MEDMEN: Channel, Partners and Co-selling

00:06 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. That's Andy — 00:08 Andy Whyte: — and that's Pim. And in this episode we're talking about channel. 00:12 Pim Roelofsen: Channel. Yes indeed. Because this is something we're really passionate about — MEDDIC as a common language for the entire go-to-market team. But in two ways. You've got co-selling, which is of course where the channel exists to help support go-to-market teams to sell with partners. But also what is often not talked about — which is that our partners have other partners as well. They have their own businesses to run, their own interests, and therefore their own decision criteria around which partner they want to work with. So if one of their customers calls them up and says "I'd like you to support me on this initiative" — the question is: who do they pick from their partners, and why? So from a vendor perspective, it's not just thinking about the co-selling notion of how we sell together, but also how we sell ourselves to our partners. 01:17 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. And if you go back to the beginning of what you said — it's across the go-to-market function. That includes the functions that work with partners within your own organization. And then what you're touching on here are separate companies starting to work together and truly collaborate by using one common language. Let's start with the co-selling side of things. Effectively what we're saying is we're working with another party on a mutual outcome — most likely we have the same customer, whether it's a prospective customer for both of us, or as is often the case, they're already a customer of the partner and the partner is helping us sell to them. 01:50 Andy Whyte: What we want to make sure we're doing in that instance is everything we can to help our partner portray us in the best way they can. They may know a lot about us, about our solution, our industry, and the customer's challenges and goals — but they're never going to know it as well as we do. So we want to make sure we can brief a partner, consult with them in the most succinct way possible, to enable them to do the best job they can of representing us — because we're not always going to be in those conversations. We want to make sure they understand what value we can bring, to which stakeholders, and therefore which stakeholders need to be involved in the process. Who is typically the champion? Who is typically the economic buyer? What are typically their pains, their interests, their decision criteria? And of course the process side too — what does a typical process look like? Understanding from our partner what that process looked like when they were working with the customer. 03:15 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And just using MEDDIC makes all of that so much clearer, so much easier — to package up our value, package up the stakeholders, and articulate the process to our partners. It's just the perfect way of doing it. Now — I've been selling with partners a lot in previous roles. And a question that should be asked here is: if your partner doesn't use MEDDIC, does it still work? And that introduces two variations. You collaborate with a partner and you both use MEDDIC — that's kind of the dream. And then there's the other variation where you use it across your GTM, but your partner doesn't necessarily use it. Does it still bring value? 04:02 Andy Whyte: For me, absolutely yes. Because it still underpins the understanding of how we cover value, stakeholders and process together. From the perspective of the company that uses MEDDIC, it will infuse the actions they're taking with that partner. If you imagine selling with a partner that doesn't use MEDDIC — well, what's the alternative? You either say: "Typically when we engage with an organization like this, we see they have these challenges and pains, which are costing them this much. And typically to solve them, they need these things from a solution like ours. And by the way, we're best suited for this because we have these things unique to our proposition. We typically need to engage with this person, and there's always this person over here who is the overall authority — who we absolutely must engage with because they make such a big impact on our success rate. And we normally see the process look like this." I haven't really said any MEDDIC words — well, I said pain, but that's fairly universal. 05:04 Pim Roelofsen: The alternative would be trying to find some sort of middle ground where you just end up being very inarticulate. You use a lot more words, and no one really knows what you've covered because you're just blindly talking and hoping you've hit all the bases. Whereas even as Andy was talking through that, I was going through my head: OK, we've covered the I, the M, the DC, the C for champion, the EB, the DP, the PP. And it just works. It just brings such clarity. 05:44 Andy Whyte: And I think to add another layer here — thinking about this in a holistic way across your partner and end customer relationship. If you're a vendor with a partner you sell with or through to the business that will ultimately derive the value from your solution — it might be that the personas you'd typically find in an end customer account are now sitting in the partner account. So the champion might be someone in the partner business, and that partner is the customer. At the end of the day, the end customer leans on the advice the partner gives them and ultimately decides which solution to go with. So you want to take a very flexible approach in terms of where the stakeholder sits in the respective dynamic of the engagement. 06:44 Andy Whyte: And I think now we're seeing trends in the market — like the AWS Marketplace — where the process elements shift from the typical place customers would go to procure technology to a centralized location. That introduces new ways of consuming technology, and looking at it through a MEDDIC lens is going to look different too. The best salespeople are the ones thinking: "Well, if this customer has a cloud transformation initiative, then there's at least one new champion in this business." Because I might be selling to marketing or security — whoever my typical contact is. But if that organization is heavily invested in their cloud provider, as they often are because of committed spends and all the associated value, then there'll be someone in that business who will be delighted if another department is considering a technology investment that could be procured through the marketplace. It benefits so many different stakeholders. So you've just found a new champion. And in the process, you've probably introduced cloud marketplace into the technical, economic and relationship decision criteria. 08:24 Andy Whyte: Technically it must be on their chosen cloud. From an economic perspective it helps go towards a committed spend. And from a relationship perspective — we're aligned. You're close to AWS, we're close to AWS. As our friend from AWS, Phil Stone, says: "You don't want to meet your customer at the checkout." And that's very well put by Phil. You want to identify that champion proactively — the person who would be really excited to know that you're partnering through the cloud marketplace. And on a topic like this, you really don't want to leave it until late. 09:00 Pim Roelofsen: Because that economic decision criteria you can tie to something like this also translates to the economic buyer. If the CFO is the economic buyer and they're looking at a massive spend commit — and suddenly you're able to tie yourself to that in a proactive way that your champion might not even know about — then you have this great additional angle that makes everybody more successful. And it will massively accelerate everything that follows. 09:35 Andy Whyte: One other thing I want to touch on — and I mentioned it at the start. We've been talking a lot about co-selling. But often, as I said, partners are partners — they have multiple vendors they work with, and often they work with our rivals. And one thing I think is brilliant from a partner perspective is making sure we're considering our partners' own interests. What pains are they likely to have? It could be poor margin. It could be that some of the vendors they work with have solutions that lead to unhappy customers or no real expansion opportunity. Whereas we have multiple products — we land and expand together, they resell our licenses. It could be that a rival solution is poor and lowers their NPS. Or it could be that they feel under-resourced and not getting the support they need from other vendors. 10:43 Andy Whyte: All these pains could exist. And so as the vendor, we need to consider: what pain does that partner have with other vendors, and how can we present ourselves as something better? And that's MEDDIC. The metrics could be: typically when we engage with a partner like you, we not only win more — which is important — but in those relationships our customers tend to want to spend more with you. So the relationship grows. That's just thinking about value. And from a decision criteria perspective — making sure we consider not just our customers' decision criteria but the partner's too. They're interested in share of wallet, good margins, all that good stuff. 11:23 Pim Roelofsen: And this is also where the full go-to-market approach comes into the picture again. Because everything you've said there — anyone watching this episode could be thinking: "As a seller, as an individual contributor, this is the mindset and approach I want to take as I collaborate with partners and make sure I'm working with the right partner on the right deal." But that's at the individual level. You also have the partner manager in the go-to-market team. And all of this also works at the level of the entire relationship with that partner — quantifying what your goals are together and considering all the other elements at large. 12:08 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And we shouldn't forget those other pillars. In the partner's business, you need a champion — someone who is thinking about you. So that when that customer calls up or that opportunity arises, your champion is saying: "The best solution we can bring to this customer is us." And the economic buyer — if we've done everything right with our partner to engage with their customer, everything's been perfect. But if the economic buyer within the partner's business has a relationship with another vendor who calls up and says "I know we're coming from behind, but I need your support — we'll make this work" — you can lose your deal because you didn't engage the economic buyer inside that partner's business. So you have to have that covered. 13:03 Pim Roelofsen: And of course decision process is crucial here too. It's so easy with partnerships to look at each other and go "yeah, you can bring a win to me and I can bring a win to you." But so often those conversations fade away — because the process of how you actually take this partnership to your customer base falls away. So if you're not doing that, you're leaning on a lot of assumptions. And that's never a good thing. 13:33 Andy Whyte: Never a good thing. So in summary — two parts to MEDDIC and channel. It can help you to co-sell. But it can also help you to sell yourself to the partner. Making sure we're always thinking about delivering the value we can provide, engaging the right stakeholders, and staying process-oriented. 13:53 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, that's an awesome summary. And I think it proves that MEDDIC expands across your own go-to-market team — but also to your partner ecosystem. 14:02 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. Cheers!