Contents

0

5

The Buying Process and Success Criteria

overview

1

6

The Situation and The Pain

Competition / Alternatives

2

7

The Champion

The Sales Qualification Methodology

3

8

The Stakeholders

Arming The Champion

4

9

From TacTIcal To Strategic

The Economic Buyer

10

The POV

11

From a Technical Win To The PO

12

Value Sales Metrics

13

Discussion

14

closing notes

Overview

As sales professionals we live for the wins. In many situations we must win or face consequences. While we don’t know many salespersons and leaders that don’t want to win, we certainly know many that don’t get the output they need. This handbook should be an insightful guide for anyone who is involved in running a value sales organization, arming the reader with actionable strategies and playbooks for driving effective value sales at scale. So, let’s embark on this journey!

Since the dawn of commerce, sellers are trying to understand their buyers’ needs, present their offerings in the most valuable and differentiated way and charge as much as they reasonably can.

Historically, sellers were trained to focus on relationships, master their pitch and “Always Be Closing”. The accelerated growth of the technology sector since the 1990s with new players focused on disruption and displacement of incumbent providers gave rise to a new sales philosophy. Modern sellers learned that the key to changing the status quo of the buyers is not a certain flavor of donuts or an eloquent pitch. Buyers buy because of their needs and pains and their desire to succeed in their role. Offerings have no inherent value - they are just tools; the real question is what the buyers are trying to achieve. The job of the seller is selling value, not features. Getting buyers to the realization that to be successful they must change the status quo in a certain way, but this is easier said than done.

Buyers are used to maintaining their status quo and typically see it as good enough. They have ways of dealing with its known shortcomings and many of them are too busy sustaining it to have time to reconsider it. It is much easier and safer to maintain and incrementally improve the status quo than to leave the comfort zone, learn new things and deal with unknown challenges.

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makers, learn how they see the strategic alignment and how they measure business impact and success, and make them realize that the strategic impact they seek is directly linked to the same tactical capabilities, which happen to differentiate the seller from the competition.

Since most of the internal buying discussions between the stakeholders happen without the seller in the room (only 17% of the entire buying time is spent in front of sellers. Gartner, 2020), the champion that is driven by tactical pains, who typically wouldn’t even know how to measure the business impact of the change (nor care about it in many cases), must be guided and armed by the seller in order to drive the discovery and win the business for the seller.

Guiding and arming the champion doesn’t end there - most champions are not experienced in driving corporate buying decisions with all the stakeholders, steps, complexity and pitfalls. It is thus the job of the seller to guide the champion in uncovering and driving the internal buying process.

Champions are not the only ones who struggle to measure business impact or drive complex buying decisions. Many of the sellers themselves struggle as value sellers and most of them are not doing a great consistent job in building, guiding and arming the champions, qualifying or analyzing business impact. It gets even more complicated with channels and overlay sales.

When done right, effective value sales execution highly improves the conversion rates (by making sellers and champions win more), increases the average sale value (by being able to justify and defend bigger deals and higher price points), shorten the sales cycle (by increasing buyers’ urgency and avoiding pitfalls) and improve forecasting. But doing it right at scale proves to be highly nontrivial and most sales organizations struggle to drive buyers’ urgency as they keep selling features rather than value and small tactical offerings to practitioners rather than enterprise deals to leaderships.

This handbook describes the latest strategies, best practices and insights pertaining to driving and managing effective value sales at scale.

We would appreciate your feedback, comments, insights, anecdotes and stories. Please write to us at the link below and we will be happy to add in select items and credit the contributors.

We hope you find this insightful and valuable,

Nadav Efraty (Editor and chief contributor)

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1

Chapter

The Situation and The Pain

The Situation and The Pain

Every prospect has a specific situation with a certain combination of a role, duties, tasks, requirements, objectives, challenges, implications, use cases, tools used. Every prospect also has various needs and pains but given the complexity of driving a corporate buying decision and the typical resource limitations, most prospects are not actively looking to acquire new capabilities.

Some prospects, however, are actively looking to acquire new capabilities, either because they are committed to changing their situation for various reasons, or because they are forced to change it (e.g. because of new regulatory requirements).

Prospects that are willing to take a call with a seller may do so as a way of keeping their finger on the pulse of innovation, but typically, they will take a sales call because they are considering or already committed to changing their status quo, and they are now assessing and evaluating their alternatives.

The seller must quickly understand the prospect’s situation in order to direct the discovery journey in an effective way. The first questions should typically be related to the reason that brought the prospect to take the call – their use cases, needs and pains and the compelling event that is driving this.

Note that chances of winning are the highest when the prospect must make a change, lower if there’s a commitment to make a change without a strong compelling event, and lowest when there’s no clear commitment nor urgency to make a change. Hence, sellers better target and focus on Ideal Customer Profiles of buyers that are compelled to make a change, if such cohorts could be characterized.

The discovery journey in all those scenarios is similar – starting from the situation, understanding the unique combination of tasks, objectives, challenges etc. of this certain prospect, getting to needs and pains and then drilling in to better understand what is causing those pains, what are their implications and impact, how could they be mitigated, which capabilities would be needed and so on.

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This entire time – the focus is on the prospect (or buyer) – it is not about the vendor and not about the offerings. Just about the situation and pains of the buyer. Buyers want to partner with and buy from those who have the expertise to understand the root causes of their pains and cure them, generate value and help the buyer to succeed.

Note that whether the buyer can clearly define needs and pains or not, the seller has an opportunity to direct the discovery journey into the areas that seem critical for that buyer and aligned with the unique capabilities of the seller, based on the seller’s hypothesis on the buyer’s needs. The buyers often have certain pains or needs, but the seller can guide the buyer to the conclusion that the root cause of those pains, the pain behind the pain, is different, and that addressing that pain behind the pain is the only viable thing to look at – not the band aid the buyers were initially thinking of. Buyers could come to a meeting with certain notions and needs just to realize that to achieve what they really want, they should focus on completely different capabilities and priorities. Note, however, that the seller should never try to force the buyer into the wrong solution - in certain cases the conclusion of the discovery is that what the buyer needs is not aligned with the seller’s offering. In such cases, the seller should openly share that with the buyer and help navigate the buyer in the proper direction. This is not just prudent to the buyer – it will save the seller a lot of time.

This kind of discovery is beneficial for the seller, but even more so for the buyers, who are getting new insights and better understanding of their situation, pains and how to get to a better future.

The sales deck for this stage of the sales process is not designed to pitch an offering – it is designed to guide the discovery, give new views and insights that will help the buyer better understand the situation and the root causes for the typical buyer’s pains. It will also demonstrate the seller’s domain expertise and insights that could become an asset for the buyer and drive success both in acquiring the capabilities and later in using them.

The objective of the first meeting is to come out with clearly uncovered pains and the compelling event which may force the change. Without clear pains and ownership of the buyer on changing the status quo, there is no shot at a sale. The seller could still pitch the offering for marketing and educational purposes, but an opportunity should not be opened.

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At the early stage of the sale, many sales organizations focus on the 3 whys:

1. Why buy? What are the needs or pains?
   
2. Why now? What is the compelling event that creates urgency to make the change?
   
3. Why us? What are the certain differentiated capabilities that make us the right choice?
   

Note that from the 3 whys, why now is typically the hardest to pin. Uncovering some buyers’ pains (why buy) that are uniquely addressed by the seller’s offering (why us) is typically easy. The real challenge is getting to the top of the priority list of buyers, so they will commit to making the change now and not at some point. Unfortunately, this is where most opportunities die – buyers want them but cannot get them prioritized. Strategies for getting buyer organizations to prioritize the purchase are discussed in the next chapters.

With various offerings, use cases, buyer personas, pains, drivers etc. it is often hard for the sellers to always ask the right questions that lead the buyer in the discovery journey – Sales organizations try to support the sellers with playbooks, coaching and enablement. Because of this wealth of situations and playbooks, most of the sellers get overwhelmed and default to pitching instead of discovering, thereby greatly reducing their productivity. The best solution could be to put the leading sales leaders and domain experts on every sales call, but this is not practical. A practical solution could only come in the shape of technology that guides the sellers during the execution of the sales process rather than occasionally in enablement sessions. This tech should navigate all the complexity of the various situations, hiding it from the sellers and only highlighting the most critical questions that are relevant in every specific situation and stage on the discovery journey.

Another effective approach is to turn the unstructured stories about situations and pains etc. into repeatable structured categories. Use drop-down and pick-lists in the CRM rather than free text fields to identify the various aspects of each buyer’s situation and make it easier for your sellers to run the process and easier for your leadership to understand the status, forecast and improve the process.

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2

Chapter

The champion

the champion

The champion has a personal interest in buying from you. That makes the champion your partner, but it also creates bias. Champions are often optimistic about making the purchase, and thus, tend to underestimate the challenges and objections, or just believe that they can overcome them, often without even fully sharing them. Also, because of that relationship that is forged based on their interest to see the purchase through, it is often hard for them to be the bearers of bad news. For those reasons, as much as we trust the champion, we must always validate everything that we learn from the champion with the Economic Buyer (more on that later).

As we partner with the champion to sell to the corporation, we can better qualify and test whether we have a real champion or not. The properties we are looking for are:

1. The champion must give access to the Economic Buyer. A person that doesn’t give access to the Economic Buyer is NOT a champion but rather, a coach at best. In such a situation the seller doesn't have a champion or access to the Economic Buyer, so these red flags mean that the opportunity is unlikely to close.
   
2. The champion should advocate and internally sell the 3 whys (why buy? Why now? Why from us?).
   
3. The champion should demonstrate proactiveness and urgency. Again – it is almost impossible to sell to a corporation unless people inside are excited about the offering.
   
4. The champion should share internal information (e.g. politics, competition, etc.).
   
5. The champion should coach and remove roadblock related to the decision process and criteria.
   

Arming the champion – It is the seller’s job to create the best possible sales decks, case studies, business case and other opportunity specific customized assets that will enable the champion to advocate and sell internally when the seller is not in the room. If the seller doesn’t know how or doesn’t commit the effort of creating those assets for the champion, no one should expect the champion to come up with them, thereby greatly reducing the probability of winning.

The sales org must guide and arm the sellers so they can guide and arm the champions. Just like you cannot expect the champion to develop everything for themselves, leaders are responsible to develop the system and tools that will help their sellers win.

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In partner driven sales, the channels would sometimes own the relationship with the champion. In such cases, the seller should arm and guide the partners so they can transfer that to their champions.

Historically sellers placed huge emphasis on relationships. Modern sellers realized that relationships are critical for the incumbent vendor who wishes to maintain the buyers’ status quo and prevent them from making a change, but they are not as useful for the change agents.

First, the incumbent vendor will typically have a much longer and stronger relationship with the buyer than the seller that is trying to displace the incumbent, so deep established relationships are the new seller’s weakness to begin with.

More importantly, even if the champion is the best friend of the seller, the champion will typically fail to get the deal through without understanding the strategic implications and business impact and without aligning the stakeholders and Economic Buyer. On the other hand, a seller that has a relationship with the Economic Buyer will often see that the tactical buyers resist the change because they have other priorities. Last, in an enterprise environment, with the complexity, stakeholder, checks and balances, even if one of the stakeholders is the seller’s best friend, it would still be a full, non-trivial sales process, and in most cases the buyer is not the best friend of the seller...

This is all to say, there is no doubt that relationships are great for getting a meeting or two, and it goes without saying that sellers should be personable, respectful, attentive, empathic. No one wants to deal with, let alone buy from assholes. But in the end, the buyers will not buy unless they and their stakeholders see real value and sellers should focus on value, not on relationships building.

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3

Chapter

The stakeholders

the stakeholders

There are typically multiple individuals or groups that are involved in every corporate buying decision. The list may include people from the purchasing business unit, IT, Cybersecurity, Information and Data, Operations, Finance, Procurement, Legal and more.

Some of those people will play specific roles in the buying process – champion, the Economic / executive buyer, coaches, supporters, blockers etc.

The champion has personal motivation to get this done. Most other stakeholders do not have the same emotional / tactical connection as the champion – each of them has their own beliefs and priorities, which could be aligned, conflicting or unrelated to the pain of the champion.

The seller’s role, along with the champion, is to identify those personas, functions and power structures, understand their motivations, priorities and objections, and find the ways to bring them to support (or at least not block) the buying decision. The more supporters that could be found the better – the seller should explicitly try to turn such supporters into additional coaches. In some cases, sales organizations require that there would be at least one coach in addition to the champion.

The first group of stakeholders, and the most critical one, is the one which will make the decision for the buying business unit – the buying committee. These are the people that need to approve the budget and resources allocations based on the champion’s tactical pains along with the strategic alignment and the business impact analysis. Specifically identifying the buying committee stakeholders and addressing their strategic priorities in the discovery and the decks are an important part of arming the champion. In addition to getting them to prioritize the purchasing of a solution, it is also critical to make them realize that certain capabilities are required if they want to succeed, and the seller must lock in certain differentiated capabilities, so the buying decision will not end up at the hands of the competition.

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The second group of stakeholders has functional roles that relate to the procurement process (including procurement, legal etc.). The ability of the second group to override the decision of the first group depends on the strength of the decision of the first group. With a weak recommendation or without locked-in decision criteria that differentiates the seller, the second group will be able to block or renegotiate aggressively, while a strong conclusive decision from the first group will eliminate most of the risk with the second group.

Employees in big corporations tend to change roles every few years (whether they are leaving or moving internally). Having stakeholders leave during the sales cycle is common and the risk is that losing a critical stakeholder is likely to kill the opportunity. Even if others still support it, the new stakeholders will often take time to develop a new plan and re-evaluate previous priorities. While sellers should always try to have the leaving supporter hook them up with the right internal leaders to continue to push the deal forward, this serves as a reminder that time is a critical factor – the longer it takes the more likely it become to have negative surprises, so seller should maintain high urgency and sales organization should constantly thrive do shorten their sales cycle.

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4

Chapter

from tactical to strategic

From Tactical to strategic

There is no opportunity unless the seller uncovers a critical need or a pain and identifies and builds a champion that is committed to changing the status quo. The bad news is that this is where opportunities are created, but most of the opportunities are going to die because while the champion desires the seller’s new capabilities, the decision makers see things differently. Namely:

1. The purchase is not prioritized by the decision makers or buying committee, which decide to stick with the status quo further, so while the champion may keep trying, the deal either dies or keeps hanging as a zombie.
   
2. The decision makers or buying committee decide to go with other capabilities or vendors so the deal is lost.
   

For that reason – while the pain discovery is critical, it is as important to switch gears from the tactical discovery that won the champion, to the strategic implication and the business case discovery that will win the executives with the decision power over the budget and the resources.

We divide the discovery into three stages or levels:

1. Level 1 – Tactical - understand / uncover the use case, the needs / pains, the compelling event. In this stage the seller is trying to sell to a champion that has tactical objectives and emotional connections to the pains of the status quo. This is the time for the 3 whys, mentioned in “The Situation and The Pain” chapter.
   
2. Level 2 – Strategic - Together with the champion, discover the motivations and priorities of the other stakeholders. Then, uncover the strategic implications of the tactical pains, their alignment with strategic drivers and initiatives, the metrics that could be used to measure financial / business impact, and business case analysis, so that the other stakeholders will understand the strategic impact of the tactical pains, will support and prioritize this buying decision over others and will underwrite it.
   
3. Level 3 – Technical - The deep technical implementation details that are required for the POV and/or the implementation, which may be critical for the definition of the success criteria as well as the implementation itself. Level 3 discovery is typically done by the Sales Engineers.
   

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While each of the three levels has different objectives, in the end, each group of stakeholders has different needs and priorities – the role of the seller, and of the staged discovery, is to get all of the stakeholder to realize that their different challenges and objectives are all related to the same big underlying pain and that new specific (differentiated) capabilities are required to cure it. Failure to paint this big picture is very likely to end in the loss of the opportunity.

Focusing on the strategic impact or the business case and impact analysis at the first discovery stage is premature and will in fact be counterproductive. The champion typically focuses on the tactical needs and will not necessarily know how to align them with the strategic corporate initiatives and how to analyze the business impact. In fact, the metrics that are required for that analysis may be outside of the champion’s normal scope. Even in cases where the champion is an executive which would personally interested in a business case, it is important to understand that the initial buying decision must be emotional (i.e. – related to the pains and desires of the champions) and that only after that emotional decision comes the rationalizing phase (i.e. let’s justify what we want with numbers). Focusing on business metrics and ROI before the champion has bought in are more likely to shut the champion off than to drive excitement. After all – champions are trying to solve pains – not to get a certain ROI figure.

On the other hand, without the strategic alignment and business impact analysis, corporate executives are MUCH less likely to prioritize and underwrite the needed investment. Presenting financial metrics and analysis without a clear link to the tactical pains and the required capabilities is less likely to work as well. Also, note that beyond the financial parameters the decision makers will consider resource allocations, overheads, contact switches of team members etc. Thus, the business case should not be limited to the financial side – the seller should try to address the big picture which is always weighing the impact on one hand, the costs and tradeoffs on the other. The seller should help the stakeholders realize both how big the impact is and how small the cost and tradeoffs in order to bring more of the stakeholder to agree to the decision or as a minimum, not object to it.

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Not every ROI / payback analysis will have equal impact - lofty ROIs that are based on revenue acceleration or on quantifying business risk reduction are not perceived as credible and may lead buyers to assume that the offering doesn’t bring hard measurable value. Thus, the business analysis should focus first and be based on the ROI and payback of the hard savings such as reducing costs and labor. The lofty business acceleration and risk reduction figures should be presented as the upside, not the basis for the analysis.

It is the seller’s job to guide the champion in collecting the data and then build the defensible business case for the champion. The best way to embark on that discovery journey is to start with a generic business case that is built / customized based on the use cases, offerings, pains, drivers, etc., that have been expressed by the champion. For that, have basic business case templates that use some parameters of the specific opportunity along with multiple default assumptions that together, can create a business case that is mostly generic, but still somewhat customized for the specific opportunity. This is something that the champion can start to use internally, and the seller can now guide the champion which of the parameters and assumptions in the model need to be discovered and validated in order to tighten the business case and have the champion own it when it is presented internally.

The strategic alignment and the business impact could be validated and further tightened following every stakeholders’ meeting.

The discovery of the strategic implications and the analysis that leads to the business cases are non-trivial for most champions. Thus, they must be guided and armed by the sellers. Unfortunately, this part is even harder for many of the sellers that just like the champions, are better and more experienced in the tactical vs. the strategic. It is the leadership role to guide and coach and enable the sellers so they can pass it forward.

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5

Chapter

The Buying Process and Success Criteria

The Buying Process and Success Criteria

Having the right sales process for each different sales motion is critical. A sales organization that will try to impose an enterprise sales rigor on transactional sales will likely cause unnecessary friction with buyers that will slow deals and often kill them. On the other hand, a sales organization that sells medium to large deals and will use a transactional sales approach will often find willing champions but will rarely see those opportunities won.

While champions may be optimistic and believe that if they want something their organizations will just acquire it, experienced sellers know that is hardly ever that fast or simple and that certain requirements, activities and approvals are seldom missed. Beyond the standard steps, there are often additional steps that tend to be required or not based on the specific situation and sales motion.

If certain activities are very likely to happen, it will not be prudent to not anticipate and prepare for them. Furthermore, such activities are typically initiated by stakeholders that are not the champions. Sometimes the stakeholders’ motivations are pure - to learn and evaluate the new requested capabilities. In other cases they may be initiated to slow it or block the process or present other alternatives. Hence, proactively driving and controlling the sale process is critical. If the seller is not driving it, either no one is driving or the opposition is driving and in either case, the seller is far less likely to get to the right destination.

In order to align the buying organization and control the process, it is recommended to create a deal timeline template with the typical milestones. This timeline should be reviewed with the champion and updated based on the champion’s understanding and uncovering of the buying process in his organization. The seller and champion should fill in the dates, starting from the required launch date and going back to all the preceding milestones and activities. Later, this timeline should be validated by other stakeholders. The purpose of the timeline is to reduce the chances for surprises, both for the seller and the champion, and once the buyers commit to it, drive urgency on the buyer's side. Some of the typical elements are the key meetings, key approvals, where and when is the budget approved, the POV, the final business approval, the procurement related milestones, the implementation milestones etc.

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The timeline should also be validated with the Economic buyer. If the original timeline becomes irrelevant, the timeline should be updated based on the new expectations of the parties. If there’s no way to commit to any timeline, it means there are big unknowns and risks for that deal, despite any comforting messages from the champion.

While the internal sales stages and activities of each company tend to mirror and be aligned with the typical buying process of its buyers for every sales motion, and should contain the big milestones (e.g. first sales meeting, Economic buyer meeting, POV etc.) along with some of the internal activities that lead to those milestones, having an internal process doesn’t replace the need to build and validate a mutual buying process and timeline with the buyers.

Decision criteria are used by buyers to align the various stakeholders and collectively define what exactly they are trying to achieve and which capabilities are required for that. Decision success criteria are often overlooked or intentionally avoided by the seller or champion who wouldn’t see the value or feel that defining it is counterproductive. Again, champions are often naïve enough to think that they will give whatever they ask for, and sellers are easily tempted to believe in that too. However, decision criteria are the “objective” way to:

1. Lock in the seller's offering and the champion’s desires.
   
2. Prevent the POV and buying decision from extending due to internal misalignments and varying confidence level of stakeholder.
   
3. Eliminate the competition by putting on all the weight on the differentiated capabilities of the seller.
   
4. Strengthen your position against aggressive cost cutting negotiations and bidding wars at the later stages.
   

Note that without success criteria, different stakeholders may have different perspectives about the pains that they are trying to solve, but even if they all agree about the needs and pains, not locking in the seller’s differentiated capabilities means that other vendors are equally likely to win the deal. In fact, if the seller does not guide the champion or better, define the success criteria directly for the buyers, it is more likely than not that a competitor is shaping it, and your seller is blindsided, marching to a trap. Once defined, the decision criteria should be confirmed by the relevant stakeholders, and later validated by the Economic buyer.

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The Decision criteria should be designed to address the operational / tactical elements of the pains that could be cured by your offering, and that serve as the basis for a critical part of the hard business impact analysis (hard savings vs. the upside). In addition, it should be designed around operational benefits that differentiate your offering from the competition.

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6

Chapter

Competition / Alternatives

Competition / Alternatives

Understanding the competitive landscape is critical for many reasons:

1. The seller must be prepared for the specific competition in the opportunity to set the proper traps and avoid competitors’ traps.
   
2. The sales deck should include the case studies and positioning messages and slides that are the most effective against the specific competition.
   
3. The decision criteria should be designed to focus on the differentiated benefit that would separate the seller from the competition.
   
4. Any demo and the POV should be designed to increase the differentiation from the competition.
   
5. Pricing may be affected given the capabilities and pricing profile of the competition.
   

Those 5 items are also the key to handling the competition – the focus should always be on highlighting the pain behind the pain and the bigger pains and greater implication which correlate to the capabilities that differentiate the sellers from the competition in each deal. Other than those elements – the seller who does a better job in understanding the buyer, uncovering its tactical pains, working with the champion to uncover the strategic alignment and business impact, and generally, does a better job in managing the process and stakeholders greatly improves the chances of winning against any competitor who is not as proficient in guiding and arming its champion.

While it may be uncomfortable to inquire about the competition, not knowing the answer dramatically reduces the chances of winning. If your champion is not willing to share that information, it greatly increases the chances that there are in fact other competitors, and it is quite likely that they are at a better position than you. Finally, it indicates that the person you thought to be your champion may be a coach or an advocate to some extent, but not your partner and not a champion.

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Finally, it is important to remember that other vendors are likely to have their own champions, which must be uncovered and handled as described above.

Beyond the competition, there are typically two other forms of alternatives:

1. In house development – in house development would usually be less sophisticated, less advanced, less integrated, slower to deploy and harder to maintain. When competing against such alternatives, it is critical to differentiate based on the bigger impact that could be achieved as well as the operational cost of the in-house development and its anticipated timeline and maintenance direct and indirect cost.
   
2. Do nothing – in the end, the vast majority of deals are not lost to competition, they just don’t happen, despite significant efforts by the champion and the seller. Our job as the seller is to identify those deals as early as possible and not allocate resources that should be allocated in other directions. In the next chapter you will find more about uncovering those deals.
   

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7

Chapter

The Sales Qualification Methodology

the sales qualification methodology

Engineers are taught to look for the weaknesses and breakpoints in their work. Sellers tend to be optimistic and focus on good potential outcomes. While there are clear psychological as well as job security reasons for that bias, ungrounded optimism is counterproductive at the sellers and the sales organization levels.

At the early stages of the sale the focus of the seller is on the positive side - why would the buyer buy. As the process progresses, the focus should turn from the why yes to the why not – why would the deal not happen. The sellers must actively qualify and proactively look for yellow and red flags. Yellow flags are indications that there are weaknesses that should be addressed in order to keep the deal from derailing. Red flags are indications that the deal is not really likely to happen, in this case, forecasting based on that deal and any further investment of effort would be futile unless something dramatically changes.

The common qualification frameworks are:

1. MEDDICC – which stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Process, Decision Criteria, Identify / Implicate Pain, Champion, Competition. There’s also MEDDPICC with that added P that stands for Paper Process.
   
2. BANT - which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Time.
   
3. SPIN - which stands for Situation, Problem, Implication, Need Payoff.
   
4. SPICeD - which stands for Situation, Pain, Impact, Compelling event, Decision.
   
5. The Sandler Submarine which refers to Pain, Budget and Decision (in addition to some non qualifying stages before and after).
   
6. ORDER – which stands for Opportunity, Resources, Decisions, Exact solution, Results. Presented in the book Let’s get real or let’s not play, which is recommended.
   

More about any of those qualification schemes can be found online.

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Both MEDDICC, SPIN, SPICeD and ORDER are similar in their focus on the status quo, pains, decision making, impact and thus suitable for value sales, but MEDDICC is the most detailed and is the most widely used, by far. We estimate that over 80% of the SaaS Sales organization that we meet using or at least trying to promote MEDDICC with their reps.

BANT and Sandler are more basic and are often used by more traditional or less mature sales organizations as well as for transactional and smaller fast paced deals. Unlike the other schemes, they highlight the budget. Note that in modern value sales, it is not recommended to discuss budget before the business impact of the offering is understood. The value seller wants to focus on the buyer’s pains and the impact and only them bring up the pricing. When value sellers are forced to discuss budget too early in the sales process, they typically offer a wide budgetary range. On the other hand, inquiring if a budget is available for a certain purpose is legitimate and can indicate about the maturity of the buyer’s decision, but should only brought up if there are other reasons to believe that the buyer is already advanced in its buying journey. In commoditized and transactional, unlike value sales, validating the budget at beginning is required as the seller should no pursue an opportunity unless it is already in the budget.

Most sales organizations that use MEDDICC typically implement it in their CRM or in worksheets either as a single text filed per letter or as checkbox per letter or as multiple qualifiers that are either presented as a list under the relevant letter or that are implicitly spread between the sales stages and activities. An example to such qualifiers that could be implemented as a list under each letter (C in this case) are Potential champion has tactical ownership on the status quo and pain; Potential champion has access and influence on the Economic Buyer and the stakeholders; Potential champion has a recognized personal win; Champion identified and gives access to the Economic Buyers; Champion shares the competition and internal politics; Champion is selling for us internally; Champion is coaching and removing roadblocks etc. all of which are rolled up into the Champion indicator.

The qualification is not about doing activities and checking boxes – it is not a task list - it is about the answers that are received, that are meant to identify the weakness in an opportunity. There should be no expectations that all the MEDDICC letter will be green – in most cases a deal would have weakness and the whole idea is to uncover them, not just get to green. Bringing every opportunity to all green MEDDICC is impossible and completely defeat the entire purpose.

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Typically, these qualification methodologies should be completed around the middle of the sales process – when all the elements that have been uncovered earlier in the process by the seller are validated by the Economic Buyer. The exception is the Paper Process in MEDDPICC which is designed to cover the tail of the process, after the Economic Buyer decision to proceed with the purchase. However, sales organizations that have a relatively high percentage of opportunities that are stapled or lost at the late stages of the pipeline should add multiple additional late stage qualifiers that could cover the budget status, approval status, late hurdles and obstacles and more. While those latter qualifiers are not part of the traditional qualification frameworks, they may be critical in order to uncover additional sets of weaknesses, close better, and improve forecasting.

Most sales organizations have sales stages and defined activities in each stage. Some of those may be real activities (e.g. meet the prospect, prepare the POV deck etc.) while others may be qualifiers (e.g. champion identified, budget availability confirmed) and may implicitly or explicitly include references to one of qualification methodologies.

More advanced sales organizations explicitly add text fields to the CRM that are associated with each of the MEDDICC letters, where they expect their reps to describe the status of each letter.

However, while qualification should be important to the sellers themselves as it help them drive and manage the opportunities, guide their champions, avoid pitfalls and increases their chances of winning, and while sales organization invest in endless qualification enablement, most sales organization struggle to drive adoption and usage, which leads to significant productivity loss and forecasting glitches.

The main reasons have to do with the sellers feeling that they already know the status, so writing long stories in the CRM for the sake of the big brother is not helping them sell. Sometimes some sellers even prefer vagueness over clarity for job security reasons. Many frontline leaders share that feeling – the stories in the CRM are not directly translated into scores, go/no-go and forecasting decisions which they need to fill manually in different places, so the long texts don’t help them either.

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TTo make this work, organizations should implement modern solutions that guide, automate and enable the sellers so they can get the productivity benefit of stronger qualification without the add labor, and managers could automatically get meaningful metrics and reports instead of stories so they can manage the pipeline and coach the sellers at a much higher level at far less effort.

Another big barrier to adoption is that while the qualification frameworks call for the qualification of the status quo and the pains, the decision process, criteria and the metrics etc., they never explicitly detail HOW to uncover all of those things - which questions should to be asked in every different situation, how should the business case and ROI be calculated etc. For that, sales organizations typically have one playbook for the prospecting, another playbook for the sales stages and activities (of every different sales motion), another for the qualification framework, another for the discovery questions for the pain and drivers and impact, another for the business case analysis, another for the competitive positioning, and if you have multiple offerings and use cases, those playbooks start to multiply and grow VERY thick. All of this complexity requires endless enablement and assets from product and marketing etc., but even then, it is just too overwhelming for the average rep who sits in front of the buyer and has to navigate all those playbooks while focusing on the buyer and staying in the conversation… The more you build, the more overwhelmed the sellers become, and the less likely they are to adopt and use any of that. The less you build, the less likely you are to effectively sell in the various different situations that the reps will encounter. The solution? Intelligent playbooks that guide, enable and automate everything for the sellers.

Different sales motions call for different qualification schemes - transactional deals should be low touch for both seller and buyer, so if the seller would try to force an enterprise sales qualification process this will likely upset buyers and kill many opportunities. On the other hand, trying to win complex enterprise deals with a light transactional approach will drive terrible results. Similarly, selling through channels would have its own unique characteristics given that the seller needs to drive the deal without being in direct touch with the buyers (champion, stakeholders, Economic Buyer), so some of the qualifiers become irrelevant while others remain critical.

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8

Chapter

Arming The Champion