00:06 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim, this is Andy — 00:09 Andy Whyte: — and today we have a very special episode because for the first time ever, we have a guest. Welcome to the show, Caroline. It's great to see you. How are you? 00:21 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I'm amazing. This is great to be on the show. I've been watching it since it started and I'm excited to be on it. 00:29 Andy Whyte: Well, thank you for coming over — I know you don't live in London, where we are today. Where are you living now? 00:35 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Near Lisbon. 00:37 Andy Whyte: Brilliant. So for those that don't know you, maybe give us a quick introduction — how you got into this wonderful world of sales, some of your experience, all that kind of good stuff. 00:46 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Sales was by accident, like pretty much everybody. Twenty years ago I accidentally started with big companies — Computer Associates, Oracle and so on — which are good for methodologies. Then I went to the States, and when I came back I joined BMC. That put me on the path of why we're here today — we'll talk a little bit about MEDDIC. Then I moved on to exciting startups and scale-ups like Sprinklr and Datadog, which are also MEDDIC companies. And the last four years I've been on my own, building a consulting boutique company, helping European startups and scale-ups with their GTM playbook and everything that comes with it. 01:36 Andy Whyte: Love it. So cool. What you said there about startups and scale-ups — some of those logos are now pretty big companies. What was your timing, and what was it like at the time? 01:46 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Early. We opened a bunch of new logos with Sprinklr, and for Datadog I was pretty much first on the ground building the team for SaaS in Europe. Very early — Datadog was not what Datadog is now. Every day I'm talking to people and they say "oh, you're a MEDDIC person." And it's like, "oh, you're one of those." It becomes like a religion or something. And I always say: MEDDIC was given to me as a framework that I finally understood — because all of this is art, right? These companies scale based on the passion of their people. All MEDDIC brings to the table is the science to do it repeatedly. 02:43 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: And when you do this across the board — even product is now looking at metrics seriously. "Oh, we're going to create this new feature." Amazing. Why? "Look at the product-market fit criteria." I'm like: how many people are going to work on this feature for how long? Because if you don't think about problem-market fit — what is the pain you're fixing with this feature? So product is looking at it too now. And it all makes sense because MEDDIC is not just a methodology, as you've said many times — it is the science behind how to operate efficiently across all departments of a scaling company. And that's why I think startups and scale-ups really understand how important it is, because you create silos super fast when you scale super fast. 03:34 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And one of the things I love about the common language — and this is the most beautiful way of selling — is that you're storytelling, you're reference selling, you're not having to go in and ask those ridiculous discovery questions of "what keeps you awake at night?" and "who else cares about this?" You're just going in and saying: "Look, we believe we can help you because we've done it before — not just done it before, but done it with your peer organization, and here's the value they saw. Don't you want the same?" And if they want to go and talk to that peer who is both a potential champion and an existing champion, you bring them together. 04:07 Andy Whyte: But I think that's the sales cycle. In product, what you're talking about there is using that same logic of "here's where we're seeing pain in the field with our customers" — and using that information to inform the product team on what they should be focusing on. The greatest way MEDDIC helps with this is by getting product teams to look at the elements and ask: when we win, what is the decision criteria? When we lose, what decision criteria are we missing? And if I was leading a product team and I had this language, I could just tap in and start saying: "When we win, it's for these reasons. When we lose, it's for these reasons. What's that thing we're losing for? Can we fix that? Can we build that?" And what better reinforcement do you need than actually seeing it's going to win you more deals? 05:16 Andy Whyte: Now the product team builds it, and then the marketing team says: "We've got to do some marketing for this new feature." And they go: "Well, why don't we put it into the language the sales team, the SDR team, and the channel team are already using — let's just give it to them so they can talk to their customers about exactly how customers want to hear about it." Storytelling, reference selling, showing you've done your research, leading with value. It's just the best. 05:43 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: And so you're so right when you talk about how people have this perspective of MEDDIC. And it's because, like you said — and I hadn't heard it put that way before — using it as an efficiency framework. That's a really clever way of putting it. Because we tend to talk about it as a qualification framework, and we think it's so much more. But it's also really important to do qualification — so it's almost like we don't want to throw shade on qualification. But if you put it into isolation as just the thing that MEDDIC does, then you need these other languages. "Well, MEDDIC's just qualification, so when it comes to selling, you're going to need something trademarked." And that means flying in consultants and spending millions building a new language — when the one you've already got works perfectly. 