, the best CMOs — they're in this to build something great. They treat it strategically, not just tactically. You're going to have great quarters and bad quarters. But if you do the right things, use the data, talk to each other, provide the feedback loop, you will get there. It might be tough along the way. 54:30 Richard Dufty: You'll lose some deals. There might be tension between teams. But if everyone stays positive and aligned on where you want to get to — and accepts that how you get there will change along the way — you've got a higher probability of success. 56:43 Andy Whyte: And I like how you're framing this — because I see the upside and I see the downside too. It's so important for teams, leaders, and individual contributors to know that sales isn't a linear or binary process. You can have the best product, the customer who needs it more than anyone, the best salesperson — and that is still not a foregone conclusion. There will be problems and challenges. And if we're truly trying to be the most professional version of our industry, we shouldn't measure success as binary: did we win or did we lose? Losing is failure — we've talked about how that's not necessarily a permanent thing, but it is a setback. If we're winning, it's not just: did we win? It's: how quickly did we win? How much did we win for? How often do we win? And what I want to make the point of is this: if salespeople think that a challenge in a deal is a reflection of their personal failure, we get into a very difficult place. 57:44 Richard Dufty: The best sales cultures — I'm sure you have this in your team — are the ones where salespeople are the very first to put their hand up and say: "Hey, I've got a great deal here. This prospect really needs Arcus Labs. Here's what I know so far. But this person I'm working with — I'm not sure they're a champion yet. I haven't found the economic buyer. I'm six months in and I'm still not sure." That is a million times better than being six months in, not sure, and pretending otherwise. We need to normalise — in sales culture — the concept of being confidently vulnerable. Actually, I think we have to go further than normalise it. I think we have to incentivise and reward it. And we've tried to do that. When someone makes a meaningful step forward on a closed plan or a MEDDIC review, we'll publicly acknowledge that in Slack — I'll pause a conversation and say: "Adam, that's awesome — thank you for acknowledging where we actually are and what we need to work on." Because it is not about being perfect. It's about identifying the gaps so you can fill them. The reps who figure that out first are the ones who'll be the most successful. 57:44 Richard Dufty: One of my frustrations, honestly, is when reps don't leverage executives. And I get it — there's a balance, and I know some people listening have probably thought: "Richard, you were too involved in my deal, too controlling." Fair. But going back to the big Telstra deal that got me to America — I was the quarterback, but I rallied resources. I fought to get executives into that deal. The CEO flew to Sydney. We had the SVP of Asia Pacific. My job was to connect the pain to the solution and to the right people who could help articulate that. I've always said that to every sales team I've worked for. And it's funny — David and Peter, our team members down in Australia, came back after doing the MEDDIC course and admitted: "We thought we knew MEDDIC, but we realised we hadn't gone to the level we wanted to." Right there — that's growth mindset. They came back month after month excited — genuinely excited — doing deal plans and realising: "We don't have half of this done yet. Let's cancel this review and come back when we do." Now running those things by themselves. And that's the behaviour and the activity that's going to get us there. 59:38 Richard Dufty: Not "I've got this" — and then whether we win or lose, we never had the right people partnered in the process learning alongside us. Because even when we win — could we have won it three months earlier? Could it have been 30% bigger? It's not just winning or losing. It's the sub-matrix. If we want to truly embrace a growth mindset: how could we do it better? Could we have closed it faster? In the subscription economy, I don't think winning and losing is the definition of success on the first deal anymore. When I get your first ten customers, people say you've got product-market fit. I used to think that. Now what I would say is: when you close your first ten deals that renew and expand — that's product-market fit. Because that's when you're truly demonstrating real value. The initial sell involves an element of trust and assumption. It's only at renewal that you really know your solution is providing value against the pain you implicated 12 months earlier. 61:33 Andy Whyte: Yeah, spot on. There's one last thing I want to talk about — something I know you're really good at, and something you and I are very much aligned on. You've touched on it with the executive support you give your team in the field. And one thing we've discussed is how you sometimes use MEDDIC to talk to your customers about your process — actually explaining to them how you work. I'd love to dig into that. 61:33 Richard Dufty: Yeah, absolutely. It was an interesting evolution. After we did the MEDDIC training and certification with you, I posted a picture on LinkedIn — and one of my champions, Nick, commented asking: "Was I your champion?" So I spoke to him afterwards and said: "Absolutely, you were." And we talked through what that meant. What we realised was that without using the exact MEDDIC terminology, we had articulated what MEDDIC looks like throughout the process. Without explicitly saying "Nick, you're our champion" — we had talked about it. And I'll be candid — there was a moment in that deal where I think we pushed too hard to accelerate, bypassing what we knew was the proper decision process. By itself, wanting to accelerate a deal isn't a bad thing. But you have to be respectful of the culture of the organisation you're selling to. Because one of the worst things you can do is build a champion — whether you use the word or not — and then put that relationship at risk. So one of the things we've started doing is being more transparent about the process we go through. And more importantly: here's what's in it for you. 61:33 Richard Dufty: Here's what we've seen happen when we follow this, when we get to an economic buyer early. Let's talk about what that means. I want to explain what we view as a champion — would you be my champion? It feels a little nerve-racking, a bit like being back in Year 10 and asking someone to the school dance. But if you don't ask, you don't know. And happy is not a strategy. We're optimistic by nature. We assume. What we do now is, at the right point in time — and as you say so well in your training: use common sense. You don't walk in after two meetings and say: "Hey, will you be my champion?" You lay it out at the right point in the journey. And what we've noticed is that when we follow this framework, the buying process is simplified and accelerated. Going back and reconfirming: "The pain we implicated together two weeks ago — is that still real?" "Yes." "OK, so every month that goes by, your security posture is being impacted and it's costing you X in lost user experience?" "Yeah, absolutely." "So what would it mean to you — you originally said you didn't think you could go live until February — but if I can genuinely get you there by November, does that matter?". 67:07 Richard Dufty: And sometimes, by the way, the answer is no. But invariably I find the answer is yes. And that's what I tell my reps: if you truly believe there is real value and real pain here — why would the customer not want to get there three months sooner? Help me understand that. Because your buyer is not a professional buyer. The CSO, the Head of Engineering, the Head of Fraud, the Head of Application Security — whoever you're selling to — they don't wake up every morning and say: "I'm so excited to go buy four pieces of software today." They're solving other things. And I think what people miss about being a rep is being a true consultant, helping the customer through their own buying process. So when I show them the mutual action plan, I don't shy away from it. I show them the MAP and then ask: how can we cut a week off every one of these steps? What would it look like if we took a week off each major milestone? I was with a bank about two weeks ago. The conversation went: "We really want to use Arcus — the problem is really bad.". 69:34 Richard Dufty: "Great." "I think... maybe late 2023, early 2024 before we can get this live." And I just paused. Let that pause speak for itself. Then said: "I don't understand — walk me through the barriers." And as they listed them, I said: "Let's work through them together on this mutual action plan. We've closed a lot of banks. Here are our certifications — FIPS, ISO, all of it. We've done this before. How could we tackle this differently together? Could we start talking to this person in parallel?" — "Actually, I don't see why not." We took what was going to be a 15-month process down to what looks like a 7 or 8-month process. We nearly halved it by sitting down and having an open conversation about how we've done it before and what it would look like if they let us help them. 71:29 Andy Whyte: Do you know what's funny? We act as if customers enjoy the buying process. What you're saying is: what if I could get you what you want faster, with less hassle? That's really what you want to say, isn't it? And that reminded me — I was recently with a sales team and I said: over the past year we've bought a lot of technology, over 30 SaaS products. And we received exactly one agenda before those meetings. Out of 45-plus meetings, one agenda. And I was moaning about it. When I received that one agenda, I was genuinely happy — it told me the person valued my time, had put thought into it. And someone in the room piped up and said: "I don't send agendas — because if I send one, it gives the customer an opportunity to cancel the meeting." I don't entirely disagree with the concern. But the point that person is making is: customers don't like being sold to. They want to postpone, they want to cancel. And we know this. Yet what you're describing as a strategy is: "Let me work with you to make this a more efficient, more professional process, so we get to where you want to be sooner.". 71:29 Andy Whyte: That should be music to their ears. But — and I'd probably push back to that agenda-avoider — if you haven't implicated the pain and built the champion relationship, that's true. But if you have done those things and you have a real champion, they want that agenda. And maybe it's also about the language of what's on the agenda. If it says "reviewing commercial proposal" — use some common sense. But I think the order in which you've done things determines whether it works. And let's not look at any tactic in isolation. 