MEDMEN: Andy Whyte's Biggest Pet Peeve With MEDDIC

00:12 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim, and that's Andy. 00:15 Andy Whyte: What are we talking about today, Pim? 00:17 Pim Roelofsen: Today, Andy — we are talking about your biggest pet peeve with MEDDIC. So what is it? 00:23 Andy Whyte: My biggest pet peeve with MEDDIC is when people try to put MEDDIC in a box. They say: "MEDDIC is this, or it's not this. MEDDIC is only a qualification framework. It's not a methodology. It's not a process." I heard one the other day — "MEDDIC is just a forecast compass." We've heard people say it's just the X-ray tool that tells you which bones are broken with your opportunities. And what I will say about this is: if that's how you're using MEDDIC, you are not wrong. You're not wrong. If that's it — that's the beauty of it, right? That's why we love to call it a common language: you're applying it to however you use it. You are not wrong. What you are, though, is narrow-minded. Just because you're using it for a very narrow use case doesn't mean that's all it can be used for. 01:14 Andy Whyte: It's a bit like this — and I joke about this — my dear mum has an iPhone. And I've tried to show her the merits of an iPhone, but all she'll use it for is calling me. Which I love. Of course, she can just use it for that. She hasn't even figured out texts on it yet. And if she were to turn up at a dinner party and say "my phone — I use it for calls and that's all it's for. It doesn't do anything else. You're wrong if you use it for anything else" — well, the people at that dinner party who met on a dating app are married. People who arrived in a car they found on their phone. That dinner — the home was probably found on a property app. We talk every day via Slack, we meet on Zoom. There are all of these different use cases. So if you were to try and push it back into its original, very narrow use case — you'd just be dismissing everyone else, giving them no credibility. It's self-created limitations on something that aren't necessary. 02:24 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And at the same time, we don't criticize someone for just using it as a phone. But we would encourage them — "hey, you like playing solitaire — you can download a game for that." That's the point. As we approach MEDDIC, it's a common language. A common language that covers the three imperatives of customer engagement: what value do we provide to this customer? Which stakeholders stand to benefit from that value? And process — which stakeholders have to be involved, what is the customer's buying process, how do we best align to it, how do we give them the most diligent and efficient experience? MEDDPICC acts as the perfect common language to align to all of those things. 03:02 Pim Roelofsen: And it's not just a reactive qualification X-ray tool. It's great at doing those things. But our best customers get so much more by being proactive. Not just proactive in the sense of thinking about which bones are likely to break before they break — to stretch that daft analogy — but through to the entire customer lifecycle, the entire go-to-market team. If you approach MEDDPICC as a common language proactively, it can become the language that helps product teams through the ideation of their products, through to marketing teams positioning those products, through to your sales team capturing customer attention with the value you provide, through to the selling, and then through to delivering that value as well. Our customers are using MEDDPICC as a common language across the full customer lifecycle and across their entire go-to-market team. 03:53 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And there's a big difference between just reactive qualification and having a common language for the full go-to-market team that spans the full customer lifecycle. 04:04 Pim Roelofsen: Exactly right. So — my pet peeve. Please: if you're using MEDDIC just for a very narrow use case, good — you do you. But please stop trying to tell everyone else that that's the only thing it works for. Because we literally have hundreds of customers doing so much more with it. And they'll think you're saying you can only use your phone for phone calls. Here's to our customers! 04:31 Andy Whyte: Here's to our customers — cheers!