06:32 Andy Whyte: Yeah. That's where it exceeds just qualification. Because as you're effectively using an M1 to do discovery — it's not qualification anymore. It actually becomes methodology. And what MEDDIC is, or what it can be, really comes down to the organization and the people within it and how they want to use it. And we recently talked about this — the analogy of phones. I know the iPhone gets used and abused as an analogy, but I'm going to use it anyway. If you go all the way back to the Nokia — for many people of our generation, that was our first phone. What could you do with it? Make calls and send text messages. 07:29 Pim Roelofsen: Oh, and have a week-long battery life! 07:31 Andy Whyte: Yeah! Anyway — back then it was great. And if we put that back into the context of MEDDIC and go-to-market teams, back then it was mostly used for qualification — what are the things we should be focusing on, uncovering gaps. And now it is so much more. But only if you have the open mindset towards it and actually let it be. 08:08 Andy Whyte: I think one of the things we're doing right now is just proving the power of the common language, because we're moving around lots of different examples. And one of the things I wanted to talk about — you mentioned being early at Sprinklr, early at Datadog. Those two companies are probably four or five times, maybe even ten times, the size in terms of people when you first joined. So much has changed. But if you think about a common language and how you were using it in those organizations back then versus how they use it now — it's probably a little different. But that's the versatility of it. And what I imagine — tell me if I'm right — is that in those early scale-up days, you weren't necessarily creating a category, but you were pushing into new territory. Sprinklr didn't create social media software, but they were certainly expanding the boundaries. And so you had to be very proactive — almost in what people would describe as a challenger sense, without the "you're wrong, I'm right" mindset. More like: leading with thought leadership. "Here's what we're seeing. Here's the pains we're seeing in the field. Here's the value we're seeing from solving those pains." Which is quite different from how I imagine those organizations are selling today, now it's a much more established category. 09:44 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Yeah. And in the last four years I've been working with companies that are more like Sprinklr and Datadog were at the time. They're building a go-to-market. A couple of things you mentioned that I want to talk about, that I think are very important. These companies were MEDDIC companies. And we've talked about this — it's bottom up and top down, and the leadership has to embrace it. But what does this mean? You can't do MEDDIC if you don't have that. One thing I keep seeing when talking about MEDDIC as a common language is companies that want to adopt it but haven't taken the time to write down their decision criteria. I still have people saying "decision criteria is price." And I'm losing my mind. 10:43 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: No, it's not. And sometimes I have to spend half an hour, 45 minutes, even with the leadership team, to tell them: no, it's always value. What are your differentiators? How do you differentiate in the market today? Sometimes it's not feature-function. In the case of Sprinklr — it was definitely holistic. In the case of Datadog — I'll give you two examples because they're very important. You can't do MEDDIC if you don't understand that you need your differentiators. You need those differentiators to solve pain better than anyone else. And you need to know who, at that moment, is the right customer. Because as you say, these companies are not the same companies they were seven years ago. Time flies because they're scaling — they win their early adopters, keep moving, and then in the case of Datadog, reach mass market. But back then they already had a strong story, a strong differentiator. 11:52 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: In the case of Sprinklr — I remember we had about 3,000 competitors. There were 3,000 that began with the letter S. What Ragy did at the time was genius — he said: "We're not competing against these guys, because we're targeting the enterprise." If you had a small brand or a small company with low maturity and no need, we would not go after them back then because they were not a product-market fit problem. What were we fixing? We were giving a platform — an entire suite. And that was not a feature-function thing, because if you took the modules back then independently, they might not have been the greatest. But as a suite, as a platform, nobody else could do it. Some people tried integrations, tried partnerships. Nobody could technically have all the information to do customer experience the way we did. And that was the differentiator. That was the go-to-market, that was the value. 13:03 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: So when we talk about metrics — we tried to go for ROI, which is what a lot of companies try to do. They come with Excel spreadsheets and calculate things. And CFOs, who are most of the economic buyers nowadays, don't care about that. But if you come with true metrics — "OK, this is how you used to do it before. How long. How many people. Impact on delivery. Impact on go-to-market strategy. And this is how you do it now" — that's very concrete. So the essence of all of this is to sit down and ask: what are their decision criteria? And if I can say this to everyone here — if you think it's price, you've got it wrong. 13:54 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: A lot of people say "no champion, no deal," "no pain, no gain," "no budget." But I see that we say this because we've always been in companies that had done the work — they'd got their differentiators, got their story right. So we were always like: "What's most important is champion and pain." And I still think champions are important when you've done the decision criteria work. Yeah, because you can be the best salesperson in the world, with the best product, selling to the company that needs your product more than anything else. But if your competitor has set their strengths as that prospective customer's decision criteria, you're playing a game where the rules are written towards your competitor winning. It doesn't matter how good you are, how good your product is, how much the customer needs you — they're judging you based on criteria that doesn't support your strengths. 14:49 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: And in this case — I can't name the customer — but we changed an RFP twice in our favor. It wasn't written by the competitor, it was written by the customer themselves. I remember they said: "If you want to get in, you have to send a proposal for £50K." And I was like: "No, we don't even know what we're talking about yet." When we did the presentation, we changed the game. We changed the story and opened it up towards what it would look like from a customer experience perspective — that was actually their decision criteria. So I think we forget that we can still influence the decision criteria, and the story is important there. 15:37 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I talk about this a lot with organizations like McKinsey and Bain — the super smart management consultancy firms who will not engage in the same way we as salespeople engage, without at least CEO or executive sponsorship before they've even talked about doing the work. They won't turn up for that first meeting without it — and from then on, they're going to be charging for everything. But if you were to zoom out and get someone with zero context of our industry and say: "Here's Caroline selling Sprinklr to L'Oréal, and here's someone from Bain talking to L'Oréal about the importance of customer experience and these new channels — tell me how those two are different." That person with zero context would struggle to really separate the two. And if you said: "Well, that person from Bain is charging $1 million just to give the information — and that person is giving all that information for free, because at the end of the day, the technology they're going to buy will mean they spend one and get ten back" — the person would go: "How does that one get to charge, and why doesn't that other person charge?" 16:59 Andy Whyte: And that's this weird scenario we've got into, because as an industry we've almost been apologetic about selling — because a lot of the time we are selling badly. Just rushing to the demo, pushing features and functions, not being the trusted advisor. You should be the consultant, right? 17:21 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I think when people — and I remember back then — we keep talking about Sprinklr, it must be boring for Pim. It's like a reunion and Pim wasn't invited to the party! 17:34 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah... so. 17:35 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: OK, so back then — I'm not going to name it because I don't want to promote any specific platform — but we had a worldwide group chat. And I think that's what made salespeople back then so passionate about their jobs: social media was such a bubbling, fast-moving industry. You had Chief Digital Officers putting programs in place. We had a bunch of people who were passionate and sharing articles so we could always be the experts in our field. I was coming from BMC — I was definitely not doing SaaS — and suddenly I'm on this rocket ship, Sprinklr, meeting with CMOs. You had to be relevant. It was like being educated consistently, because so many people were sharing about their industry. And this is what I say to people: try to be an expert. Before you try to be an expert in features and functions — you've got pre-sales to talk about the technical side — what you need to talk about in the first meeting is storytelling. 18:55 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: You mentioned that. And you said people still use MEDDIC as a qualification framework. I disagree. Because if you qualify with MEDDIC, you're already into that motion of "do I have all the info?" — you're almost doing BANT. If you're going into MEDDIC as a qualification framework, you're going at it like: "Do I have my pain? Do I have my champion?" And you're taking it with the wrong philosophy. If instead you're saying: "I know this client — I understand the value pyramid, I think they might have these pains, I'm going to create strong discovery questions in a challenger sales style, take them on a story, go to their pains, build my champion, and influence my decision criteria" — then you're doing it right. And then you take it from there and consistently use MEDDIC as a compass to see where you are and how much control you have within the opportunity. 20:15 Pim Roelofsen: And I think in both what you've said and everything we've discussed before — there's a big piece that goes back to mindset and how leadership thinks about these things. Because you were talking about top down, bottom up. When I was still a customer of MEDDICC, I experienced that first hand — it makes a big difference how the senior leadership team thinks about it, is bought into it, and is committing to it. And to your example about decision criteria — are we in a mindset of "we know why we win, so we don't need to spend much time and effort there"? Or "there's always room for improvement, always a next level, we can always unlock more potential"? For me that's a very big thing. 21:08 Pim Roelofsen: We were in Vegas a couple of months ago and we were talking about decision criteria in particular. We came up with the concept of three-dimensional decision criteria — as a reminder, and to make people think: what does that mean? Because to your point, it's not pricing. It can be a small factor in the economic decision criteria. Technical decision criteria — table stakes. And then there's relationship criteria as well. As a seller you want to cover all of them. But if you go back to something you said about ten, fifteen minutes ago: if you want to do this at scale and help an organization unlock its next level of potential, you do need the entire organization on board. How many examples have we seen where the starting point of two organizations is relatively similar, but the collective commitment made all the difference — not only in the success, but in how quickly they got there? 22:17 Pim Roelofsen: So if you put this into the context of MEDDIC — a lot of it depends on how you think about it and whether you apply a growth mindset to it. If you go back to decision criteria and the required capabilities — the neutral version of presenting your differentiators — good salespeople look for unique selling points when they're joining a company like crack cocaine. Because they know they're going to position them systematically as strong differentiators. But they also tell the leadership: these have a lifetime. You can only be unique for maybe three to six months before someone catches up. And once they do, it becomes a comparative, a commodity — just part of an RFP. So from a leadership perspective you have to consistently think about how, just like the iPhone — you have to picture the problem of the industry. And you can only do that if you understand the industry you're selling to better than they know themselves. 23:44 Andy Whyte: I want to go back to something you said before and tie two things together. One was around the occasional negative PR that MEDDIC sometimes gets. And the other was how it's seen as a qualification framework, and why that's just a bad way to look at it. I think those two go hand in hand. The reason some people have a negative perspective of MEDDIC is because they see it just as — and I know this term gets used — the X-ray tool that tells you which bones are broken. This mindset of: "You've got this great tool that tells you which bones are broken." Well, I don't know about you, but if I'm climbing a tree and I need a tool, I want to know which branch is going to break before I fall and break my arm. 24:46 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I like this analogy. 24:47 Andy Whyte: So I want that — because if the bones are already broken, maybe my champion is a false champion, I'm losing on decision criteria, the decision process is running away from me. I want to get ahead of that. If we were to write down right now what we think are the ten best traits of a salesperson, they would all align with being proactive, not reactive. Setting the decision criteria, building the champion, all that good stuff. And so if you're looking at it retrospectively — looking back at deals — that's the problem. That's why it goes back to that negative PR. People think it's about using MEDDIC retrospectively. "I'm the manager, you're the salesperson, and I'm going to run your deal against these letters. It's going to make me look really smart and make you look stupid." 25:53 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I had this recently — and I know it's a common term but I only just heard it: "stump the chump." The idea is you're basically trying to catch the person out. And I think that's how it gets a bad name. I've been thinking about this in the last six months — we keep calling them deal reviews. And I think there's something wrong with that word. Because a review — if I go to a restaurant and leave a review, I'm finished at that restaurant. If I go to a hotel, it's final. Whereas you're brainstorming. You're just getting started. You know — and it never ends. Because when the deal is closed, salespeople have done all this great work building champions, and then they have to give it away — to Customer Success or a key account manager or whatever. They're giving away all their work to somebody else, and there's no transition. It's very sad. "Deal" doesn't make sense either, especially if MEDDIC lives through the customer lifecycle — which it should. 29:31 Andy Whyte: Exactly. And MEDDIC lives throughout the customer lifecycle. And even outside of the formal sales cycle — we've all been in deals where we've been doing the best job we can and something's changed out of our control. And if we treat MEDDIC the way so many people do — "that's my champion, that's the economic buyer, that's the decision criteria, done, check, on to the next" — we're going to fail. Because someone else has come in: a competitor, a new stakeholder with a different view, different pain, different decision criteria. Maybe they had a bad experience with our company before, or a great experience with someone else. Everything's changing all the time. So it's of course the full customer lifecycle — but even just within the sales cycle itself, it keeps going. 30:20 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Oh yeah. And when something goes wrong — you did the checklist. It's really interesting: think of all the deals you've done in the last ten years. How many have you closed where you were really proud — and you were telling the story of having a complete MEDDIC? 30:43 Andy Whyte: Good question. Like — no. Of course you complete it if you want to complete it on paper. I suppose I'd say I feel like I have consensus on everything, I feel like everything was confirmed and qualified. But I think it's virtually impossible to truly complete it. 30:59 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Exactly — it cannot be done that way. It proves that if you do it as a reporting exercise — "it's green" — first of all, you're going to fool yourself. You're going to fool the entire company. Because "my champion is in green" — so are we going to stop developing and testing? Is that what's happening? 