MEDMEN: Deal Complexity

00:06 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. That's Andy — 00:08 Andy Whyte: — and this is Pim. And we're going to talk about MEDDIC relative to complexity. 00:14 Pim Roelofsen: Yes. The age-old question: we sell to small and medium businesses, we are a commercial team — is MEDDIC right for us? We get that question a lot. And it's almost like saying: is qualifying still relevant if you sell to smaller businesses? 00:37 Andy Whyte: Yeah, a great way of putting it. And the too-long-didn't-listen version of this is: yes, it is. Because where people make the mistake is they say: "I was looking at that opportunity with that large Fortune 50 company that took a year, had 100 stakeholders, 50 meetings, and a very detailed version of MEDDIC used throughout. We sell to small businesses. We have one or two meetings — maybe three. We rarely see more than one stakeholder. So MEDDIC can't be relevant because it works for those gigantic situations — how could it be relevant for the small ones?" 01:21 Andy Whyte: Because as we know, it always goes back to the pillars of professional selling. A small business is still trying to solve for something. There are still stakeholders involved. You still have to follow a process. So if we're saying that just because we've got a fast-moving opportunity with not many stakeholders and a fast process — that we're not going to focus on value, not going to focus on engaging the right people, not going to make sure their interests are covered in the decision criteria, not going to understand the process — that sounds a lot like order-taking. 02:11 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. If you approach it like that as a seller, you're not really selling. You're just getting on a demo, showing the product, sending a proposal, and waiting for the customer to say yes. And then we probably think we're being a salesperson because we say: "Hey, what about that — give you a discount, will you sign then?" That's not really selling. That's just haggling on the seafront. That's not professional selling. 02:42 Andy Whyte: No, absolutely right. And we do get quite a few customers who come to us with this very question. They'll typically serve small businesses, and sometimes mid-market and enterprise as well. And the question becomes: should we only do a MEDDIC initiative — only empower the team with this common language — for the enterprise layer of our team, or should we do it throughout? And we've always said: this underpins professional selling. So unless your team are order-takers, you want to do this across the board. 03:19 Andy Whyte: But over time we started to put this into an analogy. As some viewers will know, we're into F1 — and I think we have a good example of how it works relative to complexity. A Formula 1 race, depending on the circuit, could be anywhere from 50 to 90 laps and take multiple hours. In that race there is so much going on — engineers, tyre changes, sometimes refueling. There's a wider strategy. You're going to spend a lot more time thinking about each lap, each pit stop. That might be your average engagement in B2B sales. 04:14 Pim Roelofsen: But then when you have the sprint race — which is around 20 laps, with no planned pit stops — you wouldn't look at that and say: "We shouldn't prepare for pit stops because they're very unlikely to happen." You'd still be prepared. What you do is take the strategy and apply it accordingly to the length of the race. And it's the same with the complexity of the sales cycle. Then at the other end of the spectrum you've got 24-hour races — much more strategy goes in there. The point we're making is: you make the amount of MEDDIC you apply to an opportunity relative to the complexity of the opportunity. 05:03 Andy Whyte: Yeah, absolutely. So if we take the 24-hour race and the sprint race as the two ends of the spectrum — large enterprise deal versus something that is just one or two meetings — you can think about EB engagement as a specific example. In the sprint race you're still looking for pain to solve for, still looking for a metric to position and prove how well you've done it before, the persona you're working with you're probably still treating as a champion, and you might be coaching them to make sure they're audible-ready when they need to get sign-off from the EB. You might have identified the EB but not necessarily engaged them — that's a quick example of the sprint side of things. On the large enterprise side, the sales cycle stretches across 12 to 18 months and you're constantly executing with the framework as a lens, covering every single base. Same framework, executed in a way that is relative to the complexity of the deal. 06:14 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, for sure. And in summary, it really comes down to this: if you're approaching any engagement with a customer to sell your solution, you have to qualify. You have to first understand whether there's a pain worth engaging this customer for. If it's only one or two meetings — is there enough value you can provide to make it worth their while? Not just to buy, but to go through this process of evaluation. Because just because it's a shorter engagement doesn't mean we're any less precious with our time. If you have salespeople with larger opportunities that last longer, they have fewer of them. If you're working on smaller opportunities, you have more of them. Your time is just as precious either way — you should still be making sure you're spending it in the right places. 07:10 Andy Whyte: And if you qualify that way, it's a better experience for the customer too. If you're both mutually looking for value — then think about the stakeholders. As you aptly said, we may not get engagement with the economic buyer. That may not happen — either because we're not going to be able to do it, or because the deal is moving fast and we'd actually slow it down by trying to bring another stakeholder in. But that doesn't mean we neglect that person's interests. We want to make sure we're still building out clarity on the pain we solve, the value of addressing it, and how we do it via the decision criteria. So that when our identified champion is selling internally — as they may need to even for a fast-moving deal — all the right stuff is there. We're arming them in our absence, because we know we won't have the time to do those things ourselves. 08:00 Andy Whyte: And then of course the process — you're still going to have to forecast, still need to understand what's going to happen before you get that deal in. So absolutely — it's important to focus on value, stakeholder, and process. And as we know, MEDDIC is the best way to do it. 08:26 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. The one thing I'll add — and it's more of a leadership point — is to be very careful around the expectations you set for the team. On the smaller end of the business you typically have high velocity, high number of deals, high number of interactions. Arming your team with MEDDIC is the best thing you can do to underpin professional selling across these three pillars. But at the same time, you don't want to introduce a massive amount of admin workload on each and every opportunity. The expectations and guidance you give are going to be imperative for the success you have with this — across every point on that sliding scale of complexity. 09:09 Andy Whyte: Well said. Cheers! 09:12 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers — I think you found the glass just in time!