MEDDICC: The ultimate guide to staying one step ahead in the complex sale

by Whyte Mr Andy

Those where you have correctly qualified out will often come back to you when they are ready. If you hadn't qualified, you might have pursued this organization incorrectly and burnt up sales capital to g...

Discovery is the most critical part of any enterprise sale. No other element will have such a significant impact on the success of your deal.

Further still, a fantastic by-product of discovery is that by approaching your customer in a thoughtful and well-researched manner, you can demonstrate at the earliest opportunity that you have a credible point of view that may open up their mind to knowledge and challenges they have not yet considered. Discovery

Despite what many organizations or the top 20 results on Google would have you believe, discovery is not something that starts and finishes on your first call, nor is it a stage in your sales process. Discovery is a mindset.

and if you limit yourself to doing discovery on a first call, then from that point on, you will always be selling with historical information.

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is that we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.” - Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart The above quote from Roy T. Bennett epitomizes the difference between how an emotionally intelligent Seller approaches discovery compared to one with a lower EQ.

Get a confirmation that you understood by asking, “Have I understood that correctly?” This won’t only ensure you have understood but it shows you care that you do.

“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” - Theodore Roosevelt

What is working? What is not working? When it works, what good things happen? When it does not work, what bad things happen? Whom does that affect? How much does that cost? Why haven’t you tried to solve it yet?

The 7 big questions aren’t necessarily the questions you ask. They represent the intention of your question. For example, you may not specifically ask: “What is working?” Instead, you’ll ask something like: “I read in your annual report that digital sales have grown 40% this year, what do you attribute your success to?” As you can imagine, that question is likely to open up an interesting discussion about their growth. Once you feel you have uncovered enough positive information from this track, you can switch to a question like: “Even though 40% is impressive, is there anything that you think held you back from growing even more?”

Discovery is not a Race Average Sellers are so often excited to start talking about their company and products that they race through discovery as quickly as they can. These Sellers approach their customers with a bank of questions intended to uncover pains that they can then sell against. This experience is awful for the customer; they sit there while the Seller bluntly digs for pain that they know will be used against them to try and make them buy the Seller’s solution.

The First Call Once you have completed your research, it is time to prepare for the first call. The first call isn’t always a call, it can be a meeting, but oftentimes first meetings have multiple stakeholders within them and/or an expectation that you will present something in the meeting. So, therefore, it’s good practice to set up the first call ahead of the first meeting to do discovery and validate your research.

The Deal Sheet You can use your format to do this, but if you want to use The Deal Sheet, you can find a copy in the downloads section of www.meddicc.com. The Brief - To begin, I find it helps to summarize your engagement so far with the organization and how the opportunity to engage with them came about. For people on your team joining the first call, this will give them a useful context.

Tech Snapshot - If you are selling a technical solution, I find it helpful to capture information about their tech landscape. Not just what technology they use, but if applicable, what kind of metrics can you see? Publicly available information such as how many web hits they get can be useful at this stage.

The Questions - Within your document, you can plan which questions you want to ask. These should be personalized questions rather than generic questions, meaning you start with a blank section for each Deal Sheet.

if an SDR has created the opportunity, they can use it as a handover/briefing document for the Seller.

Be Open At least nine out of every ten of your discovery questions should be open-ended versus closed. Open-ended questions invite thoughtful answers. They are generally tough to give short answers to. If used correctly, they open up a discussion about a topic. For example, an open-question could be: “Can you tell me how GDPR impacts your ability to communicate with your customers?”

In contrast, close-ended questions should be used sparingly. Not only will they limit the amount of information you get, but being on the other side of them is a pretty miserable experience for your customer. It starts to feel more like an interrogation than a conversation.

A general rule of thumb is to only use a close-ended question if you want an affirmative “Yes” or “No” answer.

An excellent hack to keep your questions open-ended is to use the TED Acronym: Could you please Tell me about it… Can you please Expl...

A proven method to open up the discussion on the right path in the first call is to ask the customer what it was that made them take the meeting or what they are hoping to get from it.

Switching from Pain Mode to Qualification Mode Sellers frequently make the mistake of switching too quickly. They hunt around trying to find the pain and the moment they uncover it, they switch to trying to sell against it. Metaphorically speaking the pain they have discovered is just the smoke rising from a more profound fire. The Seller is so intent on getting the chance to do their pitch that they ignore the potential signs of a more significant fire to uncover and instead, switch into selling their ‘smoke removal solution’. If they had stayed in discovery mode, they would have found the fire itself, and the chances are that the fire is burning like an inferno, causing 10x more pain to the organization than that of the smoke.

One-Sided: Seller: “Would you say that this issue is making your team less productive?” Customer: “Yes.” Two-Sided: Seller: “Are you able to tell me how much less productive you think this issue is making your team?” Customer: “Hmm, perhaps 20-30%.” At first glance, the main difference between the two questions may seem that one is a closed question, and the other is an open-ended question. This is true, but it is what happens next that defines whether it is one or two-sided. In the example below, we assume both scenarios have come from the two-sided answer to the previous question: One-Sided: Seller: “20-30%, that is a lot! If I could help you reduce that, would you be interested in looking more closely at it?” Customer: “Yes.” Two-Sided: Seller: “20-30%? That is high, can you explain to me why this is the case?” Customer: “Well… Not only does it take us longer, but when the process runs, we have to monitor it, so my team can’t take on any other tasks.” Seller: “Wow... So, of the 20-30% productivity you are losing, how much of it is because your team is having to keep an eye on the process while it runs?” Customer: “Maybe over half... 15%?” Seller: “If you were able to free up 30% of your team’s time, what else would they be able to get done?” Customer: “We looked into this and figured out that we could probably save 3-5 days each month.” Seller: “And how much extra revenue a month would that deliver?”

The more you dig deep into the pain, the causes, and the repercussions, the more your customer will feel implicated by it, and the greater their appetite will be to solve it.

Finish Strong One of the highest stakes moments in enterprise sales is the conclusion of the first call. The call may represent the amalgamation of hours of work trying to get the customer interested. Depending on how you finish the call will determine whether all those hours of research and preparation was worthwhile. Can you achieve the next steps you want? The good news is that if you have adequately prepared, you will have readied yourself for this moment and should be prepared to obtain the next step you desire. However, one thing to be conscious of is that if you ask your customer what they think the next steps should be, they are likely to stop, think, and contemplate the circumstances and then formulate an answer. As you may not have had a chance to build trust with your customer at this point, customers often retreat to the safety of taking the decision offline. They will say: ”We’ll debrief internally and get back to you on what we think the next steps should be. Are you able to send us the deck?” This is not a...

Voss states that he doesn’t know what the science is behind this line, but it seems to remove barriers and tap directly into the customer’s thought processes. Voss states that the line “Unlocks the floodgates of truth-telling” and that your customer’s thoughts will come streaming out of their mouth. In my experience, this hack works like a Jedi mind t...

“Thank you for the super insight you have given me today. If it is OK with you, then I think a good next step would be to show you how we can connect our solution to solving some of the goals and challenges you have raised today.” This will have a robust effect on moving your deal towards the next steps you desire.

If your customer doesn’t know they have a problem, they are unaware of how big their problem is, or they know they have one but didn’t know it could be solved, then it is your job as the Seller to alert the customer to the problem and the pain it is causing.

The best way to raise the problem's profile is through thorough two-sided discovery focusing on getting the customer to walk you through their operations.

Learn your Metrics - New Sellers to MEDDICC assume the first element to learn is Implicate the Pain when instead, you should focus on the Metrics as they represent the business outcomes your solution provides. Therefore by knowing your Metrics, you will know what questions to ask in discovery, and be able to offer a viable solution off the bat.

“I am not going to get into a tit for tat discussion about us and competition name. They have quite a good solution, and sometimes organizations will pick them, and sometimes they will pick us. One thing we have become very good at is picking the companies that are likely to choose us and specializing in trying to win them as customers. That is why I am here to support Seller’sname, and you have the full support of my team on this project. The reason we feel so confident we are the right solution for you is…”

Trap-Setting Questions Trap-Setting Questions are questions that you ask your customer to uncover or highlight a point of differentiation around your solution that, by proxy, goes on to highlight a shortfall of your competition.

For example: If a sales leader is looking to implement a sales qualification framework and is considering MEDDICC versus BANT, and I want them to buy this book, I would not criticize BANT. Instead, I would ask Trap-Setting Questions aimed at highlighting my strengths and BANT’s weaknesses. The questions may sound like: Me: “What are you doing to ensure you are qualifying your deals throughout their lifecycle?” Sales Leader: “We are not qualifying our deals very well at the moment, least of all throughout the lifecycle.” Me: “Ok, but if you do invest in implementing a qualification framework, will you want it to help you qualify throughout the entirety of your deal lifecycle?” Sales Leader: “Yes, definitely!” Me: “Do you mind if I add this as part of your Decision Criteria?” Sales Leader: “Please do.”

However, you should also practice with your peers. It is likely that as a sales team, you will be able to construct some themes for your Trap-Setting questions for each competitor. So, I’d advise getting together to brainstorm some likely traps you can lay for your most commonly found Competitors.

PRICE CONDITIONING In enterprise sales, it is rare for an organization to know with any accuracy what a solution like yours will cost them. Unless they have received guidance from a competitor or someone within their organization who has purchased a solution like yours, often they will not know what the likely cost will be.

As crazy as it may sound, it is often that simple. Your customer’s perception of cost is often left wide open, just waiting for someone to set expectations. For this reason, a highly effective strategy is to deploy what is called ‘Price Conditioning’. This is a process where you give your customer information leading towards setting an expectation whereby the price is likely to be higher than it will be.

The Reference-Based Price Condition When you refer to a customer and the successful results they have had from your solution, then use this to price condition by saying something along the lines of: “When ACME INC implemented our solution, they saw the lifetime value of their customers rise by 25%, which meant an additional $20m of annual revenue. The size of their deployment of our solution is similar to yours, and I am sure you wouldn’t mind paying us $500,000 a year if it meant you, too, could get an additional $20m of revenue, right?” The Casual Drop Price Condition When you have the opportunity to drop a number into the conversation subtly, you do so; only the number is a price set to raise their expectation of the cost. You could do this with a question, for example, you could be asking about the Decision Process and say something like: ”Do you have any varying authorization levels based on different cost amounts? For example, if our solution was to cost over $500,000, does it need to go through any additional decision-makers first?”

The Pricing Model Price Condition When you are starting to work on the scope of the deal with your customer, you can use the process of explaining your pricing model as a price conditioning exercise. For example: “Our pricing model works via the number of calls you make on our servers. Based on your numbers, if you continue to grow as you have over the last 12 months, the price could be as much as $500,000 more than it would be on last year’s volumes.” The Pricing Model Price Condition can also be used when talking about deployment size or different modules too. Other methods of price conditioning can be as subtle as filling out the ‘cost’ section within the Go-Live Plan. When done consistently and thoroughly, by the time your customer gets your proposal, they will be expecting a higher cost. Therefore, your price will seem low, and this is all before they’ve even started to negotiate. I am often asked what happens if the customer reacts negatively to the price conditioning exercise. Usually, people will ask something like: “What if the customer says ‘forget it as we cannot afford that amount’?” Believe it or not, this is a wonderful thing to happen. It means your price condition has landed and taken effect. In an instance like this, I would advise the Seller to simply say something like: “Oh no, I don’t know how much this will cost for you. We are yet to crunch the numbers. I was only giving that number as an example.” I have heard some people refer to this process as anc...

Price conditioning is more around the psychology of the buyer’s journey. Good news though, reader, is our solution is only going to cost $300,000, which is $200,000 less than what this chapter had price conditioned you to believe. Why? Beca...

Throughout the course of your deal, the customer will ask a number of questions through a number of channels—from in-person to calls and email. Capturing all of these questions and adding them to a ‘Q&A’ part of your Go-Live Plan has three distinct benefits: It is convenient for your customer - they know they can go to the Go-Live Plan to find the Q&A Answering questions in a document allows you to link to supporting documentation, or to include graphics within your answer It builds trust as there is an easy to find and auditable list of questions that have been asked and their answers It allows Sellers to follow up on important questions that were asked and engage other stakeholders from both sides to weigh in on the response The benefits of The Go-Live Plan, in summary, are centered towards increasing visibility of the current status and future stages of your deal whilst also increasing communication and collaboration around it.

They also use it as an opportunity to qualify the stakeholders on what role they will play (Champion, Economic Buyer, Coach, etc.) as well as setting out some expectations from the Seller’s side around reasonable response times and which channels are preferred for communication.

Elite Sellers may alter the styling to make it fall in line with the branding of the customer. This

Adding the customer’s logo next to yours at the top and personalizing the header to say the customer’s name are just a couple of small tweaks that go a long way. The

An Elite move is to invite all of your team to open the document when you share it with your customer so that they can see your full team active within it.

“I have the introduction to Procurement down as stage 7, is that correct? Are there any other stages that have to come before it? And are the stages afterwards correct?”

Pro Tip: Backdate activity in the Go-Live Plan to your first engagement. It will remind the customer of all of the work you have both invested to that point and will give the impression of a document that is alive. It will instantly be easier for your customer to understand if they see how it has been completed to that point.

5. The Status This section helps you to keep track of progress against each action. Similar to the deadline, it will help drive progress and accountability as nobody likes having a red ‘No’ against their actions.

The Absent User The Absent User rarely looks at the Go-Live Plan, if at all. This may be for a number of reasons and it is important that you get to the bottom of what the rationale for their lack of cooperation is. The common reasons are: - Personality type - They aren’t very organized or they are not fond of these types of approaches. This is OK, but it is important that you find an alternative manner of keeping on top of the Decision and Paper Processes with this type of person. - Technical type - This user can’t use Google Documents either from their own technical proficiency or due to guidelines from the organization they work for. As with the Personality type, it is important that you find an alternative method to keep on top of the Decision and Paper Processes. - The Unqualified type - This has little to do with the Go-Live Plan itself and more to do with the customer not being qualified to be at this stage of the deal with you. It

Metrics 1 (M1's) - Metrics Proof Points These are the business outcomes you have delivered for your existing customers. A quick hack to uncover what the M1's could be is to consider yourself with your customer six months from now in a Quarterly Business Review (QBR). What positive business outcomes would you expect to see from your solution?

The best way to introduce M1's is to reference existing customers who benefit from them.