Everybody, welcome. If you. OK, so I’m going to get started. So hello, everyone. My name’s Victoria Mussalli. I’m the People Operations Manager here at Long Ridge. I appreciate all of you for coming here today as we talk about the MEDDICC framework and how to run a MEDDICC sales process.

To that end, we have Cory Bray with us, who is the Managing Director at ClozeLoop and the co- founder at Coach CRM, which is a platform for driving sales coaching success plans. He’s also been extremely productive. He’s a very productive author and has written eight sales books in a course of five years, basically, including the Sales Enablement Playbook, Triangle Selling, and The Five Secrets of a Sales Coach. He works with B2B sales teams and go- to- market strategy and sales execution. So we are very lucky to have you here, Cory.

I kick it over to you.

Thank you so much.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining today. So if it’s OK with everyone here, I want to make this as useful as possible for everyone. And to that end, have it be conversational interactional. So I have some prepared slides today. I looked at the questions that folks had sent over in advance. And so why don’t I flip open my screen. Let’s look at an agenda for today. And then I’m going to go around the room and just get quick intros from everyone and see if there’s anything else that you want to add to the agenda. Sound good? All right.

And also, if you’re just watching this and you’re just kind of hanging out doing something else, that’s totally fine. Just let me know if you want to be actively engaged and participate, if you can turn your camera on and so I can see your face, have you see your reaction. We could have chats and follow- ups and things like that. That’d be great. So like Victoria said, I love writing books.

One of the reasons is because when we started our consulting firm in 2017, my partner had been doing sales training for 10 years after having been an internal operator as a sales leader. And what we found was that a lot of times, folks end up having to pay large consulting fees for content. And I think content should just be out there. And so the idea of consulting is really making the content applicable to the organization, make it work inside the company. So I love open sourcing and publishing things.

And something I’ve been working on for the last six months or so is this idea of making MEDDICC work. Because I’ve worked with tons of companies that have successfully rolled out MEDDICC or have unsuccessfully rolled out MEDDICC and want to talk about it. And so when the OneGuide folks reached out to me, I was excited to put this together. And just as a quick note up at the top of the session, I use MEDDICC with two Cs because MEDDICC with one C and MedPIC are both registered trademarks.

And the guy that owns MedPIC is running around suing people for using MedPIC in writing. So we don’t put that anywhere in writing. We can talk about the concept of it later on, but that’s the reason for the idea. So in terms of Creset agenda for today, here’s what I’ve got.

Take a quick glance at this and then let’s go around the horn. Tell me if there maybe is a quick name, role, company, and then anything else that you want to make sure that we touch on as it relates to MEDDICC or sales methodology, sales skills, anything in that area. I’ll just go in the order I got you on my screen. Ryan.

Thanks for putting this together, Cory. I’m Ryan Sindelar. I work for Ninja Trader going on year 18 with the firm. Since it was a startup and we were working out of a house, I’ve worn many hats of the organization. Most recently, I found my wheelhouse in the evaluation services space and growing that business unit, but spent a lot of time in business development and working on developing partner relationships, working on the Ninja Trader ecosystem and developing that, which is basically a partner network to create exposure for the brand.

So looking forward to seeing how the sales tactic can be applied to developing those business- to- business relationships.

Very good. Thank you. Sherry.

Hello. I’m the VP of sales ops at Authentic ID. Our CRO is traveling today, so I was fortunate enough to sit in his place. I’ve been here about four years. We put MEDDICC in, I would say that we’ve put it in and taken it out with the prior CRO. So I’m super interested to dig into not only where it fails, but Cory, what have you seen that really makes it successful and not just a field that’s filled out, but valued for the executives and the people that are required to go collect MEDDICC, if you will.

That’s going to be the first slide that we dig into. So we’ll jump right into it. Thank you.

Vinay.

Hey everyone.

This is Vinay Gautamay from Acquian. I lead the solutions consulting and… I’ve got my, I think the whole team here from my team. So thanks a lot for this. We do follow Medpig today. And that’s why we thought it would be a good refresher for all of us to attend this and implement it in any other better way and optimize it in any other better way that we can.

Very good.

Thank you. And then anybody that’s on Vinay’s team who says, Hey, me too. Same thing. Same reason I’m here. We can just, we can just quickly skip over here so we can, we can get to it. Matt.

That’s me. I think. Hey, Matt here from Ripjar. I am in charge of revenue operations at Ripjar, which includes sales operations in that, in that mix as well. We are just putting in Medpig right now with or without RP or two Ps perhaps. We’ll find out. But particularly, I think number two and number three on this are interesting for me. Medpig as a qualification methodology. I’m also interested in kind of the sales methodology that maybe goes along with that as well. You know, where are the gaps?

How do we fill them and how do we kind of match our value proposition with that as well? And just kind of dovetailing those things. So interested to hear all this.

Thank you.

Very good. Thank you. Matt Shock. Actually, if anybody, if anybody’s off camera, I’m just going to say, Hey, we’re, we’re going to move on if anybody wants to introduce himself or have anything specific to cover, flip your camera on.

Cool. Okay.

