Product teams are key in driving success in your business. Without their thorough understanding of what pain to solve for and ability to make ideas reality, how could you properly deliver value to your stakeholders? But to unlock their full potential, product teams need to be empowered by the rest of the GTM team. This can be achieved through the use of MEDDPICC at a business-wide level.
How, exactly?
The best product teams thrive on feedback and input from the field. To constantly strive for improvement and excellence, they need to know how the product has been received and what things must be leveled up. MEDDPICC provides the perfect permissionless lens to all customer engagements - it gives the product team a direct line to the information they need.
During the Selling stage, you can empower the Product team by using Decision Criteria. You can do this to engage with customers, and even beforehand. By determining the Technical, Economic, and Relationship-based aspects of your solution that differentiate it from alternatives, the Product team can see immediately what areas need to be improved or expanded upon. It nearly goes without saying, but a better product can really help during the Selling stage. Then, when it comes to actually engaging with the customer, AEs (for example) can get feedback from prospects and potential customers who are reluctant to commit to your solution. Maybe they felt the time to value was too much, or they weren’t completely happy with their user experience. The information gained from a Decision Criteria-focused discussion with a prospect, positive or negative, can provide great development opportunities for the Product team.
Typically, the Product team will not have direct exposure to the customer. Therefore, it is essential that the rest of the GTM team maintain communication with Product. That is how you make sure that your customers are receiving the best version of your solution. Product can also get insights from the Marketing team at this stage. Marketing can share with Product how certain product launches or releases have been received, as well as feedback gained from social listening during the Awareness and Prospecting stage. Evidently, MEDDPICC is most effective when the entire team uses it.
In the final stages of the Customer Lifecycle, from Value to Growth and Retention, the Product team can once again look at the Decision Criteria to understand how they can improve upon the product. The strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities that are brought to attention in the pursuit of continued value will help the Product team identify the direction they need to head in. During these stages, another opportunity for collaboration between Product and the wider GTM team can arise; they can work with Customer Success teams to understand any limitations with the product, or any common themes raised by customers. Since CS is primarily focused on the post-sales process, their input regarding how to continue to provide value to new and existing customers can be invaluable to the Product team.
They can measure and articulate this value utilizing Metrics, which can highlight quantifiable success and failures that the Product team can turn to when working on your solution. Product can look directly at use-cases, and subsequent parts of the product, to identify what is driving the most value to your customers. This can be particularly helpful for Product teams in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) or subscription-based businesses, as being able to consistently show value with the product is incredibly important at the renewal stage. MEDDPICC is crucial here, as it serves as a common language between Product and CS. which is imperative to successful renewal cycles.
Once a company has implemented MEDDPICC across the board, all the information that the Product team might need will be readily available without them needing to speak to the customer. They can look at what is helping the rest of the GTM team win deals, and analyze what the things are that they miss when they lose. Then, they can work directly to prioritize their roadmap going forward based on real-time feedback at scale. Additionally, if Product do want to speak to the customer, MEDDPICC provides a succinct flow from the customer’s perspective. When all departments speak the same language, they avoid sending conflicting messages to the customer and ensure the customer receives the same service and experience across the board.
As you can see, MEDDPICC is applicable at every strata of the business. Come back for the penultimate installment to get an idea about how CS can use MEDDPICC!