MEDDPICC — A Checklist For Modern Day Selling with David Weiss

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Kevin, thanks for having me, man. I'm pumped to have this conversation.

This is a good one. The moment I asked you like, hey, what kind of topics? You said medpic, I was like, done. I'm not listening to anything else. We're going to get into this today because it's something where I think a lot of people look at it as a save all or it's one of those things like, yeah, it sounds great.

But how on earth do you actually do it?

How do you actually get an M, E, two Ds, a couple Ps, an I and a few Cs in there in the real world? So for those that don't know what it means, can you quickly break down what MED pick means? Just like the different letters and then we'll go kind of letter by letter on how to actually execute.

Heck yeah, man. And a couple things. One, med pick is not a sales process. Processes. And I think you mentioned this when we were kind of prepping. Even a process is something that's linear. In other words, you need to get the M to start the C at the end and you got to do everything in between in the middle. So medpick is not a process. What it is is a gap analysis checklist. It sits on top of your process, it sits on top of your sales methodologies, plural, for a reason. And it helps you kind of see blind spots. It's a blind spot detector is how I like to think about it. The other thing I constantly see, you know, certain individuals on LinkedIn hating on MED because they say, well, it's not modern, it's a framework. It's 10 years old, 20 years old, all this shit. It's like, look, if you haven't evolved your strategy in 10 or 20 years, yeah, it's probably a bad strategy. Medpick, like anything else in sales, has evolved over time to account for multiple decision makers, more complex buying cycles, the modern selling environment, all of those things. So the way I teach medpic, I like to think is the modern way of doing that. So now I'll answer your question, I will define each letter and then we can kind of chat about maybe how it's been modernized, how it's out of process, how you don't need to get every single letter done on the first call. Oh my God. It's not banned. So let's, let's chat about some of those things. So first metrics, those are the financial benefits that you're going to use to eventually build a financial business case. Economic buyer. That is the person who can create budget for good ideas. This is not your executive sponsor. This is not someone with a C suite title. This is someone's actually going to sign and again create budget. If you hear from someone, oh, I don't have budget. They're not an economic buyer. There can be multiple, but typically there's one person where this budget's coming from and then other executives involved. That's E D decision criteria. That's the wish list. That's like, hey, what are all the things? Feature functions. We don't sell feature function, but those are the feature functions in the solution that your customer is looking for. And then you can co create with them from a scorecard perspective which we'll dig into Decision process, the D and the P decision process, paper process. There is a business process and a legal process. You want to account for both. And we'll dig into those and how they work through mutual action plans together. I is identify pain or implicate pain. That's just making sure you understand the problem you're solving. All the people in the deal again, modern buyers, 6, 8, 10, 12 decision makers, all the people involved and all their different Persona based pain. And then you have the two Cs. You have your champion, which is different from a coach or an influencer, somebody else. A champion. Champion is defined as someone selling for you when you are not there, that has access to power. And the last C is competition. That is who you're competing with. Both status quo, do nothing, 57% of deals. And then you know your true legit competitors. So that's, that's med pick broken down.

There we go. And so now let's go through it step by step because I'm glad that you called out that it's not linear. Because I was, you know, I was honest, man. I shared this right before. I was like, all right, I've got my feelings on this. I was like, does he really want to go with med pick with me on the call? But when you knew it wasn't linear, I was like, okay, at least I know we can have a conversation. So can you define that just a little bit more? Because what's about to happen is we're about to break down these letters linearly. And I'm afraid that people are going to hear it and go, okay, that's my process. So can you talk about that just a little bit more before we get into the letters?

Yeah, man. So there's a lot of different ways to look at this. There's like a super formal way and there's a more informal way, like super formal. Like how I have it structured inside of my salesforce environment that all my, you know, reps follow is it's gated. In order to, you know, have the first meeting, you need to find pain and someone that, you know has pain, so potentially a champion you can work with. Then you want to progress and you want to, you know, start understanding, you know, what's their decision criteria and their process. And then, you know, you want to make sure as new people come involved, you identify more pain and kind of restart that process. And then, you know, as you go through the deal, you want to start building the business case. So like, you know, stage two and a half to stage three, post demo business case, all of those things that are wrapping into criteria that are now also wrapping into decision process with a mutual action plan. As you get towards stage three, you want to start finding more champions and things like that. Then as you progress the deal, you want to understand your paper process, who you're competing with, making sure that you're, you know, properly setting landmines and doing good and having a good competitive talk track on why someone should choose you versus others. So like, as you're thinking about Medpic, every letter of MEDPIC applies at some phase of the deal. The informal way of just looking at it is just looking on top of your deal and saying, hey, I'm about to go have a conversation with somebody. What information do I know? What information do I not know? What information am I assuming that hasn't been validated? That I think I know. But you know, maybe I'm getting happiers around. I need to like double click on a little bit. Like that's what medpick should be doing for you is like helping you just kind of see all of those things and then kind of figure out, okay, what do I do about it?

And then what are your thoughts on, I guess, how to get ahead of it? So I'm already taking this conversation a different direction. But like, these are the areas I see most companies fail is like, it feels like it almost is always retro. It's like people are missing it. And then it's like, okay, going, all right, so David, did you get economic buyer? David, did you get the paper process? And so I was like, oh, no. And you have to go back to get it. Like, how have you helped implement it? Where this is like a proactive guide, not a deal inspection checklist?

Yeah, no, great question. So first medpic should be for the rep, not the leader. Now leader.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Say that again. Maybe a little bit closer to the mic.

Should we say for the people in the back, Med Fit. Med Pick is for the rep, not the leader. It is a great forecasting tool for leadership, but it is for the rep. Thank you.

Continue.

So how I learned Med Pick and why I got so deeply entrenched into this framework, methodology, whatever you want to call it, is because I personally used it, got amazing results from it, like literally 2xing my income the year I implemented it. And I was like, oh, shit, okay, this is for me. And I've taught it through that lens and evolved it through that lens. But how is it not retroactive? Cool. So you kind of have to think of every conversation that you're going into and you're like, okay, what outcome do I want in that conversation? So typically, my first conversations with people is discovery. But discovery never ends. You're always kind of discovering more. But I'm starting to think through that, like, okay, going to this first conversation, want to have some discovery. Who am I meeting with? So, you know, when we talk about Med Pick being effectively implemented, you need to kind of have all the building blocks that sit behind medpick for medpic to be most effective. So, like, one of the building blocks, again, proactiveness, discovery. Do you have discovery templates built for each Persona that you're speaking to? So when you're going in and you're talking with three, four different buyers, you can kind of isolate them, the things they care about, ask the right questions. And then after that meeting, you know, go and look at medpic and go look at it and say, oh, what did I learn today? Oh, I learned that these people are getting involved in decision. They kind of want these things live by this timeline. This is kind of their criteria. This is the pain they're trying to solve. Here's three of the six buyers I know are probably going to be involved. This is what they care about. Okay, so my next meeting, I need to double click on these things, maybe invite these people to those things. So you start kind of like playing that game of, I'm looking at medpick before my call, where are my gaps in my deal? I'm looking at medpic after my call. What did I close? What's still there? Okay, what do I need to do next time? And it's kind of just evolves. It's, again, it's a way to see.

Love that. And you said something I think is also important for leaders to hear. And so I want to double tap on it, right Is you know, this is for the rep. Now if I were to go ping 100 sales reps that or are using medic or med pick and ask them, do you believe it's for you? I don't believe 100% of those reps are going to say it's for me. So as a leader, so speaking of the leaders, real quick, how do you sell Medpic to your reps in a way that they believe they will benefit? Because I'd be willing to bet if I pulled most reps using Medpic, they don't feel like it benefits them. They feel like it only benefits their boss. So how do you sell that into an org where they go, oh, I want to use this.

