MEDMEN: MEDDIC for your SE's

00:10 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim Roelofsen. 00:12 Andy Whyte: And I'm Andy Whyte. And today we're going to talk about MEDDIC and SEs. We know that SEs are always a very essential part of the typical team accompanying a deal. The brains. The brains — exactly. And we cannot get deals across the line without them. And some of our customers have been bringing this question up quite a few times — more than ever before lately. Do you include SEs when you are on this MEDDIC journey, with MEDDIC adoption? Do you make them part of it? I think today is all about discussing that — what we think and what our advice is back to these customers. So what are your first thoughts on this? 00:52 Andy Whyte: Yeah, well, I think of MEDDIC as a common language, and a common language is best spoken when it's spoken across the most number of people — the most number of stakeholders internally. And there is no stakeholder that is involved in the deal more consistently than the SE, typically from when the deal is qualified. So they're there from the earliest stages — sometimes from the very beginning, depending on how you're set up. And then when they're not doing their part — which is the technical expertise — they're the person basically seeing everything that's going on. They're seeing the customer's reaction to what you say. You can't look at everyone at the same time, but whilst you're speaking, they have a view of everyone in the room. 01:35 Andy Whyte: And the thing I don't think people talk about enough is that no one really has as much deal experience as an SE does. Because even if you're an AE, your SE ratio is typically 2:1 or 3:1 — and I've worked at companies where there's one SE for 5 or 6 salespeople. So they're getting deal after deal, and they're getting to see and feel and build a real University of deal craft. They'll see not just how customers react, but they'll see how an AE does something that works very well — or doesn't — and so their deal intuition is probably second to none. 02:13 Pim Roelofsen: I agree. Have you had situations with those kinds of ratios? I recognize them — I've had a few of them. I also had a 1:1 ratio at one point, which was great. Have you had a time where there was an absence of an SE for a short while and you had to do it without? 02:30 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And it depends — in my career it depended on what technology I was selling and how much that mattered. But there were certainly points where I just couldn't sell without one, there was no way. And then other times I knew the product very well and it was lower complexity by nature, so I was able to get my head around it. But on the higher complexity end of the scale, it's a bit of a love story for sure. I'm sure we both share this: we typically tend to say "no champion, no deal" — strong belief. Right? 03:06 Andy Whyte: Yeah. It's also true to say — and useful, to an extent — "no SE, no deal." And the more complex the sale, the more competitive it gets, the more that applies, I would say. 03:17 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And while you were talking just now — you and I, we both follow one sport in particular. We both do — F1. And I was just thinking: if you are an AE and you imagine yourself being the F1 driver, you are on track. You have someone in your garage next to the track sitting there, analyzing — with the help of the wider team of course — when to make the right calls: when to go in for tyres, when to push hard, or when to slow down a little bit to conserve and be able to finish the race. And I was thinking this is much like a sales cycle, really. 03:57 Pim Roelofsen: But if for some reason that engineer sitting on the side of the track doesn't have the ability to have that conversation with you — doesn't speak the same language — how are you going to win that race? 04:13 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I like that analogy. And you can almost imagine it like the difference between a deal review with MEDDIC and a deal review without MEDDIC. Without MEDDIC, the salesperson starts talking about their deal and it's just trying to make sense of it — often a lot of waffle, or "fluff" as some say. And I think the same thing goes for the conversation with the SE about the deal. If there's no framework, no common language to talk about, they might be talking about the same thing differently. Or one person might use a term like "champion" but without a shared definition of what a champion has to be — you end up arguing over whether someone's a champion based on different criteria. 04:55 Andy Whyte: And so you're not going to be able to tap into this great asset — someone who, as we've already said, has a real intuition about deals and has as good a view of your deal as you do because they've been there all along. You're not going to be able to maximize that potential. 05:15 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So effectively what we're saying is that the SE brings a lot of deal coverage — and if they're not part of the MEDDIC language, you're not able to converse within that common language as a team, and you won't be able to focus on the right things in the deal reviews. 05:35 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And then another big thing on this topic — because it's a topic I love — is that in sales we talk about being single-threaded a lot. We talk about how the salesperson should not be single-threaded to the organization, meaning they should be talking to more than just one person within the customer's organization. And that's common sense — if anything goes wrong, if that person leaves, you don't have enough. People debate whether it should be 5 or 10 contacts, but that depends on all kinds of things. 06:06 Andy Whyte: The thing we never, ever talk about in our industry — which I think is a bit daft — is reverse single-threading. Typically in deals, it's the salesperson who owns all of the relationships. You might have an exec team trying to connect with the economic buyer and all that good stuff — but typically the day-to-day everything, for whatever reason, tends to go through the AE. And I think that's a missed opportunity. Some of the greatest teams I see — particularly great SE teams — take ownership of the technical contacts. So whilst the AE maintains the relationship with the champion, the SE builds a relationship with their technical counterpart and builds a technical champion. Which I think is just so powerful. 06:51 Andy Whyte: Because we know this, right? We know that when it comes to technical matters, the customer doesn't want to hear from the salesperson — they want to hear from the expert sales engineer, because they have more credibility. They know the SE isn't specifically a salesperson, and for all the right reasons. As much as we as salespeople dislike that, that's the truth — and that's how it should be. So why wouldn't we lean into that? Why wouldn't we give the SE the opportunity to engage and do exactly that? 07:23 Andy Whyte: And the other thing that's really good about this is that even when you're doing everything right in a deal, sometimes customers go quiet on you. There's a period when they're in heavy decision mode, or another priority has popped up, and even with a great champion they kind of put you in a holding pattern. The great thing about having an SE with a technical contact on the other side is it's someone outside of the commercial group who you can ask to get an inside track on what's going on. I'll give a shout out to one of the greatest SEs I've ever worked with — a guy called Ben Kennedy. The number of times I'd be able to lean on him and say "look, I'm not sure what's going on here — can you find out?" And he'd drop an email or a text to his counterpart, and you'd get the unofficial version of what was happening. And it would help you realign and take action if you needed to. 08:11 Pim Roelofsen: I also think that if you don't do this, the chances of influencing decision criteria are that much lower. Because typically these things are largely decided on the technical side of the house for a customer. If we don't tap into that — or if we only do it single-threaded from the AE's perspective — you can't really go to the depth you need to in order to truly shape how your solution lands in the best possible way. 08:40 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love it. I see you get the message! Absolutely. That's it. I'll say cheers to that. Yeah. Thanks very much!