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April 8, 2022 - May 5, 2023
During this class, we conducted an exercise (that I still do today with various sales teams) called: Why Do We Win? Why Do We Lose? Why Do Deals Slip?
Our journey from $300m to over $1bn revenue took just four years, and along those four years, PTC met and exceeded every quarterly revenue goal in front of them.
McMahon would lead sales at Ariba, BladeLogic, and then BMC and advise many great sales-driven organizations, including AppDynamics, HubSpot, Fuze, and Sumo Logic, Sprinklr, and ThinkSpot.
I joined Sprinklr in 2015 and was reunited with John McMahon, who was on Sprinklr’s board at the time. Sprinklr’s Global Head of Sales Mike Logan (PTC 1995 - 99) and I agreed that I would join initially as an Account Executive to learn the business and then transition to lead Sales Enablement to support the planned growth of the organization.
Sprinklr had tripled three years in a row.
I only ever refer to time within PTC via the measure of quarters; this is because, in Enterprise Sales, nobody cares what kind of year you are going to have. It’s all about your Quarter.
CEO Steve Walske, CRO Dick Harrison, and VP of Worldwide Sales Mike McGuiness espoused at the time: “Longevity with the company has nothing to do with Future Employment.” PTC was a true Meritocracy.
2018 saw Poq targeting increasing its overall Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 160%. This is an extremely challenging task for any SaaS company, especially one with questionable product-market fit within a vertical market such as retail.
I believe it was the main contributing factor to how Poq was able to achieve 103% of the 2018 target and forecast within a margin of 10% for each quarter.
We implemented MEDDICC immediately. At the time of writing this chapter (9 months later), the average order value in EMEA has doubled. We have also reduced the average sales cycle length by 30%, which is a very unusual achievement.
Four out of the top five Branch customers in EMEA have been won since the implementation of MEDDICC, and if the current forecast is to be believed, then by the first anniversary of implementing MEDDICC, only one of the top ten most valuable customers in EMEA will all have been won before we implemented MEDDICC.
PTC is renowned as one of the most successful software companies of all time, and much of the credit is given to their sales team who took PTC from 0-10bn dollars in 10 years, which is a feat only surpassed by how they never missed a single quarterly target in over 43 straight targets—almost 11 years!
MEDDICC is uniquely suited to enterprise sales organizations. Enterprise sales usually requires engagement with multiple stakeholders and often will require a complex solution to meet their needs. For this purpose, MEDDICC is ideally suited as a qualification methodology.
There are two critical factors required to create predictable revenue: Efficient Resource Allocation Forecast Accuracy Let’s dive a little deeper into each:
A Seller who is unable to qualify their opportunities won’t just be inefficient to themselves, but they will also pull in other resources draining their efficiency too. MEDDICC helps Sellers continually ensure that they are investing their time in the right deals, and if not, it gives a clear path of how they can get back on the right course or qualify out.
Elite Sellers are accurate forecasters and elite sales leaders are too.
The Customer Everything should start with the customer, and this book is no different. Within this book, the customer is the person or organization that is the buying party. They can be both a prospective and existing customer to the Seller. The Solution Provider The Solution Provider is the organization that is looking to sell its solution to the customer. You work for a solution provider. Coach The Coach is helpful towards the Seller and gives useful information. However, they are either not qualified to be a Champion, or the Seller has yet to test whether they measure up to be a Champion.
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You may think this is a little pedantic, but it is critical for the success of how people embrace MEDDICC that they don't make these two common mistakes: 1. Assuming that MEDDICC is a sales methodology and, therefore, will provide how their organization structures their go-to-market with such initiatives like product and value messaging. 2.
There are several different types sales methodologies and providers, a few that you may be familiar with are below: Sales MEDDIC Group Force Management SPIN Selling The Sandler Selling Method The Challenger Sale Target Account Selling Value Selling Miller Heiman There are three things you should do when selecting a sales methodology for your organization:
While it is hard to argue against the concept that two sales qualification methodologies are similar, comparing BANT to MEDDICC is like comparing traveling to the shops on your bike to going to the moon in a rocket.
I do not mean to be derogatory of BANT. It is a highly useful framework to empower SDRs and Inside Sellers to obtain an early steer on an opportunity, but at Enterprise-level selling, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Many hugely successful sales teams will use both BANT and MEDDICC in their sales processes with SDRs using BANT to obtain an initial qualification on deals they create before passing the deal over to a Seller.
“The art of persuasion is a paradox. The more we attempt to persuade people, the more they tend to resist us. But the more we attempt to understand and create value for them, the more they tend to persuade themselves.” Or as Blair Warren says in his book, The Forbidden Keys to Persuasion: “People rarely argue with their own conclusions.”
As a Seller in enterprise sales, you are likely to have a territory—whether geographic, vertical, or by named accounts. You most likely have a go-to-market team assisting you in finding leads and technical support in the form of a solution consultant or sales engineer.
This is a harsh lesson to learn, and I sometimes wonder whether I would ever have had the chance to fully embrace it if I hadn't led a sales team for an organization that’s product-market fit was extremely narrow. A post-mortem on a poor Q3 made me realize that we had gone too broadly out of our narrow comfort zone. While the early metrics had looked great with lots of meetings being booked and pipeline being built, the conversion rates fell through the floor. If we had been better at qualifying earlier in the quarter, we would have been able to change course sooner and be proactive, not
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the number of meetings and pipeline shrank drastically, but the conversion rate went through the roof, from less than 5% in Q3 to over 30% in Q4.
By the time the first call with a customer comes around, you and your team may have invested hours into the opportunity. From initial research, stakeholder mapping, and perhaps a demand generation element, to anything from webinars, events, or sales development work. It
It is essential to specify that there is a difference between having a first call where you identify that the opportunity doesn't qualify and one where you have been unable to qualify.
The latter scenario most likely means you have more discovery to do,
If you haven't been able to uncover enough pain or a willingness to change the pain you have discovered, then this is a pretty strong signal that you should qualify out.
Still, it isn't a good fit, and yet they persevere with the opportunity trying to make their square peg solution fit through the customer's round hole problem.
"We are not here to tell you about us, we are here for you to tell us about your solution." Of course, Sellers should politely push back and try to persevere with discovery, but if the customer remains uncooperative, you should qualify out of the opportunity. I have never met a customer who does this and has enough seniority to get a deal done, and I doubt you will either.
It is my firm belief that if you have any concerns about the qualification of your deal after applying MEDDICC to it, you should qualify out.
Qualifying out because of doubt will commonly have one of two effects: Your customer will accept your position and rationale for not pursuing the opportunity with them further. Your customer will disagree with your position and try to convince you why you should pursue the opportunity with them. Win/Win.
Qualifying in the Early-Stages
Metrics and Implicate the Pain - Have you found enough pain that when it is quantified, it makes a compelling case for an evaluation of your solution?
Champion and Economic Buyer - Do you have a good understanding of who your Champion is or is likely to be? Do you have a good understanding of the stakeholders and who the Economic Buyer
Parts of MEDDICC to Analyze Carefully in the Mid-Stages:
Decision Criteria and Decision Process - Do you have a full understanding of the Criteria in which the customer will decide and the process they will undergo to come to that decision?
By the late stages, you should have earned the right to ask all of the difficult questions to ensure you are correctly forecasting your deal.
You should approach any uncovered Risk head-on. The only reason Sellers avoid doing this is because they are afraid of upsetting their customer or the deal, but if the Risk isn't dealt with, it will derail your deal anyway. Being brave and bold will help you win, not lose. The case study below gives a real-world example of where this was true:
After a brainstorming session, we had a breakthrough idea; the organization created live TV talent shows and much of what they wanted social media software for was to better manage their engagement with their audience during the live broadcasts, but trying to filter through the firehose of engagement would have been an impossible task without some kind of automation. All hail the rules engine! So, we had a unique differentiator. The task was now to Implicate the Pain related to it and apply Metrics that the customer would agree to. Once we had this, then we could work on trying to get it into
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Except, we weren't! My Champion responded, stating words that have stuck with me ever since: "No, we don't have to do that; we just need to find the price that works for both of us." BINGO! The glimmer of light we needed. They were prepared to pay more for our solution. It took us threatening to walk away for them to show their hand.
WHAT DEFINES ELITE? The shortest answer I can give to this question is simply: " Forecast Accuracy." Sure, not all accurate forecasters are Elite Sellers, but all Elite Sellers are accurate forecasters.
What outcome do I want from this engagement? Who else do I want to speak to? Have I set the expectation ahead of time? Agenda, etc.? What objections could be raised? What messages do I need to reinforce?
By contrast, the worst Sellers I know aren't process-driven. Their definition of following a process starts and stops with updating the deal stage within their CRM system.
Elite Sellers are plotters.
'Closed Lost with Hope.' Deals on this stage would be omitted from the forecast, but would still be worked on by Sellers in the (desperate) hope they come back to life. I think this is a terrible idea; if you are a Seller and find yourself in the emergency room doing CPR on your deals, there is something very wrong with your qualification process.
qualifying out of those you deem as unqualified, you will notice two surprising by-products:
Customers will increase their interest and self-qualify themselves. Sometimes inexperienced buyers pretend they are less interested than they are, and by calling their bluff, you'll force them to show their hand.
