00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Today we are talking about how to keep urgency. 00:03 Andy Whyte: What's the one thing for you when it comes to urgency, Lucy? 00:06 Lucy Williams-Jones: Pain. Pain drives urgency. 00:09 Andy Whyte: And is pain one and done? 00:11 Lucy Williams-Jones: No — I don't think pain is binary. And I think there are many factors that can either strengthen or weaken the pain throughout a sales cycle, depending on a number of external factors. 00:20 Pim Roelofsen: The first time I heard you talking about this, you said pain plus value equals urgency. And that always stuck with me. If you can find those two things together in a very articulate and crisp way, that's where you want to be. And pain breaks down into three levels — not binary, not one and done. Identification, indication — how it measures — and implication. Keeping that underpinning all communication from that point onwards. 00:48 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I think the thing with pain plus metrics equalling urgency — or pain plus quantification equalling urgency — is that you're covering for the head and the heart. Because the pain with the personal signs you've uncovered for the champion — that should make them feel urgent. They don't necessarily need it quantified to want to run around putting out fires. But their peers, their colleagues haven't had you doing that great work with them to make them feel the same way. So they need the head element — the metrics — to go: "Look, we've got this problem, and this is how much it's costing us." To have that same impact. 01:28 Andy Whyte: So that idea of bringing those two things together is really, really important. But as you said — it's not binary, it's not one and done. And this is a challenge we see time and time again: urgency falls off, and people think "their priorities changed." But probably what's actually happened is the fire you set in people's hearts has just burnt out because you've not been stoking it. You've not been keeping that fire alive. You stop pouring energy into it and it dies down. 01:56 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah — time kills deals, right? And if you think about being a telco and you've got the three peaks — Black Friday, Cyber Monday and an iPhone launch — if you're in the lead-up to that, and they know they've had outages previously and they need to fix it: as soon as the iPhone launch is over, where's the pain? Because they're not going to have the same event for another 12 months. So you need to make sure you're working towards events — or a pain that isn't going to go away. 02:24 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And those compelling events are interesting — because we don't always have them. So what does a salesperson do outside of those events? They have to create compelling events. And creating compelling events is not "my boss has said if you don't order by the end of the month, the price is going up." That's not a compelling event. Although you can use commercial elements to inspire urgency, it's not the same as just putting a price on things. There has to be more to it. If the conversation is revolving around the price of the solution rather than the cost of inaction the customer is suffering by not taking action — you've not set up the value conversation, have you? 03:15 Pim Roelofsen: No, I absolutely agree. And I think the indication of the pain — or the value on the other side of working with your solution — isn't sufficient either. I don't declare myself as anywhere near an expert in psychology. But I do know this: people hate losing, and they prefer not losing over winning. And so if you think about the way we create a distinction between the three levels of pain — identification, indication and implication — the second level, indication, is where the logic is. If I invest in this, it takes away this risk, adds this efficiency, has this economic impact. It justifies the business case. But it's not necessarily what moves people to act with urgency. That's the implication level. And so if we can get into that territory — and do it in a way that's specific to the stakeholder — then you're at a level where you're going to make an impact. 04:17 Pim Roelofsen: And equally, if you're not there and the pain sounds the same to all the stakeholders you're working with — you're probably not done yet. So in your example — if you think about the stakeholders involved from the customer's perspective in the telco scenario, what would be the difference in how they each experience essentially the same pain? 04:43 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah, sure. So if you think about the three peaks for a telco provider — it's obviously such a competitive market, because everyone's doing the same thing. Especially around the iPhone launch. If you went onto a website and you weren't able to order the new iPhone — whatever number we're on now, I lost count a few years ago — and that site went down, would you go to a different telco provider? Yeah. So you've got various people within the business who all have different levels of pain. But the top one is revenue — because if they lose all those customers to a different telco provider, that hits the CEO and the CTO. Then you've got people in the organization who need to get product updates out more quickly. The pain they're solving for is: if we can't fix this problem now, we're not going to be able to deliver the updates when the next iPhone launch comes around. So the pain has to be supported by metrics — and the metrics that people care about will differ depending on the role they're in. 05:52 Andy Whyte: Yeah, 100%. Because then if I'm in that development department and I don't get what I need from a technology perspective to deliver the updates on time — my job may be on the line. Or the existence of the role I have to begin with. And suddenly you've found vested interest at a certain level in the company. Whereas an economic buyer — a CFO — will care about the financial implications and what it does for the predictability of the balance sheet. So it's still the same pain on the surface. The indications may still share the same basis. But the way it implicates at the individual stakeholder level is completely personalized. And that's where you want to get to if you really want to be as successful as you can be in complex selling. 