31:23 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And it goes back to something you were saying just a minute ago. Salespeople entering the session — if they don't know what's expected of them and feel like the onus is on them to show that they're doing a good job, that they know everything that's going on — I would be lying if I said I hadn't been in that position myself. I told you a story about a worldwide VP of Sales I had very early in my career. I would be sweating two weeks before he came in for the overview sessions. And that goes back to what you were saying about trust. If you go in with that laboratory mindset — "we're going to find out what's wrong so we can come up with the right actionable items" — that's the way to do it. But that goes back to creating the right culture where that can happen. 32:19 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And one last thing on deal brainstorms — there's another wonderful output from those sessions: if you have them as team sessions and you invite in as many people as you can — product, marketing, SDRs, Customer Success — not just because it's a great opportunity for them to learn deal craft. I've been in so many of these sessions where you're talking about a stakeholder — an economic buyer, a champion or something like that — and suddenly the SDR says: "Oh, they used to work at ABC. And this person also works there. And that person's a big champion for us over here." Because that's what great SDRs do. They know the network. So as much as they're learning deal craft, they also bring huge value to the table. 33:25 Andy Whyte: And what you also get is that everybody's learning. Because if you take a typical pod of salespeople, there'll be one brilliant salesperson who knows the craft inside out. There'll be someone who knows the space really, really well. There'll be someone who's super well-connected. And what you get is basically a live training session — almost like a role play — of "how can we move, how can we overcome some challenges we're seeing in deals?" Everybody benefits. And the person who benefits the most is the person whose deal it is, who comes away buzzing, ready to go and attack the field with those tactics. So if you're a sales manager or individual contributor and your team isn't doing this — get them doing it. We'll call them deal brainstorms. 34:19 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I remember at Sprinklr we used to call them clinics — so that salespeople could help one another. And I want to go back on that. Yes to the pod. Yes to bringing in people from outside the pure sales organization — marketing, product, Customer Success, even if they're not yet on the account. I limit it to five people though. Because when you have too many, some people — especially in a virtual meeting — have their camera off, they're doing something else, and it drags down the energy. If you come to this session, you have to feel grateful and lucky to be there, and you have to give back to the salesperson who's giving you a deal on a platter to practice on. 35:19 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: The other thing is: if you record it and you have a good enablement team internally, I recommend recording the sessions and giving them to the enablement team so they can take mini snippets of things to use in training. Because this is like an onboarding session — there's nothing better than a real example to understand what was said on a live deal, what the call to action was when someone didn't have a champion. That's super powerful. And I'll take it back to the common language — because imagine the enablement team trying to make sense of some chat about a deal without MEDDIC language. "You know what, you need to go to Steve, and Steve's boss Jessica needs to approve this, and you need to get him to understand the features and benefits, and then we need to figure out in the timeline where this happens" — everyone would be like "whoa, whoa, whoa." Whereas: "We need to make sure the champion introduces the economic buyer, and they're bought into the decision criteria so we can move forward on the decision process." That's it. 36:15 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: And this is actually a tip I use with clients. If you're in one of those sessions and someone does a great introduction to an opportunity using MEDDIC language — go: "OK. Now try and do that without using MEDDIC language." And watch how much they struggle to describe it. And that's just what it's all about — because it works across the entire go-to-market team. And even within those three salespeople you were describing — you want to create the effect of having the phone burning in your pocket. The person driving the deal will walk away with the most value. But by way of the common language, if Steve's champion in the deal being brainstormed — then Barry, and whoever else is in the room, can very quickly switch to their own deal: "Hold on, this is 100% applicable to what I should be doing as well." And that's when the phone starts to burn. Not the Nokia — the iPhone. 37:28 Andy Whyte: We're right at the end now — this has flown by. I'm going to put a question to you: if you had the opportunity to talk about one element — one letter — of MEDDIC, which one would you choose and why? 37:50 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I mean, we've talked about many letters, but I want to go back to champion. And as we've said — MEDDIC nowadays is not the same MEDDIC as when it was created in the 90s, because we're in a different era with different types of companies. I think it's the same with champion. There are different champions you need to know of. Number one: procurement. On the field, we're actually seeing that you can create champions in procurement if you go to them very early on — because they are essentially reverse salespeople. If you create a friendly atmosphere with them, they can actually be true champions. 