Your sales reps are bleeding – here is why they need a MEDDICC

You are about to enter the next management meeting and in quick glance in your CRM you feel that the sales dashboard does not reflect the pipeline… when you ask your sales teams why they don’t update the CRM on a daily basis, the frequent answer is “The CRM is too complicated for us, it slows us down and we don’t see the value in it..”

Many companies design sales processes that don’t provide sales teams the feedback they need.  The salesperson lacks the information he needs in order to move the deal forward.  More importantly, the process doesn’t provide an accurate picture of where the deal stands.

In order to improve your sales process you need to consider 3 important key elements:

  • Understand the buyer’s journey – Think about the steps that the customer has to go through each stage from the awareness to consideration to decision-making
  • Opportunity Stages – You want each step to be a combination of a rep-focused action and a buyer-focused outcome. In the image below we took a popular opportunity stage “Demo” and we shifted it from seller centric mode to buyers centric mode:
  • Design clear exit criteria – The actions that have to happen in order for a sale to move from one stage to the next

In order to encapsulate all elements above we started to encourage our clients to use MEDD(P)ICC Sales methodology and translate it to a sales process. Each letter represent a value that the sales rep has to collect through the sales process which can really make a difference! once we understand what each letter means we can arrange them in the different opportunity stages.

  1. Metrics – set of challenges the customer is experiencing, there might be different challenges between the different stakeholders.
  2. Economic Buyer – In the end of the day, the economic buyer has to understand your solution and how it can fit the business needs. He is the guy that signs the contract and he should be involved in the deal as early as possible.
  3. Decision Criteria – May be a mix of product functionality, market fit and budget. Once you identify the criteria you can make an assessment wether your product has a potential to win the glory or not.
  4. Decision Process/ Paperwork – You should always feel free to ask what is the process to approve a vendor / product similar to yours. it may bubble new candidates that should be involved in the deal or help you estimate the deal velocity.
  5. Identify the pain – Without pain, there is no urgency, without urgency there is no budget and without a budget, there is no deal. Try to always quantify the pain number of costs will help you and the client compare between the different options. your solution may cost more that the pain costs.
  6. Champion – The champion is the person that will help you push the deal, share inside information and be a key factor in your chances to win. In some scenarios, they will be the person that feels the pain the most over other people in the company.
  7. Competition – Identify the competitors and try to emphasize where your product shine over the others.

Here is an example of how we broken down the opportunity stages and embedded the different values in each stage:

In essence, each paragraph is an opportunity stage – areas where the client needs our help to move forward in the journey. the bullets inside are the exit criteria.

You can win twice – Your sales teams will fill in the data in the CRM as their guidelines. and you? you will be able to see accurate dashboards and make valuable data-driven decisions.

The content of this article is part of a presentation we conducted in our last RevOps event. These series of event are relevant for any Marketing/Sales/Support operations that are looking to grow their knowledge and contribute to the tech community.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *