Luke Rogers on Decision Criteria | Masters of MEDDICC

00:39 Andy Whyte: Welcome to Masters of MEDDICC. I'm here with Luke Rogers. Welcome, Luke. How are you doing? 00:39 Luke Rogers: I feel fantastic. 00:39 Andy Whyte: Good, good. And Luke is the VP of EMEA at the ever-fast-growing ComplyAdvantage. 00:39 Luke Rogers: Yeah, that's right. 00:39 Andy Whyte: Great to see you, sir. Why don't you introduce yourself to the audience — tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this wonderful world of sales? 01:18 Luke Rogers: Oh, the wonderful world of sales. Yeah. Well, thanks so much — love the opportunity to talk. Really love what you guys do and love the idea of being able to share some of what I've learned over the years. So how did I get into sales? The original story was definitely by accident. I was selling laptops at Comet — for those of us old enough to remember Comet as an electrical retailer. Yeah. I also set up my own company when I was 15. Just by necessity of being an early entrepreneur, I learned how to sell and talk to people. But then I really realised, after university, that was the direction I wanted to go. My first real sales job was on the Cisco Graduate Sales Academy scheme. Wow — that's a great place to start. They pumped a fortune into it. Yeah. It was difficult times — 2008 when I graduated, so the world was sort of falling apart. I was really lucky to get into that scheme. They were definitely one of the marquee academies. 02:17 Luke Rogers: They basically spent nine months taking us to Amsterdam. It was kind of like a Noah's Ark situation where they took a pair from the UK, a pair from France, a pair from Spain, you know — put us all together in this kind of MTV-style experiment in an Amsterdam housing complex. And we were all educated in the world of sales in a very academic way, plus all the product content as well. It was a great grounding. They probably spent $300,000 on each of us from an education perspective. So really lucky to have had that. 02:17 Andy Whyte: Wow. It's funny what you said about the MTV show — I feel like that's a documentary someone should make. I think I'd watch that. Yeah. It had some spicy bits too. Especially being Amsterdam, I'd expect so. 02:59 Andy Whyte: So what was your business at 15? 02:59 Luke Rogers: It was the time of Windows Millennium Edition and everyone getting the internet — AOL discs everywhere. Viruses were rife. It was basically a bunch of distressed mums and dads who'd bought a computer, realised it was full of viruses, and the kids had broken it. I was just going around my home town fixing them, charging £50 an hour. But it just ballooned. It went from being a call-out service to people wanting to buy computers from me. So I signed a deal with a distributor so I could buy hardware cheaper. I taught myself how to build PCs from scratch, undercutting the retailers, selling them, built a website to sell online, started getting orders that way as well. And before I knew it — about a year, year and a half in — we were turning over about a quarter of a million pounds. 03:56 Andy Whyte: Wow. That's incredible. Yeah, it was a great run. And it set you up perfectly for working in tech — where people assume we work in IT, and you actually could fix grandma's computer when she calls. 03:56 Luke Rogers: That was literally what I was doing. So many retired people trying to learn computers — I would quite happily sit there and teach them. But yeah, it was a great grind. I'm a geek — I've been into IT and computers for as long as I can remember. So I love this world of constantly being exposed to new technological innovations and bringing them into the business world. It's a real privilege. 04:32 Andy Whyte: So you had this great start at Cisco. Yeah, sounds brilliant. How long were you there? 04:32 Luke Rogers: Three and a half years. Graduated from that programme, did a year as a quota-carrying BDR essentially, then inside sales, then graduated into a role selling their new data centre solutions they'd just launched — kind of a cool new market entrant play. Did three and a half years there, but got a bit frustrated with the gradual pay ceiling. You look around and go: "I'm doing just as much revenue as everyone else and earning a fraction. " So yeah, I went to IBM. Don't regret that — it exposed me to the kind of cultures I know I love and know I don't love. There's a place in the world for IBM, for sure. Just not for me. There wasn't really a pipeline-generating culture, not really a playbook culture. 05:42 Luke Rogers: It was just a bit play-it-safe. So I did 18 months there, and then that's when I changed my life and joined AppDynamics. 05:42 Andy Whyte: And that was one extreme to another, you know, from — and one of the things I always find when I talk to people who've had the kind of meteoric success you've had in your career is this undeniable underlying drive and aspiration. And I always find there's this sense of constantly wanting to move forward. So it's like wherever you are today, you'd have been very happy with this position six months or a year ago. But if I ask you right now whether you're happy, you say no — you need to keep moving forward. And that's why people like you find it hard at IBM, because there's no direct connection between "if I do this, then I'll have this direct result of improving myself. " And then you go from that to AppDynamics — and not just AppDynamics specifically but the culture and the people there. That place was famously one where if you could hit the ground running and keep up the pace, you could just run at miles an hour. 07:03 Luke Rogers: Yeah. It was an epiphany moment. A real watershed turning point in my life. And I say life because it was something bigger than just a career turning point. It exposed me to a completely different type of person and a totally different type of mindset. That has since been codified by Carol Dweck in her book on growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And I found that a lot of people in my career to that point had quite a fixed way of thinking. Then all of a sudden I was around these people who thought anything was possible. And I had a leader who basically said: "You're capable of anything you put your mind to. " And not only that, he was giving us tools — MEDDIC qualification frameworks and all these other supporting processes and techniques — to help us realise our potential. It's almost like there was no limit on it anymore. And there wasn't. It was an incredible time in my life. I met my now-wife the week I started at AppDynamics. 08:04 Andy Whyte: Wow. 08:04 Luke Rogers: After years of dating unsuccessfully! And I think I just found myself. 