MEDMEN: The Lesson From Underestimating Self-Build as Competition

00:06 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. This is Andy — 00:08 Andy Whyte: — and that's Pim. And Pim, it's been a while since we got together to record an episode. I have a question — and it may be a little bit of a loaded question. Are there any lessons you could share about what you've learned in your role as CRO since we last met? 00:34 Pim Roelofsen: So many. Since we last met — it's been a while. We've seen the team grow. We've seen many different prospects we engage with as a selling team ourselves. And even for us, things don't always go exactly perfectly or according to plan. So yeah, there are definitely some lessons. Is there something specific you'd want me to zoom in on? 01:02 Andy Whyte: Yeah — a deal that we thought was more solid than it turned out to be, and how, in hindsight, it felt a bit daft. 01:12 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. So what I'll actually start with is a MEDDIC element to tee this up — because one of the biggest things for me, very early on when I first found out about MEDDIC, was the way we can start considering competition. Which is, of course, different than just rivals. And so for me, that was a bit of an eye opener. In this particular case — the deal I want to zoom in on — is that we massively underestimated self-build as competition. 01:47 Andy Whyte: It's so funny that that seems like such a binary competitor. We talk about competitors being your rivals of course, but also another initiative — basically anything that's going to compete with you for budget or resource. Inertia — doing nothing, staying the same. And then we always include self-build because if it's in the mix, it's a real threat. But you can go so long without seeing it. There are so many categories — security, infrastructure, marketing tech — where you rarely see self-build. But then occasionally you come across an industry where it's quite a big thing. And if that is the case, you absolutely have to include it as a competitor you look for all the time. 02:39 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And in this particular case, looking through the lens of value — there were zero question marks around the additional value we would be able to deliver. However, that doesn't just happen automatically. Even if you can do the same thing they would build for themselves a thousand times better — which we truly believed — it's not a foregone conclusion that it plays out the way you'd like. And so picking it apart in reflection, there were a couple of things we should have acted on earlier. The absence of a true champion — making sure we could get into a position to articulate the pain and the value we'd bring to the business, so that we'd influence their decision criteria enough that we'd ultimately end up partnering. In summary: we were never in a truly mutual evaluation. They were already set on self-building — all the resources and attention were going in that direction. 04:01 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I think every single MEDDIC element was crucial here. But of course the thing with building a champion is they have to understand what value you can bring to them. What pain can you uniquely solve, and how do you make them truly understand how you uniquely solve it — that comes back to decision criteria. And the interesting thing, on reflection, is that from a technical decision criteria perspective, there wasn't a single area where self-build had strength over us. They're not going to have the level of expertise we have. They're not going to have the level of experience we have. So much of what we do is pattern recognition — we've had literally tens of thousands of questions come up as we've helped enable organizations. We build the answers to those questions into our programs. They'd have to approach it completely afresh. It's just going to be a definition of "M stands for this, E stands for that." Our content is going to be more engaging, more relevant, more effective. 05:47 Andy Whyte: Where we didn't have color was the economic decision criteria. Because ultimately they were thinking: if we build this ourselves, we build it once and we've got it — not taking into account the maintenance, the updates, all of that. And because we didn't have a champion to have that conversation with, we found ourselves playing catch-up. 06:22 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's definitely a factor of us having happy ears and seeing it for what we wanted it to be. And something I want to pick up on: the only decision criteria category where we didn't have color was indeed the economic one. Because even the relationship decision criteria were in place — we were already a proven partner on a different side of the business, we had quite an extensive network within this organization. So I think we felt overly confident on the basis of history and previous success within this business. But there are no guarantees, no foregone conclusions. You can't underestimate things. And I'll point to the thing on the wall in your office: nobody regrets qualifying out. We wouldn't have regretted it if we'd done it sooner here. 07:17 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And very specifically — not having true engagement meant they weren't in a true evaluation. We did have access to the right stakeholders, but getting access and actually engaging are two different things in this example. You wouldn't have regretted qualifying out at all. 07:38 Pim Roelofsen: Not at all. I have never regretted qualifying out. But I do regret that we didn't do it sooner here. So in summary — the lessons learned: don't have happy ears. Don't assume that on the basis of past success you can have an easy run — and even if you get one, don't treat it as such. The second lesson: qualify out earlier by staying sharp on MEDDIC. 08:07 Andy Whyte: And something else to add: we often get asked how MEDDIC fits in from an existing customer perspective. And this was an existing customer. A large organization, one of our happiest customers — we work with multiple departments across the business. And it just goes to show how important MEDDIC is even for existing relationships. It's so easy to go "well, they know us, we've had tons of success" — but that's exactly why, in many cases even more so, it's important to make sure we're qualifying with MEDDIC, engaged with the right stakeholders, driving the right value conversations, and really in charge of the process. 09:08 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And in our team, there's never been a moment where anyone has been burned for something like this specifically — because the ownership of making something successful is on all of us. Am I happy this happened? In many ways, no. But at the same time, as long as you take the lessons from it and do better going forward, it's acceptable. If you think about everything MEDDIC-related — it's about focusing on the right things in the right deals, having the common language with your team, and getting better every day. That doesn't mean everything is executed perfectly — that goes for our team too. As long as we take it to become better, I can live with that. And we'll do better going forward. 10:01 Andy Whyte: Love it. Cheers, Pim! 10:03 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers, Andy!