38:43 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Number two: I've started making a distinction — because for deals over $200K you usually have several champions. I started using names for different champion types. I differentiate the operational champion from the deal champion. Because a lot of people nowadays confuse the economic buyer — who has the final yes — with the deal champion. And what is a deal champion? This is something I first experienced at BMC. It's somebody who knows how to talk to the EB. I am living proof that you can do deals without ever directly meeting the EB — as long as you have access to the EB through the right champions. And the deal champion is very important there, because you can lose a deal just by confusing champion and EB. In the world of CMOs, for example — a CMO can have the budget, they can be the person who signs. But we all know this is not the EB. Asking the question: "Who do you have to present this to to get final approval?" — that's essential to distinguish between the EB and the deal champion. There's a lot more to be said about the champion evolution in 2024. 40:21 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: And the last one — you might roll your eyes — but I keep seeing people tell me: "Oh, my champion is Danny. Danny is my champion, Danny this and Danny that." And you know where I'm going with this. If you're talking to only one person within the company — that's not champion-worthy, that's not what the metrics support. You have to talk to at least three to five people outside of Danny to know that Danny is a potential champion. There's a lot to be said about champion because, no champion, no deal. And even if Danny is the unicorn that doesn't actually exist — who can just be the one person you talk to — things happen. People leave. You can't rely on one source of truth. How do you know that Danny's pain is the company's pain if you can't double-check it with other people? 41:22 Andy Whyte: Yeah, absolutely. Triple-check it even. And what I love about what you're saying there — and we see it the same way — is having different flavors and responsibilities of champions. We see so much now of cloud marketplaces, where a lot of big deals are being transacted. If you're selling to a big organization that has a cloud commitment with Google, AWS or Microsoft — inside that organization there will be a cloud champion just waiting to be activated. Somebody who's responsible for the AWS relationship, for example, who loves it when you transact through the AWS Marketplace because it goes towards their committed spend and they know what a great, seamless experience that is. So if you're a proactive salesperson listening to this right now, and you're selling to an organization with a relationship with AWS — inside that organization there will be somebody who is just waiting to be activated as a champion for you. Because they'll see transacting your solution through the marketplace as a good thing for them. And that will help you get so much of the good stuff Caroline just described — including procurement as a champion. 42:48 Pim Roelofsen: And I think this might be — by way of you both going back in time a little bit — worth tagging on here. Because once upon a time, I was your champion. 43:05 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: That's right! Yeah. 43:05 Pim Roelofsen: And I think companies typically have a pretty good idea about what a potential champion looks like for them — this profile, this role — and that's what they target in their pipeline generation efforts. I wouldn't necessarily have been a typical champion persona. So my point is: you do look for the right role, but if someone unexpected steps up to help you, you want to qualify them against what we know are the three traits of a champion. And to your point — if you're just talking to that person and they're being nice to you, you can fall into the trap of happy ears. Probably not your champion. Maybe a coach. They can still be helpful, but you need someone getting you access to other potential champions and ultimately the EB. So: look for that person. Sometimes they won't be your typical role — but they can still be a champion for sure. 44:04 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: I think the conclusion is: don't always try to find champions in the buying persona. Find your champions in whoever is actually having the pain. For example — I'm selling a solution in HR to help you recruit faster. My buying personas are in HR — they're the ones doing the RFP, looking at features, functions, price. But who has the pain of not recruiting fast enough? The Director of Sales, the Head of Factory. Those are the people you go and see. They're not recruiting fast enough. And they are going to put pressure on HR to work with you faster. 44:49 Andy Whyte: And then what you really want to understand is how they win. Because going back to Pim's example — did he really experience the pain we were looking to solve at scale? Well, to a degree. But mostly he had a very clear vested interest — he saw a potential wider initiative he could attach himself to, which he thought at the time would mean great things for his career and development. And now he's here in this seat. So it played out nicely. That thing you really want to understand with your champion: what is their vested interest? How do they win when you do? 45:26 Andy Whyte: Wow, that time flew. Thank you so much, Caroline. I think this is going to be one for the ages. It's been so long overdue — we've been talking about getting you into the MedMen studio for two years, since pretty much when we started the show. And I think you've nailed it. You've nailed the outfit, you've got the style of the era perfectly. Thank you. 45:58 Caroline Woussen-Franczia: Thank you for the invite. This was great. As you said at the beginning — we only met each other for the first time today. But I feel like I've known you for a while. When I first came across MEDDICC, we had a couple of meetings and I started reading the books on the shelf over there. So I feel like I've known you for a while. But it was great to have this conversation with you — thanks for taking the time. 46:24 Andy Whyte: Thank you, Caroline.
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