08:04 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. And there's something here that I don't think gets talked about enough. We look at successful people and trace back their origin story, and it can come from complete opposite ends. You could have the most supportive parents, or you could have had a chip on your shoulder from having it tough. But what I don't think we talk about enough is the idea of having a leader that does the same thing. It's the same thing as great parenting, surely — if not more directly linked to your professional success. I love how you describe that, because it's so visceral — someone telling you "you're capable of this, I believe in you. " If you're already driven, that confirms and underpins it. But it also makes you accountable to them because you don't want to let them down. 09:12 Luke Rogers: And that's the same thing with teachers at school. You always really responded to the ones who said "I'm not angry, I'm disappointed. " And it's the same thing — when you develop a level of respect for somebody because they're having such a transformational impact on your life, it doesn't matter if they make you feel awful some days by telling you things you don't want to hear. You still respect them. I've since come to identify that as a real core value of mine as a leader — a culture of respect. Not that I have to be everyone's friend, but if I can earn their respect and give them mine, and we can make each other better as a result — I can replicate what I experienced. And to your point, I say to my leadership team now: you are the most important person in the life of your sales team. Because you're the person they spend the most amount of time with in any given day. That is a huge responsibility. 10:29 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And we have this in our company — this concept of a winning culture. And the reason we focus so much on it is because our goal is to hire people who are winners, but more importantly, people who genuinely, passionately care about their craft. Whether that's Nick, our producer and videographer — that's his craft — or someone in the sales team whose craft is being the best salesperson. If you find the right people — true A-players who truly care about that craft — then a byproduct is they will have to win. It's not that they want to win, it's that they'll be massively unhappy if they're not winning, because they'll feel like they're not meeting their potential, they're falling short of their aspirations. 11:14 Andy Whyte: And so the idea is: if you focus purely on setting everyone up to win, then everyone will be happy. We always have this joke, which is: no amount of ping pong tables or free pizza will ever mask the negative feeling of losing, or get anywhere near the wonderful feeling of winning. 11:14 Luke Rogers: Absolutely. And the idea of the people surrounding you — particularly your manager — playing such a big part of that. This is a conclusion I came to in the last few years, especially working in B2B software sales where the sales cycles are longer and lumpier. And with the complexities Covid brought to selling, and the loneliness that came with that, and now the current macroeconomic environment where budgets are tighter — yeah, winning, and helping somebody feel what winning feels like, doesn't just come through closing business. 12:17 Luke Rogers: It has to come through other things, because people can't wait nine months to feel like that. So one of the great things about high-performance cultures with these tools and techniques is this: if you bring somebody in — even somebody who's already great — and you baseline them. Let's look at your hard sales skills and your soft skills, and let's go through a self-evaluation process. Where do you think you rank on your ability to generate pipeline? On your presence in front of an economic buyer? On your ability to set decision criteria? How good are you at champion identification and building? All these things. And then I'll do the same assessment. We'll calibrate it together and get to a shared view that says: "Right now you're a two out of five on this. " So while we're building pipeline — which is obviously the name of the game because you're new — in parallel we're going to have a development contract between you and me that says my job is to get you from a two to a four in three months. And that's winning. 13:01 Andy Whyte: That is winning. Because you're fulfilling your end of the bargain — you're developing people. That's probably worth way more than any single deal will ever be. It has lasting value. And especially if it comes from the inside — you've said you're a two, you want to get to a four. That comes from within. That's not been imposed on you by some system. The person you most look up to and respect says: "I think I can see you've moved. " I love that. 14:01 Andy Whyte: I think this is such a fun topic — winning, particularly in sales and revenue — because I think we as an industry get it so wrong. You touched on it already: the idea that defining success or failure by whether you've closed a deal is too binary. But there are a couple of bits here I get excited about. One is that in a nine-month sales cycle there are so many wins along the way. Did we become vendor of choice? Did we get a meeting with the economic buyer? Did we accelerate the decision process? Did we influence the decision criteria towards our strengths and lay traps for competitors? There are hundreds of wins in there. 14:36 Andy Whyte: And not only are they wins, they're learning points and points of encouragement for the rest of the team. If you have a great culture and you say: "Well done, Sarah — she just got a meeting with the economic buyer at ABC. Sarah, share with the team how you did that. " It's a learning point. So that's the first thing I get excited about. The second thing I get excited about is that we fundamentally get the criteria of success and failure wrong. The idea of: did you win the deal? Good job, you succeeded. Did you lose a deal? Unlucky, you failed. Of course there's the "you never fail, you learn" principle and I agree with that. But if we just zoom in on high-performing teams and classify success as closed-won versus closed-lost, we're missing a huge opportunity. The real metrics are: how much did you win by, and how fast did you win? 15:33 Luke Rogers: Those two things overlap of course — winning a £50K deal in a month might be better than a £100K deal in six months if there's significant expansion opportunity. But yeah, I so often see success defined purely as closed-won. And it creates a huge ongoing problem. I've come into ComplyAdvantage — it's such a successful product that a huge amount of sales come from inbound. Over 95%. Because there's a great reputation, a huge G2 score, very happy customers. So there's been this tendency for salespeople to just react to inbound. But you still — when you get an inbound lead, even though you didn't have to generate it outbound — it's still going to take you three, four, five months to close. And if the value of that is £20-30K and you could spend six months closing a £300K deal — yeah. 16:43 Luke Rogers: But it feels good because everyone's been told that winning is the only thing that matters. And if you don't have a deal and you don't have three times pipeline, it creates really bad habits. It's not a wise use of your time. And it's a real problem when sales leaders only focus on revenue. Most of them are missing huge opportunity as a result. And it's one of those things that's simple to boil down: they're looking for quantity over quality, and looking at lagging indicators. Things we all learn the wrong way first. But it so often starts at the top. The expectation — I remember coming into a sales role and being told they needed five times pipeline coverage. I looked at the pipeline and had eight times, and I thought: "I've finally landed one of these jobs where things are actually easy. " Got excited. Then realised that effectively, at a certain point in the culture, they were just lifting the carpet and sweeping dead pipeline from last quarter in. 18:24 Luke Rogers: And the lesson from that was: as I ramped up and settled in, we actually only needed three times pipeline coverage. So the indicators were wildly off. And if I hadn't had the experience to spot those things coming, a sales leader in that role without that experience would have gone: excitement, shock, failure, excitement, shock, failure — until they either had some luck or lost their job. 18:49 Luke Rogers: And the miss is just blindly believing it's three times pipeline because somebody said that once and it became industry standard — without really analytically understanding your funnel. What is my conversion rate at each stage? If stage one is discovery — finding pain and finding a potential champion — and you give yourself 30 days there, what is the dropout from stage one to stage two? And the dropout from stage two to stage three — when you want to have met the economic buyer, have decision criteria in place, and be ready for a proof of value? And all the way through to close. Once you actually know your conversion rate at each stage, then maybe you can reverse-engineer the top-of-funnel pipeline you need to hit your quota. But even more importantly, your job as sales leader is: how do I improve each one of those conversion points? Because that's what dials up productivity. 19:51 Luke Rogers: At some point the law of physics says you can't just shovel more pipeline in. There are only so many hours in the day and people have got to close deals. Your job is then: how do I get my 25% conversion from stage one to stage two up to 40%? And that's what I obsess about now. And taking the science of MEDDIC and all the supporting processes — Decision Criteria in particular has been one of the most meaningful improvements to that conversion profile, because it's about winning the game before you've even started to play it. 20:29 Andy Whyte: I love that. I could not agree more. When people ask what's my favourite element of MEDDIC, I always try and change the question because I think we all know the whole chicken-and-egg of pain versus champion. Everyone feels innately why those things are important. But the game-changer — and I've now found the words for it: "winning the game before you've even started to play" — is Decision Criteria. And it comes back to this concept of our customers knowing what they need from us. Do we even want them to be experts in buying a solution like ours? They've got their own jobs. I did this exercise about a year ago where I went through over 200 LinkedIn job descriptions for Marketing Director and VP-level marketing roles. I was looking for a single bullet point of responsibility mentioning technology buying. I didn't find one. Not a single one. 21:47 Andy Whyte: And so we go and meet these people and expect them to have real expertise in buying solutions like ours. Absolutely not. The only way they'll have that — and this is the risk — is if their decision criteria has come, at worst, from our competition, or hopefully from an analyst. Neither of which is likely by nature to favour us. And if it's come from the competition, they'll do everything to screw us. Which is exactly what we should be doing to them. Exactly. 21:47 Luke Rogers: And I think the difference is when you really value-sell and use something like the three whys to really capture the need. One of the things we're working on at ComplyAdvantage right now is really trying to help the primary persona — the Chief Compliance Officer or the Chief Risk Officer — to make themselves more business-relevant. 23:15 Luke Rogers: It's similar to what happened ten years ago when we were doing that with the CIO — helping them get a seat at the table by saying: "We're moving our business online, and if we can't give our customers a good e-commerce experience, we won't be relevant. " We're in a similar world now in financial services, where the Chief Compliance and Chief Risk Officer is saying: "What got us here isn't going to get us there. " Because regulations are getting tighter, money laundering is getting worse, criminals are getting more sophisticated, more payments are moving online. We have to get smarter. And it directly impacts the client experience — if your compliance policies are too conservative and make it difficult for people to buy your products or open an account, they'll abandon and go to a competitor. 24:03 Luke Rogers: So it's about saying to the champion who wants to drive change — and who, as you point out, probably doesn't really know how — and who gets challenged for their significant investment request in the boardroom — it's about helping them defend it. Saying: "I know I'm asking to change the compliance system. But I'm asking because I can improve conversion rate by 13%, reduce operational expense by 11%, and completely change the speed at which we can enter new markets. " That's totally different from the pitch of our incumbents and legacy competitors, which is: "Risk, steady state, don't rock the boat. " We have to disrupt. We have to change things. $3. 5 trillion a year is laundered by criminals through the world's financial system — that's 5% of GDP — and it's growing. We have to do something differently. 