Let’s get rolling. All right. There’s a lot here, but I want to, I want to paint the picture with one, with one piece. So when we think about medic, we think about the letter. So it’s a, it’s an acronym. And when we, if I were to describe the acronym, it would be, and somebody said it already, a qualification framework. Now it’s not just about qualification. It’s something that lives and evolves over the course of a deal, where we want to figure these things out for each one of our conversations.

And the reason why there’s so many columns on this screen is because a mistake that folks make is they roll it out and they’re like, Hey, we need to get metrics. Well, what’s good. Look like what’s okay. Look like, what’s bad. Look like if we don’t define that upfront as a leadership team. And if we don’t train the reps on it, then people live in this world where there’s this concept in adult learning called the illusion of mastery, where people think that they understand it. Like, yeah, I got a metric there. And so it’s good.

And so the reason I lay it out like this is to really clearly outline that there are different degrees of what these, of what these things could look like. So what’s included in medic? Well, from a qualification perspective, it’s really about who do we want or what attributes of an organization of a prospect do we really need to uncover to prove that this is a deal that a, we want to work. So these would be things that we uncover earlier in the sales process.

There might be a couple of these that are more, more important in that first meeting where we’ve got to find them. We’ve got to figure out if they’re of a, you know, certain type of metrics, if we can identify a certain amount of pain, for example. So pain and metrics are ones that are very common in that first meeting and then move it along the process and make sure that as we do that, we’ve identified, you know, how medic works with each stage of our, of our deal cycle.

And in doing so, where do we need it to be? So I’ll get to this a little bit later. But as you think about a sales process, you know, oftentimes we’ve got our stages. So it could be like stage one discovery, needs analysis, presentation, proposal, and then closing a negotiation. So very simplified sales process. Well, defining how does this need to evolve over the course of that process? So do we need a green metric and green pane after stage one? And then before we send out a proposal, we need to make sure that we have these things in line as well.

That’s really looking at it from the positive building upside. The other angle to look at this from is we sometimes refer to these as the deal killers. That if we don’t have this stuff well understood, if we don’t have it well defined for each specific deal, these are the reasons why we’re experiencing risk, why this thing could go sideways. And so that’s the whole idea is to use this as a way to qualify the opportunity at the rep level.

And then from a leadership perspective, from operations perspective, we can go inspect these things and say, okay, is this deal in the right stage given what we’ve been able to uncover so far, and then really push the sales team on their ability to synthesize the information down to its core and get some really nice, concise, tight language around each one of the items. Because what’s not helpful are the things on the right here.

And then at the same time, 500 words of notes for each one of these letters isn’t helpful either because A, nobody’s going to go through it, and B, you don’t know if the salesperson actually understood the core of what’s going on, or if they just wrote down everything that they heard and said, ah, it’s in here somewhere, we’ll figure it out. So that’s the concept. I’ll pause here and see if anybody wants to elaborate, ask questions, or throw anything out there.

Have we seen examples using this or other ways to qualify, inspect deals where we just end up with a lot of this from the salespeople? And then all of a sudden we’re like, well, is that real or not? What ends up happening then is your pipeline review meetings become narrative driven. And we rely on the salespeople to show up and speak a lot and explain their deals to us. Well, the best pipeline review meetings, the information, the objective facts about the deal are reviewed by all parties coming into the meeting.

It’s not the first time they’re seeing that. That’s the whole point of the CRM. And so if the culture is that prior to the pipeline review meeting, we’re going to have content like this in here, then the conversation can be around, how do we uncover blockers? How do we work through those? How do we engage other resources internally or talk about pricing strategy or deal terms or anything like that? It up- levels the quality of the conversation.

If we’ve got these basics on the ground, absentness, then the conversation devolves to just the most basic content that could possibly be discussed during that pipeline review or deal review meeting.

So this is Sherry. I’m curious. I see you’ve got a mutual action plan link there. Is that something we’re going to look at?

We can. I’ve got some templates, but I wasn’t planning on it. What are you thinking?

No, I’m a firm believer of it. Yeah. Right. Because I know it’s a basic, but sometimes it’s the basics that get lost because everybody wants something more sophisticated. And I mean, basics can take you a long way to getting deals closed. Yeah, exactly.

Because if the decision process is having next steps is critical. If you’re doing a complex sale, then having one next step doesn’t really help. It’s

Yeah. And having a view on the seller’s side and not on the buyer’s side, that’s not mutually agreed to, is also, creates stalls.

Exactly.

I know I’m stating the obvious, but…

Well, I think that’s kind of why we’re here today. All this stuff’s super basic. There’s no rocket science involved. I think when we get to the later part, not to, I won’t bury the lead, this stuff works if it works every single week, week in, week out, and it’s paid attention to. Where I see it fail oftentimes is that people, it’s the flavor of the month. And they’re like, oh, we’re going to do this now. And then all of a sudden, 22 weeks later, the sales managers aren’t actually looking at it and inspecting it.

In terms of mutual action plans, something she just brought up, if we’ve got clarity around, what are all the steps that are going to happen between now and later on? What’s the target go live date? Why it matters? If we don’t know that, then prospects don’t care about the signature date. That’s what we care about. They care about when they’re going to go live, when we’re actually going to solve their problem. If we can define success criteria, that helps. And then, obviously, outline all the activities.

And then these other tabs have, if you’re going wild, I don’t know if anybody’s deals are this complex, but sometimes I work with people that are doing crazy custom implementations and scoping for big projects that could use the tabs on the right. So that’s the idea of mutual action plan is get that thing tight as part of the decision process. Because if this is all we understand, that’s fine, but there’s gaps, there’s holes, there’s risk. And that’s why I use that deal killers comment earlier.

I agree. And it shows better buy- in if they participate.

For sure. 100%.

I’m questioning my mind. I guess the mutual action plan, it’s in the name, isn’t it? The mutual question in my mind is, is it important? How will people know this information? Is it valid? What evidence do we have? For each of those points on the mutual action plan, who’s told us this? Can we rely on this information or is it just a pipe dream? Is it somebody doing loads of admin work that looks good, but it’s just going to disappear in a puff of oxygen?

Help me understand what you’re talking about. So are you talking about from the prospect telling us what’s going on or from us?

I guess the champion, we’ll probably talk about this more, but if we’ve got a good champion that knows their stuff, that’s actually on our side and working for us internally, and they’re telling us this stuff, then that’s better than your coach or procurement or somebody who’s outside of the deal. Or just a salesperson with happy ears giving it their best shot.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, the salesperson with happy ears, the easy way to inspect that is if the prospect didn’t say it, it’s not true. It doesn’t exist. And that’s something that we can use as a principle throughout all of these things. And so if we’re inspecting MEDDICC and we say, what are the decision criteria? Did they explicitly say what the discussion criteria are? And if they didn’t, then that’s not, we might have a hypothesis. That’s fine. Hypotheses are great. We can go inspect them and have a conversation with them during the meeting.

You mentioned admin work. I’m going to, I don’t know that this is what you were saying, but I’m just going to make a comment. These take like five minutes to do. And here’s why. Because we know how we sell. So if we think about the target market that we’re selling into and the type of company that we’re working with, well, we know how we win deals with those folks. And so the steps that go through, we can pre- populate it with everything that we typically do with an organization that size. And maybe there’s some variables.

Maybe they have procurement or they don’t. Maybe they’ve got to go get budget from somebody else or maybe they already have budget secured. So there are some things that flex in here. But in terms of success criteria, target go live, why that matters, capture that from folks in the matter of questions. And I often see salespeople push back on things like this because they perceive writing things down as admin work.

Whereas you end up in a pipeline review meeting and we’re having these circular conversations, repeating the same things over and over and over again. If the facts are on paper around deal qualification, what the process looks like, then we can have the higher level conversations around what we can do to identify and move past blockers. So that’s the take that I’ve got on that.

Cool.

Anything else on this? So if you’ve already got MEDDICC in place or you’re thinking about rolling it out, I’ll tell you, this exercise right here is probably the most valuable thing that you can do in terms of prepping the team to be able to leverage it, especially around what does this look like? And the easiest way to do this is go look at the deals you already want because we’ve done this before. So when we’ve had deals move smoothly, what metrics were we impacting? You probably got one, two, three that are really key. What pain do we solve?

You’ve got that. We know what pain we solve. And if you have different products, if you’ve got different ways of implementing them, then they’ll be different. So it’s not just going to be a single data point to sell. There might be more robust.

but getting this prepped up, getting it bought into by the team, by the management, frontline managers, and saying, yeah, this looks right. This looks like what we do. This looks like how we win. And then leveraging it as you inspect what’s actually being discussed in the conversations, what’s being captured in the CRM, and aligning. Well, are our meetings yielding green column content? Are we capturing green column content in the CRM? And that’s it.

Because if we’re qualifying the deal well, and if we’re doing what we need to do at each stage, then we’re working towards this place.

Cool.

Anything else? So one of the questions from the pre- question was what metrics to track? And I think I touched on it a second ago, which is just look at what you’ve done in the past. Quantifying the pain is one of the best ways to do it. So somebody give me a specific pain point that you solve for your customers. What do we got? Brian, what’s something that you solve for your customers?

Not sure if this is necessarily applicable, but what we find is when we bring on board new vendors is that there’s some expectation on their side on the end user client support component of things. And I think we do a better job during the negotiation process of making them understand what’s their responsibility for end user support compared to our responsibility for end user support. And sometimes that leads to pain points down the road once the solution’s implemented.

So the question’s really around what pain points do you solve for people when they buy for it? So they buy from you, why? You can pass to somebody else if you want. I just want a real example from the group here.

I can throw in.

Matt, go ahead.

We’re often around improving the accuracy and speed of processes. So reducing false positives, false negatives, reducing the cost and inefficiency.

Got it. So in terms of error rate, is that something that folks in your market track or is it something they just have a hunch that it’s higher than it should be?

It’s a combination of the two, but it’s kind of a compliance related use case. So these things are critical.

So being a compliance related use case, does that mean that there’s a certain number of situations where they’re out of compliance over the course of time?

Yeah, potentially.

So maybe, again, just Matt, you, so I don’t know, but maybe something like that is a metric that we could track so a number of non- compliances over the last 60 days or something like that. If we’re looking at metrics that we, efficiency. So what is their efficiency right now? What do they need it to be? And when it comes to things like efficiency and cost, everything’s inefficient companies. Think about the last company you worked at. This was inefficient, that was inefficient.

Efficiency, inefficiency is about, but what motivates somebody to actually care enough to buy something from a vendor to fix an inefficiency? They’re not running around trying to hire a vendor to fix every inefficiency. And so the question with metrics really helps there because it can help answer the question, okay, this is inefficient, but why the heck does it matter enough that we’re going to fix it?

And so if they can’t tell you how inefficient, if they say it’s inefficient, but they can’t tell you how inefficient it is today, I would really question whether or not that’s a deal. That’s a real big one that I think you could hit on. So why do deals stall? Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve done a lot of deep dive and post- mortems on CRMs and you just see inefficiency cost, inefficiency cost, inefficiency cost. It’s like a country song. It just repeats itself over and over again.

So if we see that inside of the lost deal notes in the CRM, that’s a great place to look back and say, how could we create a metric that we need to understand whenever somebody brings up an efficiency or cost? And it’s conversational, it’s very simple. Do you mind telling me how you’re measuring that inefficiency today? And then they tell you and you say, is there a target rate of efficiency that you’re looking to get to? Okay, so say that we’re going from 70% efficiency to 80% efficiency on some magic number. Okay, cool.

So then the logical question is, what’s the business impact if we’re able to go from 70% to 80%? Boom, now we’re getting closer to being able to justify a deal. Because if they tell me that going from 70% inefficiency to 80, 70% efficiency to 80% and if it, if they go from 70% efficiency to 80% efficiency, if they tell me the business impact of that’s $ 3 million and our solution’s 50K, well, now we’ve got, it’s too expensive, becomes less of a probability down the road, right?

Anything else related to metrics that we’re gonna dig into here? Cool, let’s keep rolling. Okay, so when I say that I bucket MEDDICC as a qualification framework, on the other end, there’s the idea of a conversational framework. And so when you think about a sales methodology, the sales methodology has to encapsulate the qualification framework as well as the conversational framework. Otherwise, we send our salespeople out to get MEDDICC Well, how do they do it?

Well, you can’t just give the prospect a questionnaire and say, hey, here’s seven fields I need to fill out in my CRM. Can you do it for me? You know, if we could do that, we probably wouldn’t need salespeople. So that’s not gonna work. So here’s just a few things to think through that if we’re rolling it out, or if we have rolled it out, do we have a structured way that we want people setting agendas? Are people here recording their calls for their salespeople? No?

So Sherry, how do you understand what’s going on in the meetings from sellers without the recordings?

Our CRO attends a variety of the meetings. So he’s partnering with them. We have sales engineers and TAMs. So rarely, only at the very beginning is it a salesperson without another resource within our organization. And our metrics are very detailed and very complex. And we don’t get a lot of, sometimes getting the visibility from a client is hard to measure them, but that’s how we know what’s going on in the meetings. Got it.

Okay, cool. So you got other people there. So one thing I’d wanna understand is, do we do a really good job of setting agendas at the top of the meeting? Do we get everybody’s agenda? Do we exhaust the agenda? Do we do it in a way that manages rapport? And then are we getting clear next steps at the end of every meeting? Are we getting something that they agree to that’s on the calendar? And I mean, the nice thing about this is you can track this in the CRM nice and easily.

And your next step should be the prospect doing something that has, you know, call Bob as the next step.

So what’s the prospect actually going to do in terms of- Yeah, we actually require next steps to be put into our CRM every week. They don’t like me, but it is a requirement. I think that a discipline that gets missed in this day and age is setting good agendas. And I’m a fan and I’m a fan of pre- calling, but yeah.

That’s a whole nother piece.

Pre- calling internally.

Well, with pre- calling, okay. What’s the game plan for today? If we’ve got 30 minutes with somebody, there’s no way on earth we’re going to go deep in every single one of these things.

Yeah.

And I think that’s a really good call. A pre- call prep, especially if you’ve got multiple stakeholders from your side coming in, especially if one of them is more senior than the other ones, because the senior people love hijacking the meeting and they’re going to go in there and talk about whatever they want to talk about. And then if we’re being methodical about a qualification framework, well, geez, we told them everything that we do, our history.

We went narrow and deep on one very important thing, but we missed two things here that we want to get before we move to the next stage. So the pre- call prep around what we’re going to do and who’s going to do what is critical for sure.

And we sell mostly to what, I mean, our greatest success has been with Wales with tier one clients. So it’s even more critical. So we’re doing more and more pre- calling and seeing a lot of success in doing that.

Love it, love it. I think a thing that’s often missed is when you’re doing it, when you’re executing a qualification framework, medic, band, whatever it is. I mean, there’s actually a verb that says, don’t band to me. Band, budget, authority, need, and time, when similar to medic. Because sometimes people show up to these meetings and they say, well, my boss told me to go get medic. So, hey, can you tell me, Vinay, what your metrics are? Okay. And then do you have a decision process for this? Okay, thank you. What pain are you experiencing?

Again, it’s like the interrogation type approach. So knowing how to ask these questions. Let me give a couple of examples here in a second on a future slide. But making sure that we’re doing this in a way that measures and manages rapport is critical. Same thing with objection handling is, what are we going to do? Are we going to manage objections in a way that’s conversational or are we going to do it in a way that’s confrontational?

MEDDICC doesn’t talk about demos or presentations. Does everybody here do demos or presentations as part of their sales process?

Yeah, so I think that’s another big piece, and so what you end up seeing here is you do the demo presentation, sometimes you might do a trial and pilot, and then you’ve got all these other things around: definition of target market, personas, competition, objections and responses, pre- meeting prep, all of these other things- and so it ends up you zoom out and you see that we were well intentioned because we had the goal of rolling out MEDDICC, and then all of a sudden, there’s all these other things that balloon.

So I think my point with this is: just beware, feel free to take a screenshot of this. There’s lots of other things to account for if it’s all gonna fit together, because without a strong agenda, without strong next steps, without all the other stuff on the screen, it’s harder to get the content that we want from the MEDDICC piece, and we already heard a couple examples today of salespeople don’t wanna do it. They don’t wanna update their next steps every week. They might view the mutual action plan as admin work.

Well, here’s a bunch of other stuff that we need them to do as well. So this is where it could potentially turn into a more robust science project if it’s not well- addressed or thought about upfront. Yeah, I’ll send the slides out. Sure, corey?

We will have the slides for y’all in the recap page.

Yeah, is anybody doing trials or pilots as part of their sales process? Okay, are we happy with conversion rates on those and the amount of effort that we invest in them?

Absolutely not, okay. So more, please.

Structure around those is key, and I think that fits in here in terms of decision process, which is why the heck do they need a trial. So what’s your typical trial or pilot process? Look like Matt, it’ll depend on the deal.

On the larger end, it will be a very extended bespoke. It could be like an on- premise. To point out, POC: it may or may not be paid, may well have custom development work- yeah, lots of resources involved. At the other end of the spectrum, we do have a SaaS version of our product which is much more plug and play, so there’s various data points that we capture, going into that to determine what delivery work is needed for the proof of concept, so that we can make some smart decisions about how we resource that and plan it.

Love it, yeah, I think that the thing I see people do on that front that have more success- I mean, look, if they’re doing a trial or pilot, it’s hard to have 100% everything that you want, but at least if we can get a kickoff meeting with the right people involved where we clearly define what we’re trying to do, why we’re doing a pilot, what success outcomes look like, preview, what next steps could be following the pilot, get all that just tightened up up front.

Make sure that we’ve got- depending on how long it is complex and who’s involved- a check- in meeting during the pilot to see how it’s going- A lot of times folks don’t even use it- or, depending on what it is, make sure that we’re on track and then at the end get a commitment. And doing all this upfront, making sure that before we even allocate resources to it do we have a commitment that the right executive sponsor is going to be involved in a debrief meeting and that we’ve clearly defined. I mean, I like to do metrics around the pilot.

So what’s the metrics? What’s the process, what’s the criteria? So we’re hitting on these and then who’s the economic buyer? So using a lot of these points to really define what we want to ask for as part of the pilot, and if they’re not willing to bring the right people in and if they’re not willing to at least entertain what potential next steps could be after the pilot, it’s, then we’re just gambling, and so I would leverage this to think about how to structure the pilots as well. Cool anything else on this page folks want to dig into.

So did we touch on number seven?

Yeah, number seven’s around: just definition of target market, personas, competition objections, just knowing what we do, and then- yeah, I know- when it comes to trials and pilots, like how do we run trials and pilots? So the thing that we just talked through: you can use medic to support that, but rolling out medics not gonna make your pilots better.

unless you do the other work in addition to that. So the point, again, point with this is previewing that, hey, there’s a lot more to it. And this is where I see folks start having issues is that they don’t account for this stuff. And then all of a sudden they’re sitting there 23 weeks later saying, why the heck aren’t my salespeople filling out these fields in the CRM? And it’s because it’s not working for them. And it’s just like anything else, you know, the gym doesn’t work because I’m not getting in shape.

Well, I’m using the machines wrong, or I’m not going enough, or I’m not going long enough, or I’m not pushing myself hard enough. It’s exactly the same thing when it comes to something like what we’re talking about today. Okay, this is where it can get. So I said, there’s more stuff. Let’s give an example of how we can peel it back a little bit. So I just pulled this from one source on the internet, and this is common. Cool, we’re rolling out medic. Here’s 26 questions your team needs to learn. Whose team’s gonna memorize 26 questions?

Okay, so here’s the order of operations for this. We have to learn the questions, and then we have to remember them. Then we have to know when to use them. And then at the right time, during the right meeting, we need to use the right one. And we need to do that well. Not gonna happen. So the trap here is, well, here’s the questions for metrics, and here’s the questions for decision process, and here’s the questions for all of this other stuff.

So what I’m gonna give you all is three questions that we can use for any of these, that, or for pretty much anything when you’re doing discovery. Previous experience, social proof, disqualifying question. So an example of previous experience could be the last time you evaluated software like this, do you mind sharing who else was involved in the evaluation process? Or when you’ve evaluated big programs before, have you put together specific criteria around how you’re gonna make a decision, and is that something that you’re doing today?

So when we use previous experience as a technique, we’re learning about their operation and how they do business. So this could go to, do they use procurement, or do they dig into finance, or whatever they do. So we wanna learn more about how they specifically do things, especially if we’re in an area of the business where we know different prospects do it different ways, and just wanna dig into their world. Well, they don’t always know, because maybe they’re new, maybe they’re looking at something for the first time. So then we can use social proof.

And we can say, usually when people are evaluating a purchase like this, they’re looking at a handful of metrics, such as metric X, metric Y, metric Z. I was thinking A, B, and C. X, Y, and Z, metric X, Y, and Z. Are any of those critically important to you? Or usually before we kick off a pilot, we get a vice president, senior vice president, CFO involved at the kickoff to help really understand what we’re trying to accomplish and make sure that they’re aligned with what our goals are.

Is that something that you’re open to having them invest 15 minutes on? Whatever it is. So just another conversational technique to help get people involved. And the last one, disqualifying question. So again, going back to the pilot example, you’re not concerned that the CFO hasn’t even heard about this project yet, are you? So you can ask a question in the negative format, which for those of you that have done this before and are comfortable with it, it works great.

If you’ve never done it before, it takes some practice before it comes off the tongue nicely. So that’s the idea of using previous experience, social proof, and disqualifying questions to uncover any of this stuff instead of forcing the team down the path of having to memorize 26 questions and figure out which ones to use when. All right, operationalizing it. All right, let’s talk about this. So when we look at, I’m moving my, you know, those faces are on my screen so I can see everything. Okay, so first thing is making sure the fields are easy to use.

Does everybody here use Salesforce or use something else?

or use something else?

Salesforce, okay. So when the user, when the salesperson goes into Salesforce, sometimes people default to the activity screen, sometimes people default to the detail screen. If you go to the activity screen, you just got a bunch of stuff you gotta sort through. So if we go to the detail screen, that’s great. And then as the salesperson, are these fields at the top of the screen? I know this sounds super simple, but if it’s not up there at the top, then people are less likely to use it and engage with it. So make it easy to find.

And so it’s just glaringly obvious to them if it’s empty or if it’s got something in it. And then we touched on the exit criteria before. So before a deal moves from stage one to stage two, we’ve gotta have something for identify pain and metrics, for example. Or I’ve even seen situations where before we go to a proposal, manager has to sign off that medic looks good because we’re not gonna spend our effort putting a proposal together if we haven’t done a thorough qualification discovery.

Or on the other side, if we haven’t and we put a proposal together, it’s not about the effort level, it’s about, well, we’re decreasing our chances of winning the deal. So let’s get an opportunity with a prospect to have one more meeting, fill in some of these gaps, and then we can go from there. And then take all of this and include it in reporting. I think that it’s wild to me that many companies don’t have standard reports that people use every week that show the breakdown of the field.

So for example, imagine you’ve got a report that has all your deals, and then you’ve got columns, metrics, economic buyer, decision process, decision criteria. And so you’ve got each one of those and you’ve got the content within themselves. I know in Salesforce, it’s not real pretty to do text reports, but the whole idea is, at a glance, we can look at it and filter by salesperson, for example. We can look at it and we say, okay, first, is it there? Okay, so this salesperson has several deals where nothing exists, so that’s not good.

And then we can look at the quality. And that goes back to that green, yellow, red concept that we had on that first slide after the agenda. I think it’s good. Salespeople can only control two things. They can control their quality of activity and quantity of activity. And so here we want to inspect the quality to make sure that it’s solid. And just because it’s not in there doesn’t mean that they didn’t uncover something in the meeting, but we’ve got to inspect it because if we don’t inspect what we expect, then folks are going to do something else.

They might go prospect, they might go prep for the next meeting, or they might go do something in a personal life as opposed to keep this report tight. So having the report that just shows the qualitative piece in there is huge, and then leverage that as coaching. So if they’re not doing it, we can coach around the activity. If they’re doing it and they’re doing it poorly, we can coach around the quality. And this, just four simple things.

I know there’s definitely more and we can toss some more ideas out there, but if we do these four things, then we’re going to be in good shape to increase the probability that it gets adopted and actually used well. What do we think?

That’s good to me. So we’re doing the first three of those at the moment, and I think moving into number four, I think arguably one of the most important steps, right?

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve seen as a result of doing number three.

I mean, that’s kind of cutting edges to where we are now. So we are kind of having reps do an initial assessment, which is quite a backlog of work to get done. So we’re trying to do that in a manageable way. And then, so we have all the reports built. We have the traffic lights atop the opportunity, all the fields to fill out. We use Quip alongside Salesforce, so we have some more free text in there. So the reports are there, traffic lights are there.

When we’re doing the pipeline reviews at the moment, it’s kind of zoomed in, so that doesn’t include all of the red medpix down the side. But as we kind of get a critical mass of those, then we can start including them. So we’re kind of working on that critical mass of having these filled out. But I think in the more kind of focused one- to- one discussions, we can already start doing that.

For sure, love it. Yeah, and this number three is a great thing to review the day before you’re doing a one- on- one with somebody or the day before you’re doing your pipeline review meeting. Because as a manager, you don’t wanna show up to a meeting with them unprepared. And there’s lots of management approaches if people show up to meetings unprepared or what you can do. We won’t go down that rabbit hole today. But yeah, so these are four great things. Thanks, Matt. Anything else from the roster group?

