How MEDDIC Can Be Your Common Language for Cloud GTM
MEDDICC is a Sales Qualification Framework that some of the world's most successful sales teams use to drive efficient and predictable growth. In this session, Andy Whyte, CEO of MEDDICC.com, will explain how MEDDIC can connect your entire GTM team as a common language and be the framework that connects the entire customer lifecycle.
I think we are live. Let's get rock and rolling. Share my screen here. We are
live. Hello,
Cloud GTM XP audience. It's awesome to be here. Thank you so much for your time
and attention
today. I'm going to get stuck straight in here because I know that we've got a
packed
agenda, not just for me, but lots and lots of people to get through. So I want
to get
rock and roll. We've got about 19 minutes to get through. And what I want to
talk about
today is how you can use medic, med pick as a common language for your entire
go-to-market
team. The way I'm going to do this is breaking into three parts. If I can get
the clicker
to work, there we go. The first is what is medic. The second is the importance
of having
a common language. And the third part is medic for channel. I know so much of
the audience
today works in the channel has that crossover of go-to-market. So I want to
like bring some
value in that regard as well. My goal for the next 19 minutes is to give you as
much information
as to why you need a common language and why you should use med pick for it.
Now, before
we start, you might already be thinking, is it like medic of one C, medic with
two Cs?
Is it med pick? You might be thinking like, what? I mean, I live this every day
so I can
relate if you're feeling a little bit like that. This is how we look at it.
This is not
definitive. This is just how we think about it. We think about medic with the
one C. That
is the thing. That's the ecosystem. That's talking about the whole framework.
Our company
is called medic with two Cs. And med pick is the most commonly used version
with the
extra P which stands most commonly for paper process. So what is med pick? So,
well, it's
a framework. That's the best way of describing it. It's literally reverse
engineered from
how customers like to buy from the best organizations in the world. We have
done a lot of work to
make it more versatile to expand it. And I'll talk about that in just a moment.
But this
is kind of what it is. It's an acronym, right? Things that people often get
wrong. They think
it has to be used in some sort of linear order or that every letter has to be
used in every
conversation, not at all. It's just a framework that helps go to market
professionals to focus
on the things that their customers care about. I'm not going to be able to go
into depth on
medic right now, when I think 101, because we've got a lot of go-to-market
stuff to talk
about and common language stuff. But if you want more information, there's a
load of free
information on our website and on a YouTube channel has a med pick in 10
minutes video.
If you're not sure, you can go and find out or take a screenshot of this. Now,
one thing
we see, not very common, but it is out there. And given the audience, I thought
I'd cover
it, is that people would use the P and medic for partners that we don't think
you should.
We're not very precious about this. Don't get me wrong. Some people get very
animated
and very upset if you dare to mess with the heritage of medic. We don't. But we
think
that you don't need to. And I'm going to talk about a little bit later on. I'll
talk about
why that is, but the P for us stands for paper process. Now, one thing that's
very important
that we start before we get too far in is something we call naming, which
stands for
not all medic is equal. And the reason why I wanted to sort of level set with
this before
we get too far in is that I was looking at the audience and, you know, some
really great
companies there. And we know from an informal survey that AWS did with our
partners that
around sort of 70 to 80% of you use medical ready. But the thing with medic is
it's kind
of an open source and people use it differently. There's different levels of
proficiency and
that sort of thing. So what I'm going to talk about is how we use it, how we've
extended
it, how we've made it more versatile for go to market teams. That doesn't mean
that if
you're hearing this and you think, Oh, we use medic, you're going to be able to
go back
to your team and them know what you're talking about. So it's kind of like a
level set that
it's not me bragging. It's just making sure that I don't set you on the wrong
path here.
Because if you took eight professionals in the go to market and said to them,
Hey, do
you know what medic is? They would all say yes. I'm pretty sure everyone would
say yes.