24:54 Luke Rogers: So the decision criteria shouldn't just be seen as a way of subverting competitors — it's about helping your champion make a genuinely value-added choice, and helping them defend that choice in the face of the safe option. Just like people used to say: "You never get fired for buying IBM. " But also — those businesses that bought nothing but IBM for 30 years? A lot of them aren't around anymore. 24:54 Andy Whyte: I love that. Absolutely. And that comes back to something so many people overlook in decision criteria, which is that they only consider the technical elements. Yes, we're selling technical solutions — technical criteria matters. But if you're broadening the view of decision criteria, and you give your champion the economic decision criteria to use — the business case language — they can go and have a conversation with the economic buyer. 25:38 Andy Whyte: Whereas if you only give them the technical guide and they try to talk to an economic buyer about speeds and feeds — yeah, exactly. But if you empower them with the economic decision criteria, they can go and make the business case. And there are actually three types of decision criteria. There's the technical one, which is the capability criteria. Then there's the economic one — the gain and the pain. Selling gain gets people excited and they want to buy from you. Selling pain, risk — they feel compelled, almost out of obligation to the business. You've got that perfect balance. And then there's the third type: the relationship-based criteria. Not just do they like you, but do they feel they can be partners with you? Do they feel like you're moving in the same direction? 26:45 Luke Rogers: Ask most customers after you've closed a deal: "Why did you buy? " What will they say? The primary reason we chose you was because of your team. Nine times out of ten. They don't say "because you've got widget X, Y, or Z. " They say "because of you. " Because of the pre-sales team, the post-sales team, the executive team, the account executive, and how they helped me go on this journey as a buyer — who, as you rightly said, is doing all of this off the side of their desk, in addition to a day job that's already consuming more than 40 hours a week. 27:28 Luke Rogers: They are going internally to drive meaningful, potentially high-risk change. They have to build consensus. Create organisation-wide awareness. Create investment cases. Go through the scrutiny of the budget process. They are often challenged by people with alternate points of view. There are always political elements. They are going into battle. And so many salespeople think that they are the salesperson during a deal. They're not. It's our champion. And if you can help your champion clearly articulate the criteria by which they're making their decision — and why — and make it defensible and linked to business value — then you're not sending them into a lost cause. 28:17 Andy Whyte: I had this wonderful experience recently that speaks to a lot of what you said. We had a customer where everything was going really, really well. The champion was excellent — delivered on everything, no complaints at all. But the unusual thing for me was that we were a little more involved post-sale than usual. The economic buyer was most certainly the President of the company, which is a little unusual. But the CEO was also involved and we were treating them as an economic buyer profile because they were emotionally attached to the project. And I was sat with my champion, and the CEO walked into the room, and I was like: "Oh, is that the CEO? " And he said yes, and I was like: "I've never actually met him. " And I could feel the deal starting to go into reverse. 29:35 Andy Whyte: But actually — the salesperson had done such a good job of priming the champion for conversations with the economic buyer as a persona that we assumed they'd spoken, because there was so much information flowing back and forth. But it was mostly going via the President as a proxy. The President then gave the CEO a download, who was one more step removed. And you know what? Even in a small company, the CEO — if you work for them, you might only speak to them for half an hour a week if that. So if you're one or two layers away, it's absolutely feasible you've never met or spoken to that person. 30:18 Luke Rogers: And — about 12 months ago, maybe still the case — Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase was signing off everything over $1 million. That's a that's a meeting you're getting in with Jamie Dimon, selling some software. If he's the economic buyer at JPMorgan Chase, then yeah — credit to you if you get there. 30:18 Andy Whyte: But that's such a good point, because we're seeing more and more — the new economic buyer is the CFO by default. And the way we've been working with clients on that is: look, that does raise the stakes. The typical economic buyer has a direct vested interest in the project itself. But now the vested interest is the capital investment. That's why they're involved. But the CFO by nature can't be closely aligned with every project — they have to have the same level of engagement in HR systems, ERP systems, office space, insurance, and tens of other things. So the likelihood of getting proper quality time with them — as we would with a more typical economic buyer — gets harder. And so it comes back to this idea of treating the economic buyer as a persona, working backwards using things like the value pyramid to make sure you're relevant to what that organisation is actually trying to do. And using all the information you've learned to prime your champion to be able to sell for you when you're not in the room. 31:50 Andy Whyte: And I hear a lot of people now saying: "Yes, the economic buyer is now the CFO. " And what I see them do is just go: "Well, I'm not going to get to them, so let's just not try. " And it's bonkers, isn't it? But that's almost the default response. And I always say — it's hard to get to the economic buyer. That's a good thing. You don't want it to be easy, because then everybody would do it. That's what differentiates average salespeople from great salespeople — the great ones run towards hard. It's hard? Great, let's go. And especially given the tools we have now: if you build a really brilliant three whys with your champion — I've seen champions take a three whys into a C-suite meeting with the economic buyer. And C-level people fight over who's going to own that document and put their name on it. 33:12 Luke Rogers: I remember when I was managing the Canadian team at AppDynamics — there's one deal I'll never