00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show, Season 3 — 00:02 Andy Whyte: — Episode 1! 00:04 Pim Roelofsen: My name is Pim and that's Andy. And in this episode we are going to talk about two things that people get wrong with a common language. 00:13 Andy Whyte: Yeah, a common language. You know, it's funny that we should be having this as an episode topic, because I can genuinely remember a time not so long ago — around the time I was writing the book — where I really debated about referring to MEDDIC as a common language. Because people didn't understand what it meant. Every time I referred to it as a common language, I'd have to follow up and explain what I meant. And I think now we're seeing it almost become a bit of a buzzword. Every methodology, every framework is throwing their hat in the ring to say "oh yeah, we're a common language" — but they're getting it wrong. They're looking at a common language from the perspective of: well, if the whole sales team uses the same framework or methodology, then it becomes common. No it's not. It does not make it common, because outside of that sales team, no one knows what it is. That would suggest it's actually the opposite — it's uncommon. 01:01 Andy Whyte: And that may not seem like a big problem — you might say: "Well, if everyone in the sales team speaks it, then it is a common language." But it's not. Because every time you hire someone new to the team, you're going to have to teach them this new language on top of teaching them the product, on top of teaching them about the personas they'll be selling to, the industry, all of the stuff new starters have to go through — the three-letter acronyms, learning how to submit expense reports, all of that. Yeah — so that impacts time to attainment, the overall experience. There's enough to deal with as it is. It's a new language they have to learn. 01:38 Andy Whyte: But I think there's a bigger problem than having to learn it — it's the will to learn. If you join a company and they say: "You'll need to learn the product — of course. You'll need to learn the industry — of course. You'll need to learn how we operate — of course." But then: "You've also got to learn this obscure common language that one in every hundred companies uses." If you do a job search for that term, it's barely going to come up. But if you search for MEDDIC, you're going to see thousands of jobs. So the will to learn is important — because if you join a company and they say "we use MEDDIC," the person is going to go: "Great — this is something I'm not just going to use here. It's going to make my job easier, make me more successful, make me more cohesive with my team. And I can go and join other organizations — those top organizations that we know use MEDDIC or a variation of it like MEDDPICC." 02:44 Andy Whyte: So you have the will there as well. And will gets fueled by what's in it for me — what's in it for the individual. It's something that will make them better in their current role immediately, and something that will reflect well on their CV forevermore. 02:57 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. I have a story — I went to a small Caribbean island. My wife is from there. She would like for me to learn the local language, but it's spoken by maybe 0.00001% of the world's population. And at the time I had to decide: am I going to spend time and effort learning that language, or am I going to double down on a language like English to open up career opportunities? I did the latter. Sometimes it gets me in trouble at home. But the point is: you make a decision on the basis of your vested interest. 03:30 Pim Roelofsen: If you look at our industry, when an individual gets to learn MEDDIC as a language, it opens doors. It opens up opportunities with the very top of our industry. I get asked every day — no word of a lie, at least once a day — either from a sales leader who's hiring: "Andy, do you know any people in Berlin? In Dallas? On the East Coast, West Coast?" — who've been through our programs or know MEDDIC at the level we teach. Likewise, I get salespeople every day saying: "Where's the next hot MEDDIC company? I want to go there." They know it's going to be an asset. And they know there's an association between MEDDIC and the fastest-growing, highest-executing companies out there. So really, really important. 04:20 Pim Roelofsen: So that's the first thing people get wrong: they think about a common language meaning it's just commonly spoken in the sales team. No — it has to be commonly spoken in our industry. There has to be upside for the person investing their precious time in learning it. The second thing people get wrong with a go-to-market language is that they think about just the sales team. We already know how much progress we've made as an industry in evolving to think not just about the sales team, but the revenue team, and now the go-to-market team. And the common language has to be for the whole go-to-market team. You can't have one language in marketing, another in the SDR team. It's like the marketing team doing all their marketing in French, the SDR team trying to book meetings in Spanish, and then a salesperson coming along in English or Dutch. It doesn't make sense. 05:05 Andy Whyte: Even if you're translating between them — which is what happens, by the way. The product team talks about "jobs to be done" or "user problems." The marketing team talks about "problem statements." The sales team talks about "pain." Well, all of those things are the same. There are all different words for the same meaning. It's literally a collection of uncommon languages bundled up together. 05:35 Andy Whyte: So for a common language, it has to work across not just the entire go-to-market team — product included — but the entire customer lifecycle as well. There's no point qualifying using "pain" and then when you're actually selling, switching to "negative consequences" or "before states" or anything like that. It has to be consistent all the way through. So that when the product team is ideating, they think about pain — and they can give that briefing directly to the marketing team, who can then use the same pain, look at the metrics they hypothesize will come, and think about: what decision criteria will we need to inspire a customer to want our solution? Who is the person that's going to benefit — who's the champion? Who's the economic buyer? What are their interests? And that carries all the way through from positioning to selling to, importantly, delivering value. 06:30 Andy Whyte: And of course the beauty here is: the value you deliver — if it's captured in a common language — means the product team and the marketing team can just listen in. Be a fly on the wall with customers to understand: what pain do we solve? What value do we get from solving it? What are the metrics that measure the pain to the value? How does our solution do it — decision criteria — and who cares — the champion? Why are we better than the competition? It's a common language. It's beautiful. I'm a little bit invested — but I love it. 07:00 Pim Roelofsen: We can tell! Alright — so two things. The first: a common language has to be common not just at the level of your sales team, which is like a tiny pixel on a very wide canvas that is our industry. It has to be a common language in our industry. The second: it has to be applicable across the full go-to-market team — product included — and across the full customer lifecycle. So that it unites the entire go-to-market team to do the best possible job for our customers. It's a common language that is truly common — and that's what makes it a language.
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