MEDDPICC as the Full Customer Lifecycle Framework: Customer Success

The best sales teams follow the Customer Lifecycle all the way through, from Awareness and Prospecting to Growth and Retention. Focus should be on the full delivery of value to the customer, not just on signing the contract. Think: when you eat at a high-quality restaurant, would you expect the waiter to simply drop your food at your table and never come back to make sure everything is good? No, because quality places want to ensure quality experiences. The same can be said in the world of sales. Quality sellers want to ensure the customer receives real, measurable value.

For GTM teams, this is why Customer Success teams and managers need to be fully integrated. It’s how you ensure your customer gets the value from your solution that you know it can deliver. So CS can do their best work, they need a smooth handover from the sales team. To facilitate that, both teams need to be on the same wavelength.

CS can use MEDDPICC as the common language to communicate with the wider GTM team. It ensures harmony throughout the Closing and Implementation stages and allows essential information to be passed from the sales team to the post-sales team.

• Metrics that were used to demonstrate the potential value to the customer become KPIs to strive for. These metrics are M3s and refer to the point at which the proposed measurable value becomes a goal that the GTM team sets. Using M3s gives CS something to assess the customer’s success with your solution against.

• CS can identify the Economic Buyer by determining who has overall authority and which executive stakeholders the team should align and engage with. The sales team will either have already identified the Economic Buyer or have a strong idea of who it is, and can provide feedback to CS here.

• The sales team can explain the customer’s Decision Criteria so CS can understand what the customer based their decision on from technical, economic, and relationship perspectives.

• During the handover, CS can also learn about the customer’s Decision Process, which can be useful for upsells and renewals. This is especially helpful for ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) or subscription-based businesses.

• Details about the Paper Process can be shared so CS knows what needs to be completed to get official agreements signed and processed.

• The pain that has been Implicated will show the post-sales team the problems their solution is designed to solve.

• With a Champion clearly defined, the post-sales team can remain engaged and help carry the deal through to long-term success.

• Information about the Competition can also be communicated during the handover so CS knows what alternatives exist, and which alternatives the customer may favor.

During the Value stage, CS can focus on achieving the goals that have been set by working toward converting M3s into reality. At this stage, CS differentiates your solution from other alternatives by demonstrating what makes your solution so valuable. When customers evaluate your solution in the future, the value CS delivers at this stage will influence their Decision Criteria, as it clearly demonstrates how your solution stands above the rest.

In the final Growth and Retention stage, the customer will already have a strong sense of the value your solution provides, so CS can use M1s to introduce new use cases and modules to expand that value and continue helping customers succeed. The post-sales team can keep the Decision Process and Paper Process in mind to increase predictability and efficiency of renewals and upsells. In addition to this, CS can collaborate with Marketing to capture the M3s that have been successfully achieved, and those M3s can re-enter the Customer Lifecycle as M1s.

The CS manager should use MEDDPICC when looking for opportunities to expand existing accounts. To do that, it is important to ensure they are quantifying the right value, engaging with the right stakeholders, and ensuring that when it is time for renewal, they are aligned with both the Paper Process and Decision Process.

With that, we are nearing the end of our series on the Go To Market team, but we’re not quite there yet! Join us next time for the final installment on RevOps!