forget. Two C-level people who worked for the CEO got hold of the three whys, and it was so good that there was a full-scale fallout over who owned it. And it just made me think: we do these things, we're capable of these things, and it's genuinely mind-blowing for these people. That's what good selling looks like. It's making people feel like that. 33:12 Andy Whyte: And it goes back to what it's all about. The same thing you did there with building the three whys and empowering your champions to feel like it's their own document — building the champion, building the value pyramid, building the decision criteria — that is, I think, the most powerful element. Because it's timeless. It evolves, of course — people will try to nudge it back towards their own strengths and away from yours — so you have to stay on top of it. But the idea of creating that classic buyer's guide: if someone is thinking about methodology or framework or anything like that, help them have a buyer's guide of what we think good looks like. Which, of course, just happens to align with what we do. But that's not mis-selling — if it genuinely solves the problem for the organisation buying it, what's the harm? 34:53 Andy Whyte: I say this when people make a cold call and the prospect says "No thank you, I'm too busy" or whatever it is — the mindset you've got to adopt when you've done this research and this preparation about this individual, this company, and the fact that our solution is going to add value: you have to believe so deeply in what we do and that it's going to be transformational for that person. If they said no — you almost have to feel sorry for them. The fact that they said that. You have to call them back and say: "I think I'll take the blame here, because I clearly didn't do a very good job of articulating it. But I genuinely think this is something you're not going to want to miss. " And if you have that conviction — that what you do is genuinely good for the people you're talking to — you'll just be beyond successful. 34:53 Luke Rogers: I had a brilliant lesson, which is the opposite of this. I worked for an organisation where they gave our sales team a pot of credit — we could pick 50 accounts and, essentially, offer those companies our software for free. So if Tesco's ARR would have been $1 million, you'd take $1 million out of this credit pot and Tesco's could have it for free. The idea was to get logos. 36:36 Luke Rogers: So I got excited. I bought a whiteboard, printed out logos — the Tesco logo, the ASDA logo — stuck them down with the AE names next to each one, had magnetic boards for the sales stages, tracking who we'd contacted and where we were. I thought: we've got a product that every company we're selling to would genuinely be better with. This is not opinion — it's black and white. So we're going to hit our number on this and everything else is a bonus. I kid you not — guess how much free software we sold? Zero. Not a single penny. Free is free, right — surely everyone takes it? And the craziest thing is: some of those accounts actually had open opportunities at the time. They weren't cold. 36:36 Luke Rogers: If there's a lesson that everyone could download into their brain, it's this: I've now sold the most expensive version of things on the market at several companies. And if it really is the premium, if it really is the Rolls-Royce, great people will pay for it. But every time you give it away or over-discount it, you're cheapening everything — all the hard work the engineers did to build it, and all the hard work that good salespeople have done to value-sell it. And there you are, trying to win on commodity because you haven't got a champion, haven't met the economic buyer, haven't articulated the problem properly. So you're using discount. You're just cheapening it for everybody. 38:03 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. And the thing I always come back to is: our customers typically don't know how much our solutions should cost. And the way I frame that for salespeople is: when you went for your interview at the company you're working at now, how close were you to guessing what the average selling price was? You might have thought it was £50K. If it's actually £30K or £90K, you were just as far off as your prospects will typically be. 38:03 Luke Rogers: And actually — at ComplyAdvantage, the EMEA team's average order value was $35,000 and the US team's was $85,000. And for me in my career doing EMEA roles, I'd always expected rough parity with the US. So it was a surprise to come in and find that disparity. The first thing I did — and I don't think I've ever told anyone this — I created an email that looked like it had been forwarded to me from RevOps, stating a new minimum price. I put the minimum at £36,000, just above the then-average of £35K. Before that, the average was £24K. And guess what? Almost every deal immediately became £36K. As we pushed further upstream over the year, we actually got to £85K — £1,000 above where the US was. And for me that was a telling point, because I wasn't doing anything special as a leader. It was just hitting reset. It was like the Men in Black mind-wipe pen. That for me shows the power of perception. 40:26 Luke Rogers: And going back to discounting — I saw this first hand doing land-and-expand deals at AppDynamics and at Instabase, where you'd go in with one use case, one application, one part of a massive bank. The first deal was really important to get right. In a land situation, people are so desperate to win the logo. And I remember the difference between one big American bank where the unit price was discounted at 85% of list, versus one of the big four UK banks where I was 11% off list. Similar number of licences bought over three years. But the revenue from the UK bank was higher because of the legacy of that initial price point. I went back to the VC community and shared that. You have to be very, very vigilant that when you land tier-one organisations, you're not setting a really low price point — because you will not escape it. 41:34 Luke Rogers: And the idea of just doubling your price isn't talked about enough. There's a VC firm — I think it might be Andreessen Horowitz — that just says: raise your pricing. And if you look at it — if your product is working and customers are happy and it's accruing value — people will tolerate price increases. And you can manage the bridging of that with clients and contracts so people don't feel unduly hard done by. It's very standard that great software, as it gets better — especially in the subscription world where updates are part of the package — people expect to be paying incrementally more year over year at renewal. 