Three things. One, Medpic is a common language. If everybody speaks that language, it will just happen because we're all talking the same way. I bet you if you pulled those same exact organizations you just mentioned and said, hey, how do you define economic buyer? How do you define champion? How do you define champion versus coach? What's pain really mean to you? They'd get 100 different answers. Not a common language. So you got to all teach it and talk it like it's a common language. Second thing, if leaders are just in calls and using it just in forecast calls, they have failed their app is not it. Medpic is a great forecaster. People who nail it correctly have a 90 plus percent forecast accuracy. But if all the leader cares about is an accurate forecast, you know reps are going to feel like you're just using this as a forecast tool. It's not for me, it's just for you. The way it's most successful common language used during all phases of both the buyer seller journey. For internally, do you have a conversation with your folk to say, hey, let's talk about your deal. How's it going? Where do you see us winning? Where do you see maybe some gaps or some us losing? How can I help you to close some of those gaps? It's part of deal strategy. It's part of one on ones. It's when your rep comes to you and asks you for advice, you start asking for questions and understanding and double clicking again. But in order to do all that, you have to have a common language with it. It needs to be used everywhere.

Got it? Okay, good. All right, so now let's start to get into it here. So let's break these letters down and what I'm looking for is the definition, but also like how you do it. Right. Because it's one thing like, oh, yep, I, I've got some. Yep. I got some metrics. Got some metrics. Great. Right. So let's break this down letter by letter, what it means.

Right.

Which you kind of did already, but more importantly, how to actually do it.

Yep. So you're starting with your mic and I wish we should almost pause like real quick between each one. I'm thinking, because like, otherwise, man, like, I'm going to, I'm going to talk at you for the next 20 minutes. So let's, let's, let's do that. But anyways, so M Metrics, as you're having your conversation with your buyer or buyers, what you're just trying to do is kind of quantify pain. So I'm having these types of problems. Cool. Well, help me understand those a little bit better. Our solution solves this problem by 20%, this problem by 10%. We improve this by 30%. So, you know, you said these are your three problems. This is how our solution impacts those problems. This is how much it typically impacts them by you look at historical. I've worked with other customers like you and we've done these types of things. I think you're going to get 20% here, 10%, 30%, what have you, and then that's a metric. Okay. But a metric alone isn't a business case, isn't a reason for someone to make a change. What happens with that metric is, so if I can, you know, increase revenue by 30%, reduce the amount of time you spend on this task by 30%, then you just need to start quantifying that. Well, how much revenue do you make? How much time do you spend? Okay, this equals this. So if we're able to improve this by this, this is your business impact. Is that right? Cool. Well, what other levers can we pull? What other impacts can we have? What other thing? You've got five buyers in this conversation. That's what about the others and how it helps them. Then how does this tie to broader okrs or broader business goals that you guys have trying to grow by 5% or grow by 5%? Here's all these people that are now touching your deal. So if we improve these things by this and this, by this and this, by this and do this and this, what does that happen to this big corporate initiative? So when you eventually get to an economic buyer, someone who can make a decision and create budget, and you're having a conversation with that individual and you're like, look, you have business goals that look like this at the C level. You have all these functional folks and all these different business units that help you kind of aggregate all that together to get to that. This is how our solution impacts these groups. This is how much it impacts these groups by. This is now your financial implication for making a change with us across this. This is going to be your roi. And you know, now it's a validation exercise that's metrics done, right.

What do you do if they don't know the metric? Because I know this gets brought up often, right. Where it's like, yeah, you know, selling to. And this is where we get, you know, grief sometimes too. Like, well, selling to sales, all that's easy, right? Revenue pipeline, meetings, close rate, deal size, whatever. But like, what if they don't know the metric? Like, how do you help guide them in the buying process?

