KEY TAKEAWAYS:
SDRs are crucial at the Awareness and Prospecting stage, setting the foundation for the rest of the sales process and making it essential they adopt frameworks like MEDDPICC early in their careers.
Training SDRs in MEDDPICC aligns them with AEs, improves handoffs, and ensures consistent communication across the team, enhancing the overall customer experience and minimizing redundancy for customers.
MEDDPICC provides SDRs with a structured approach to asking targeted questions, identifying customer pain points, and engaging potential champions, helping them gain sales skills that will serve them as they advance in their careers.
SDRs can leverage elements like Pain, Metrics, and Decision Criteria to align their outreach efforts with potential customer needs, demonstrate the value of their solution, and set up metrics (M1s) to establish meaningful connections early on.
Many elite sellers start their careers as SDRs. While there is a lot of turnover in SDR roles, with talented SDRs quickly accelerating through the sales ranks, SDRs play an integral role in the Customer Lifecycle. Focused on the Awareness and Prospecting stage, SDRs set the tone for the rest of the GTM team. The better the SDR is at their job, the better paved the way is for everyone else.
Why should SDRs use MEDDPICC?
While the typical tenure of an SDR is relatively short, they are often the first impression prospective customers will have of your business. This is why we at MEDDICC believe that it is essential to train SDRs in MEDDPICC, because it allows them to put their best foot forward. Not only can SDRs well-versed in MEDDPICC apply it in their day-to-day schedule prospecting leads, a strong foundation in MEDDPICC prepares SDRs for furthering their sales careers. When a company invests in training its SDRs in MEDDPICC, it sees better prospects as a result, and down the line as these SDRs advance through the ranks, the company reaps the benefits as they have fostered elite sellers from an early stage.
Ensuring SDRs have a good understanding of MEDDPICC facilitates the overall ease of the Customer Lifecycle. As we established in the introduction, if the Customer Lifecycle is a wheel, then MEDDPICC is what keeps it turning. When SDRs nail MEDDPICC, it makes the handover between them and AEs seamless. MEDDPICC acts as the common language for GTM team to talk about deals - for the SDRs and AEs, this means there is no confusion or miscommunication about what has been established about the customer.
No prospective customer wants to repeat themselves to an AE answering questions they were already asked by the SDR. MEDDPICC makes sure this never happens by placing SDRs and AEs on the same page, so when it is time for the AE to step in, they can pick up exactly where the SDR left off.
Since SDRs are most often in the early stages of their sales career, they tend to have the least product, category, and industry experience. Using MEDDPICC can be helpful for them to get an idea of what kinds of questions to ask when prospecting. SDRs can look at the elements of MEDDPICC to identify what they should be looking for in potential customers, who they should reach out to, and how they should approach the overall prospecting process.
How can SDRs use MEDDPICC?
SDRs can start by Identifying the Pain during the Awareness and Prospecting stage by looking for the pain your solution typically solves. This helps identify who could benefit from your business’ solution, as well as attracting the interest of prospective customers.
SDRs can also incorporate Metrics, as they demonstrate the typical value customers gain by solving that pain. Metrics can help to identify pain points as well. The types of Metrics used as part of MEDDPICC can be split into three different categories. We refer to these first metrics that the entire GTM team, SDRs included, use as M1s. M1s use proven and relevant value from your existing customer base to enable your prospective customer to rapidly capture understanding of the value you provide. When promoting the value of your company’s solution to prospective customers, SDRs can demonstrate the difference between the before and after for other customers. Rather than driving the prospective customer on the defensive by highlighting areas where they clearly need your solution, SDRs can instead use M1s to paint a picture of the real value their solution has brought others. They can then illustrate how that M1 can translate to the customer’s specific situation. The M1 can even become the KPI of this new relationship.
Looking to past wins with other customers also helps the SDR to uncover their Champions. They can ask themselves: who typically cares about the pain we are solving? Who has been ideal to talk to in the past? By seeking out that person, SDRs can accelerate the Customer Lifecycle for their GTM teammates.
If prospective customers are dealing with their pain in a way that might not be as efficient, SDRs can utilise Decision Criteria to illustrate how their solution solves the pain better or uniquely than anything else available. The opportunity to do this does not always present itself at this stage of the sales cycle, so it is important for the SDR to take the initiative here.
With a firm idea of how they can use MEDDPICC, SDRs create a frictionless handover to the AE and ensure the customer doesn't feel like they're in the same meeting twice. Want to learn more about how SDRs can use MEDDPICC? Check out Med Men: MEDDIC for your SDRs from our CEO Andy Whyte and CRO Pim Roelofsen. Stay tuned for the next instalment on Sales Engineers!