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 talking about deal reviews — when you get the whole team together to look at one of the team's deals and really dig into it, make progress on it, while at the same time everybody benefits from learning a little bit more about the MEDDIC framework. What do you think about deal reviews, Pim? 00:32 Pim Roelofsen: Well, I think they can be great. And we've all been there, right? Whether it's just a seller and management, or the extended team including SEs — you have different settings. But I feel there are challenges for many organizations out there when it comes to the way these meetings are set up, what they focus on, and whether there's a common language in place. So that when you explain certain elements about the deal, the person you're explaining it to actually understands it the way you meant it. Those are some of the key considerations that come up when we speak about this. 01:12 Andy Whyte: Yeah. Whenever I get asked about how to run a good MEDDIC deal review, people are always looking for the logistical things — which letter should we start with, what medium should we capture the information in? And I'll answer that: I typically like to start with the pain, because that frames where everything starts and where everyone's interests are going to be aligned. But I think that's actually the wrong way to be thinking about it. Because when I think about a deal review — and you touched on this — it is probably one of the most powerful hours you can spend with your team. Not just enhancing one deal, but enhancing your implementation of MEDDIC post-training, post-enablement. It's the thing that can really start to set the scene culturally for how MEDDIC is going to be embraced in your organization. 02:03 Andy Whyte: And that doesn't come down to logistical things like which letter you start with. It comes down to the cultural understanding that first and foremost, MEDDIC is a framework that's going to make everybody in that room more successful. There's not one person — whether you carry a quota or not — who isn't going to become more successful because of MEDDIC. The efficiency alone is going to go through the roof. More success, more deals, faster — all that good stuff. But to get to the point where everyone's using it openly and honestly, with a degree of vulnerability — which is needed to have very open and frank conversations — you have to start with everybody trusting each other. 03:00 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. That trust is really, really important. It's imperative. If you don't have trust, you can't run a proper deal review — because the salesperson won't feel trusted by their peers or by their leadership team. 03:14 Andy Whyte: Yeah, there are a few big words there — honesty, trust, culture. These are big topics. But if we think about what that looks like in practice — when you were talking, I was thinking: have I been in deal reviews where these things weren't the case? And sometimes it's not even down to company culture or a lack of honesty. It's really about not having the right things in place yet to let a deal review take place the way it should. What that looks like is: the AE takes the stage, presents the deal, and starts telling everything they know. And if there's something they don't know — they make something up. The goal is to look good in front of management. And especially in a lot of growing companies where promotions are being made, you don't always have a team together that is at that cultural level yet. 04:29 Pim Roelofsen: And so what I'd want to talk about here is how we overcome that. How do companies get to the level where there is that trust and that kind of culture? 04:39 Andy Whyte: Well, the key to that for me is in what you said there — the individuals trying to look good. If they're trying to look good at the cost of communicating the true state of the deal, that's already wrong. Because this is how it should be — and this is why trust is so important. It should be table stakes for anybody carrying a quota who is working on active company deals. Anyone trusted with representing the company on an opportunity — given what the cost of acquisition is these days — should be trusted as more than capable of doing the job. They are a capable salesperson, a capable representative of the company. So that should be the baseline level of trust, and it should eradicate the salesperson feeling the need to prove they're doing a good job. That should be table stakes. They should know what they're doing. 05:37 Andy Whyte: So what should become the real recognition of doing a good job is either genuinely positive progress — and of course that's why metrics are good, because you can't really fool people with metrics, it's very straightforward — or, and this is really important: spotting problems with the deal. The gaps. That is the definition of a good salesperson — that they can see where they're weak, where the weaknesses are, where the problems and challenges are. Because only then can you solve them. And so going back to that trust piece: the salesperson should come in and feel "I can be vulnerable here." Not be afraid that by putting their hand up and saying "look, I've got this deal, I'm really glad we're here to talk about it — and let me just start out by saying I haven't got a champion. I've tried. This is the person I've been working with but for whatever reason I haven't been able to test them." That is a salesperson doing an A1 job. Because if they don't make that the number one thing to discuss — if they skirt over the fact they don't have a champion and talk about how great the decision criteria is and how well they understand the process — nobody in that organization is going to care about those metrics anyway. 07:06 Pim Roelofsen: Exactly. And this is a big thing, because many organizations today are looking to adopt MEDDIC to improve their results — velocity, average sales price, and so on. They start by implementing it: that's the education piece, bringing people up to speed so they can speak the common language we always talk about. But if then, as a next step, people are keen but also want to show they're doing a good job — you have to make sure, as the company adopting the framework, that the gaps are celebrated. As you said. You want to tackle that straight away, because otherwise there's a really high risk of the opposite happening. 07:47 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. And for me that is one of the initial major benefits of the deal review — getting those gaps out in the open so they become the number one thing everybody's focused on solving. And the great thing, as you said, about having all those different people in the room — other AEs, of course, which is really valuable, because not only do they bring value from their own experience, but they're also vicariously learning about this person's deal, which will definitely be relevant to their own deals in the future. That kind of learning through someone else's experience is brilliant. 08:25 Andy Whyte: And then you can bring in SDRs who may be on the promotion path. Some of the greatest revelations in deal reviews I've seen have come from an SDR, because they might have been researching that account for three hours before the meeting or opportunity came along, and they'll say: "Oh — have you thought about Sarah Smith? She used to work at ABC, who was a customer of ours." And all of a sudden you think: wow, we didn't know that. Because that SDR had that extra context, or just a completely fresh perspective. 09:00 Pim Roelofsen: No, I love that. And I also like how practical you're getting here. So if we are practical about deal reviews right now — the session starts. Do you feel like the person presenting the deal should talk for a long time about what they already know, or should we dive straight into the gaps? 09:19 Andy Whyte: Strong opinion on this. Deal reviews should be once a week, an hour long, per team — per group of roughly six to eight people, with everyone related to that group invited. Marketing, SDRs, partnerships should be there. I'd love to see senior leadership coming into those sessions too. For me there's no better hour you can spend with your team. Get them involved. 09:45 Andy Whyte: First things first: make it voluntary. Don't rota people in. Don't make it alphabetical — person A first, person B second. Create that healthy competition where people see the value and are almost fighting over that spot in a friendly way. And then — a nice problem I've had in the past is having to add a second weekly session because there wasn't enough capacity. That's a great problem to have, by the way. 10:08 Andy Whyte: So the second thing: get people to nominate their deal. The session's on a Wednesday — use Slack or whatever messaging tool you have, and automate a message on Monday asking who wants the slot. And then the job for the person who takes the session is to write a short brief in Slack — whatever messaging platform you use — that everyone coming to the session has to read beforehand. That eradicates the first five to ten minutes of "and then I did this, and then I did that — listen to what a great job I've done!" — and I say that with love, because I've caught myself doing it. "Oh God, I need to stop talking about the things I've done." Yeah. It's so common. 10:53 Pim Roelofsen: I think this is a great setup for improving deal reviews in general. And some of the topics we've just spoken about are big — culture, trust. But those things happen in the smallest things you do in your organization. So if you can do it anywhere, you can do it there too. 11:12 Andy Whyte: Yeah. One last thing I'll say on the logistics: there are likely to be ten actions that come out of a session — you need to go and get introduced to this person, tighten up on the decision criteria, understand what happens in the decision process after this step, understand who the competition is better — whatever those things are. Those actions should be captured and held accountable. The way I used to do it was at the start of the next review: there'd be a period where we'd look back at any outstanding actions — not just from the previous week, but going further back — just to keep things front of mind. 11:58 Andy Whyte: And it's not just for the obvious reason of making people take the actions. There's a bigger picture thing around accountability here. If you're being invited to spend an hour of your time a week joining a deal review — and it's not always your deal, maybe it's your turn 1 in 6 — you're being asked to give up an hour to help someone else on your team. You don't mind if the culture is right, because you know that helping your teammate means more success, more references, more money in the bank — ping pong tables, whatever you want to spend the money on. But if you're giving up your time and what you're seeing is a lot of chat and not a lot of action, that's the decay that will start to happen in those sessions. People start thinking: this is just a session where everyone says all the right things, but no one's ever held accountable to the actions. 12:50 Andy Whyte: And the funny thing is it's the best salespeople that this impacts the most. Because if you're an elite salesperson — maybe one of the best in the team — and you're sitting in on someone else's deal review, let's be honest: you're already a bit upset that someone else has got a deal you don't. That's just how our industry works. But if you're listening to this deal and there are all these actions — some of which you're thinking "I would have done that already" — and those actions aren't being held to account, the whole thing implodes. You start thinking: what's the point of these sessions if no one's ever held to account anyway. 13:36 Pim Roelofsen: So that all ties back into the cultural importance of building trust, accountability, and collaboration — everyone pointing in the same direction. 13:45 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. That's great — very practical. I feel like there's so much in this short episode, right? Yeah, for sure. It's a bit like Netflix — great value for money. Someone's got to pay for it though! Thanks very much everyone.
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