Yep. So I love that and I used to train people. Ask your questions to the wrong people. You ask good questions to the wrong people, you get to the right people. So that to me is that it's okay. Well, no, hey, totally cool. Understand you may not know that, but it's going to be really important for us to figure that out because that's what we're going to base a lot of the reason your organization make a change on. So typically we work with you to figure these pieces out, but then there's other people in your organization that will often see a cfo, a coo, a VP of whatever that can maybe answer those questions. Out of curiosity of somebody like that, who do you think would know the answer to those things? Oh, it'd be this person. Cool. Can I send you some questions, you go ask them or even better, can we set up 15, 30 minutes with them tomorrow, later next week, what have you to have that conversation? Ask those questions. You just find a way to get it. Someone always knows the answer. You just got to now figure out who.

I love that. I love that. And also I love that phrase, good questions to the wrong people will get you to the right person. That's catchy. That's good right there. I like that. Okay, so now let's go to this next one, right? The wizard of Oz behind the curtain, right. This economic buyer. And because I do think people do get it very confused with decision maker and economic buyer because I would explain this to my team often it's like when it comes to a software for the sales org, who's the decision maker? Who's going to decide what we use that is me. If not actually my managers. Like my managers are the decision what we're going to use. But who writes the check is someone completely different. So let's talk about this economic buyer. You defined it well. But how on earth do you get in touch with this wizard of Oz behind the curtain, right, that no one can ever seem to talk to.

I love that. So there's a couple of places, but one you're, you're, you're nailing this. So like this is where people totally mess up medpic. They think there's one person that makes a decision and they get all mad. No, the modern buyer environment, there's 6, 8, 10 decision makers. It's like, no, there's not 6, 8, 10 decision makers dot there's a decision committee. There's a group of individuals that your solution is going to impact. They all have their own like little piece of the pie that they care about. And then there is ultimately this committee that's going to go and make a recommendation to likely 1 or 2 or you know, a small group of individuals. And then one of those people is often the executive where the budget comes out of. If it's a sales tool, it's going to come out of sales marketing tool out of marketing. You know, finance, a lot of finance. Like normally there's one. Sometimes there's split budgets where like I'm going to impact two parts of the organization. So like there's two people where money is coming from. That's okay, it happens. But that's normally not. But anyways, how do you get to the person behind the curtain? There's some plays I really like to run here. One of them, as you're asking questions throughout your sales process, you're saying, hey, I know all of you are involved but ultimately who are you going to bring this to that can say yes or no? That will ultimately the budget's going to come from them. So you're asking those questions when you also make some assumptions. You have a typical buyer. You have normally 1, 2, 3 people that are the titles you normally sell to. And as you're going throughout your process, you're asking about those individuals as you've done your research, you know, I see, you know, Sally, is your cxo. Is Sally going to make the ultimate decision on this or is it, you know, I'll see John or is it John? So you're asking some of those questions, some of the plays. I like to run one. As you build a financial business case you, the rep sends a note to the ultimate person you think you're going to meet with or that's going to make the decision and say, hey, this is what I'm seeing. I'm working with all these people, I see this type of roi, but ultimately this is going to go to you. I'd love to review with you before it does. So we make sure we're on the right track and have your vision in mind for our solution. That's one great one. Another one, have your fricking executive that mirrors that executive pick up the phone and build a relationship. Hey, our team is doing a great job working with your team. But you know, before we, you know, ever like to form formal partnerships, we'd love to have a conversation with you. We see this as a great long term relationship. I normally like to build relationships with my peers. Love to have a conversation with you. Go let that happen. Let, let executives go talk. So you can do it. You can get shepherded in by the team. You can have your leader do it. I'm a huge fan of creating executive alignment. So that's normally what I'll do there.

Yeah, I like that. And I do. The one thing I would call out here is there's buying committees. But, and you probably know this too because you have also been a buyer, right? You are the exact, there's buying committees. But I do think more often than not there is a decision maker. And what I mean by that, right, is like say it's me, my sales ops, my sales enablements managers, they want a tool. And I don't. The odds that that's getting through are going to be very slim right now. If there's something I want, I want them all bought in. But there generally is someone where it's okay, who's the domino, where if they fall, the others will fall around it, right? And it's like identifying that. But I love these questions. And the exact to exec is still just not utilized. But it really isn't. Why I'll just ask you like, why don't you think more people do that? Because that is such an easy way to like get that relationship built. But people just don't.

Reps are scared. They don't trust their leadership. They, they don't. They're scared to lose control of their deal, lose control of the narrative. But if you, if you prep your exec, right, your execs in that role for a reason, like they've done your job, the job above yours and the one above yours and the one above theirs, like you can trust them to go have Another exact conversation. You just need to prep them. Right. What's the outcome you're looking for, what details you need to share? You know, things along those lines.

Yeah, because what, what people miss on this exec side of things too is like at the end of the day for most companies, for the product you're using, there's an exec at your company that uses said product. Oh yeah, that's what they want to hear from, is who uses your product. Most sales reps don't use the product they sell. Whereas if you're selling to hr, get your HR exec to reach out. If you're selling to finance, get your finance exec to reach out because they're the ones using the product and they can speak to it better than anybody else can because of that use and their execs. So okay, I like this. We got, okay, so now metric, great economic buyer. We're starting to figure this out, we're going through it. Let's talk DC and DP here. So we have decision criteria and decision process. How do we figure those things out?

So decision criteria is amazing for inbound leads. If you're getting an inbound decision criteria should be like, where do you start? What are you looking for in a solution? What's your wish list? How well do we align to it? That should be very early. If you're bringing an idea to someone, which is what a lot of hunters and most of the roles that I've lived are doing, you need to kind of co create. So this is the idea of creating a scorecard and I love this. And so many reps don't do this. And again, this is another building block. If you want decision criteria to be successful, you have to have a scorecard because you need to repeatable way to measure against your criteria. So that often sounds like something like, hey, it's been great working with you. We just kind of showed you all this stuff. Think like post demo, what are the four, five, ten things that I showed you? What's resonating the most? Now that we've framed up the problem you're trying to solve, how do you see our solution? Solving it, what are those things? And you're kind of writing those things down. And by the way, modern environment, they're going to go talk to competitors. What you're trying to do there is create really tight alignment between the problems they're trying to solve, how they're trying to solve them, how your solution solves them, Write them down, write them down with your differentiators in Mind and then share them with the buyer. And then when the buyer goes and talks to competitor two and competitor three, they're using your framework to evaluate your competitors. If you've written your scorecard right, you should just win that. Now this is where, in my opinion, a little bit of Medpic also is super important because you need to be able to look at the health of your deal. If they're trying to solve 10 things and your solution solves five and a competitor solves 10, then you're going to need, you should probably bring in a strategic partner or something like that to fill in the gap. It's going to be really hard for you to get your deal across the line. Conversely, say you solve 10 and they're only trying to solve five. Well, those five other things that you solve that they don't care about weigh into the cost of your deal. You need to know that because at some point you're either going to need to discount it or you need to paint this bigger picture vision of maybe you only need them year one, but what about year two, year three, year five? We need to picture this maturity curve together and how we can grow together. If you can't get them to lean into that and you've got a competitor that sells five and they want five, well, shit, and they're half the cost. You just lost your deal. So you need to be thinking through these things. And that's why it's so important to get aligned on the decision criteria. Because now you have your criteria, you have their criteria. If you're close, cool. If you're far apart, there's something you need to do there and you need to be aware of that.

Yeah, I think that's such an important call out is, you know, one not being afraid of competitors. Lean in, you know, you know, and if you're like, we talk about this a lot like, you know, on the circuit and like my own teams is like reps, hope there's not another competitor. How about you just 100% assume there is because there is. Right. Like there is a competitor in this process and you need to be proactive. We used to similar to, I think what you're talking about, the scorecard we had the. Oh, be sure you ask them this question. If you're speaking to any of the other competitors, be sure you ask them this. And it was such a great like doubt planting question of like, oh, if you're gonna be talking to, you know, super biz dude, be sure you ask them about uptime and onboarding. Just Ask them.

Just.