41:34 Andy Whyte: And this comes back to something important we've talked about before, which is this idea of Decision Criteria and differentiating ourselves and making that the real thing we lead with. But what I often see happen is: someone does a great job of going into an organisation that either didn't know they had a pain, didn't know how bad it was, or didn't know it could be solved. The salesperson creates brilliant urgency around this pain and brings it right to the top of the priorities list. And then for good reasons from the customer's perspective, they decide to look at other solutions to make sure they're getting the best. What the salesperson often fails to do is tie the differentiation of their decision criteria into the pain and the Metrics of solving it. So effectively — and this is a rough way of putting it — they create pipeline for their competitor. 43:31 Andy Whyte: They do. Yeah. Because the competitor is not going to walk in and go "actually, we can't do that — our solution isn't as good. " They're never going to say that. Even if it's true, they're going to say "absolutely, here's how we do it. " And then your unique value has been commoditised because you haven't attached it to your unique decision criteria. So how do you get your teams to make sure they're connecting the business value to the technical side of things? And how do you do it when you're selling an innovative solution against incumbents? 44:08 Luke Rogers: I love this topic. So let's spend a bit of time here. And I want to start with a shout-out — to all the amazing pre-sales people in this world who don't get anywhere near enough love, attention, respect, or credit for the work they do day in, day out. In all my 15 years selling software, I would not have closed a single deal without an excellent pre-sales person working alongside me. And a lot of what I'll talk about now — I want to be really clear from the outset — you can't actually do this alone as an AE, especially if you're selling a fairly technical piece of software. And even ComplyAdvantage — it doesn't really involve deep IT — but there are still subject matter experts who operate compliance systems day in and day out, and your pre-sales team needs to be able to face off against those people and build that credibility. Because you can't own the business champion, the economic buyer, and the technical champion as the AE — it's just not realistic. Huge love to my pre-sales friends. 45:47 Luke Rogers: So let's start with what happens most of the time when people think they're practising MEDDIC and think they're going through their little tick-box exercise. The majority of companies that use MEDDIC — unfortunately — the question their salespeople ask the prospect is this: "Now that we've established you've got pain and you want to do something about it — what is your decision criteria? " And the customer says: "Shelly, that's a great question. Let me get back to you on that. " So what happens? A week goes by. Shelly — who's some middle manager or two levels below C-suite — has sent an email to all the subject matter experts and technical people saying: "We think we need to change our system. What should we use as our buying criteria? "46:28 Luke Rogers: And those people — who've been using the incumbent technology for the last 20 years — use their tribal knowledge of what they do today and all the features of the current system to build a spreadsheet of things they think they want to buy. Technical capabilities that are supposedly going to solve this high-level business problem we've just quantified. And all that does is create a decision criteria for do nothing. Oh yeah. I never even thought of it like that. Yeah. Because now — "I don't want you to change this tool. I like it. I've got a certification in it. I go to their conference every year. I play golf with the rep. " And all of a sudden the champion has completely kneecapped themselves. The salespeople left it to chance. The champion doesn't really know how to build decision criteria. Nobody's helped connect it to the business outcome. And someone will just tell them: "We'll just change how we're using the incumbent and everything will be better. " It won't. And you'll have just done six to nine months of work for absolutely nothing and you'll lose. 47:43 Luke Rogers: So the first mistake: don't ask the customer for their decision criteria. My advice to anybody. So what should we do? Well, there are layers of excellence involved in this. At a basic level, you can say: "We've quantified the problem statement together. You collaborated on that and said 'great piece of work, really appreciate you codifying this for me. ' So what we've also done is taken a bunch of our key capabilities and mapped those to how they would solve the specific problems we identified. " You've woven a story — and that's your why me. That is such an essential part of the three whys process. You see people building three whys and they build the why — but they've actually only got a one-why. And that one why can be used by your competition. 48:46 Luke Rogers: So the precursor to actually building the decision criteria document is that initial "why me" slide. Get somebody bought in at a higher level about why your unique approach to solving this problem is the right approach. An example for us: we're a full-stack compliance solution. We have our own data on every financial criminal in the world. We also provide the screening and application layer and the workflow layer. Our competitors do all of that in pieces — some have one component, some have two, a lot of them partner with each other. But that creates a big mess which makes it really easy for criminals to evade detection. From the outset, at a high level, we need to help people understand why a full-stack compliance solution with its own proprietary dataset powered by AI is going to solve the problem — and why only that is going to solve it to the extent they want to solve it by. 49:51 Luke Rogers: And only then can you start talking about the detail. Because in those situations, you've not just defended your differentiators — you've laid traps for the competition. The thing about effective traps like that is the outcome is never really neutral for the competitor. Even if they turn up and say "no, that's wrong, let us show you how we do it differently" — even if their alternative is genuinely not bad — they're still seen as coming from behind. You're seen as the thought leader. 49:51 Andy Whyte: And that's where the real magic comes in — how do you checkmate them? How do you make it basically impossible for them to win on price? Because if they come in at almost as good and half the price, people will buy that. Or if they have a champion who manages to shift the criteria — you're toast. 49:51 Luke Rogers: So once you've got that initial buy-in, that's when you create that organisational consensus with your champion. There is a new way of doing this. It is a full-stack way. It is going to change how we operate. We're going to move from a case-by-case view to a single customer view. 51:23 Luke Rogers: And that's when you start layering in the next level of detail — the critical capabilities. If we want to truly transform how we operate, we have to change our process. So you take a list of critical capabilities. What are the features and functions that give us the ability to do these things? If we're all agreed on wanting a single customer view — what are the critical capabilities that get us there? And that's when you start planting your unique secret sauce in there, and convincing people: if you want to do this but you don't have critical capability X, you won't get there. 51:23 Luke Rogers: Once you've got that consensus — almost at a spreadsheet level, with ten key capabilities and 30 to 40 critical capabilities all mapped, and those key capabilities linked to the business outcomes you're trying to drive — you've got a decision criteria document. But you have to build it with your customer. The next mistake I see people make is they do all this really hard work, build that spreadsheet, and just email it over. Oh yeah. "I built this for you. " And the customer goes: "OK. Thanks. But I've already got one. " You've got to make it feel like their own thinking. You've got to build it with them. Because who would ever use something in their own company to defend a decision, or drive change, if they didn't feel like they built it? 53:01 Andy Whyte: One of the things I love to see people do — and people think I'm a little bit daft for this, but I genuinely believe it's the standard we should hold ourselves to — is: if I've got a first meeting coming up — doesn't even have to be a New Business Meeting, just a first contact — I think the salesperson should write the follow-up email before the meeting. The idea is this: of course you're not going to just get off the call and hit send. But you're putting yourself into the zone where you think: at the end of this meeting, what do I want to say? What do I want to communicate to this customer? You're foreseeing the outcome you want. 53:01 Andy Whyte: So you're saying the usual things — great to meet you, blah blah blah — but also: "As we agreed, these are the next steps. " But one thing I also like to do is plant the decision criteria from that very first conversation. Bingo. What I'll say is: "It sounds to me like you're looking for a solution that does these things. " And: "It also sounds like you're looking for this" — and that can be the through-line you follow from the first call onwards. "Would you agree? " And now it's their idea. It's coming from them. 54:42 Andy Whyte: And the other thing: going back to the pre-sales point — if I've got a call coming up and my SC is on with me, I'll say: "And now [SC name] is going to follow up with some of his thoughts on the technical side, because the customer wants to hear from the SC anyway. They see him as more credible, as having less of an ulterior motive. " So you can do both at once. There are lots of wins here. One: you're preparing for what you want from the meeting. Two: you're starting to set decision criteria. Three: by bringing in your SC, you're doing something I don't think we talk about enough — reverse multi-threading. We're always so focused on the customer being single-threaded to us, and going: "You need five contacts, ten contacts. " But if we reverse multi-thread from our side first — and the other bit — and this is why I think it's so important — if you've had a great first meeting, done everything right, everything's green: that customer is going to be thinking about you. 55:45 Andy Whyte: They might walk to the kitchen and see the CIO. They might join another call and say: "How's your morning going? " "I just had a great call with Luke from ComplyAdvantage — we're having that problem over there right now. " What do you want them to do? Ad lib what they remember? Or reach into their inbox and hand over the follow-up you sent? So you're literally putting it straight into their hands. 56:15 Andy Whyte: Well, I mean, I love this. And as you're talking, it reminds me — I studied artificial intelligence at university and I opted to study game theory. And really what you're talking about is game theory. And I remember — Dugan used to say: "Game theory in sales is great. Sales is about playing chess, not checkers. " Because you're always thinking many, many moves ahead. And most salespeople, unfortunately, are just playing checkers — reacting. What you're thinking about is: I'm going to work backwards from a deal nine months from now. And if you think about that, it's like a nine-month game of chess. All the moves that would go into a nine-month game of chess — if you're really at the top of your game, you're doing that at Kasparov level. 57:23 Luke Rogers: And decision criteria, and the art of this part of MEDDIC, is probably the most applicable to game theory. Because it really is: I'm going to do this, and then this will happen. Then I'll send an email. Then someone will object. Then the competitor's champion will try to input their criteria. Then I'll need to run a workshop with my pre-sales person to box that out. Then I'll republish version two of the document. Then we'll need to update the three whys and have an EB meeting where we bring in the updated decision criteria. Always thinking steps ten, eleven, twelve ahead. And this is what really great sales leaders do — they get on a whiteboard with their reps and say: "Here's where you are. Here's where you want to be two weeks from now. A lot is going to happen. Let's work backwards. Let's think about all the possible outcomes and plan for all of those steps. Before that first meeting even happens. "58:26 Andy Whyte: Brilliant. And what you're talking about there is the concept a lot of what we've discussed today — decision criteria — is about taking control and influencing it, moving it towards momentum for you. And a lot of what you said is also about taking control of the decision process. I remember — when I levelled up going from a large organisation to a playbook company, going from Oracle to Sprinklr — I had this great deal on the go. Everything was looking good. And my boss's boss said: "So have you sent over your MSA for the legal team to have a look at? " And I was like: "No — I'm not even vendor of choice yet. " And I thought I was saying that in my head, but I also kind of said it out loud. And I sort of went: "No, I haven't. " And then I had this walk-home realisation: you don't have to wait for that. You don't have to wait to be selected before you start the legal process. If you wait, they'll send you their 93-page MSA. Or you can get your eight-page version in front of them first and save three months. 