4 Tips to Scaling MEDDPICC with Gondola

4 tips to scaling MEDDPICC

The purpose of this article is to help you scale the MEDDPICC qualification framework across your organization and ensure that there is follow up and adherence to that process 1, 3, 6, 12 months after initial training. 

At Gondola, we’re huge fans of this qualification framework and have adopted it internally during our own sales cycles. We believe it’s the best way to identify real deals and accurately forecast close dates. That said, we also think it’s quite challenging to scale across an entire team of 20+ reps. We’re going to show you how we did it at Gondola and provides some best practices on how to accomplish the same thing in your sales org. 

Also, if you're interested, here is a link to our MEDDPICC discovery call template!

First off, what is MEDDPICC?

MEDDPICC is a sales qualification methodology that’s popular among enterprise B2B sales. In the MEDDPICC methodology, there are specific steps involved in the B2B enterprise-sales process, which include: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Paper process, Implications of pain, Competitions, and Champion. Before we dive into mastering this 8-step B2B enterprise-sales process, we’re going to disseminate the difference between MEDDICC, MEDDPICC,and MEDDIC. 

Elements of MEDDPICC

Metrics - Metrics are the quantifiable measures of value that your solution provides

Economic Buyer - Is the person with the overall authority in the buying decision process

Decision Criteria - The various criteria in which a decision to process your solution will be judged 

Decision Process - Is the series of steps that form a process of which the buyer will follow to make a decision

Paper Process - Is the series of steps that follow the decision process in how you will go from decision to signature

Implicate Pain - Means you have identified, indicated and implicated the pain your solution solves upon your customer

Champion - Is a person who has power, influence and credibility within the customers organization

Competition - Is any person, vendor or initiative competing for the same funds or resources you are

“MEDDPICC is not linear, it is dynamic, the conversation is fluid and the route you take to collect all pieces should be as well.”

Four tips for scaling MEDDPICC

1. Break it out and keep it focused
2. Real time enablement
3. Conduct ongoing deal reviews
4. Gather feedback, identify gaps, improve the process and repeat. 

Break it out and keep it focused

One thing we’ve been focused on as we scale the MEDDPICC framework is thinking deeply about the specific parts of MEDDPICC that we’ll want to focus on, at a particular stage in the sales cycle. 

The above chart was pulled from the MEDDPICC Masterclass. You’ll see that it provides areas of focus as you move from early to mid to late stage sales cycles. Each part of MEDDPICC brings value to the deal cycle and segmenting the learning and execution of each can create a deeper depth of understanding. It's good to review the importance behind each step in the process, understand the value of what your reps look to gain and what potential risks occur when a part of the process isn't run correctly.

This makes logical sense if you think about the progression of a deal. You wouldn’t ask about Paper Process before you’ve uncovered a business use-case, deeply understand pain and the implications of that pain. Each step has a logical place in the sales cycle and thus, you should think about enabling your team is such a fashion. 

For example, on Discovery calls, we recommend that you build out note template that focuses on uncovering the Business Use Case, potential business pain, Metrics behind that pain and the implication of those business pains. We’ll frequently encourage an org to include fields for Champion and Economic Buyer. 

If you’re curious to see what steps we included at each stage of the sales cycle - check it out below.

Real time enablement

This is the area in which most organizations miss.. Proper enablement, in real time. Many of the sales teams that we work with have undergone one or many trainings on this framework throughout their career. It typically starts and ends the same way. Everyone leaves training fired up and ready to implement the key learnings. Sales leadership throws in 10 new Salesforce fields to ensure rep is following the process and logging the notes appropriately. 2 months later, minimal fields are filled out and reps are back to “the old way” of doing things.

Organizations are missing a key component to success - ongoing real time enablement.

There are a multitude of reasons that this can occur, but there are two at the top of the list:

1) The reps don’t have a thorough enough understanding to implement the framework in a meaningful way. A good example is when a rep can give a 30 minutes demo of a product, but they can’t give a quick 5 minute synapsis. This is because they understand the HOW but not necessarily the WHY.

2) They understand the framework well enough, but they don’t see enough value to push a true change in behavior. “What I’m doing works, why change it.” This is why it is important to use past deals as examples and give your reps real life uses where this new process could have helped them win a deal that was lost. We all know that sales people are money motivated, make sure they see that the short term work in learning a new process is worth the long-term reward $.

To us here at Gondola, this means providing your reps with proper guidance around MEDDPICC in the moments that matter most - live customers calls. Enabling reps to be laser focused on the information they need to uncover in that call, appropriate questions or topics to discuss and the correlated Salesforce fields to put those notes in to. It’s a very simple concept, but challenging to execute on. That’s where we come in!

Here is a perfect template that can help you scale MEDDPICC on Disco calls

Conduct ongoing deal reviews

It’s one thing to provide guidance to reps in calls, but there is another key to successfully scaling MEDDPICC across your sales team - Manager deal reviews. As we mentioned before, reps are money motivated, show them the value behind implementing MEDDPICC and they will adopt. Combining reviews on lost deals, showing them where they made the mistakes with live deals and strategizing on how to fix that moving forward is key. This is the time where a manager and managee or team, sits down and reviews each of the Opportunities in the pipeline for that month/quarter. 

During our deal reviews, we look at the current status of each deal, identify gaps, strategize on how to overcome those gaps, and prepare for the upcoming meeting(s) that week. During this part in the process, it’s important to make correlations between previously lost deals and similar threats on new deals to stress the importance. We suggest pulling up that AE’s pipeline view, talking through each of the pieces of MEDDPICC with a critical and somewhat skeptical eye, and coming up with a game plan for the calls that week.

Gondola’s pipeline view and browser extension will allow you to do this easily. Any key points we discuss as a team will be surfaced to that rep during the call so they can properly address it with their prospect. It’s very effective. 

Gather feedback, identify gaps, improve the process and repeat.

After building thousands of templates for hundreds of different sales orgs, I can tell you one thing - the processes that you set up first, won’t be what ends up working in the long run. This is everything from the templates you create, questions you want them to ask, how you run your deal reviews with your team, etc. The point is constant improvement. After you’ve run this process for a month or two, conduct a retrospective, gather feedback from your team, identify those gaps and improve the process. 

This is an important step and will encourage you and your team to think through the processes with a critical eye. Showing your team where you’ve gone wrong with previous outlines can help to boost your rapport with them. Reviewing previously lost deals can be an emotional subject. As a manager you need to show them that you’re only there to help them improve and showcasing how you’re working to improve yourself can go a long way! Ultimately, getting buy-in from your team in the right way will allow you to better enable them on the processes you want to scale.