But if you actually ask what like their proficiency is, it would be everything
from like googling
it asking chat GBT. And if you kind of weighed in their proficiency, it's going
to vary massively,
right? From like having very, very little proficiency right up to being quite
effective
with it. And it's not just around proficiency, right? It's about how you use it
. Most people
use medic as a qualification framework. So if you talk about to our peers in
the ecosystem
of medic, everyone else calls it a qualification framework. That means that
they, if you were
to say it was a methodology that says not methodology, if that says process, if
it's
not a process, if you talk to them about a value framework, let's say you're
going to
need something else. If you talk about measuring, they're not going to have any
idea what you're
talking about. And therefore, it can't be used to go to market teams or across
the entire
customer life cycle. Whereas we see it differently. We think it can be used for
all of these
things, right? And particularly for all go to market teams and the entire
customer life
cycle. And that's really what I'm here to talk to you about today. But just to
give you
kind of, I don't want to go into like a, this is certainly not supposed to be
anything
like a sales pitch. I just want to give you the context of how we see things.
So if you
think about something like a champion, you can see how we see it as more than
just that
kind of quite linear binary, like, do I have a champion or not? We're seeing as
, hey, if
I do have a champion, or I don't have a champion, how do I build a champion?
How do I get my
champion working for me? How do I how and where should I see the champion in
this process?
How do I get my champion to understand the value we talk about? How should I
best engage
on value? And what's the impact of having a champion or not having a champion?
And of
course that, like I said before, goes through the entire go to marketing. Every
department
cares about champions from product through to post sales and revops for
measuring it.
And they're important at every part of the stage. You don't just need champions
in the
sales process and you pre-champions and post-champions. And it's the same with
all the letters as you
go through. Now, people get upset at me here. They get really, really angry,
all the like
the purists of medic, because it's like you can't do that. They say medic is
just the
qualification framework. They're the same kinds of people that say that cell
phones are just
making telephone calls, right? It's like the world's moved on. We've managed to
take something
that's really cool and make it even better. And it's the so it's either like it
's, you
know, the dinosaur saying it's a qualification framework, or because and or can
be both that
they've got their own methodology they want to sell. It's their own IP. They
don't want
anyone else to kind of step on it, which is fine. Everyone's entitled to have
their own
IP, but they want to have that call at their own thing. They don't want to
expand something
that people are already using. So you have to have an uncommon language.
Whereas we think
you should have a common language, right? A common language that talks to the
free imperatives
of customer engagement, which is value stakeholders and process. It doesn't
matter whether you
are engaging with a prospective customer or an existing customer, whether you
're trying
to work through a co-selling motion with a partner. This is what really matters
. This
is what you want to get into to make sure you're having the best conversations
with your customs,
what they really care about as well, right? And it kind of breaks down like
this from
a med pick perspective. You've got what pain is it that we're solving and what
value do
we provide by solving that pain and how does our solution do it? Right? That's
like the
first three elements. Then we think about stakeholders. It's like, who's our
champion?
No champion, no deal, big champion, big deal. Who is the overall authority the
economic
buyer and who are we competing against? Remember, competition isn't just your
rivals. It's
other initiatives, projects. It could be doing nothing. In our share is a
competitor if you
use med pick correctly. And then there's of course the process. How do we
engage? How do
we make sure we engage? How the customer wants us to engage? How do they buy?
Which is more
than just paperwork nowadays? Of course, we have the cloud marketplaces and the
most switched
on organizations are the ones that are being proactive with that. So they're
thinking about
this right at the start of engagements and using it as a differentiator to
build new
champions and find that person that really cares about that committed spend and
all that good
stuff. This is not new. This is like right message, right person, right time,
but it's
the first time that somebody has put a framework together to make it work
across the go to
market team. So part one, key takeaways. First things first, medic is an
acronym, right?
It's got different letters to it, but generally that's, you know, med pick is
the most common.
Not all medic is equal, so proficiency will vary and most people use it for
qualification
only. And we see it as a common language across free pillars, value,
stakeholders and process.
All right. So the importance of a common language for go to market teams,
basically, first off,
why do you need a common language? Well, it's pretty straightforward from my
perspective.
We've got this go to market, but it's very, very siloed, right? Every different
go to market team,
and this is not, you know, this is not definitive. There's other teams that
fall in and out of go
to market, of course. What they really are caring about, what customers care
about from them
is understanding, you know, what value is it you provide to which stakeholders
and when is it right
to surface that value in the customer life cycle, the customer process, right?
But if we just talk
about value alone and we go back to our silos, every single department talks
about value differently,
right? Product talks about user stories and jobs to be done, SDRs talk about
custom stories,
marketing talks about features benefit. Every department has a different way of
talking about
the same thing, which is the value they provide to their customers, the pain
they solve,
the value they get from solving that pain and how their solution does it. So if
you're the customer
here, right, and you enter in from the website or some traditional manner, and
you go around a
cut, you know, a sales cycle to becoming a customer, it's so incohesive, right?
You're not going to get
a very strong, clear message. You're kind of having to like translate the
messages as you go,
and that's the customer, right? Each go to market team themselves has to try
and like figure out
what is they mean for their colleagues and so on and so on. Now, like, value is
an interesting
thing, right? How do you define it? Well, we like to define it this way. It's
basically this. It's
what pain is it that your solution solves? So what pain is it the customer has,
and then
what value do you get from solving that pain, right? So you find the pain and
you quantify the
value in solving that, the utopia state after your solution, that is value,
right? So it's kind of
like i plus m equals value, implication of pain plus the quantification of
plane with metrics
equals value. But that's not that makes it sound so simple, doesn't it? That's
just the high level
value. But if we zoom in on stakeholders, every stakeholder feels the same pain
and the same
quantification of the value in solving that pain differently. I'll give you an
example of what I
mean. I think it's hard in these sessions to pick something that everyone knows
, but I think we can
all relate to ransomware, right? The idea of like if somebody takes over your
company's machines and
you can't get access. Let's say we, collective audience here, we have a
solution that 100%
solves ransomware, and we're selling it like hotcakes in the market, because
that would be a great
thing that was 100% proof. But even so, we all know at high level what value we
get from solving
ransomware, every single sea level person on this slide has a slightly
different interpretation
of value. So we've got like that job of multiple go-to-market teams, multiplied
by the stakeholders
who each see the value differently. If we don't have a common language, what
chance have we got
to really appealing to how each stakeholder really cares about the value. And
then you've got the
process. It's not just like value on, value off. You have to build the value
through the process,
and not just through the sales cycle. It has to come pre-sale cycle to capture
the customer's
attention and show getting them to think about us differently through to
winning them,
through to delivering that value as well. A sales cycle looks like this, right?
If you've got like
the horizontal access here, which is the time of the sale, before to the
closing winning,
and then the perception of value is the vertical access, right? So the higher
up the line goes,
the more pain is being perceived. Now, salespeople think this happens, right?
This is the mistake
they make. They think they build value to the point, and then the customer's
like, "Yes,
brilliant. Well done. You're amazing, Mr. and Mrs. Salesperson. I want to buy
it." And they think
the value stays up there. And this is wrong, right? This does not happen. What
actually
happens is this. They build the value to a point. The customer shows some
interest,
and then they switch to closing mode, and they typically forget to carry on
building that value.
So it falls off and falls away. And hopefully it doesn't fall below that
inertia line so that
they still win the deal, but that it slows down. And that's why one of the
reasons why
deals can slip is because people lose that enthusiasm. Now, something that bad
sales people do as well
as this is they leave things like the cloud marketplace engagement until at the
end as our
good friend Phil Sohn at AWS would say they meet the customer at the checkout
and then talk about
cloud marketplaces. Not a good move, right? We'll talk about what good sales
people do in a second.
But let's just talk about good salespeople as a whole. So what you may think I
'm going to say
is it's going to be like this very linear up line, but it's not. It'll go up
and down because
all kinds of things that happen. The customer can have other priorities. They
can have the
competition that starts to do a good job as you get into closing the paper
process and those
things can really slow things down. And so the customer loses that bit of
perception of value,
but the good salespeople, they bump it back up. They bump it back up as they go
as do good go
to market teams. Now, as I said, good salespeople, they're thinking about the
cloud marketplace
engagement right at the start. I know salespeople that are using it as a
pipeline generation
method. They're going into big organizations where they know they have a
committed cloud spend,
and they're finding that person that cares about that to make intros for them
for their product,
smart thinking, right? Now, of course, they follow the cloud marketplace
throughout the process,
right? They're keeping it engaged. They probably have some kind of really
awesome technology
that can help them do that. I don't know. Maybe you guys might have heard of
something that I know.
What's really important now, if we expand this out over the entire customer
life cycle, so you can
see we've gone live or business as usual and renewals in place here, we also
have the danger zone. Now,
the danger zone is if the customer's perception of the value falls below that,
you're even not
going to buy if it's pre-sell, if it's post-sell, they're not going to renew.
If we put our bad sales
person line over the top, we can see they might get the deal, but they're
probably not going to
renew. The perception's falling down, whereas our good salesperson, they've got
it above it,
but up and down, but most importantly, when it mattered, the value was high and
they're going to
get the renewal. But it's wrong to say that this is just a salesperson doing a
good job here.
This is an effort of the go-to-market team. You can see the departments and
when they're coming in,
I know that maybe in your business, there's even more departments. In fact, it
might be even more
complicated. I imagine it's even more complicated than this. Lots of different
departments all
playing really important roles throughout the sales cycle, but also in that
perception of value,
keeping that perception high. If we look at, say, partnerships, and this is a
work in progress,
because I couldn't quite get it done in time with all of the great insights I
was getting from so
many of my friends that work in the channel, but there's all these different
things. The point I
want to make here is if you work in channel, this might resonate with you, but
every person that's
in marketing will have the same slide with different things on and an SDI will
have different things,
and sales engineers have different things. You're all trying to do the same
thing, which is provide
value to the right stakeholders at the right time, but you're all doing
different ways to do it,
which is fine, which is like your job, right? You're not supposed to be carbon
copies of a go-to-market
teams. But if it looks like this, it's very hard to scale that engagement with
your customers,
because it means you're having to translate at every point. Whereas if you had
a common language,
everything goes together. Why MedPik for this? Well, before I talk about why
MedPik have to talk about
what a go-to-market common language is. First thing first, there's three imper
atives. The first
of the imperatives is it must be common. Now, I know what you're thinking. I'm
glad you probably
will sat down for that mind-blowing insight you just gave there, Andy. Wow,
common language has to
be common. But actually, people get this wrong all the time. I hear over and
over again of these
frameworks that no one, I don't see anyone using, but people are saying it's a
common language.
So it has to be common. If you look at MedPik, this is back from March, so this
chart might
change a little bit, but you get the point. Seven out of the top eight public
cloud companies in
terms of their enterprise value in next 12 months, forecasted growth. Seven out
of eight
are MedPik companies. I don't know what they do. Good luck to them, though.
Good luck to them.
It's like a very closed shop, that's for sure. If you look on LinkedIn and you
search for jobs,
they're advertising MedPik. There's 170 mentions. If you combine challenger,
Millerheim and Sandler, gap selling and Spiced, there's 49. Actually, there's
36 because gap selling
is just gap and Spiced is Spiced. So, Chef jobs, basically. If you look here,
you've got George
Kurt, CEO, president, founder of Awesome Company CrowdStrike on stage with one
word behind them,
MedPik. Phil Sohn from AWS at Partners Summit, AWS Partner Summit here. MedPik,
it's a common
language, right? I'm sure I don't need to sell that to you too much. The second
part here is it
has to work for every go-to-market team. So, if we think about product here,
when they think about
value, they think about what part of the product, what pain does it solve for
the customer,
and what value does the customer get from solving it, and how is it that our
solution does it,
and then you can think about the stakeholders who care, who's going to be the
champion for this,
who's going to be the overall authority. And that carries through for every
single go-to-market team.
They have the same language. They define it the same way. So, they use it in
different ways.
Obviously, marketing uses it in copy on websites. SDRs use it in outreach.
Sales people use it in
demos, and so on in discovery, and so on and so on. But it's the same
underlying message,
and for the same stakeholders, and they use it at the right points in the
customer engagement process.
The third imperative here is around the customer lifecycle itself. So, it must
work
across whole customer lifecycle. So, we're talking about having disparate go-to
-market teams
is the first example here. And what I mean by this is they have like,
features, benefits, the marketing teams, maybe use BAN, and then they use some
homegrown or,
you know, off-the-shelf kind of methodology, and then use QBRs. The silo GTM
similar, but they use
kind of well-known frameworks, but they use them all, like, in their silos, so
qualification for BAN,
MedPIC, just for qualification, a conch-mod of the message, or as sort of value
-selling or something
in that section, and then they use QBRs and NPS scores, and then the common
language goes all
the way across. So, somehow, when you have three minutes left, so I'm going to
have to really speed
up. I thought I was going fast, you know? Anyway, I thought I'd want to run
over that for sure.
So, here's the bit I want to leave you with before we wrap up with how you use
the channel. This is
how we position how we use MedPIC as a end-to-end value framework. You have the
M1, which is a
example of where you've delivered the value before. I'm not going to go into
too much detail on this.
You can get in touch with us, you want more information, or if you, it's
definitely on our
website, if you just want more information, don't have to buy it from us to get
this information.
The idea is an M1 positions the value that you can bring to that customer based
on a real-life
example of where you've delivered it before. If that resonates, then you pivot
to an M2,
which is where you talk to that customer about how that value, what that would
mean for them.
So, you kind of personalize it. And then if you win the deal, you then have
what we'd call an M3,
which is the targets now that we're aiming to deliver to the customer. So, it's
basically
like we position value. This is where we've done it before. This is us selling
value. This is how
we'll do it for you. So, it's personalized metrics. And then once we actually
win the customer,
this is how we'll deliver value as well. And the beauty of this, of course, as
you probably have
figured out is an M1 turns an M2, an M2 turns an M3. And then if you deliver
that value, it goes
back in the top of the funnel for the rest of the go-to-market team to use for
new prospective
customers. You actually have a flywheel effect. All right, last two minutes,
Medic for the channel.
So, I said right at the start, we don't use P for partners. It could be quick
on this bit. The
idea here is you don't need to have a P for partners, because if you're
thinking about partners in
isolation of a letter, not in the overall view of value stakeholders and
process, then you're
missing a trick. The idea is that if I'm selling, if I'm co-selling, then I can
use MedPIC to inform
my partner of exactly what value I can bring to them. So, I can say to them,
you know, this is the,
if we're wanting to co-sell a customer, I can say, this is the pain we solve,
this is the value
they get from solving it. Here's how our solution does it. Here's why we're
better than the incumbent
or the competition. Here's who we normally engage with. Here's also who needs
to be involved from
an economic bar perspective. This is how the process normally looks. This is
how we engage in the
cloud marketplace. The last point here, I'll say, before I wrap it up, I'll
just keep it in time,
is it's not just about co-selling, but also selling two partners. And what I
mean in this is we can
use MedPIC to go to our partners and show them why they should work with us
over maybe another
vendor that they may be considering working for that prospect. And I'll just
load this one up in
case someone wants to excrete it, because I am out of time and I don't want to
disrespect
the next speaker at all. So I thank you very, very much for your time. And yeah
, I'll happily
pass it to the next person. Thank you very much for your time. And if you want
to connect,
why me on LinkedIn.
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