Just ask them. Let me know what they. And just. You plant those seeds where you're not afraid of it. You're saying, hey, you're probably talking to someone. Ask these things. Right? And I think that's such an important way to do it. And thank you for the call out on inbound versus Outbound. Because that, like, people do this, though, man. This is my frustration with Medpick. It's one of those things where conceptually I love it. The way it plays out at most companies, I hate it because they go outbound and they're starting with things like M, E, D and D. And it's like, yo, you just called me. Like, you have to earn the right.

To ask these things.

Like, I don't know the decision process.

We just started talking. I'm not even making a decision yet. Why would I know the process around it? Right?

So I love that call out of inbound, outbound versus criteria and guiding them if there are outbound. So now it's cool process. We cover that enough as well. Right. Like the buying process, I'll mention real quickly on it.

But you just mentioned something on C. So you're always. There's always two people. You're. And we'll talk about when we get there. But it's your status quo. And then what you were just talking about is landmines. I love landmines. Landmines are that concept. So you plan a little scene, and when your competitor steps up, blows up right in their face. You just need to know those nuanced differences and call them out. That's exactly right. But decision process, biggest thing here, folks. Have a mutual action plan document. And when. Right around the time when someone. When you're asking the question, like, hey, out of curiosity, when would you want to be live on this? Get really good on working someone through a backwards timeline. Oh, you want to be live in three months? Well, my implementation takes a month. Security takes, you know, security and infosec takes, you know, two to three weeks. Takes a month to get this thing signed. So you want to be live in three months. We have a week to get this done. Like, we were probably in trouble. So, like, understand how to do a backwards timeline and build a mutual action plan accordingly. That's. That's nailing a decision process. There's. I could probably Talk for another 30 minutes there, but that. That's the idea.

I did an episode probably not a year ago now. All on mutual action plans. Like, those are slept on, dude. Where it's just people don't it's just not done. And I think oftentimes, you know, reps, they hear all this and go, that's just a lot of work. Yes.

Why?

You get paid, paid 200, 300, 400, 500k a year to do this work. If it was just as easy as being personable and like closing people, shoot, we'd all be millionaires at this point. Like, this is what makes you world class, is you do these things that actually get you. So reps, listening and leaders that even almost all of y' all are literally just one extra deal out of 10 away from adding 100 grand to your paycheck. One more out of 10. That's it. This is the stuff that gets you one more out of 10. Because if you're hovering around that 20ish, 25% close rate, you're getting the ones that you should. When you get to 30, 40% close rates, you're getting the ones that you helped buy. And that one extra out of 10 could be adding 100 grand to your income every single year. And it takes this stuff in order to do it.

And also, as you work more complex deals, I promise you, you got to think of the rep you're competing against for that. If they're doing this shit and you're not, watch out. Yeah. I've often said the difference between the high six, low seven figure earners and everybody else is they just do all the things that we talk about.

They do. They're not sitting there complaining about a mutual action plan. They know it's going to make them money. They're not sitting there upset because they have to put notes in Salesforce. They know it's going to help make them money. And so I love this process here. Now, process, paper process. Let's talk about this a little bit because this is a big one. Sellers, you sell your product every single day, every single month, every single year, your buyer buys your product maybe one time ever. So this paper process is a place that I think a lot of reps need to invest more time in helping their customers establish. Let's talk paper process here.

Yeah. So think mutual action plan for your decision process apply to the legal and procurement side of things. So who's going to be involved? Who's ultimately signing? How busy are they? How many. What priority does this set? Oh, you've got 10 contracts in front of you right now. Great. So when you normally have 10 contracts in front of you, how long do you think that that will take? Okay, well, it's going to take you procurement this amount of time to get to this point, reviewing business commercials, how long is your legal going to take? A legal tip normally takes this amount of time. Okay, so let's add a week for vacations and nonsense. So we can probably agree that this thing's going to get signed in like, you know, this amount of time. Yes. Ok. Okay. Well, you start then. What are the, what are the steps of communication? Who's involved in all of those steps? When are those things going to happen? And then you just essentially create, you know, again, a little bit of a mutual action plan and touchpoint timelines and you're seeing if you're tracking or not. And if you're not tracking, then, you know, it's like, okay, well now who do I need to get involved? So that's really important. Why? You have an executive sponsor. So my executive sponsor can call up these people and push us along if we're starting to stall. This is why you build and give to gets. Okay, if we sign by this date, we're going to give you this, but if not, that goes away. I hate that type of stuff. But it does work. You also need to expect one that you're going to get squeezed on cost. So there's like some things there, like never negotiate before you get to procurement. That's like one of. If I'm going to, if I'm going to make any recommendation to any salespeople out there, don't. If someone says, hey, you guys, we want to keep you in the game, but you need to drop your price 20% and that's like mid cycle. Just pause there and say, we're going to get there, we're going to get there. But until I understand holistically every single thing that your procurement legal teams are going to ask for, I can't. Let's just not do it. Let's focus on us being the right solution for your business and then let's let them negotiate it. This will save you so much. Anybody who's misquoted by 10 or 20%, inspect all your previous deals. See if you negotiated before you got to procurement, if you did and you stop that and just wait there, you'll make up the 10 to 20% on your annual quota just by changing that one behavior. So right there, like, those are some things to think about. I'll flip back to you. I feel like you got something.

Oh, no, I just love this man, because it's just so true. And like, this is where we get to talk as buyers, sales reps, you have to understand what is procurement's job, I think you need to understand this. Right. Their job is to drive down price. That is their job, to get the best terms for the company. They know what they are doing. They know what they are doing. Right. I know how to squeeze down a price by 20, 30%. Like it's. We have strategies and part of that is getting the price lower before we get to contract stage and then splicing out the different things.

Right.

We're going to negotiate each thing on its own. The term, the price, the seats, whatever type of upsell down, sell. Like all that process that procurement runs very well. And if you're discounting early, I love the way you phrase it because that's the key is like discounting should only come after the yes. Right, like, oh, we need to negotiate. Okay, so you're going to move forward with us, right? Well, no. Well, then there's nothing to talk about yet. Well, we know we need you to lower your price to even consider moving forward.

We'll get there.

We'll get that.

Let's make sure we're the right vendor first.

We're not there yet. So I love that in terms of the process. Now let's get the ICC right. I knew this one was going to go long. This is a good one. And I want to keep going on this. So let's talk about the icc. You have identified pain champion competitions we kind of touched on a little bit already with competition. Let's talk about the I and the C for champion.

Yeah. And really quick story. And I know, I know we're going to not tie, but I used to have the head of procurement for adp. His name was Vito. And Vito used to swing a baseball bat around his office in ADP headquarters, New York and used to. And I loved watching this. He used to say to vendors all the time, I know you negotiated a deal with my team, but now you're talking to me.

Yes, just.

He used to teach us never negotiate until you got there. So, guys, just picture Vito, big Italian dude swinging a baseball bat, ready to chop up your deal if you don't. If you negotiate anyway. All right, so I identify pain. Biggest thing on this one, folks, Persona. Think about the six, seven people that are gonna be part of your deal. Persona based pain discovery is not a single part of your sales process. It is across the whole sales process. You are never done discovery. So anytime you're, you're going and having a new conversation with someone, you're trying to identify pain with that individual. And the Things they care about. If you have one discovery document that has five pain based questions and you just reuse it every single time you are failing the buyer. If it's also the same pain that you solve for everybody else, you don't know pain deep enough because pain is individualized. It's how the person is experiencing their unique world. You need to understand that another second level of pain is personal levels of pain and wins. And you don't get that on group calls. You don't get that on the first call. You normally get that midway through the process. One of the best ways to really double click on pain and find personal professional wins as it relates to it. Pull people aside. After the demo, you just demo to 5, 6 people. Set up an individual 15 to 30 minute call with every single one and just say, hey, it looks like you really, you know, got some value out of this part of the conversation. Love to understand why. How does that, why is that important to you? How does that impact you? And you. That's also where when we talk, you know, champions, building champions, that's how you intentionally build champions afterwards. It's those one off conversations that aren't steps in your sales process that you're having, you know, human to human conversations with people like that is so key.