59:53 Andy Whyte: And when you're dealing with larger organisations — especially now — RFIs and RFPs are a mandatory part of the procurement process. People who just respond to the spec as it's been written, without having influenced it — think about all the awareness and consideration that went into writing that RFP and who influenced it, either from the incumbents or from competitors who got in early. If you're responding to something you've had absolutely no influence on, your chances of winning are less than 5%. Why would you spend all the time and energy responding? But conversely — if you've built a great decision criteria document that your champion can easily lift and drop into an RFP template, you've done them a massive favour and you've won the deal before the RFP process even started. And going back to the three whys — if they're taking it and saying "thank you for this, I'm going to take your logo off and make it look like ours" — don't even put your logo in the first place. Our three whys template is just white slides with "Insert Customer Logo" on the front. And once you're really in flow with the client, ask for their PowerPoint template. Their corporate brand file. For public companies, their investor relations or press kit is usually downloadable from their website, often in PowerPoint format. 61:35 Andy Whyte: But again — the real art of champion building is all about deposits and withdrawals. That's always how I think about it. It's a build-test loop. You're always trying to do things, build goodwill with the champion, help them. But then you're always asking them for things as well. You're depositing but also withdrawing constantly. And what you've got to be conscious of is: when do you become overdrawn? Because that's when you enter a state of stress, that's when relationships fall apart — when you've done a bit in the beginning and then stopped giving. And then all of a sudden you're just saying: "When's the next meeting? When are you seeing procurement? I need a meeting with legal because I've got to close this in three weeks and my boss is on my back. " What have you done for that person lately? 62:13 Andy Whyte: That's when you burn a champion. But if you have this concept of the build-test loop — deposits and withdrawals — and you're thinking: if I put this slide deck together in their format and put their name on the front, knowing I built it with them, I've just done them a favour. That's work they now don't have to do. If you're always thinking about work you can take away from them and do for them, you'll genuinely help that individual. 62:13 Luke Rogers: I love that way of putting it. One of the challenges I see with salespeople when they build champions is they're good at building — but then they're worried about using them. About asking them to do things. Partly because they don't want to seem like they're making a withdrawal. They don't want to upset someone they've invested in. And I always say: we're not trying to marry our champions. We're not trying to be friends for life. Although — ironically — some of my best friends are people who were once my champions. My ROI sponsor at Cisco became one of my best friends. But at the time we weren't friends — we were in a mutually beneficial relationship. That's the art of champion building. That vested interest — having a genuine shared stake in each other's success — is so important. 63:53 Andy Whyte: Symbiosis. Exactly. Because without that, someone's going to end up overdrawn at some point. That's a great way of painting that picture. Yeah. Look, I've got a lot from this already. And that's the thing — I have this superbly privileged opportunity to get to talk to people because of this podcast. I say this to people all the time: you should start a podcast, because you can literally pick the people you see as the biggest experts in your industry and just chat to them. And it benefits everyone. So thank you so much. If people have heard all of this and are feeling like they want to get back on their feet and take it up a gear — where should they find you? 63:53 Luke Rogers: Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll respond to anyone who isn't trying to sell me recruiting services or software. And our jobs board is up there as well. Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. 65:08 Luke Rogers: And a tip — when connecting with me, write a personalised message. Tell me why you're asking to connect. Otherwise it just gets lost. And I say this to people about pipeline generation as well — don't just connect with people without context. As automation gets better, I actually think it's easier to stand out. My favourite example: companies whose automation tools auto-correct company name capitalisation — so they write "ComplyAdvantage" as "Complyadvan" — and I'm instantly like: that's automated. Straight in the bin. I got an email yesterday: "Hi Mark. I need to sell you some sales productivity tools. " Wow. Could not have failed harder at that. So yeah — targeted, relevant, researched messaging. Call me as well. You can get my number. Send me a WhatsApp. I respect that. Be super direct. Tell me what you want and why you're contacting me, and I'll make time for you. It's just about being relevant and well-researched. Those two things together — you can get anyone's attention. The generic "I sell stuff" outreach just needs to go away, because it's making the signal-to-noise ratio worse for everyone. 67:10 Andy Whyte: Absolutely agree. Although I still believe you can stand out — I can stand out — but if people are getting so much inbound that they're just not reading anything from third parties anymore, then yeah. The fatigue is real. I don't open anything now that looks like an outreach sequence from someone I don't know. Because it's clearly just a template no one's thought about. Well — we are right up on time. I know you're busy. I could talk to you all day. Yeah, likewise — let's do this again sometime. I'd love that. Thank you so much, Luke. And everyone — if you want to get hold of Luke, you now know where to find him. Just make sure you're relevant and well-researched. Thank you very much, sir.