MEDMEN: Why Most SKOs Fail And How to Fix Them

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? 00:04 Pim Roelofsen: Today, Andy — we are talking about launching MEDDIC at your SKO. 00:09 Andy Whyte: Here's the thing about SKOs — we love them. Think about the privilege of working in this industry: you often get to go to great locations, celebrate the year you've just had as a sales team, as a go-to-market team. You hear from the C-suite, you see your colleagues sharing their success, there are always new product launches — things to be excited about. It's a great time. But — and this is a big but — one of the things I always think is interesting about SKOs is how expensive they are. And I'm not talking about the raw costs — flights, hotels, location. I'm talking about the cost to the business. Because either way you look at it, it's a week out of the business, and the people in that room are quite often among the highest-compensated in the whole organization. So any minute in front of an audience, any minute in a workshop — anything you're doing at an SKO is hugely expensive. You have to make every single second count. 01:33 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. And it's all about connecting the momentum and direction you set at that event back into the field. Because you see it time and time again — people get flown in, especially if it's an international event. There's travel fatigue, there are all these things going on. People can become passengers in sessions. And there may be great things there — important product updates, direction of the company. All of that is important and should happen. But for revenue and enablement leaders especially, something to keep in mind is: what is it that we need to happen that will get us the results we need in the coming year? If a MEDDIC initiative is on the agenda, the SKO becomes a monumental event to make sure everybody is on the same page with the right velocity behind it. 02:26 Andy Whyte: Yeah, exactly. And the key word you said there was initiative. The amount of times — and the closer it gets to SKO season, the more this happens — where a team will realize: "Oh, we haven't got a theme, we haven't got a speaker." And they'll say: "Can you come along and speak at our event?" And then we'll ask: what are you actually trying to achieve here? And they're basically thinking: "We haven't got a headline, we haven't got a speaker — what if we just put someone on to talk about MEDDIC? And then for the rest of the year I'm sure everyone will embrace it and remember every word that was said in those 27 minutes and it will transform the organization." 03:05 Pim Roelofsen: Which is of course complete and utter nonsense. That's just not how it works. As much as we love those opportunities at the micro level — at the macro level they're just not going to work on their own. You're not going to see the change. It's not a magic wand. But what it does do — a well set-up MEDDIC initiative inclusive of an SKO, with a combination of a keynote and a couple of workshops — is create more momentum than anything else. That's the best possible thing you can do if you're serious about your initiative and truly want to get to the second-nature stage of embedding MEDDIC as a common language. 03:42 Andy Whyte: But you have to do the work around it so that it ultimately doesn't become a flavor of the month. Because the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is real — 50% forgotten after one day, 5% retained after one month, or however the numbers go. So that one SKO moment is not going to cut it on its own. It will create a momentum that you can then build on. And I feel like that curve should have an SKO element on top of it — jet-lagged, hungover, tired, death by PowerPoint. We should ask the media team to create that version of the curve! 04:18 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah — indeed! So I think what we're saying here in summary: we love SKOs. They're brilliant. Let's look forward to SKO season. But let's not have the flavor of the month where it's like: "This year we're going to do Challenger, next year we're going to do value selling, this year it could be MEDDIC." Let's use the SKO as the kickoff to the initiative — the clue is in the name. We really start something there. We hit the ground running, and then we have a plan to carry through for the rest of the year. In that combination, nothing will work better. 04:52 Andy Whyte: I'll drink to that. Cheers! 04:54 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers!