Andy Whyte:  What the best salespeople do. They identify where they can win, but more importantly, they identify where they're losing and get the support of the team so that they can figure out, can we actually overcome this obstacle? And if not, let's qualify out and focus our efforts on where we can win.

Dan Saks: That was Andy Whyte. Andy literally wrote the book on the power of the MEDDIC sales system. He helped AppDirect firsthand by giving us tools that changed the way we view our sales methodology. But before Andy became this powerhouse in sales, he was an account executive at impressive companies like Oracle and Sprinklr.

He also led many successful sales teams at various companies before starting out on his own. Today, Andy is CEO of MEDDIC, a sales qualification framework used by sales teams to help qualify their opportunities. In today's episode, Andy talks about how the best salespeople are really good at solving their customers' problems.

He shares his three key parts to selling, how companies can best adopt and implement MEDDIC, and the big changes he's seen in sales as companies evolved from enterprise-led to productled. This is Daniel Saks, President and Co-founder of AppDirect, and it's time to decode MEDDIC and help you close bigger deals in a shorter amount of time.

Welcome to Decoding Digital, a podcast for innovators looking to thrive in the digital economy. I'm your host Daniel Saks. And I'll sit down with other founders, CEOs and changemakers to decode the trends that are transforming the way we work. Let's decode.

[00:00:00] Dan Saks: Andy, welcome to Decoding Digital. Great to have you on the show.

[00:00:03] Andy Whyte: Thank you so much for having me on. Well,

[00:00:05] Dan Saks: I appreciate it and really excited to spend time with you. So if we dive right in, what I'm really excited about Andy, is he has a wealth of knowledge being an account executive at companies like Oracle and Sprinklr, and across those different experiences, he's really had great experience with MEDDIC, a sales methodology and framework that we've adopted.

[00:00:26] And in some of my past podcasts, we've spoke to the importance of predictable growth and aligning your sales teams for scale. And if you're at a company and you're driving revenue, revenue predictability, revenue consistency, and a sales methodology is really, really important to be able to optimize your revenue and align all stakeholders, whether it's execs, salespeople, or the customer.

[00:00:52] And one of the things that we've done when implementing our methodology was look for experts in the field. And Andy has really helped pioneer and evangelize MEDDIC. He wrote the book literally. So Andy's super excited to have you.

[00:01:09] Andy Whyte: Thank you so much. Thank you.

[00:01:09] Dan Saks: Let's dive in. So before jumping into being the MEDDIC Pro, you do have like a wealth of experience within different companies.

[00:01:18] Can you speak to some of your experiences and what worked and what didn't?

[00:01:23] Andy Whyte: Yeah, great question. So I think the thing, like so many people in sales, I don't think many people grew up saying, Hey, I wanna be a salesperson when I'm older. There's no sort of curriculum at schools or colleges or anything like that that points people towards sales.

[00:01:39] So like everybody else that I've ever met, I kind of found myself in sales because that was something that someone very close to me, my brother in fact, said that I should go into. So I kind of started in B2C sales and then moved into B2B sales. And I kind of went from a bootstrap startup where I was the first employee basically after the founders that sold e-commerce solutions to Oracle.

[00:02:03] And the thing that I really learned the hard way was that really when it comes down to selling, it's really obvious when we say it like this, but customers really, they only care about what it is you're gonna do for them. They don't really care how it is or what it is that you do. They just care about you helping them solve a problem they may have.

[00:02:23] A lot of the time, the best salespeople out there, there're the ones that they highlight. A problem that the customer either didn't know that they already had or they didn't know that it could be solved. And so in terms of like my sort of learning and experience and to your question, it's like the thing that took me the longest time to figure out was that customers really don't care that much about my company, my solution.

[00:02:42] They just care, what is it I can do for them?

[00:02:45] Dan Saks: So let's talk about MEDDIC. Can you define it and then unpack it?

[00:02:50] Andy Whyte: Yeah, sure thing. So the interesting thing about Medic is it's, well, I like to call like an open source sales framework. So the idea here is it was originated inside of a company called PTC who were like one of the darlings of the tech industry.

[00:03:03] You know, no one really had sales growth like they had back in the early nineties. How it was formed came from literally reverse engineering their success. So they were looking at when they won, what things helped them win, and when they lost, what things were missing. And you know, the same thing if a deal was forecasted to close and it missed the date, it was forecast to close on.

[00:03:23] So what they noticed across those six things, are those six commonalities that they then kind of fitted into the acronym of MEDDIC and what it basically boils down to, the way I like to talk about it is there's three key parts of selling it's value understanding, you know, the pain the customer has and the value they get from solving that pain.

[00:03:40] The second part is all around stakeholders. So who cares about, you know, the value they're gonna drive from your solution? And then the third part is process, and that's the one that people often overlook is process. When they start to think about how is it that first and foremost in a lot of engagements we're having today, the salesperson and the company is kind of sparking the interest.

[00:03:58] It's not necessarily an inbound motion. So we are kind of going out to market and saying, Hey, you should really look at what we do. And so the whole process actually starts then from how do we get this customer to start actually evaluating according to the however they evaluate solutions and us understand what we need to do to get this to be seriously considered all the way through to them becoming a customer and going live.

[00:04:18] So those three parts, value stakeholders and process are really important to selling. But if I phrase them to you like that, and I'm sort of talking to you about an opportunity or something like that, it's too far out, it's too zoomed out. And so what MEDDIC does very, very well, I think, is zooms in just the right level of those things.

[00:04:38] So if we start talking about metrics, the ‘I’ in MEDDIC stands for identify the pain, and then we kind of evolve it to identify, indicate to the customer how much the pain is costing them, and then make sure the customer feels implicated in the pain. So there's sort of three ‘I’s there. The second part, once.

[00:04:54] Identify the pain is quantifying it. You know, how much value are we gonna provide this customer by solving this pain? How much value is that? And that's the ‘M’ for metrics, right? So the quantification of the value. And then you can kind of start to think about, the one thing I think is really important is the decision criterion.

[00:05:11] This comes down to. When you have a customer that's trying to buy something, you know, whether, like I said, whether you've proactively sparked this interest or whether they've come to market with you, the chances of that customer having the very, very best idea specification, scoring algorithm, whatever it is to make the right decision for what solution they should buy is unlikely because they're not likely to be experts in whatever category it is you work.

[00:05:37] So the best salespeople, they don't just work to the customer's criteria in which they're gonna base their decision upon. They actually help the customer to really kind of form it. So that first part is the value. The second part, how Medic Helps is you have a ‘C’, which is for Champion, which I think everybody knows.

[00:05:55] Everyone listening here will understand the role of a champion in MEDDIC. It's very specific as someone with power and influence, if someone has a vested interest in your success and is someone that's selling internally for you, so that's the champion bit. The other stakeholder. Other two stakeholders that are called out is the economic buyer.

[00:06:10] That's the ‘E’ and that's kind of the overall authority. So it's not necessarily the budget holder, it's actually probably above the budget holder. It's who like set the budget, who the budget rolls up to, and we know how important it's to be engaged with that person because of how much control they have over the overall project.

[00:06:25] And then the last stakeholder, is the competition, uh, because I think they're a stakeholder, whether it's someone internal trying to build it themselves, whether it's a rival, whether it's another initiative that's trying to borrow the resource or something like that. So that's the stakeholder bit. And then last, but not least, I've touched about it already, but it's the process.

[00:06:40] It's like how do we go from getting this even to be considered to getting it closed? And that's the process. And that comes under decision process in MEDDIC. So there's your kind of two minute whistle stop tour of MEDDIC.

[00:06:51] Dan Saks: It's amazing and we're gonna double click and decode this further. So for our listeners, you know, we have a lot of founders, sales executives, we have people who are really interested in technology and digital process.

[00:07:04] And I think if you're in business, obviously one of the big key metrics you have is revenue growth, revenue predictability, and obviously Andy's framework is a great way to be able to drive execution around your sales. So I think it's kind of a really relevant thing for everyone to pay attention to.

[00:07:23] Now the listeners that are here though might say, I'm selling already, or Why do I need a methodology? Or is this too advanced for me? Or, I have really easy transactional business. Is this still relevant? It'd be really cool kind of for me to get a sense from you, like experiences of people who haven’t used MEDDIC and what their kind of life was before.

[00:07:45] And then, you know, to your point, what's the problem you're solving for them with MEDDIC?

[00:07:49] Andy Whyte: Yeah, that's a tremendous question. Yeah, so I think the first thing I'll say here is that I like to think of MEDDIC as being relative to the complexity of the deal that you are working on. So if you're an organization that maybe has one or two engagements with your customer at your first call and then a demo, and then you close.

[00:08:06] Then the chances of you doing like a really complex deep MEDDIC analysis is unlikely. It's not gonna be worthwhile to go into that much depth. So if you think about things like I said before, how important it is to engage the economic buyer, chances are you might not actually, if it's, if it's a high velocity transaction like that, it might not be.

[00:08:24] As I like say, the juice is not gonna be worth the squeeze to go and try and find that engagement. But it doesn't mean you don't wanna think about the economic buyer. You just wanna take it from a perspective of saying, okay, well if I know that my champion is going to go and have a conversation with this person, I need to make sure that I prepare my champion to be able to talk in the language of the economic buyer, which is gonna be a different set of interests to what your champion is likely to have.

[00:08:43] So that's how I kind of think about it from a perspective of scaling up and scaling down from a perspective of what you can expect by implementing MEDDICine. You made the really good point there. It's like, well, we're selling okay, we're doing all right as it is.

[00:08:57] I like to break sales sort of success, if you like, or velocity, down into fall levers, which actually fall under the sales velocity equation. So it's like the amount of opportunities you have, the average contract value or average selling price, whichever acronym you prefer —so, you know the average price, you are closing deals for—your conversion rate.

[00:09:16] And I always like to work conversion rate based on unit sales, so you know, opportunities to close rather than volume. Because what I see happen a lot is a salesperson will have, you know, two salespeople, one will have two deals, both for a million dollars and one will have 10 deals for a 100k.

[00:09:35] One of them closes seven of them. And so they've got a 70% conversion rate in my mind. The other one will close, you know, 1 million and then they'll get a 50% conversion rate they actually only closed half. You see what I mean? So the conversion rate, I think is a unit sales, and then time to close is a really, really powerful metric that I think we overlook in our industry.

[00:09:52] So what we see with MEDDIC, when you take those four levers into account, Is that the average contract value will go up, because what we're hoping to do here is get much more close to the value, get much more broad with stakeholders. So basically, even if we only have one use case, we bring that use case to more stakeholders where it's gonna be more impactful and then obviously the value goes up with it.

[00:10:15] What's more likely to happen is, as often happens in solution sales, is we have more use cases and the more people we talk to, the more value we can find. And therefore, whether it's being more defensible against discounts because we're providing more value or because we've got a broader solution, we're able to include other modules and things like that, then the value will go up.

[00:10:33] Same thing happens for conversion rate. The more people you're engaged with, the more urgency you build, the more likely it is you're going to win your deal and not lose to what is the biggest closed lost reason I see, which is inertia. It's not losing to rivals, it's not losing to other, you know, someone building internally these days.

[00:10:48] It's always a no decision. And then the time to close one is the one that really has the biggest impact in my mind because companies don't tend to focus on it as much as I think they should. And therefore it's like this big opportunity. If you can start to make some big changes to the time to close, then that's gonna have the biggest impact on your overall performance because you know, if you just sort of shave off 10% off overall, it's like you get another month of the year to close deals.

[00:11:14] It's like having a 13-month year all of a sudden. You know what impact that would have for your final results at the end of the year.

[00:11:20] Dan Saks: Yeah, the value is just tremendous. And when you look at public performance and stock performance, some of the best outstanding performers, whether it's what Snowflake, Airtable, Okta, they've all implemented MEDDIC, and they have that predictability, they have that consistency and many alternatives that go public without a methodology, they really struggle.

[00:11:38] And if you go public and you miss a quarter, you're put in the dog house by investors and it may be hard to ever catch up. So I think. MEDDIC is, you could argue that it's optional as an early stage startup, but then as you scale, it's definitely required and it more than pays for itself. But one thing that I wanna speak to personal experience from is that it's easy to implement MEDDIC in an incorrect form.

[00:12:00] And you know, my personal experience is that we've had a sales leader come in, say, I really want to adopt MEDDIC. Without executive support from the company, train the reps. And the reps may have gone through a session where someone like you comes in, rah rah, everyone's amped up, but then the company doesn't understand it and it's not really adopted.

[00:12:20] And then things change and sales managers may not focus on it. And you may not get the true value from MEDDIC. So I wanted to kinda get a sense of what your thought is on how companies best implement it and what they're doing beyond just training the sales team with one of your seminars or sessions.

[00:12:36] But what else can they do to really make it the best it can be?

[00:12:38] Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. So my favorite way of answering this type of question is to talk about how I see MEDDIC being a common language. And the reason why it works so well as a common language is because it really does help translate the scenario with all of those aspects I talked about.

[00:12:55] Value stakeholders and process of any opportunity of any go to market into a language where everyone can very cohesively and efficiently communicate with each other where they stand, and get that visibility of where they are with the deals. Another reason why the common language analogy works so well is like any language for it to be successful, everyone has to speak it.

[00:13:16] I couldn't be speaking to you in French right now if you didn't know French back, right? So it's the same thing with MEDDIC. You need to kind of invest in your go-to-market team. If you want to get like the maximum benefits, your go-to market team speaks it. So what I mean by that is that, you know, if we go from top to bottom, obviously the sales team use it, but the SDR team, they'll use it in their outreach.

[00:13:35] For example, they'll look for the pain that they know that your existing customers had before they worked with you. They'll talk about the value that your customers got from solving that pain. They'll target people who are typically champions because they know those are the kind of game changer people to work with.

[00:13:50] So at the very start, we're already using MEDDIC, and then obviously when it comes into the opportunity, Then the other stakeholders like sales engineers, you know, we want to make sure they feel responsible for the technical decision criteria. We want to make sure that our partner team who are working with party partners we may be working with are also looking to tie into that, those kind of common language across the proposition, across the stakeholders.

[00:14:13] Even if we take a step back to say, marketing as well, we want to make sure that marketing or organizing events for champions, organizing events for economic buyers, we want to make sure that the collateral they're creating relates to the value we are talking about. So the metrics that we're talking about.

[00:14:27] So the whole sort of go to market motion, whole engine that's there, kind of works cohesively together to focus on communicating to the customers the same way. And when this really starts to operate well, some of the things you can really start to get more sort of bang for your buck from things like marketing where you can say, well, we see that in the decision process, we start to slow down when we have to do a security appraisal because, you know, our solution has this peculiarity with security and teams always slow it down.

[00:14:47] It's like, okay, well now we've identified that because we can see it cohesively happening across all of the sales processes.

[00:15:03] We can enable our marketing team or product marketing team to create a white paper or a document or a how-to guide to accelerate that process when it happens so we can give some information to the security team on the other side of the table. These are all things that are quite operational, quite cadence based, but once you start getting those going, you've got kind of all the sort of buy-in to have a very, very strong implementation.

[00:15:26] There is another part that's really critical as well, and this is what I tend to refer to as more like the cultural implementation. What this is, is basically if you give a sales team MEDDIC, it's like one of my colleagues describes as this. He says, it's like putting on a special pair of glasses and all of a sudden you have like this x-ray vision of a deal.

[00:15:46] You can see who's pro, who's against you, who's got influence, who hasn't, where your strong, where you're weak. And that's a bit like having a superpower on a deal. And if you're a salesperson and you have a deal, and there's not often a deal where everything's green and everything's great, right? If there ever is, you know, they get called a bluebird.

[00:16:05] And so there's often challenges. And what we like to say is the best salespeople are the ones who are the fastest to identify what the challenges are, and they're the ones who put their hands up. But a salesperson can only feel comfortable, open and honest, and to a degree vulnerable to put their hand up and say, Hey, look, I've got this deal. It's great for all these reasons, but here's my challenge with it.

[00:16:24] If they can feel that kind of comfort in the culture of their team, that first and foremost their sales manager's not gonna like, you know, criticize them for not having a perfect deal. And so that cultural balance of creating a team where everybody's first and foremost trusted that they are capable salespeople, they wouldn't be there if they weren't.

[00:16:46] So that if they do have any challenges with their deal, it's actually celebrated rather than kind of seen as a negative, because what the best salespeople do are they spot the gaps. And the way I kind of described this is even if you have the world's best product, the world's best salesperson, and a territory of customers who absolutely need what you have, you're not going to sell to them all because there's a million reasons why they can't buy.

[00:17:11] And so in that situation, what the best salespeople do, they identify where they can win, but more importantly, they identify where they're losing and get the support of the team so that they can figure out can we actually overcome this obstacle, and if not, let's qualify out and focus our efforts on where we can win.

[00:17:27] Dan Saks: Yeah. The takeaway I have from that, which is really powerful is, every company, or you'd hope that every sales team has some form of cadence. You have your weekly forecast call, you have your annual kickoff meeting, you have incentives like a President's club where you can reward people. You're gonna have your team meetings where you're zeroing in on a deal, and I think that's pretty table stakes.

[00:17:46] If you're running a good sales shop and you're a CRO, you would probably have that cadence. However, what I've observed is you can take a new salesperson or you know, sales manager into the company and the way they're gonna run the meetings are totally different. What that does is it creates a lot of inconsistencies in the sales process, the way they're identifying value, the questions that they ask, and what I find is that with MEDDIC properly implemented and aligned, you're all of a sudden taking this cadence and you're structuring it with value and consistency so you can speak the same language.

[00:18:16] And what we've found is that our reps that are aligned on MEDDIC, they intuitively get it. Like, okay, who's the champion? Who's the economic buyer? Let's go. Let's talk about it. Let's fly out with them. Here's the gap. You know? But salespeople who come in new to the organization who haven't had that MEDDIC trading oftentimes struggle to know what to look for.

[00:18:37] So one of the things that I've found as well is that part of your sales onboarding should definitely include at least a base level of MEDDIC training so everyone can speak through the same language. And then your point on culture is super powerful because I think there's many different types of organizations and many different types of sales cultures, and I think that there's been a cataclysmic shift in the way we think about sales culture over the last couple years.

[00:18:59] And some of the recent podcasts we've had is, product-led growth. So some of the outstanding companies that have been really great standouts, IPOs, whether it's Snowflake, Airtable that we discussed, or Okta, they're often product-led growth in nature. Meaning it's not an old school enterprise sale that's gonna go out and they're gonna be the champion and do it on their own and sign this big enterprise agreement where they're stuffing all the value in and it's a year sale cycle, and then the client's locked in for years.

[00:19:30] What we're finding is there's been a huge shift where prospects are gonna wanna learn a lot on their own and they're gonna want to be educated. And then they're gonna want to see the salesperson, not as someone who's gonna give them a price, but who's going to validate and consult them on will this work with the use case or will this solve the problem that I'm looking to solve?

[00:19:48] And what we've found is by going from a enterprise-led methodology to a product-led sales methodology, totally shifts the culture. And at first, what we. Sales reps really got scared of the idea of pricing's gonna be transparent on the website. People can sign up for free, people can get into the sandbox and experience it.

[00:20:10] And speaking from our own example, we actually had a huge sales culture clash where some people felt that they were scared of having pricing out there that's cheap and transparent, and then they'd have to defend. But what we found is that the combination of MEDDIC plus product-led growth enables our sales leaders to be strategic, to be champions, to be heroes, and the way the client perceives an account executive in the world of product-led growth plus MEDDIC is really their trusted advisor on how to buy the solution.

[00:20:40] And what we've found is that now, you know, in some deals we have prospects coming to us or at the deals signed, they're coming to me and saying, you know what? I selected you, but your reps told me like, here's the alternative. You can get this for a much lower price somewhere else.

[00:21:01] And they transparently told me like, here's the competition. Here's what you could put in RFPs. Here's where your competitors are better than you. And that's like totally scary to do because you're in some ways encouraging your prospects to like go evaluate the competitors, but it's out of a confidence that you know that the higher value solution is gonna be stronger.

[00:21:20] So Andy, what are some of the big changes you've seen as sales has evolved from enterprise-led to product-led, and how can account executives use Medic to really champion a product-led growth environment?

[00:21:34] Andy Whyte: Yeah, I'm a big, big fan of product- led growth because like so many people, I think everyone probably listening to this as a consumer, it's the best thing that's starting to happen.

[00:21:43] We're now so much more in control of the information we want to get and all that kind of thing. So I almost get really frustrated when I find a company now that could be product-led and they're not, and I'm like, you're missing out me as a customer, there's no question about it. So I'm very bought into it.

[00:21:57] And I think what you talked about there with the sales kind of. Like sales be like, hang on a minute, this is how I've always been taught to sell. I have to keep my price close to my chest and I can't let the customer know because they find out how much it's gonna cost, they won't ever spend it. And it's like, well what is it that you are trying to do before you reveal the price to the customer?

[00:22:14] Well, I need to show them how much value they're gonna get. Okay, good. How are we going to show them that you give them value? Oh, we'll show them a demo. Okay. What would be better than giving them a demo, do you think? Oh, nothing's better than a demo. Wouldn't them actually using the product be better than a demo?

[00:22:32] Them actually getting their hands on it and using it in their day-to-day, rather than just seeing it from, you know, spectating, you show them around it. So I know I'm being a bit sort of fun with it, but that for me is really where the opportunity is. But we can get the products in front of our customers so they can start to use it.

[00:22:48] And then the really elite salespeople, what they can do is they can then have a much, much more credible conversation with the customer about what it is they liked, you know? And then when I say conversation, I'm really talking about discovery. But it's not the classic kind of interrogation discovery that we typically do in sales where we ask, you know, what keeps you awake at night?

[00:23:07] And who else cares about this? And what does it mean if you don't solve this, which customers hate being asked. Instead, we can have a very practical conversation about how they're using the solution and what sort of value they're looking to derive from it. And then we can lace in, and this is where MEDDIC comes in.

[00:23:21] We can lace in. What we call M1s, which are proof points from your existing customer base Metrics Ones proof points from your existing customer base that show value that customers just like the one you are talking to get from using your solution. So you can start to say, oh, it's interesting that you're using it for that use case.

[00:23:38] Let me tell you about ABC. Here's the problems they had before. Using our solution, here's the value they're getting from it now. And by the way, what we've seen, and that's when you can start to really lay in true metrics about, you know, the increase in revenue they've seen or the reduction in costs or the reduction in risk, or whatever the by level value driver is.

[00:23:56] You can start to really sort of dig into those things with the customer. And so they start to get, okay, what they're looking for, which is the value? What is the value? Because typically the person using the solution is probably gonna. Someone who is either a coach or a champion who you're gonna have to rely on to go and bring in other stakeholders who have a say in it.

[00:24:14] So you want to arm them not just with their love of your product, but also some data points that suggest that there's a business case that can be built behind this so you can start to get other people vested in the idea of evaluating your solution. And then the next part, which really works well with product-led growth and MEDDIC, is all around really helping the customer to build, like I said before, that decision criteria.

[00:24:35] So we can really start to understand, you know, what is it that you are getting from the solution currently? And start to really make sure the customer understands the level of differentiation that your solution has. So you can start to really inform and educate the customer that what they're using there or what they're aspiring to use, or that use case, this is how you do it, probably in a manner that is more superior or differentiated to your competition.

[00:24:58] And so you start to build this sort of defensible, almost like a differentiation, which is why when you, you mentioned that when you speak to your customers that you've won and they tell you, you know, your salesperson was very open with me and they said that, you know, we could go and look at this solution or that solution.

[00:25:14] Your salespeople can do that because they've done such a good job at presenting your solution as the only show in town that caters for the value that they are desiring. And so it's almost like, you know, if you want to look at someone else, someone else does this, but based on what you've told me here and what you need, we are the only show in town for it.

[00:25:34] So it's a very, very relationship-based sale, but orientated entirely around value and entirely around the differentiation and value that your solution can provide.

[00:25:45] Dan Saks: It's so powerful and I wanna make sure everyone gets the 360 degree view. So we've talked about the benefit to your company, right?

[00:25:52] You're gonna have better sales, more predictable. We have proof points that you can have, you know, bigger deal size, faster close, more predictability, and that in turn is gonna drive, you know, increased value for your company. We see the value for the sales reps and the executives you just spoke to, some of the value for the customer.

[00:26:09] What I've found is that there's a lot of other stakeholders who can benefit. And I wanna touch on a few personas. You know, one is there's a lot of like product managers or engineers that you know, listen here, there's the CFO, or the legal teams. So let's take a second and just unpack the value for some of those different stakeholders.

[00:26:27] And maybe if we start, I know you talked about the importance of cadence and culture and what we find in our cadence is there's a lot of executive reviews, a lot of times when we're gonna have, in a deal desk setting, technical stakeholders to validate that our roadmap can achieve what they need. We're gonna have finance making sure that it hits our margin targets.

[00:26:45] We're gonna have legal making sure that the IP or indemnities are safe, and that's a high friction internal process amongst your teams. So wanted you to speak a little bit to what you've seen, how MEDDIC can help really smooth out some of those friction points within your organization.

[00:27:00] Andy Whyte: Yeah, the fun thing about that question is, this relates back to what I've talked to a bit about, probably more so than in the other elements, but the decision criteria.

[00:27:08] And it's fun because typically in MEDDIC you ask any kind of person that's very experienced using MEDDIC, what the most important element is they'll tell you the champion and they're not wrong. You know, no champion, no deal, big champion, big deal. But for me, the element is my favorite.

[00:27:24] And I know, you know, as someone whose whole professional life is around MEDDIC, I shouldn't have a favorite. It's like having a favorite child. But my favorite is the decision criteria because it's the one that if you really embrace it and you really take control of it, you can have the biggest advantage. You can have the biggest benefit from it.

[00:27:40] And in the context of what you were talking about there, we break. The decision criteria down into three parts. So there's the technical part, which is where most people tend to orientate the decision criteria around. You know, it's basically can the solution integrate with, have the user interface, the features, all the things that we need it to do to be viable.

[00:27:58] But there's much more to decision criteria. There’s the relationship part, which is very much around the business case. Is it gonna give the ROI that we want? That's the commercial part. Sorry, the commercial part is around the business case. Is it gonna be the ROI we want? Are we gonna be able to grow with this?

[00:28:11] All those kind of considerations, not just price, but the model itself. And then, as I said, the relationship part, which is not just do they like you, do they feel like they're, you're gonna be a good partner, but more so do you work with other partners that we work with? How are the legal terms and do you feel like we can have an amicable relationship here?

[00:28:27] And so if you think about those three parts of the decision criteria and how they relate to teams like product, product teams can have a huge, huge benefit from an organization. Use MEDDIC because it's what they always dreamed of. Product teams. The best product teams I've ever worked with, they want to know what's happening with the customers.

[00:28:44] They want to know what the customers like. They wanna know what the customers think's missing and all that kind of thing. The decision criteria is the framework for that because they can look at any live deal and they can say, okay, deals we're expecting to close this quarter.

[00:28:56] I just want to look wherever MEDDIC's being recorded and I want to see what things the customer is requiring. What are the things that, in their criteria, they're saying they need from a technical perspective? So they're gonna get that feedback.

[00:29:10] Better still, when they start to win or lose deals, when those deals briefs happen, whether it's recorded in the CRM system somewhere, the decision criteria of deals we've won, why did we win this deal? Okay, that's interesting. It’s for these reasons, for this, Part of the roadmap where direction had gone, we should double down on that. Likewise, why did we lose that deal?

[00:29:23] Okay. That's actually not the first time I've heard we lost a deal for that. Maybe it's time that we should start to consider building that into our roadmap. A classic example of this was in a company I worked in as a sales leader, we identified that we had lost six large deals because we didn't have European servers.

[00:29:38] Now. It was very, very easy for me to identify that and put a strong business case behind why we should expand our server operation to have servers in Europe, because I could say we lost Vodafone because we didn't have the servers in Europe. We lost Telephonica, and I can say it was the deal size was this, deal size was that. Without that kind of clarity, and focus on those things, I'm not sure if we would have such a strong internal case.

[00:29:58] So from a product perspective, that's how it can work. And then if you think about where we start to talk about working with legal teams and we start to talk about prioritization, which is often a thing that doesn't get talked about of late.

