MEDMEN: How To NAIL Sales Meetings With A Value Pyramid

00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. Today we are talking about getting access to the economic buyer by way of using the value pyramid. And this is something we've had success with quite recently. 00:09 Andy Whyte: We had success with it. My meeting coming up next was actually booked by way of using a value pyramid. And it's 20 minutes away from now. 00:17 Pim Roelofsen: Which means if we keep this episode running just long enough, you'll have to go and meet the person you're about to meet — in your suit. So if you see me dragging this one out, you know why. 00:28 Andy Whyte: I'll make that easy for you — I'll wrap it up. Yeah. OK, so tell me about how this meeting came about and how the value pyramid helped. 00:36 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. So there was a shift in the stakeholder landscape of this particular company. And if you're not sure about anything anymore, given changes, it's always a good moment to reassess — because change is constant. Probably the only constant. And so as a team we used the value pyramid to get a clear understanding of: given the changes that have been taking place — the company went from public back to private, a couple of other things going on, a new management team going in — what can we hypothesize to be the goals of this company now, and the strategy to get there? And by way of doing research, you can find out a lot of things today. We talked about AI the other day — there's a little bit of that. But it's mostly human ingenuity, as you'd expect. 01:29 Pim Roelofsen: Having worked with this particular business in a specific domain and geography, you already have access to stakeholders — so you can start to form your point of view. The value pyramid is completed through all the levels, but it's just a V1 — just our hypothesis. We get feedback from a couple of different stakeholders, and then we use it as an attachment to the message to the EBs: "Hey, we've put this together. The reason being is that we want to be a good partner to you by understanding your business, and by doing so, do the right things for this partnership. It would be great if we could spend a couple of minutes on it — but no pressure." And we left it there. You could say that's a bit open-ended. Don't you want to be sharper about it? But it took a day, and then I had an invite in my inbox for this very meeting. 02:24 Andy Whyte: Interesting. Well — this is the thing about value pyramids. In my opinion, there's never a situation where a value pyramid is a waste of time. Worst case scenario: you've got it completely wrong. Well, if you've put some time in and made some assumptions that were wrong — you now know they were wrong. Whereas before you made the effort, you didn't know they were wrong. That's literally the worst case scenario. And to the customer — they might think "this person doesn't quite understand us" — but at least you're showing that you're going to try to understand them. The alternative would be to carry on not understanding them, and the customer never corrects you because they've never been given the opportunity to. 03:04 Andy Whyte: What's more likely to happen is that you talk about the value pyramid, some of it will inevitably be wrong — but you find out what those things are. Some of it will be right and you double down on those. You get clarity. You get strategically aligned with the customer — which is the whole purpose of the value pyramid. We're in a funny position, because when we're selling to our customers or potential customers, we're sort of showing off a little. We have this internal initiative — "be the MEDDIC" — where instead of giving a demo of our software, we want our customers to see our sales team as a demo of what their team would look like if they worked with us. So we're always striving for best practice. We can lean into things like the value pyramid even more than our customers can with their customers. Wouldn't you love it if your sales team approached meetings like this? 03:59 Andy Whyte: So we get it a little easier, I think. But the point remains: I've never seen a situation where a customer has been anything but happy to look at a value pyramid. The only time they would ever be unhappy about it is if it's not qualified — you're talking to someone too junior to understand what's on there, or there's just not enough interest in the solution you're providing and they don't want to get into it because they're not aligned with the success you're trying to drive towards. 04:31 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And this comes down to the EB's perspective looking at you as a potential partner. And I think you have to step into this — the stat from the value pyramid program: 88% of salespeople are knowledgeable about their solutions, but only 24% are knowledgeable about the context their customers find themselves in. That's the bit that matters if you want to be a good partner to any business. And so what I've seen with the value pyramid — it's not a silver bullet. But it often works, and it definitely sharpens your own skills. It typically creates a situation where you get corrected — so the things you didn't know yet, you now know. But if there is something where you can align and attach yourself to the strategic initiatives that tie to the strategies a company has to achieve their goals — then suddenly an EB can open up a world of opportunities: introducing you to new stakeholders who can help you create a tremendous amount of velocity within the deal. 05:42 Pim Roelofsen: And we said it on another episode but I'll say it here again because it's relevant: we know from industry data that in mid-market deals there are seven stakeholders on average involved in a successful evaluation — and ultimately a partnership. In enterprise, that's double. So a value pyramid is not only a great way to get access to an economic buyer, but also to open up that stakeholder landscape and get into that territory. It takes a village — and creating that village fast? This can be the way to do it. 06:13 Andy Whyte: Yeah, exactly. And I guess we should wrap up by saying: if you're watching this and you've heard about the value pyramid and want to find out more — MEDDICC members, you have access. We have a full in-depth program on the value pyramid. And if you just want to find out a little bit more before diving in that deep, we have a video — I think it's the value pyramid in ten minutes? 06:37 Pim Roelofsen: Ten minutes — there you go! 06:38 Andy Whyte: A free ten minutes. Producer Nick will probably put a link up here somewhere. A nice little video — watch it if you feel so inclined. And I hope he does put it up — otherwise I've just got a little him doing some sort of Egyptian pyramid dance. 06:50 Pim Roelofsen: That's actually a good look for you. 06:52 Andy Whyte: I think we should keep it like this. There you go — that's the value pyramid. Cheers to that! 06:54 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers!