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Deals die. But more so today than previously. That's why we introduce a different analysis to understand why deals are dying - so you can fix it.
***
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (03:02) - Why deals are harder
- (04:46) - MEDDICC to diagnose performance
- (07:34) - Champion
- (11:12) - What's the pain?
- (14:35) - From pain to metric
- (17:29) - Who signs the deal?
- (20:13) - How did they decide?
- (25:04) - Turning it into an analysis
- (27:24) - It's not strictly about the numbers
***
This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.
That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.
***
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we'll talk about what to do when deals die. And it's simple. You need to run a different kind of analysis to fix it.
[00:00:18] Enjoy.
[00:00:22] Basically, as you might have
[00:00:25] Mikkel: subtly so
[00:00:26] Toni: My kid's doctor is basically across from, um, from the office and it's really high up and I can oversee
[00:00:33] Mikkel: All the
[00:00:34] employees?
[00:00:35] Toni: you know, between the metro station and the office.
[00:00:37] Mikkel: Ha! Anton is arriving at a quarter past eight today.
[00:00:40] That's early.
[00:00:41] Toni: Yes. Uh, that's where I snapped a picture of you. Um, but basically, um, Got the kid there, were at the doc, it was just a checkup for like two minutes and 27
[00:00:53] Mikkel: He's fine. Yeah,
[00:00:55] Toni: Exactly. High five. Boom. And then, you know, biking all the way back and then biking all the way back here. Yeah. So I had my workout today. I don't feel like I don't have any gym, anything. It's just, I just bike my kids around.
[00:01:06] Mikkel: No, that's good. Yeah, that's good. I mean, our kids are talking about, Hey, can we bike down to the daycare again? And it's like looking out the window. So it's raining quite a lot. Maybe not today, . No, it's gonna be a
[00:01:17] Toni: the guy who just bought a freaking mountain
[00:01:19] Mikkel: that's true. Like I got it. Thursday,
[00:01:22] Toni: Is it, are you too bored? Do you need another child
[00:01:24] Mikkel: No, I need an escape plan from the house. That's what I need. No, no, no. So I got it Thursday and it was raining heavy rain. What do you think? I did? I went out on the track.
[00:01:36] Totally safe for a newbie to be riding in the forest trail on a mountain bike. Um, but uh, no, it was great fun. And then we found a path where, so basically the road was just rocks. Have you seen. Uh, Paris Roubaix or something, where it's only the rocks they ride at.
[00:01:53] Toni: also what people need to know, We're in Denmark.
[00:01:56] There's no mountains. And when people in Denmark say they go mountain biking,
[00:02:00] Mikkel: It's hill
[00:02:02] Toni: little hops, little hops in the woods. You know, jumping over like a root. It's like, oh wow, that was a mountain.
[00:02:08] Mikkel: a treacherous path it's a treacherous path for sure but it was like we we ended up in this road where it was just rocks and then can you imagine them being wet which is not fun that was kind of dangerous but uh no yeah so i was even out again this
[00:02:20] Toni: Good thing I don't need your ankles and your feet and your legs.
[00:02:23] Mikkel: you just need my and actually by now do you need my hands can i just
[00:02:26] Toni: no, you write a lot. Come on.
[00:02:28] Mikkel: Speech to text?
[00:02:30] That should
[00:02:30] Toni: No, but this is annoying in the room.
[00:02:32] I mean, think about you like
[00:02:33] Mikkel: yeah, yeah. But at least, you know, the one thing that can happen is I can't die. That would be, then you have nothing. Then it'd just be you talking into the ether. It would be boring. People go like, where's this other guy we don't know who
[00:02:44] Toni: Yeah. Me. Miguel.
[00:02:46] Mikkel: on this show?
[00:02:46] Toni: Mike, Miguel,
[00:02:48] Mikkel: given up. They've given up. It's this weird guy. I'm the
[00:02:51] Toni: the other bold guy,
[00:02:53] Mikkel: Yeah. But so we're going to talk about when deals die, which is happening all the time, but more so at the moment.
[00:03:02] Toni: I mean, it's been happening for, you know, at the moment, like for a
[00:03:05] Mikkel: commerce started.
[00:03:06] Toni: like we. Yeah, no, but like, I mean, um, I think that the main culprit and this is no news.
[00:03:13] I mean, this is unless you've, you've lived under a rock or something like this. I mean, it's usually the CFO who says no. It's like, ah, no, can't have it. The funny thing is, I think if your main buyer persona is the CFO directly, I think you're doing swell.
[00:03:28] Mikkel: I saved all this money for me.
[00:03:30] Toni: exactly. I mean, it's like, no for you, no for you, no for you, but for myself, I know I see
[00:03:36] Mikkel: the value, I
[00:03:37] Toni: I see the value, but how much? Yes. And I'll raise you. So I think kind of, if you sell directly to CFO, maybe you don't have that issue here. Um, for everyone who isn't, it's usually, uh, what we usually see and what we usually see in our customers is. Uh, at the very end, someone swoops in that's called the CFO and you've never met that person.
[00:04:01] Mikkel: And they do a rock
[00:04:01] Toni: And she just says no.
[00:04:02] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:03] Toni: It's like, no, not gonna happen. Um, no budget for this. Who came up with this anyway? What's the ROI? Ah, pfft. Okay. The ROI is 10x, well I don't believe it. So, uh, it's, it's a little bit like sometimes, uh, working with people that, uh, believe that the, the, the earth is flat.
[00:04:22] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:22] Flat
[00:04:23] Toni: Flat earthers, right? And it's like a conspiracy theory.
[00:04:26] You almost need to ask them, what can I do to prove that the world isn't flat, right? And it's like, hey, CFO, what can I do? to prove to you that this is a good idea. And usually they're probably like, I don't know, nothing.
[00:04:39] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:04:42] Toni: We're not going to buy this thing anyway. So no.
[00:04:44] Mikkel: You have five minutes, go!
[00:04:46] Toni: exactly. So, um, and while we have done a lot of whining here now, uh, I think, um, what we wanted to kind of run through, and this can be for RevOps, CROs, um, you know, alike, I think a lot of people. I've heard about MEDDICC before. M E D D I C C. Um, so the M stands for metric.
[00:05:16] Mikkel: the Mhmm
[00:05:16] Toni: The E stands for economic buyer. The two D's stand for decision criteria and decision process. The I stands for Identify Paying, the Cs stand for Champion and Competition. And then there's a version with a P for Paper Process and something else. I forgot. Um, but the, um, the point here is, you know, while this can be a good tool to, for example, uh, teach your sales reps.
[00:05:42] Right. Kind of, uh, them running this methodology can be a really good thing. Uh, so they can take deals forward or maneuver them in the right way, et cetera, or just like an enablement tool. You know, all of these things that are not really new. MADEC is not like, Oh, wow. We've never seen this before. Um, but the structure is really good.
[00:05:59] And then, you know, it spells like you can pronounce it, you know, MEDDICC. So that's great. Um, but instead of using this as an enablement tool today, we can We wanted to actually use it as a analytics tool.
[00:06:11] Mikkel: Yes.
[00:06:13] We are back to analysis.
[00:06:15] Toni: Um, and, and in this case, really thinking about it, you know, use the MEDDICC framework and run through that deals.
[00:06:21] Now, some, some of you will be like super perfectly prepared and everything. And they have, I don't know, like in this year, um, the MEDDICC thing signed, you know, signed up and like the, maybe they can do that analysis. I doubt it by the way. Um, but I think this can be a really good way to understand, you know, Why your deals are falling off or why they're dying, um, and doing this in a more qualitative analysis and or research than just, um, Oh, you know, automotive doesn't work well, you know, uh, going a little bit deeper,
[00:06:50] Mikkel: No, it's like, you know,
[00:06:52] it, takes a different view, right?
[00:06:53] Because usually if you do the bow tie analysis, in this case, you'll see some conversion rates or times or, you know, whatever it is, but once you dive into MEDDICC or medpick or whatever, you actually start noticing very different things all of a sudden. So there might be some work to do it if you're not running MEDDICC today, but still, I think this is very much worthwhile to do it.
[00:07:13] So we're going to run through. I think part of the framework, um, with examples of how, you know, what's changed potentially and how do you use this, um, to basically analyze your, your sales
[00:07:23] Toni: So the, uh, the first thing is, um, While MEDDICC spells really nicely, MEDDICC, that's not really the order of, you know, things that you kind of do here, right?
[00:07:34] Kind of, you don't start with, okay, welcome. I'm Toni. Uh, what's your metric? Um, that's not how you start. So usually what you're doing is, um, the first couple of conversations will usually be with a champion. Um, so unless, again, unless you have a way to directly call up the CFO, which you usually don't have, you're going to be having a conversation with someone else around, uh, in that organization.
[00:07:58] And that tends to be a champion, yeah? And the champion is someone that, you know, knows the organization can have internal conversations, can be the one that's vouching for you and championing the deal through, um, but usually isn't, you know. It's usually the person that needs a sign up from someone. It's usually not the person that can sign the check, right?
[00:08:18] Kind of that's your champion.
[00:08:19] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:08:20] Toni: Um, and there are a couple of different, uh, levels to a champion. Yeah. And I think in the method, uh, MEDDICC methodology, it's kind of C1, C2, C3, or something like this. Um, and you know, the, the weakest champion is someone that is there and kind of maybe wants to help you, but isn't able to open any doors for you,
[00:08:40] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:08:40] Toni: right?
[00:08:41] Because of, Oh, okay. Yeah. Can you send me the, um, can you send me the deck? I'll, um,
[00:08:45] Mikkel: I'll,
[00:08:45] Toni: I'll, I'll, um, I'll entertain it, uh, internally. Um, when do we want to meet again? Ah, you know what? I'll, you know, I'll, I'll just discuss it at some point, you know? So that's, that's your weakest champion, um, and with that person, um, you know, if you have that person that's usually your dealer's almost dead there.
[00:09:03] You can basically just park it there. Uh, chances are, a weak champion is not going to be able to kind of sell the next meeting, right?
[00:09:11] And again, you are basically now sitting there probably with a wrap. You're going through some lost deals and trying to understand through the, through the methodology, where did the deal fall off?
[00:09:21] Right. And this is kind of champion is the first one. Another level for a champion is that they can actually give you access. To a decision maker, meaning they can, they can actually get that person into the room. Right? And, and you're going to figure this out by, and we're going to get there later, the decision making process.
[00:09:38] That's how you're going to figure out who's actually going to make the decision. But a champion's role is really, um, to get that person who can make the call or is one step closer to the person who can make the call into a meeting with you. If, if you fail there, then that's why you lost the deal. Um, and it's not because, uh, the ROI isn't there or whatever.
[00:09:58] And the, the funky thing is, um, some sales reps, love to spend time with someone that actually can make no decision. So they have like four or five calls with a champion and they work out the commercial agreement, they work out the needs analysis, they do an ROI, whatever the fuck. and they go really far, but they have actually never met anyone else but the champion.
[00:10:19] And this is not like a, Oh, you know, you need to multi thread. No, it's you talking to the wrong person. Um, and that person isn't able to give you access to someone else, right? Kind of if you analyze the deal like that, then you realize, okay, okay. If this happens a lot, if this happens a lot with one rep, for example, then that's basically where you're going
[00:10:36] wrong.
[00:10:36] Mikkel: Yeah. So you basically need to figure out what kind of champion you're working with. And how how do you, you know, How do you do
[00:10:43] Toni: test the
[00:10:44] Mikkel: how do you test the champion to know whether they, I mean, one thing is the person who's just C1, where it's like, you will probably know very quickly, right? But in terms of how far they're willing to go for you?
[00:10:54] Toni: So the way you test the champion is you ask for them to invite someone, and sometimes they just flat out say no. Um, and then that doesn't mean that it's a C1 or C2, it just means that they're not sold. But if they are sold and they want to give you access but can't, then it's kind of a weak, uh, weak champion, right?
[00:11:10] Kind of a C1 more than a C2.
[00:11:12] what you can do with the champion. And you can basically almost unlock the whole thing with a champion here. Um, the next one thing that you want to do in your conversation with a champion is to figure out what's the pain. What's the pain for him or her, what's the pain for the organization.
[00:11:31] Right. And, um, you know, if you, you kind of wrote on this quote, if there's no pain, there's no urgency, there's no exact sponsor. There's, if there's no sponsor, there's no deal, there's no budget, whatever. And, um, the pain is what's selling, not the upside, right. You need to kind of figure out what is difficult, what can't they do.
[00:11:50] and then once you find something, uh, you know, once you find out like a little bit of a, uh, ledge somewhere to hang on to, then you need to dig deep into it, really trying to understand, okay, why is it a problem? You know, what have you done to fix it? Why haven't you fixed it yet? Um, and by asking those questions, you will figure out, How important is it really?
[00:12:11] and, um, you know, what's, what's potentially the implication? So one thing is if you, if it's a time saver, I think time saver is usually difficult in B2B, but you know, it sometimes works, but a time saver can, you know, to, to kind of build out the pain as you can then ask about, you know, Well, you know, what else would you do with your time?
[00:12:29] What are, what are the other projects that you're running that you can't right now because of this thing? And this is, this is edging a little bit already into the metric, by the way, but basically kind of, that's how you build out the pain, right? Um, and, uh, another way here is also to kind of go into, um, trying to understand Um, you know, what the implications would be if they had that thing, right?
[00:12:52] Kind of, what is it, what is it that you now can do differently because you have it? and here's then also the point. You wanna try and figure out, okay, this might be your pain. Understand, but how does that pain connect to the person who's eventually going, you know, what does this mean for the organization?
[00:13:11] Yeah. You know, if you had this, what would this you enable your organization to do now and why is it important for the organization? Right. Kind of, those are things that you need to identify there.
[00:13:21] Mikkel: So already now there's two cuts to the analysis basically grouping champions? You can do it I guess by C1, 2, 3. Would you also do it by this role function and then corresponding pains? I guess it depends on volumes etcetera
[00:13:36] Toni: exactly. I think the thing is, this is qualitative. This would be, you need to sit down with a rep and kind of, you know, basically quiz them through, which, you know, depending on who you are, it will be difficult or easy to do in the first place. but again, on the identify pain, what are you going to figure out here is, did they actually identify a pane?
[00:13:53] Right? Did they actually figure out, um, what's the problem on the other side? And then did they dig into it and did they stop at the, Hey, my low level champion said, I don't know, this Excel spreadsheet is difficult to maintain. or. where they're going deeper because no one cares about that, right?
[00:14:11] It's like, okay, cool. Yeah, that's, that's a cute problem. or were they're able to actually go deeper and link it up to a real problem in the organization, right? And if, again, in the analysis, if you find that you guys are unable. To build out the pain, to identify the pain, then that might be a reason that falls off, right?
[00:14:29] And then the next logical step after that is basically to quantify the pain, right?
[00:14:35] And the quantifying the pain then, you know, leads into the metric. You know, what's the, what's the dollar impact of the solution? And the metric doesn't only mean, oh, you know, my GRR, whatever. And, or ROI. It literally means, okay, this is a specific number that you want to attach yourself to, not just to a dollar number, but it could be, um, more deals per quarter.
[00:14:56] How? Well, you're coaching those reps, uh, they're ramping, you know, one month faster, they're hitting target one month earlier, blah. Or, hey, you have a compliance software, you're going to get 100K deal through more per quarter because you improve, uh, velocity or whatever it might be. You need to connect it to something tangible, not just a dollar, but like a, a metric that surrounds a dollar.
[00:15:23] It could be gross retention rate. It could be net retention rate. It could be growth. It could be costs. It could be, you know, stuff like that.
[00:15:30] Mikkel: I think what's dangerous here is like, you can. You can go really far and end up being in the clouds where people are like, I don't believe, right? So let's say you're selling project management software to R& D and you go, Hey, we help you manage your projects because you, you know, more efficiently can manage them.
[00:15:46] You can ship faster because you can ship faster, you can increase revenue. So there is kind of a scale to it. You also need to, I think, in part navigate
[00:15:54] Toni: the, the the way you do it is you need to have, um, it's almost like, uh, steps of separation.
[00:16:01] If you need five steps to connect yourself to revenue, that's an issue because at every single step, So, I mean, this is the Gong call recording. Everyone can kind of connect to that, right? The call recording itself, how does that, I mean, come on, right? But, but they're basically saying, it's like, because of call recording, you can coach better, you have a higher close rate, boom,
[00:16:23] Mikkel: Yeah, revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:25] Toni: And, um, uh, and basically, um, this is believable or this has been now, we have been now trained to believe it basically. But, um, if you have a, a letter that is very believable, then it works out.
[00:16:37] Mikkel: But I think that was also where I was going to go with it, right? We had the episode on, uh, making metrics matter, where we talked about deconstructing metrics.
[00:16:44] I think that's very much the exercise here, to make sure and see And I think that would be actually awesome to see in an analysis, albeit quantitative, to see while these reps who have a lower win rate, they use whatever metric that's further away from what you're actually selling. So they're just more steps,
[00:17:01] Toni: Yes, that's actually a good way.
[00:17:03] But the thing is, I think number one. Are people in your team actually connecting back to a metric like this, right? And then number two, what is it and how are they doing this, right? Kind of is it, is it super far fetched? Or is it, is it straightforward?
[00:17:17] Mikkel: I would also, by the way, recommend maybe listening to the ROI episode we had with Sangam Vajre, because that this kind of ties in a little bit to that slide.
[00:17:25] Now, question for you, which I guess is a segue to the next part.
[00:17:29] How do you distinguish the So the champion will care about very specific things. If they're going to be the use of the tool, they might see like, Oh, finally, I can get rid of this thing that's super annoying and drains my time. Um, But someone who needs to sign a check at the end of the day, they're probably not going to care about you saving a bit of time.
[00:17:48] Do you know what I mean? So, you know, how do you split that and how do you navigate that next stage? And what does that do to the analysis?
[00:17:55] Toni: So again, on the metric itself, um, so we're now quantifying the pain, basically. That's what the metric means. You know what? People might be like, Toni. You're not MEDDICC certified
[00:18:04] Mikkel: No.
[00:18:05] Toni: you're you guys are right.
[00:18:07] I'm not. Um, but you know, that's kind of how this thing works, at least, you know, you know, from my very naive understanding of it and application of it, but basically kind of, this is really about, um, figuring out what the potential dollar value in, in, in ways of a KPI, in ways of a metric would be connected to your pain, right?
[00:18:26] So if you're.
[00:18:28] You need to save time, which, you know, I think, um, for this whole AI thing, I think it actually is, is a perfectly fine metric to choose, you know, time saving, right? It's all about efficiencies and so forth. Um, but also the tickets are fairly, usually pretty small, right? Kind of on, on some of those incremental improvements.
[00:18:46] Um, if you want to attach time savings to a very large ticket, I think it's difficult the way you can do it, or can try to do it. It's basically not by saying like, Oh, okay. You get, you know, our back. Or two hours or a day, whatever. Uh, what's your salary? Uh huh. Okay. Well, you know, that's, that's the money then.
[00:19:05] No, the way you do it is rather to, um, go in the direction of, asking them what else would they do with the time?
[00:19:12] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:19:13] Toni: What are the projects that are currently on the back burner that you really want to get to, but you can't because you're running out of time and what they're going to say. Well, no, it's true.
[00:19:22] It doesn't matter, but they're going to say they're going to, they're going to bring up the pet project and they're obviously totally believe in their pet project and how much value that will bring to the organization. And suddenly the project ROI becomes your ROI, right? So that's kind of, that's kind of the trick you can choose here.
[00:19:39] I think it's sometimes, it's difficult to push people, by the way, to kind of, you know, Tell, you know, to tell them that you should be saving time. Hey Mikkel, you're pretty lazy, pretty inefficient. You you should be saving time. Uh, it needs to go the other way around, but again, right. Kind of the, you know, this is an analysis.
[00:19:56] You're not running the deal. Obviously a rep should be running the deal like this, but this is an analysis after the fact. So you want to understand, you know, how, how was the pain quantified and to what degree and, you know, in what way. So that's what the metric is for. once you get to all of that stuff, that's pretty great.
[00:20:12] and.
[00:20:13] Then usually I have like the demo that's like in the process. And then at some point, depending on, um, you know, how, how well you connect with, with a, with a champion, you can basically ask them some of the money questions that you as a salesperson really need to understand. And those are the two Ds in MEDDICC.
[00:20:29] Uh, number one is the decision criteria. And number two is the decision making process. Right. And, um, you know, basically you say like, Hey, I don't want to get ahead of myself, blah, blah, blah. Um, but.
[00:20:42] If you were to make a decision here, based on which criteria, would you actually do it, right? And yes, the RRI piece will play a role here, but many other people will also say like, well, um, it should be easy to implement.
[00:20:55] Uh, well, Does it work with this tool that I have? Well, does it, um, I don't know if it's a competitive thing, does it do this one feature really well that I really need, right? Or that the other rep told me I
[00:21:10] Mikkel: Might
[00:21:11] Toni: it might be, right? Those are the, basically the decision criteria. And this is where you have the chance to try and influence this a little bit and try and kind of rig this into your direction ideally.
[00:21:21] Um, and, um, uh, you need to have. That conversation to then also when the time comes to bring up like, but Mikkel, you told me you're going to do the one, two, and three, and here's one, two, and three. Right. And this will also tell you, for example, we have this in Roblox sometimes, um, they tell us like, Hey, it's, you know, we are RevOps, it's really hard to implement.
[00:21:42] you know, we have no, don't have time for implementation stuff. Right. Um, and you know, time to implementation is important for us. And then we're like, ah, okay. We actually need to still, you know, make sure that we are selling into that problem here, which is around implementation, which is actually one of our USPs, right?
[00:21:59] Kind of, we're doing 80 percent of the lift and blah, blah. And that kind of gives a bit of roadmap to understand like, Hey, there's something missing here. Um, and again, If the sales rep, again, you're in the analysis phase here. If the sales rep doesn't actually know what the criteria are, and he or she might have a really good feeling about the deal, um, but doesn't actually know how the decision will be made.
[00:22:20] So it's like, there's a big black box on what needs to be delivered in order to actually come up in the right direction. Right.
[00:22:27] Mikkel: Yeah. I think it's also, it's also an interesting point here, which is quite rarely will the buyer know all the decision criteria, right? I mean, sure the, hey, it needs to integrate with XYZ because we have it in our stack and implementation time. There are some technicalities they will for sure know, but But stuff like, do we, is it going to be more important to us that we save time or we increase ROI or something else?
[00:22:52] And I think that's where this part of the analysis becomes impactful, because the AE who's selling the thing needs to plant those seeds and make sure that they guide the buyer in the direction.
[00:23:03] Toni: I think what's important here is that the metric and the ROI is probably part of the process, the decision criteria, but it's not all. It's like, really think, think about it as sometimes all the time constraints, like, hey, it's the end of the quarter. If we can't make this decision now, it's going to, you know, push out and then something else is happening.
[00:23:19] And then we need to push out again. I mean, there might be so many other things that have nothing to do with ROI, nothing with the business objective that they want to achieve that might influence, you know, how they're going to make that decision. Right. Sometimes it's like, Oh, we got to hire someone else, et cetera.
[00:23:32] Right. So then the next thing, and this is really the money question, I think is you need to, um, and I don't have a great answer for this. way to ask that question, but it's basically about, so what's going to be the, how are you going to make that decision? Right. And this is really, really what you're going to ask here is like, well, who else is going to be involved?
[00:23:53] Who else is going to be involved in coming to a conclusion here? And basically this is where they tell you who the economic buyer is. But that's the moment, right? If you haven't guessed it previously, that's where it's going to happen. They're going to say that big guy needs to sign off. Those two other guys, or ladies, they're probably going to have veto power, so we need to kind of check them off and then that person needs to kind of do the thing, right?
[00:24:18] And, and this is where you get to the economic buyer basically, right? And then, uh, okay, interesting that they're involved. Hey, you know, for the next call, wouldn't it be great to kind of get these people in, let's just be efficient, let's kind of get through this. And that's how you then, you know, basically test your champion in that
[00:24:32] Mikkel: Yeah. And I think, so by the way, folks like Chris Orlob, he recently posted actually specifically about this, how you, you tackle it.
[00:24:40] So just because it's such a great tactic, I just wanted to mention it. So he basically said, well, you can just connect with the person upfront rather than waiting and then referencing to your champion. Hey, I'm talking with whatever. Greg, know, you don't need to do anything, but just so you know, we are already kind of also in talks, right?
[00:24:57] So there's some tricks there. I was just curious, like, how we turn that part into the analysis.
[00:25:04] Toni: figure out if they actually know who needs to be involved,
[00:25:09] Kind of ask, ask the question, okay, now that we are all clear on what criteria need to be fulfilled, if we don't know that, that's probably where the deal died. Or, uh, do we know who needs to be involved? Because if not, then that's where the deal died.
[00:25:23] And, and some of these things, again, right, so the, the champion piece identify the pain very early on. You will kind of have that. You won't, in the first call, sometimes you won't be able to test your champion in terms of, can they give you access to the economic buyer? Maybe at that point you don't know.
[00:25:39] you will very quickly go from, uh, identify pain to quantify pain. So the metrics, that will happen very quickly. You will figure this out. So in your, in your deal analysis, those two things, You will probably, you should expect an answer to this for every single deal. Not just the deals that went to forecast or, you know, needs analysis completed that, but for every single deal that should be there, the way there was an initial meeting that should be actually there.
[00:26:07] Um, and if there wasn't a follow up meeting, maybe that was the reason, right? Kind of, if you don't have a pain, it's really difficult to, uh, to sell them the next, the Uh, the next meeting basically, right? So, um, those, those you should totally expect all the time. And then really the, uh, criteria, uh, decision criteria and decision process.
[00:26:24] That's. You know, sometimes you can do that in the first call. Sometimes it's after the demo. Sometimes it's, you know, it's, it's a bit stretched out because it's a bit more sensitive. and so not every single opportunity might have that information actually. Right. Um, and then testing the champion that kind of depends whether they then get access.
[00:26:42] Right. But what this basically helps you with is to understand, where your deals go to die. and, you know, You know, this can on one hand tell you, Oh, wow, my reps are actually not doing those actions. And maybe that's a reason why the deals go to die. And maybe that's then the reason why you want to think about implementing MEDDICC all of that jazz.
[00:27:04] Or the alternative is you see where they're doing it and they're doing it correctly, but it dies anyway. That gives you way more information to, you know, to basically kind of check that specific thing. Think about it as a. I mean, surprise. Think about it as a fucking funnel. funnel.
[00:27:18] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:27:18] Toni: It's a funnel, kind of, if you do not get to the next stage, where you're dropping off, and then you can investigate why you're dropping off at that stage.
[00:27:24] Mikkel: I think, again, the reason this analysis is so powerful, you wouldn't see this in the numbers. You wouldn't see that, hey, We're actually losing a lot of deals because it's the wrong champion or we are tackling the economic buyer in the wrong way or whatever.
[00:27:38] We are doing terrible pain discovery. That won't show up. It will be represented as a win rate or something like that, but it won't show up. And I think this is a powerful way to do it. Um, and I also think it's, you could borrow a page from KD's book and basically try and then look at, well, those reps who are overperforming.
[00:27:57] How are they different in terms of MEDDICC when you run this analysis compared to the rest, right? I think it's, it's about some pattern recognition here that needs to happen when it is more qualitative. and I also just want to maybe, you know, raise a flag and say, Hey, you also want to be careful with how you, you basically sample the data.
[00:28:15] One thing is talking with the reps. They will forget, you know, those close lost opportunities eventually. But I had a case where I wanted to understand why do people buy. And we have this amazing write up on every deal, uh, where they outline, Hey, these were the reasons for buying. But the thing is, when you list five, then you go, Well, which one of the five did they buy for?
[00:28:35] So I think part of this, if you're fortunate enough to have call recording, go and use that for some of them. I think balancing it out, uh, a little bit, some of the sources might be very helpful.
[00:28:44] Toni: the thing is, right, some people use, um, automatic MEDDICC tracking in the CRM, some people force the tracking in the CRM, but the thing is, it's It's, it's not quite helpful to just have a checkmark that decision criteria figure, you know, achieved or something like that, right?
[00:29:05] What you will find if this is the setup is that, oh, wow, they're totally using all the, they're totally using the process because you know what, in order to move the deal from A to B, they, you know, have those checkmarks in place. And guess what, what didn't happen? You know? so that's why it's, it's, it's, it's really more of a qualitative thing.
[00:29:21] Um, I think, um, if you really want to invest the time, you could listen to these calls. Um, and kind of hear and figure out what did they actually ask and so forth. But then we're talking almost full time enablement role or something like that, that, you know, starts doing some of these works, uh, some of these tasks.
[00:29:38] but really this is, you know, again, also MEDDICC is not a process necessarily. So don't, don't mix it up. Kind of, it might be different for you and so forth, but it's really a framework to understand, well, if you want to, you know, win the deal, you probably need to check all of these
[00:29:52] Mikkel: Yeah. I think what's also just, when you look at, tech startups, especially SaaS, where so data is so important.
[00:30:00] It's, you know, everything we need to make decisions on the basis of, but there's so many things you can't measure or you are even aren't measuring. And that's where I think actually bringing in this qualitative approach, you can still quantify it by the way. I think there's immense value in it. And we, we tend to gravitate to the hard numbers and believe they are more true than anything else.
[00:30:21] Um, so I think if, if you're in revenue operations or CRO, maybe, you know, challenging yourself and doing something qualitative, this is me from the marketing background, knowing there is immense value and insight in that as well. So
[00:30:34] Toni: make sure to subscribe everyone to kind of support the mission. What is our mission again? Is it a MBA for SaaS? that's it.
[00:30:41] Mikkel: Yeah. That's probably the best way to put it. So hope you liked this episode. Yeah. Follow us on Spotify, Apple, wherever you're listening.
[00:30:48] Toni: Have a good one. Bye bye.