If you’re thinking of implementing MEDDPICC without the full commitment of the leadership team, you might as well not bother.
Of course, using MEDDIC is better than not using it at all. To the individuals who come to us wondering what they should do if they use MEDDIC and like it, but their organization doesn’t use it, we always say that it’s still better to use it on your own and reap the benefits.
But when it comes to an organization-wide MEDDIC implementation, if you don’t have the buy-in and complete commitment of your entire GTM team, you are never going to unlock the full potential of the initiative.
While it often starts in sales, which is better than nothing, full GTM and leadership commitment is the best possible thing to make a MEDDIC implementation thrive. What needs to be eradicated is what arises too frequently: MEDDIC being reduced to a flavor of the month/year. Then the next SKO, you’re talking about something new. To actually make an impact, that shouldn’t be the case, and leadership is what makes the difference here.
MEDDICC CEO Andy Whyte lived this when he first encountered MEDDIC. The company he worked for flew the whole sales team out to Dallas, and put them through seminar after seminar on MEDDPICC. As happens during SKOs, many people were jetlagged, bleary-eyed, and occasionally hungover, trying to learn MEDDPICC.
When they went home, it appeared that Andy was one of the only people for whom MEDDPICC clicked. People were surprised that he had actually learned anything about what the whole SKO had been about. There was no real commitment or buy-in from the leadership side, so it wasn’t embraced by the rest of the team. It helped turn the light on for Andy, but not for anyone else.
MEDDICC CRO Pim Roelofsen experienced something similar. When a senior leader was talking about driving the MEDDPICC initiative global, they said, “We’ll do this training as it’ll be great for everyone, but we don’t want to impose it on anyone; you don’t have to do it.”
You can guess what happened next: only a handful of people recognized what there was to gain and committed to learning and using MEDDPICC. That isn’t enough if the organization wants to unite the whole team with a common language; all you end up with is small pockets of excellence.
This kind of thing happens all the time. At MEDDICC, we talk a lot about how Not All MEDDIC is equal, and at the same time, not all MEDDIC initiatives are equal.
The big changemaker is how the people in leadership show up week in, week out. The best examples of this that we’ve seen is when the CEO of an organization is using MEDDPICC in conversations, and literally standing on stage at an SKO talking about it.
For leaders to drive MEDDIC initiatives, they need to understand what’s in it for them. Not only is the sales team going to be performing at a higher level and executing better, the entire GTM team will improve their performance.
Marketing teams can look at how they use MEDDICC language in their positioning so that they are consistent and cohesive when they talk about Pain and Gain, and the Metrics that measure the delta between the two. They can make sure that they are using proactive Decision Criteria in their positioning.
Then, when the SDR picks up the leads, they can see what it was that attracted a customer to buy their solution. They can follow through with relevant messaging before handing it over to the AE.
This can go on throughout the engagement, so the whole GTM team, including the channel partners, will be aligned on what value is being sold and delivered to what stakeholders. Everyone is informed and reading from the same sheet.
When you give everyone a common language that underpins everything they do, it’s like giving them cheat codes. But without a continuous commitment from leadership, this doesn’t happen. To really see the results of a MEDDPICC implementation, it needs to be driven from the top.