[00:30:11] We often talk about the actual red lines themselves, but what can often actually be a big hindrance, particularly on the sales side, is the legal team gets busy the same four times of a year, right? End of quarter. And so how can we make decisions on which deals we are going to prioritize in front of legal?

[00:30:27] Well, it could be the ones that have the most strong chance of closing on time and the ones that we feel like are most confident about. And we can have much more visibility of those things if the deal is managed with MEDDIC.

[00:30:40] Dan Saks: This has been amazing. We unpacked and decoded what MEDDIC is. We spoke to the value from different stakeholders and we've really seen that the evolution of MEDDIC, product-led growth and really modern operating procedure can dramatically increase the velocity of growth for your organization.

[00:30:56] But we also saw further change that accelerated during the pandemic, which led to new ways that we can level up and hyper charge our revenue. Can you speak to some of those new ways?

[00:31:08] Andy Whyte: Yeah, sure. Well, I think one of the first things that we saw happen, particularly in sales during the pandemic was obviously we went from meeting in person to meeting behind screens.

[00:31:16] And I think everyone's aware of what a disadvantage that puts you at from a perspective of where you're trying to build relationships with people. That's very, very hard to do, well compared to how easy it is to be an in person. And so what I'm seeing is the best sellers out there, they're kind of innovating.

[00:31:31] So whereas before we had this untangible value you'd get where you'd go and meet your champion in the lobby and you'd walk with them for a minute, two minutes to the meeting room, and you'd build a bit of rapport. You'd get a bit of insight into what's going on. And the same on the walk back. You'd get that kind of debrief.

[00:31:46] We don't even get the debrief anymore because it gets to the end of a meeting and people just start like disappearing. You know? They just put in the chat, sorry, hard stop, and they're gone. You don't even get to kind of do the debrief. So what I'm seeing the most elite sellers do is they're kind of taking control of that and they're making sure they book time in with their champion before they're booking time in with their champion afterwards to debrief.

[00:32:04] And the worst case scenario is the meeting overruns, but the champion doesn't have to disappear cuz you've already booked their slot in. So they're kind of taking advantage of that. There's a lot I think sellers can do. They can spend more money on decent audio equipment. You know, not everyone can have a nice background, so you can use like a blurring technique.

[00:32:20] You know, it's, the first impressions really, really count these days. And then the other thing as well as just kinda leveling yourself up, whether it be via tech or your approach and making the most of every moment is. We tend to be busier now. Like I think there was some data from Nord VPN that said that prior to the pandemic, the average person was working seven hours a day and now they're working 11 hours a day.

[00:32:41] It's like a massive increase and we all feel that, I think, and I think the way we feel that is because we are kind of back-to-back on meetings and it just means that we can't be the best version of ourselves, which I think is very, very important. So I really encourage people to use MEDDIC as a framework to really qualify that any meeting you have, any opportunity you have, it is actually a viable opportunity.

[00:33:00] Because it's no good having three opportunities, one of them being good, one of them being okay, and one of them being bad. If the bad one is gonna make you miss the opportunity to turn the okay opportunity into a good one, or even worse, not win the good one, because you're spread so thin you can't do a good job.

[00:33:18] So I'm really big on this idea of just like be more efficient with your time and therefore double down on your winners. You can only double down on the winners if you have a framework that's gonna help you identify what the winners are, which is kind of bringing it all back to MEDDIC. So yeah, that's one of the things that I think is a big, big thing right now.

[00:33:34] Dan Saks: That's great. Andy, I really appreciate the time. Where can our listeners find more about Medic and your methodology?

[00:33:40] Andy Whyte: Yeah, best place I think to find us. We're MEDDIC.com MEDDIC, two Ds one C or two Cs. We've got both domains and LinkedIn. LinkedIn's the place where our team puts out the most rich content. So like us, follow us on LinkedIn.

[00:33:52] That's the best place.

[00:33:53] Dan Saks: Andy, thank you so much for joining. I'm really pumped up. Excited to go back to the sales team and I've taken away really a lot of ways and methodologies to be able to level up and turbocharge the sales using MEDDIC. So thanks again. Thank you.