MEDMEN: Obsessing Over The Wrong Type Of Competition

00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim, that's Andy — and in this episode we are going to talk about what sales teams are obsessing about when it comes to competition. 00:10 Andy Whyte: Yeah — it's the wrong type of competition, right? As we say all the time, there are four types of competition. It's not just your rivals — those other vendors occupying the same Gartner or Forrester quadrants, the ones bidding on your keywords on Google. That's one type of competitor: your rivals. But there's also other initiatives. If you've got a customer that is doing some sort of transformation, or just has other things going on that are going to push your project down their prioritization list — that's competition. They may not be competing for the same project, but they are competing for the same resource, whether that's budget or actual people from their side to work on it. That's the second type. So we've got rivals, we've got other initiatives. Self-build is also a competitor — depending on what type of solution you have, you may or may not see this, but it's definitely something to consider. We ourselves believed in building our own SaaS product, our own LMS platform — and our former vendor told us quite condescendingly "you'll never be able to build that." Well — we literally built it. It's done, it's live, it's awesome. So that's self-build. 01:26 Andy Whyte: But the theme of this episode — what's that fourth type of competition, Pim? 01:32 Pim Roelofsen: The worst one. Inertia. 01:35 Andy Whyte: Inertia. For me that feels like a real killer, doesn't it? 01:40 Pim Roelofsen: It's doing nothing. It's the customer status quo. They stay the same. They engage you, you go through the motions — and then: inertia. Doing nothing, inaction. And if you put it like this — every deal has two winners. The actual winner, and the one that gets out of it quickest so they can deploy their resources elsewhere. That kind of doesn't apply when inertia is your real competitor, because it almost feels like a race that never ends. You're participating and it's not like "came in second, race is over." You just never get to the finish line. I've seen teams holding on to deals that keep slipping from one quarter to the next. 02:31 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And typically — what is it? It's inertia. It's inaction. And if you lose a deal to inertia, it really comes down to qualification. You've missed something. You've misqualified something. It could be — as is often the case — that you've found pain, but that pain isn't implicated enough. You haven't implicated the pain to the point where the customer feels: "I absolutely have to solve this." And so they just think: "We can get by without it." We know that organizations are typically a bit risk-averse. If there's an opportunity to stay the same and be OK, they will. And it's our job in sales to get beyond that — to really get into the implications so we get far beyond the opportunity to just do nothing. 03:19 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. If there isn't a clear picture of the world with your solution — not just on the surface, but really: what is the indication of the impact our solution is going to make, and what are the good things that come from that — then you're putting your deal at risk of inertia. And this can have a couple of different reasons from a qualification perspective. It might be that the picture isn't getting to the right people — there's no EB visibility on it. Or your champion isn't really your champion. There can be a bunch of different things. 03:54 Andy Whyte: Yeah. We started here by talking about the value elements — there's not enough pain, we haven't quantified that pain. But as you aptly say, we might have done a nice job there. We might have a customer that is on fire and we've got the solution to put out that fire — but if nobody knows about it, if we haven't got a champion with a vested interest in our success who is therefore selling internally for us, helping us get introductions, helping us extract more data and insights to support our business case — it doesn't matter how much pain we've found or quantified. If we haven't got the right stakeholders, we're not going to get much further. So that's the first part: value. If you don't get the value across well enough, it's going to lead to inertia. But even if you have the value — if you don't engage the right stakeholders, it doesn't matter how much value you have, the deal still won't get done. 04:44 Andy Whyte: And then there's the third part, which often gets overlooked — particularly with inertia — which is process. If you've got tons of pain and you've engaged with every stakeholder you need to — you've done a brilliant job — but no matter what happens, your solution is not going to be at the top of the priority list, the deal is going to slip. I had this once when I was leading a sales team. We had this deal in forecast, and as we started to look at the process — where are we, what's the path through — we were selling a solution that had to come after something else being done first. It was an e-commerce account and they were re-platforming. Whatever we did, our solution plugged into their platform — so if they were re-platforming, they were never going to implement our solution onto the platform they were moving away from. It didn't matter how much they loved what we did — and they did. It didn't matter that we were engaged with the CEO, the founders, everyone. We were never going to get that deal done until they'd re-platformed. But the salesperson hadn't surfaced that factor to the team. So it slipped, fell off the priority list, the business shifted, the founders left, and it all fell apart. And it probably could have been saved — or at least we could have saved ourselves a lot of time — if we'd looked at those three elements together. Value? Check. Stakeholders? Check. Process? Nowhere near. 06:14 Pim Roelofsen: I think there's an alternative version of that scenario I've also seen — where the process element specifically wasn't considered, and you get to vendor of choice, so you start to think about the paper process. But then — oh, the customer has end of quarter two coming up. So you suddenly have competition in departments like legal and procurement, because they're turning their attention to things directly related to their own business first. And the one thing that's always true is that things change — priorities might shift. So if you have the momentum on the value side and the stakeholders are aligning, but you're leaving the process to chance — you might miss the window. The momentum you've built can evaporate. You want to make sure that's a proactive thing, because the window of opportunity might close. 07:10 Andy Whyte: Yes. And that's something we always talk to our customers about in our programs. Pain — value — it's not binary, it's not one-and-done. You don't just find pain, quantify it, implicate it with the customer, and then expect that customer to remain implicated. The second you stop talking about it, the second someone stops pushing on that bruise — it's going to fade. And if you haven't kept the momentum going, inertia is going to creep up on you anyway. 07:40 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. So the key thing here is: first and foremost, make sure the pain is implicated enough — it's enough pain to make things happen. Make sure the right people are engaged. You've got to have a true champion. You've got to be engaged with the economic buyer. And then third — last but not least — process. Make sure you can see the pathway through. Make sure you're at the top of that priority list because the pain is real and there aren't other things in your way. That's how you overcome inertia. 08:14 Andy Whyte: Yeah — be very proactive. Treat inertia as your primary competitor. Cheers! 08:20 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers!