00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. My name is Pim and that's Andy. 00:03 Andy Whyte: What are we talking about today, Pim? 00:05 Pim Roelofsen: Today, Andy — we are talking about whether MEDDIC is for pipeline generation. 00:09 Andy Whyte: And is it? 00:10 Pim Roelofsen: Yes. End the show! 00:15 Pim Roelofsen: ...Just joking. We can talk about this a little bit more. But this is a real question — because many customers come to us and I think our industry in general still thinks MEDDIC is for selling and closing. 00:28 Andy Whyte: Just qualifying is the most common one, right? Where people think MEDDIC is just a qualification checklist. All these ways of using it that really, really narrow the full benefit you can get from MEDDIC. If you consider it as a common language — and the best way we like to define a common language is to talk about three things: value, stakeholders, and process. Because it doesn't matter where you are in the customer engagement lifecycle — it's always about: what value can I bring to this customer? Which stakeholders inside that customer's business care about this? And where are we — what should we be doing at the right time? That's the process part. 01:00 Andy Whyte: And with the SDR team right at the very beginning — let's look at the value stage of positioning. Positioning starts with product teams thinking about what value a product will bring to which customers. Then marketing — the biggest stakeholder in positioning. And then the SDR team, who are the ones that need to go and get traction with those customers. So if you're an SDR considering an ideal customer profile you're reaching out to, and you have this common language — it tells you very clearly. You have to be proactive. You have to think more broadly than just qualification. The common language tells you: what pain do we solve for customers like this? What value do they get from solving that pain? What's the delta between those two states — what are the metrics? And what will the customer need from a solution like ours — that's the decision criteria. 02:13 Andy Whyte: Those are the value elements. Then we look at the stakeholder elements — who's the champion, or likely champion? An SDR probably can't tell from the outside looking in who the champion is. But they can use the common language to ask: typically when we sell to organizations like this, what persona is our champion? So they target the right persona. Same for economic buyers. They can also start to think about who the competition is — who's the incumbent, what technology the account is using, depending on what you're selling. So you start to form a point of view based on an outside-in perspective. And then through to process — which is less critical for SDRs, because you're really just at the start of the process. But you still want to consider: what are we trying to get here? A meeting, an engagement, whatever it may be. 03:09 Andy Whyte: So now — whether I'm making a cold call or writing an email — I may not use all those elements explicitly. But I do have a very, very strong point of view about what value to bring to which stakeholders. And I can start to craft my message. The way I love to describe this — it's the back-end code. Those components inform the front end. And then it's the SDR's job to use their style, their voice, the latest ways of capturing people's attention — but within that, they still have to build in what pain, what value, who cares about it. So that's just the start. 03:53 Andy Whyte: And then of course — and you know where I'm going with this — once you've booked that meeting, you get a far better handover and cohesion going into the AE. 04:03 Pim Roelofsen: Exactly right. I think if we zoom out and look at the data that's out there — and anyone can find this — the majority of a customer's journey, while they're still a prospect, happens before they ever speak to someone. So if we think about that, and it always connects back to value and stakeholders primarily on the front end — what are we doing if we don't focus on that in a cohesive way? We're just not creating the optimal buying experience. And a lot of conversion will depend on it. If you flip this on its head — MEDDIC, especially if you look at its background, is about reverse engineering the way customers buy. So if we don't do it in pipeline generation, what are we doing? That goes for SDRs. It goes for marketing and positioning. It goes for everything we put out there as a business, so that we ultimately create the best possible experience for those customers and get maximum results from it. 05:08 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And last point — one of my favorites. This is not always the case, but I'd estimate around 80% of the time, SDRs are the talent of tomorrow — the AEs of tomorrow. And so if you can start to embrace the common language, the framework used at the sharpest end of our industry — start to learn the language, see how it's deployed, and pick up on how more experienced salespeople use MEDDPICC language as a framework to guide them — then you're going to hit the ground running when you eventually get that promotion into the field. So in short: SDRs create a better customer experience, they improve win rates and conversion rates by booking more quality meetings, and it infuses career development. 05:56 Pim Roelofsen: Sounds like everyone should be using it! 05:58 Andy Whyte: Cheers to that!
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