Cool. All right. So one of the questions was around using MEDDICC and win- loss analysis. So here’s a couple of things that I’ve seen work really well, which is first, we got to isolate the reason why we lost, because not all losses were created equal. So I think the first piece, and that goes back to that, having a real fundamental definition of what is our target market, what persona do we sell to, and making sure, was this deal a deal that we should have been in in the first place?

And if the answer is no, then that’s something that we can coach or something that we can adjust marketing on, but not something that we want to really dig into around win- loss ratio and don’t let that negatively impact our metrics if we lost and if we won. And I know sometimes companies sell these deals that are almost guaranteed to churn, so probably not happening these days, probably more of a pre- bubble thing. So were they an ideal fit? Sales execution, where we didn’t perform, this is something where we can definitely dig in.

So did we have the right components of MEDDICC at the right stage in the sales process, or did we skip things? And then we just lost, we executed as well as we could, and we just didn’t win, which obviously happens.

I would look at that, bucket these, and then specifically within the sales execution piece, figure out what we did or didn’t do, and was it something that was a fluke or was it something that is systemic, either for that individual person or across the org, and then we can go back and coach it up if it’s something that people have been trained on, or if we didn’t train it well or it didn’t stick, then we go back to training. Anything else here on this question?

Is there a different criteria that you would use for why we won a deal versus why we lost, or would it just be the opposite of these? Why they’re an ideal fit, why we won them, or would you have additional criteria for analyzing the win versus analyzing the loss?

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think with why we won, the first two places I’d go in the context of this is I would look at pain and metrics, and maybe you’d want to filter in, we were able to get to the right person, we were able to build a champion, we smoked our competitor. So yeah, you could go down the list and see were we strong, were we specifically strong, or maybe we won despite the fact that we weren’t able to do something.

So yeah, looking at it from all the different angles, I think the key is isolating out the deals that we shouldn’t have been in the first place, and then looking at the ones that we executed well and the ones that we didn’t execute well as separate buckets is key. Because especially if you get…

One of the challenges I’ve seen with folks that come up through sales, and that’s all they’ve done their whole career, is a lot of times folks didn’t go deep into analytics, and so you read the reports the way the reports were read to you, and you can run the risk of…

And I don’t know if this is something that anyone here has run into, but you can run the risk of seeing things that don’t exist and start going off into different directions and drawing conclusions based on data and reports, especially if you’re in a smaller business, you don’t have that much data to… If one deal can move something several percentage points to the good or the bad, then it can start… Just using data to make decisions can be a little risky in the cases like that. And then the bottom three words are what matters on this slide.

So I think the quality inspection and coaching is key. We talked about exit criteria a few times, and then we’ve obviously got those gaps that we talked about that are outside the scope of a qualification framework to make sure that everything’s tied around. And the real key piece here when… Okay, so I’m going to…

We’ve all heard the term sales enablement and when we think about sales enablement, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but there’s, you know, think of rolling out qualification framework, sales methodology, sales training, even getting the CRM working, all of those things fall under the bucket of sales enablement. And when it comes to sales enablement, there are two main activities that happen. There’s building and there’s operating.

And the challenge is that people that like to build, once they built something, they want to move on to the next thing, build the next thing. And then they want to move on to the next thing, build the next thing. And the key with something like this is it needs to be operated on a consistent basis. So I use numbers, you know, in two weeks, 20 weeks and 200 weeks, are we still going to be doing what we said we were going to do?

Or is this something that’s going to tail off and be that thing that we tried for a while or the thing that we used to do because we don’t have consistent focus and execution? So the real answer is, when it comes to these frameworks and things, lots of things that work. Things that work the best are things that people use consistently, day in, day out. Salespeople are using them to prep for meetings, to execute meetings, to follow up on meetings. Managers are using them to inspect the quality and quantity of activity. They’re using them to coach.

The organization’s using them to train. Operations is integrating them into the CRM and the business process, and the executives are sponsoring them and saying, hey, all this is something that we do that’s important to us. And it’s that that silly phrase, you got to inspect what you expect. Nobody looks at it above you, then you don’t do it. And that’s the default culture in most people. All right. Well, those are my prepared remarks for today. Happy to chat about anything else, go deeper if anybody wants to.

I want to save some time for Q& A. How important is number two?

At the moment, we don’t have these kind of hard gates between stages, and I’m thinking more to kind of rely on, hey, this is, as the deals go through, our expectations go up. So we score each one from one to 10. And if you’re at stage one, it’s okay to be like a three, four, that’s a green. But as you go through the process, you then got to be at seven, eight in order to be green in stage five. So at the moment, we’re just kind of having that visible and flagging it rather than saying, hey, it’s red, therefore you cannot progress.

Because like you said, sometimes if you’ve got a really strong champion or you’ve got really good access to the economic buyer, if you don’t know something else and something else is red, that kind of makes up for it.

I don’t know.

What do you think?

I would say if management approves it, sure. Don’t let rules get in the way of business. But I think that breaking exit criteria…

Okay.

So two things are bad. Complicating exit criteria is bad because you say, oh, these six things have to happen. Well, the six things never happen. It could be something very simple, which is we don’t send a proposal until we’ve had a conversation with the person that’s going to sign it and we’ve uncovered pain that justifies the price. Okay. So let’s say those are our two exit criteria. Well, let’s suppose that the CFO in Abu Dhabi is going to sign it and that person has no interest in talking to us at all.

