MEDMEN: The Importance Of Leadership In A MEDDPICC Initiative

00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim, this is Andy. And today we are talking about the sheer importance of leadership in your MEDDIC initiative. I would say: if you're thinking about doing a MEDDIC initiative without the full commitment of the leadership team, you might as well not bother at all. Just go home. Isn't that right, Andy? 00:20 Andy Whyte: You know it is right. I will say this — using MEDDIC is better than not using it at all. We get it all the time: individuals who reach out and say "hey, the company I work for doesn't use MEDDIC — I've read the book or done some of your programs and I really like it, but what can I do? We don't use it internally." And I always say: it's better to just use it on your own. Everyone understands the components — if you talk about a champion, if you talk about pain, people understand what you mean. But what we're talking about here is that if you haven't got the complete commitment — not just sponsorship, but the complete commitment of your entire go-to-market team — you are never going to unlock the full potential of a MEDDIC implementation. 01:07 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, I would agree. First and foremost, if you're an individual contributor looking into MEDDIC — yes, there's massive potential for you in terms of doing better in your current role and landing a new role that requires MEDDIC experience. But if you look at it from the perspective of a company doing a MEDDIC initiative — the full go-to-market team, with the leadership of that entire team committed to the initiative, is the best possible outcome. Realistically, we still often see it start in sales — which is better than not doing it at all. But the thing that keeps coming back as what people want to eradicate is the flavor of the month. "Here we go again — we're talking about something new." And that shouldn't be the case. Typically the difference-maker, the change-maker, is leadership, isn't it? 02:01 Andy Whyte: I lived this. The first time I learned MEDDPICC, the company I was working for flew the entire sales team out to Dallas — spending a week in seminars learning about MEDDPICC. Everyone coming in jet-lagged, bleary-eyed, learning this framework we now know and love. Great framework. We flew back to London and had these really long Word documents to fill out. And it just clicked for me — I've talked about this before. So I was bought in and started doing what I'd been trained to do. No one else was. I can remember the moment clearly: my sales engineer, Kelsey — great sales engineer — I sent her my completed MEDDIC document as I'd been trained to. She took it over to the VP and everyone was like: "Wow, look — someone actually did what we were trained to do for a week!" This was a month later. And I remember thinking: this hasn't worked. Because it was the flavor of the month. That was what we were doing. There was no real complete, solid buy-in from the entire go-to-market leadership team. The sales leadership team didn't speak the language, didn't embrace it. So yes — for me it unlocked new levels of my own potential and helped turn the light on for what I now know as professional selling. But it was just me, and that organization didn't unlock the full potential they had in front of them. 03:47 Pim Roelofsen: I've got my own version of a story like this. Some of our viewers will know that I was a customer here before — I used to work for Cisco. We had a couple of steps in our MEDDIC initiative. And the third step was taking it global. The most senior leader for that global organization said: "We'll do this because it's great for everybody — the quality of the training is all there, it's a good investment in our people — but we don't want to impose it on anyone. Use it if you want to, but you don't have to." And you know what happened? Exactly what you were describing. There were a handful of people using it because they connected to it through their own vested interest — "I'm gaining something from this, I'm getting sharper, I'm getting more successful, I'm getting more deal certainty." But if you look at it from the perspective of an organization trying to unite their whole team through a common language — it doesn't work like that. You end up with small pockets of excellence. 04:51 Pim Roelofsen: Can you imagine the difference that would have happened at Cisco if someone had grabbed that opportunity and unlocked the full potential of an organization like Cisco? Getting all those business units talking the same language — being proactive, consolidating their messaging, creating concise value propositions, connecting with the partner network so that whoever a Cisco partner speaks to, whichever account representative it is, they get the same download, they can give the same upload — the same language. The customer getting a consistent experience. But no — it was optional. A massive missed opportunity. And when you see some of the work we did — like when you were my champion and we made those great strides with the Meraki part of the business — that was sponsored, it was committed to, and you compare that to how it landed in the rest of Cisco. It's an incredible case study for how not to do it. 06:03 Andy Whyte: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you really look at our industry, what you were describing at that Dallas event — that is what's happening all the time. When we say leadership commitment, that's not just the thing at the front end of an initiative — a senior leader saying "hey, we're all going to do this, everybody on board" and that initial energy gets everyone saying "yes, let's do it" — and then you go back into the field and it magically kind of happens. It doesn't work like that. In the same sense that we say not all MEDDIC is equal — it's about depth and quality of content — it's also true that not all MEDDIC initiatives are equal. And typically the big change-maker is how leadership shows up, not just at the event, but week in, week out, making sure that the environment they create allows this common language to truly cement in how the operation works. 07:00 Andy Whyte: Yes — it's the thing. It underpins everything you do. So you really have to show up every single week with that same commitment. And the what's-in-it-for-the-leader is significant. It's not just that the sales team is going to be higher performing — if you work with MEDDIC the way we see it, it's going to be the entire go-to-market team that increases performance. The marketing team can use MEDDIC language in their positioning, so they're consistent and cohesive when they talk about pain and the metrics that measure the delta between the before and after state. They use proactive decision criteria in all their positioning — so that when prospects come across their website or their marketing materials, they're starting to be inspired with what the vendor thinks their decision criteria should be. We're influencing proactively from the very start. 07:55 Andy Whyte: That carries through to the SDRs, who then pick up those leads and can see: what pain was it that attracted this customer? They flow through with relevant messaging to capture that customer's attention, book the meeting, and hand over to the account executive — who can say: "The reason why we called this customer in was this use case, this M1. And this is how we're going to differentiate." Carry that all the way through the sales process — including working with channel partners, giving those partners a consistent briefing, aligning on what value you're talking about to which stakeholders and where you are in the process. Consistent all the way through. And then delivery as well — bringing together the selling team and the delivering team, the AEs and the Customer Success managers, with one message. That's what's in it. That's why go-to-market teams and their leadership, more importantly, should be excited about this. That's what we talk about when we say you're not unlocking the full potential if you don't have them on board — because all of those little gems, and those are just a handful of literally thousands, are just left on the table. 09:06 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. I think if any leader stepped into the organization you're describing — which describes some of our customers today — and saw what's going on, they would think: "What is happening here? Everything feels simple. Almost like they're playing a game using cheat codes." But that's not what it is. It's underpinning the whole organization with a common language so that everybody operates with a next-level sense of clarity. And if we connect it back to vested interest for leaders — it's about generating the results the business is after. For individuals, it's reaching their full potential, taking the next step in their career, winning bigger deals. Everybody wins at the end of the day. 10:01 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I will just say — the best examples we've seen of this, some really commendable ones, have been where the CEO has been the one leading the charge. I don't like the term "sponsor" because that suggests it's just: "use my name to make things happen and I'll dip in and out." In these cases the CEO is fully committed. I've seen them on stage multiple times — we're talking top-tier CEOs, Fortune 500 founders. I've seen that person on stage with just one word behind them: MEDDPICC. I've seen them in deal reviews. I've seen them in conversation. I've seen them by the water cooler talking deals in the language — at the standard that everyone should be aiming for. And it's not just because it's good for the go-to-market team. It's actually easier for that CEO — they don't have to try and unpack or translate. They just understand. 10:56 Andy Whyte: And the single biggest takeaway from what you said there is the consistency. It's not just the big stage moment at the beginning — the screen behind them, the launch event. It is the every-single-day cadences and how they show up in their organization. What we are saying is that without leadership — without a continuous commitment throughout the entire year, for multiple years — this doesn't happen. You won't see that big, sustainable success in your organization. 11:27 Pim Roelofsen: Exactly right. Cheers to that!