73:52 Richard Dufty: We were reviewing our standard sales process the other day — everyone had to do a role-play of MEDDIC in a prospect engagement. A lot of fun. And what I loved were the reps who did two things: first, a recap on the first slide — here's what we've spoken about, here's what I heard, here's what we're here to discuss today. And then the bookend on the last slide — next steps, what they look like, what's in it for you. Where it doesn't work is when reps do things that serve their timeline rather than the customer's. And unfortunately, that's part of why salespeople have a bit of a bad reputation right now. But if we as an industry leverage frameworks like MEDDIC and truly think about how not to waste the customer's time — being direct, being transparent, believing enough to ask the hard questions: "Hey, look — when people ask me for a discount, what I really want is to close faster. So I'll be really upfront with you: if I spend six months less on this sale, I can probably share some of that margin with you. It's going to be a lot easier for me to go back to my CFO.". 76:03 Andy Whyte: That's gold. I've never heard that before. Record scratch — that is brilliant. So you're saying: when someone asks for a discount, the give-and-get is: well, this is the most expensive thing in our business right now — the cost of the sales cycle — so let's both benefit from closing it faster. Wow. 76:03 Richard Dufty: And I think the key is being transparent and direct — but authentic. I was on a call two days ago where I knew the prospect had a budget threshold they wanted to stay under for two reasons: it was what they had left, and going under that threshold let them circumvent some longer procurement processes. We got in front of the economic buyer — a small call, just four of us. I implicated the pain first, confirmed we were aligned, and then I was very direct. I said: "I understand what you're trying to achieve. I understand you're looking to use 2023 budget, and I understand you're trying to get under this threshold to bypass this process. I'm going to be really direct with you: it's end of year for a growing SaaS company, and finishing strong matters to us. That's what's important to me. I understand what's important to you. How do we help each other?" And he turned around, paused, looked at me, and said: "I think we can make that happen." Don't ask, don't get — but what you ask for, and how you ask for it, matters enormously. Without the authentic conversation, at the right level, having already done the groundwork to get to the economic buyer — this doesn't work. 76:03 Richard Dufty: Those conversations change at that level. I've said to every sales leader I've worked for: yes, you get a better response rate than the rep. Yes, you get better engagement. You're the CEO, the founder — that makes sense. Just like I get better engagement than my VP. So leverage that. Elevate the conversation to someone who can make it happen and who understands the economics. I always throw it back this way: our customers have numbers to hit too. I've got goals. You've got goals. Your goal right now is to solve this problem. Let's work on the commercial structure together. And internally — the opportunity cost is what worries me. The extra six months I'm working to close this deal is six months I'm not spending on other opportunities. When I go back to my CFO and ask for five extra points of discount, and I sit at the whiteboard and say: "If we can close this in Q4 versus Q2, those five points equal X. And now look at the deals Jonny can open up in the 20 hours a week he's currently spending trying to close this one" — invariably, we come to an arrangement and everyone's happy. 80:47 Andy Whyte: Wow. Look — this is one of those episodes where everyone who's listened all the way through will know exactly what I mean: there is absolute gold at the end. The whole episode has been brilliant. Thank you so much, Richard. I know when we set this up we said 45 minutes would be great — and we've been going an hour and twenty, and it's flown. When you said 45 minutes, I actually thought you were going to say 20 to 30, and I was thinking: what are we going to talk about for 45 minutes? And then I looked down and an hour and twenty had passed. And every time we talk — we managed to grab a couple of beers in London a couple of months ago — I just love it. We're both genuinely excited about this. Passionate about it. This is a domain we're all just trying to get better at together. So thank you so much. 82:02 Richard Dufty: Thank you, Andy. And thanks for everything you've done for our organisation — it's great to see the success you and the team are having. It's been a pleasure. 82:02 Andy Whyte: One last thing — I don't even need to check, but I did check — you have some open roles at the moment. If someone has listened to this and thought: "This is a place I want to be, this is someone I want to work for" — who are you looking for and why?. 82:31 Richard Dufty: Yeah. And anyone who's still listening at an hour and twenty — their attention span alone means I want that person! Look: we have open AE roles in New York, Seattle, LA, and San Francisco. We also have pre-sales roles. And here's how we look at it: we're always looking for great talent — people who meet our ideal candidate profile. We've hired people when we thought we didn't need anyone in a particular area, and it's worked out brilliantly. We're at a later stage of the journey now where we can't just hire freely in every city. But I would say there's always room for the right people. So if you've liked what you've heard, you're interested in our space, and you want to come build and be part of something great — work hard, be a ten, but have a lot of fun along the way — I'd love to hear from you. 83:37 Andy Whyte: Great! And where can people find you?. 83:37 Richard Dufty: LinkedIn, and on Twitter — @DuftyDownUnder. 83:37 Andy Whyte: We'll put those links in the show notes. Thank you again, Richard. This has been an absolute honour and a pleasure. My brain is throbbing from all the great insights. Thank you so much, sir. Thanks to the listeners for tuning in. 83:37 Richard Dufty: Cheers, mate. Thank you.