MEDDIC & Moneyball #2: Creating a Common Language To Drive Your Team to Success

When Paul DePodesta arrived at the Oakland Athletics with a Harvard degree and no baseball experience, no one would have thought he would be the driving force behind a framework, language, and approach that forever changed baseball. 

Many people believe that Moneyball is a strategy that baseball adopted, but that could not be further from the truth. 

Paul DePodesta built on the pre-existing concept by Bill James, a math whizz who pushed his ideas while working as a night-shift security guard at a Pork and Beans factory.  

James was frustrated at Major League Baseball, with them unwilling to publish play-by-play accounts, which would open up a world of data and arithmetic for fans. Bill James saw something in the math and data behind baseball, and Podesta would take it to another stratosphere.

Instead of Moneyball as a strategy, it became a framework, a way that organizations could find undervalued players through statistical analysis that baseball scouts had ignored for years before. 

By approaching baseball through this lens, Podesta introduced a common language that would eventually not go just through the Oakland A’s office and baseball staff but the entire game of baseball.

By creating a common language in their organization, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta drove the A’s to unparalleled success compared to their wage bill. 

In the world of sales and Go-To-Market teams, we are all aspiring to replicate this.

In the same way, Moneyball drove the Oakland A’s to beat their competition hyper-efficiently and cost-effectively, MEDDPICC can lead your organization to similar success.

By implementing a common language in your business and teams, you create pillars of stability, a foundation of opportunities, and a scalable fortress for success. This blog has broken down the five benefits of having a common language in your sales and GTM teams.

Build a Culture of Clarity & Consistency

One of the biggest challenges DePodesta faced when building the Moneyball framework was the pre-existing methodologies in place. The old-boy baseball scouts qualified the upcoming prospects through how they ran from base to base or how the ball sounded when it hit their bat. 

Scouts and baseball professionals used events with no statistical relevance or baseball value. Having a framework built on data and expected value instead of “gut feeling” is a significant conflict.

As he built an approach focused on statistical values, he created a language that referred to the same terminology, definitions, and mindset throughout the organization. In a sales or GTM team, everything must be understood, clear and consistent regarding communications.

When comms are broken, disjointed, and understood, it can lead to a smooth process and slow down sales and efficiency across the organization. A common language becomes a shared vocabulary that becomes relevant and useful for everyone within the team.

Creating Alignment Throughout The Organization

When you have a team where everyone understands the goal and the path to success, you have a much higher chance of winning. When the scouts understood the objectives of Moneyball, whether it was to replace a cumulative batting average or RBI (Runs Batted In), they were able to land the correct players that could help the team.

When the front office and financial analysts scoured the free agent market, they could all identify a player with a criminally-underrated batting average and get them for a cut price.  In an organization, if a sales team has one vision of a “qualified lead” and the marketing has an entirely different picture, it will create additional and unaligned expectations.

Unalignment leads to poor results, shoddy execution, and inadequate chemistry. A common language realigns any organization, driving everyone to the same goal and towards the same vision of success; in the process, they heighten the potential of winning.

Gain More Effective and Streamlined Processes

Having a common language in your organization will speed up all the processes working toward success. When Moneyball was ultimately operationalized throughout the Oakland A’s organization, there was no more confusion about what made a valuable baseball player in their eyes. Whether it was a baseball scout, a team coach, an equipment manager, or even someone who worked in finance, they all understood what they were looking for.

If your business can create a common language, everything becomes faster and more efficient. If you take the sales team as an example, if they all use a common framework and language to build up their conversations with prospects, they can go through the sales process at a much higher level of efficiency. 

The common language can also save time when explaining terminology and definitions - a faster and more effective way of communicating and making decisions. When a sales team is going through the handover process to customer success, can you imagine how much more efficient it will be with a common language? The customer will get infinitely more value from the product or service, instead of losing out due to a fumbled handover.  

Developing and Enabling Your Superstar Talent

One of the most common customer queries comes from senior members and high-level managers stuck with sales rep development. They need help getting their head around maximizing their selling potential. 

One of the most beneficial elements of MEDDPICC is how it can elevate a seller's potential, getting them up to speed faster than any training or development program out there. MEDDPICC offers a common language during the early stages of training and gives them a clear framework for learning and understanding sales & GTM. 

As a seller advances in their career, the MEDDPICC framework gives them honest and detailed feedback about how they are progressing through their deals. By knowing where their weak points are specifically, they can work to learn, improve and level up their sales ability. 

Moneyball has revolutionized the way baseball players look at their value and ability. They no longer care about how “pretty” their swing is. Now, they work to improve their OBP (on-base percentage, the statistic that saw the Oakland A’s replace a superstar with multiple efficient, undervalued players). 

In baseball, you are constantly provided with detailed feedback on how to improve, and with MEDDPICC, the same is said for the elite sellers in our industry. 

Foster Cross-Function Teamwork & Collaboration

In a sales or GTM organization, having multiple teams and stakeholders in the selling process is standard practice. You will often see a marketing team responsible for building the brand and creating MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), while on the other end, the product team needs to make the technical aspects that support the sales process. 

When you create a common language that flows through your organization, you facilitate chemistry and cross-functionality through all different GTM teams. Everyone becomes aligned and driven toward the customer's needs and desires. Every Major League Baseball organization has so many other teams, working on managing the team’s salary bill, coaching the team, scouting college prospects, or even working on player nutrition - but they all have one common goal: to win a championship.

A sales and GTM organization is no different from any sports team or franchise; while various other groups may be working on different objectives, the ultimate goal remains in fulfilling the customer’s needs and goals.  When an organization has a common language, the selling process becomes concise, cohesive, and clear to the customer - each step of the customer journey becomes more worthwhile, and the whole organization can work seamlessly to deliver value to the customer. 

You can look at developing and adopting a MEDDICC mindset today, helping you operationalize MEDDPICC across your team and the entire organization.

FAQs

What’s the difference between MEDDPICC and MEDDIC?

MEDDPICC is an evolution of MEDDIC that has added a P for Paper Process and a C for Competition.

What is Paper Process MEDDPICC?

The Paper Process focuses on how long your customer’s decision-making process will take, usually revolving around their Legal department as they handle the paperwork.

What is the MEDDPICC methodology? 

MEDDPICC is a sales methodology that is one of the most common frameworks CROs use in B2B SaaS sales, helping their sales teams increase pipeline, improve qualification and drive urgency.