MEDMEN: MEDDIC Coaching

00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim, that's Andy — and today we're talking about MEDDIC coaching. 00:07 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I have to say, I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this one. I think a lot of people in our industry think that what they class as coaching salespeople is just telling them what to do. And I think the reason for that is that most sales leaders were formerly salespeople themselves. So when they move into sales leadership, they see somebody doing the job they used to do — and typically if you're in sales leadership, you've had some success, so you were good at selling. And they see the people in their team and just tell them what to do. "Do this, overcome that challenge by doing this, overcome that objection this way." And of course we know the perils that come with that. Then what we see when you overlay MEDDIC on top of it is you become a more succinct, more cohesive version of that — more specific about "build that champion, engage that economic buyer, accelerate that decision process." But that is not coaching at all. If you think about sports teams, coaches aren't just on the sideline saying "you do that, you do this." Coaching is about enriching the players, building the team. And for me it all comes down to three T's. The first is trust. The second is timing. The third is tactics. And it's the tactics that I've just been talking about — the one everyone focuses on. But before you get anywhere near tactics, you have to start with getting the trust right. That means the people in your team trust you as their leader, and you trust them as part of your team to work together towards the same goal. 01:52 Pim Roelofsen: That's so interesting. I've heard you talk about a sports analogy many times, but more recently about creating space — for your team, for your colleagues. And if you tell someone what to do, that's the inverse of that. It's almost paralyzing to the person on the receiving end of it. 02:09 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And if you think about that in the context of trust — going back to coaching with MEDDIC — it's not about telling them what to do. It's having the conversation in a trusted environment so that they can get out of their own head, see what they need to do, and then do it. 02:24 Pim Roelofsen: Yes. And here's the thing — we always say this, but it's worth saying again: sales is not a linear process. It's not a case of best product plus best salesperson plus customer with a problem you can solve plus budget equals sale. Even in that utopia situation where all of those things align, the deal is still unlikely to go perfectly smoothly. So what great, professional salespeople do is they proactively get ahead of the problems. They bring problems to the surface. They want them out in the open — the objections, the challenges, whatever it is — so they can work on getting ahead of them and overcoming them. 02:58 Pim Roelofsen: So if you think about that in the context of trust in a sales team — if you have no trust and you're a sales leader looking at people in your team and you don't trust that they're doing a good, professional job of selling — what you create is the complete opposite. You have a toxic culture where individual contributors feel like you're questioning everything they do. If they have a problem with an opportunity and feel like putting their hand up will reflect badly on them — that you're going to hold it against them — that's where the problem starts. Whereas what we want is the complete opposite: where I'm the manager and a rep comes to me and says "look, I've got a problem here — the person I'm engaged with, I think they're a coach, I don't think they're a champion — what can we do?" And I can use that experience to help them overcome it. So the first and most important layer of coaching, of any team culture, has to be trust. Without trust, it doesn't matter whether you're the Lombardi of sales coaching. You have to have that trust first. 04:35 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. And I've seen this play out many times over the last ten years — even been on the other side of not having trust and not being able to show up in a way where I could just lay out what I thought was wrong with a deal. If you're listening to this as an individual contributor and you can spot this for yourself — if you feel like you can't really put your hand up, or if you're a leader and the people in your team are just telling stories that sound wonderful but the gaps aren't coming to the surface — you can see this show up in one-to-ones, in deal reviews, in any environment where you talk about a customer or an opportunity. If there's no trust, that shows — by way of the difficult things, the gaps, not coming up. 05:33 Andy Whyte: Exactly. And the problem here is not just that you have an unhappy team or a bad culture. It's that those problems stay hidden. In some instances, where the culture is really bad, the salesperson will proactively hide the problems with the opportunity so as not to look bad to the manager. Which is terrible, because those problems are going to stay there — like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, like a timebomb ticking waiting to go off. And then everybody loses because it's gone unsolved. So that's the first thing. 06:08 Andy Whyte: And then you touch beautifully on the second T — which is timing. You have to get the trust right first: that's the most important thing by a factor of three. But then when you've got that trust, you have to think about: how am I coaching? Am I just turning up on the forecast call and coaching then? Or is coaching part of every single conversation I have? Part of watercooler conversations. Part of one-to-ones. Part of deal reviews. On the way to a customer meeting — still having that conversation. It has to be consistent. Regular coaching has to be part of your approach. And then the third part is the tactics. That's what — as I said at the start — everyone thinks coaching is. Having the sales craft acumen of knowing how to get that meeting with the economic buyer, how to influence decision criteria, how to accelerate the decision process, how to build champions. The things your managers have from their experience. That's great — and it includes product knowledge, industry knowledge, company knowledge. Knowing which use cases apply, knowing which customer stories to bring, knowing who to bring into a meeting, knowing how to get a deal approved. That's all part of the tactics. 07:38 Andy Whyte: But all of those things — even if you're ten out of ten in sales craft, product knowledge, industry knowledge, company knowledge — if your sales team doesn't trust you, they're not going to come to you with the problems that your knowledge can help them overcome. And if you're not putting the time in to consistently coach, those problems are going to carry on even if you have the trust — until the one-to-one a week later when you think: "I could have had that information last week." So this is why these three things are so important in sales coaching: trust, timing, and tactics — the three T's. 08:09 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, I really like that. And there's one question I want to insert here — because it's not just about the team you already have. It's also about bringing on new people. You're running things this way — I'd say you want to over index on the three T's, especially at the beginning, to build the foundation. So someone coming into the team knows: "Actually, I might not have had this before — but this team, this is real. I can just come in here, put my hand up, say what's wrong. The trust is here for me to just lay it out like it is." How do you see that with new people coming in? 08:50 Andy Whyte: That's a great point. This is funny — I probably shouldn't say this — but I always think about it like when you adopt a dog from a shelter and it's not been well looked after. A lot of the time, that's what salespeople coming from a bad manager are like. A bit guarded. So you want to overcome that. And I think we've got a great way of doing this at MEDDICC, which is the trust battery. This concept came from a podcast where a CEO was talking about hiring a new CFO and saying to that person: "You earn the length of your leash." Meaning: you've come in as a CFO, a very senior role — but the amount of freedom and trust I'm going to give you as CEO, you have to earn. The more you earn, the more length of leash you get. Which I think is a really interesting analogy — but I also think it's a terrible scenario. And it's brilliant that it came from CEO to CFO, because there's surely no closer senior trust relationship than that. So "earning your leash" — horrible concept. 10:04 Andy Whyte: So we took that idea and created the trust battery. Anyone that joins MEDDICC — and I tell you this because I think you should borrow it, steal it, whatever — on day one, because we've gone through a great hiring process and we've got to know you and we really want you to be part of this team: your trust battery is full. We're pretty sure it's going to stay there. But the idea is you know it's there, and you know it's much harder to charge it back up than it is to start with it full. So for new people joining your team — use our analogy or use your own — but make sure they know that this is a place where you expect them to bring problems to you. It's their job as a salesperson to go and find those problems. And if they can't overcome them in the moment or don't feel confident to, there'll be at least one person — their manager, but probably the whole team — who can help. 10:54 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. I think your analogies are maybe partially influenced by the fact that you just got a dog — but they really do work in this context! So: trust, timing and tactics. 11:06 Andy Whyte: Yes — and in that order. Because trust is a multiplier of at least three, if not more. It's the most important. If you don't have trust, it doesn't matter how often you coach or how good your coaching is — trust is imperative. Trust is first, timing is second, because even if you've got the trust but you only coach on forecast calls or in one-to-ones, that's not going to be effective either. And then the tactics — which of course are important too. If you haven't got anything to coach, you probably shouldn't be in the role. But it works in that order for a very good reason. 11:44 Pim Roelofsen: Here's to the three T's! 11:46 Andy Whyte: Cheers!