And they sign every contract that the company processes. Well, let it go. Let it go. Send the proposal to your champion economic buyer, whoever it is. But that’s something that I would suggest management has eyes on and says, okay, I’m fine with this because. And just as a check and balance on the rep pushing things because of happy years or because you’re on them to push them. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I also like, I like optional exit criteria and hard exit criteria with the fewest hard exit criteria possible that still makes sense. But man, if you’re bringing in people to do trials or POCs and you’re throwing solution engineering resources at them, you got to have something because you got to protect that investment you’re making. And you also got to protect the culture because I have this friend that used to always joke, the best salespeople are the ones that can politic their way into the most sales engineering resources.

And so, again, no idea if that happens in any of these orgs, but that’s a real risk too. And it helps protect the culture across the rest of the sales team to make sure that, I mean, I know the goal isn’t to be fair, but the goal is to be reasonable. And so that’s a piece of it. What else?

I have one more if nobody else does.

Something in writing.

Come on to the hog in the limelight. No.

Yeah, go for it.

Matt, you go.

That was just a question.

Let’s just go.

Deal reviews, pipeline inspections. I guess you’ve got one- to- one deal coaching. You’ve got broader pipeline reviews, might be QBRs, or might be team reviews. How many deals can you review in a meaningful way in one session, do you think?

Well, that’s driven by how well people prepare for the sessions. That’s the key.

I think if it’s not valuable to the team, don’t do it with the team because otherwise you’re wasting tons of people’s time. Justify why is this thing that we’re doing with the team valuable to the team? Maybe it is because, hey, these are key deals and we’ve got some people that are newer, some people are junior. We want them to get exposure to the ins and outs of these deals that are later stage, bigger size, something they haven’t gotten to yet, and there’s business value in getting them exposure to it. That could be it.

Or maybe you’re doing a new product launch, and you’ve got your first couple of deals with that new product, and you want everybody to get exposure to it. So that’s good. Maybe there’s a new competitor in the marketplace or somebody that’s getting stronger and we want to understand, well, how do we position ourselves against that competitor?

What are some good questions we can ask upfront discovery?

Then what are some things that we can do in terms of deal terms later on? So if it’s valuable to the team, then the team can be party to it. What’s not valuable to the team is me saying, oh yeah, Matt, sorry, I was at a bachelor party and I forgot to update my pipeline. Let me just run you through it verbally in front of everybody. No good.

So that’s the far other extreme. Then in terms of the one- on- ones, I think one thing I’ll just throw out there, my shirt says coach, I always wear my coach shirt. Make sure we’re decoupling coaching and going through deals. Because when I think about coaching, one of the most impactful things you can do from a coaching perspective is isolate that one thing that’s going to have the biggest impact on the person.

Now, we can talk about deals, we can talk about nudging deals, we can look at all these things.

But when we think about coaching, segregate that from the pipeline review conversation and say, all right, well, based on this person, we always say coach the player, not the play. So how do we look at this person?

Yeah, they’ve got deals, sure.

They also have a calendar. They’ve also got the way that they conversationally execute inside of sales meetings.

They’ve got their track record in terms of their career, so we know where they’re at. They’ve done training or haven’t done.

There’s lots of things about this individual. How do we abstract away that one thing that’s going to be the biggest opportunity for them?

And so, for example, we might look at a deal and see that they don’t have good next steps, they haven’t uncovered pain, they haven’t looked at metrics.

You can’t coach lots of things at once because people aren’t going to remember. It’s going to turn into an excuse factory. But the example I just went through runs back to something that Sherry brought up earlier, which is pre- meeting prep. Well, if I’m struggling with all of these things, then can I find a root cause amongst them? And maybe, hey, are we prepping for these meetings? Show me how you prep for the last meeting.

Well, gee whiz, we’re not going in with a hypothesis of what pain they have based on their persona and market segment and anything else we know about them. We’re not going in with a hypothesis around what the next step is given our sales process and what stage they’re at. We’re not going in with a hypothesis around what objections or resistance we’re going to encounter given that we know their incumbent solution, we know how we’ve talked to folks like that before. That’s the idea of decoupling the coaching from the deal inspection.

And this happens if prior to the one- on- one or prior to the pipeline review meeting, they do a lot of that work up front, get the stuff in the system, and so it’s there, consolidate the 500 word notes down to something that’s concise, and then just work together and let the tools and the management process work for you and as leaders take more work off our backs.

That was probably a longer answer than you were looking for, but it’s what we got. Thanks.

Yeah, cool.

All right, everybody. Well, thank you. Appreciate your time.

Yeah, I was just going to say, there was a survey that was just sent out to folks through Zoom, so if people want to fill that out, that helps us on the Longbridge side to know, one, how today’s event went, but also for future events, if there are certain topics or things you’d like to see discussed that helps us when we’re choosing this.

And then otherwise, one guy, as Catherine said earlier, they’ll send out an email that has a recap page that has the recording of this presentation, all of the slides, and also kind of ways to get in touch with Cory directly if you want to continue the conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much, Cory, for coming on today.

Very good.