06:50 Andy Whyte: And the most recent data is saying mid-market deals have around seven stakeholders on the customer side — enterprise, about double that, often even more. So if you've got 7 to 14 people involved from the customer side — how does the pain sound at the stakeholder-specific level to each of them? That's the question you want to get to. 07:15 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And like we say — every stakeholder feels pain differently. Even the same pain means different things to different stakeholders. We really need to get beyond this idea of taking the same pain message to multiple stakeholders. I see that so often — people think that "our security solution stops people hacking your systems, it solves breaches" — and they think taking that pain message around a business is going to have the same impact on everyone. 07:47 Andy Whyte: This is kind of what the growth stage looks like, isn't it? A lot of organizations go through a phase where they've got a really great product and such a clear pain that all they have to do is get in front of the right persona, talk about that pain, and the deal's off to a flying start. But as the sector matures and competitors come in, you lose that competitive advantage. What typically happens with the good companies is they broaden their solution — they typically become a platform. And then what we hear is: "Our team is great selling to the technical buyer, but they haven't quite got it right selling to the business buyer yet." And it's like: nothing's probably fundamentally different. It's just that your team really understands the pain of the technical buyer. They haven't stopped to really think about the pain of the business buyer. 08:31 Andy Whyte: Which in your example — and it's such a great example because everyone can understand it — if it's the iPhone launch and the telco's website goes down, that's going to upset the CIO or CTO because it's their website that's gone down and their responsibility. But there's also the CMO, whose targets and goals rely on the iPhone launch going well and on all the associated campaigns. All of a sudden you've got a whole new business angle — someone with loads of pain that is yours to tap into. 09:10 Lucy Williams-Jones: That's why I think when you're doing MEDDIC reviews and deal reviews — especially with buying committees that have now grown to 7 to 14 people — having everyone aligned on the pain that they each care about and the metrics that support that pain is so valuable. So that it's top of mind, and depending on who you're speaking to, you know exactly what's going to press their buttons. Having it all on one page is a really nice way of doing it. 09:40 Pim Roelofsen: Yes. And I'm so glad you said it — it almost seems like this was rehearsed. It wasn't! It made me think about how we work through what we call the MEDDIC Blueprint with some customers. Because what you're talking about here — not many businesses actually have that. From what I've seen, it's: "We know at a holistic level the pain we solve for" — and it stays at that level. Rather than saying: "This is holistically what we solve for — and here's what it sounds like to the main personas typically involved in our sales cycles." 10:05 Pim Roelofsen: And what we've been doing with a few customers recently is working through all MEDDIC elements — but pain specifically — to specify: at the identification level, what do we solve for a CIO, a CFO, or whatever personas are relevant to that specific company? And then work through all the levels of pain. So that universally a sales team can tap into a database — whether you're just onboarding with the company or you've been there for years — and access something that has proven itself. It's a very powerful thing to do for leaders and for companies. Either in collaboration with us to figure out what that looks like, or do it themselves. But at least there's consistency — kind of like our word for the day, isn't it? Making it into a metrics library that can be used for the whole business when you need to support your transaction. 11:05 Andy Whyte: Yes, exactly that. And a lot of what you've talked about here is best practice — ways you can keep pain part of the conversation by quantifying it throughout. But the thing is, it's one thing having a clear view of pain and the value in solving it. If you're not engaging the customer and really making them feel implicated in it — that's why it has to be built into everything you do. Pain has to be built into the new business meeting. Has to be built into the value assessment. The demo. The business value assessment. The business case. The proposal. Everything has to have that clear pain — but also the metrics, the value in solving the pain, and the cost of inaction built into it. 11:37 Andy Whyte: Because — my analogy here — remember when you were a kid and you'd get a balloon and play that game where you have to keep it in the air? That is pain. You knock it up, you've done a good job, you come out of the meeting. And I think what people expect is that the balloon is filled with helium and it's going to stay high, and that pain is going to stay high. No — gravity is going to pull it down. Because the second you leave that Zoom call or that meeting room, another party is going to come in. Another salesperson is going to come in — not competing with you per se for your solution, but for another solution that does something else entirely. And your customer is being pulled all over the place. Unless you're front of mind constantly by re-implicating that pain — it's going to go down. 12:25 Andy Whyte: And my new favorite analogy — which I was telling you guys — is that people think pain is like a tattoo. You implicate it once and it stays on. It's not a tattoo. It's a Post-it note. You write it on, you stick it on the customer — and you better hope it's strong glue. Because as soon as a strong wind comes, it's going to fall off. Or if you leave it on the wall of the meeting room, someone walks in after you, says "I'm not interested in this" and takes it off the wall. You've got to be re-sticking that Post-it note every single time you talk to the customer — even when you're not in the room — by making pain part of all those different assets we just talked about. 12:59 Lucy Williams-Jones: That is the essence of it. Cheers to that! 13:03 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers! 13:04 Andy Whyte: Cheers!
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