And you just did something very subtle there, which whether it was intentional or not, but I love is champions, not champion. And I think that's also a place that a lot of reps miss is they get a champion singular, not champions plural. So let's talk about that because what you're hinting at now is we're starting to get into champions, right? How do you get multiple people campaigning internally? So talk about the champion part real quick.

Yeah, again, modern, modern med pick modern buying, multiple decision, multiple people as part of the decision process. The more you have, the more people in your corner, the better. And again, champions, people selling for you when you're not there. You need to test them. And how you test them is you ask them, you know, to prep with you before meeting, tell you inside info like who you're competing against and where you. What are the pros and cons? Ask them to help validate your business case and get you to an economic buyer if they can. But nonetheless, you're trying to pull people aside one on one and see if they're in your corner or not. See if they like, are they a blocker, are they an influencer or are they actually willing to stick their neck out for you? What you know, there's the Miller Hyman, Blue sheet really should inform your champion strategy. If you guys don't know Miller, Hyman, I'm going like 20 years ago, but.

It'S bringing it back, dude.

Okay, all right, great. Like that's what how you should be, you know, there should be an intentional champion strategy that you're building and touch.

On that just a little bit more as like, you talk about that strategy. Because I do think, you know, we forget. So that champion, right, they're selling without us in the room. But so often we don't enable them. They don't have med pick, right. That they're working through. They haven't gone through Sandler or Spin or Force Management, Winning by Design, KD training, David Weisser. They haven't gone through any of this training. So how do you enable them to help sell without you?

Yeah. So again, part of this is understanding their process. So how is their organization going to buy? Are they having internal meetings? What does that look like? When are they having them? How are they evaluating? Do they have their own decision process and criteria mapped out? All those things and you're just having those conversations and then when you're saying, oh, yeah, when they tell you, oh, I'm about to go have this meeting. It's our internal thing. Cool. Just out of curiosity, what are you guys presenting? Can I review it with you? Can I arm you with something? Can we talk about it together? Like, those are ways that you kind of execute on those behaviors.

Love it. And unfortunately, the recycling truck's about to go by and be really loud, but whatever. At least we made it like 45 minutes in before it got ridiculous, so. All right, my man, this was phenomenal. Let's wrap up though, with the one question ask everybody, right? Is the name of this podcast is Live better Sell Better Better? Because I also have this weird idea, right, that if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more joy and energy and fulfillment in life, that if we lived better, that the sales would improve as well. What would your Live Better advice be for people listening?

I love it, Katie. So my wife and I actually started a podcast beginning of the pandemic years ago called Psych and Sales.

Nice.

And my wife has her PhD in psychology. So what's my Live Better advice? Marry a psychologist. I tell people, matt, I did it because it would be a financial ROI to me in my long term life by marrying psychologists opposed to paying one for counseling 40 hours a week. So what are my recommendations? There's two sides of a coin. You have all the skills and tools and things you've learned and then you have your mind. And if your mind is not right, you can't use all the skills and tools and everything else. So take breaks throughout the day, manage your calendar based on your energy levels and do kind of next level time management in my mind, talk to people. If you are feeling down, it is okay, except that we have a really, really tough profession and find healthy outlets for it. I mean there are so many things that we could unpack there. But you are nothing if you're burnt out and if you're not mentally strong. So focus there and then that's the other that allows that other side of the coin of all that, all the other things to operate effectively.

I love the call out on energy because it is, it's true, right? One of my favorite quotes, I think it's from the book Energy Bust by Dan Gordon. He says discipline follows energy. When you have high energy, it's easier to be disciplined. When you have low energy, the thought of making sure that you put together a mutual action plan is like, oh, I don't have the energy for that. So then we don't. Whereas energy, discipline follows energy. If you can maintain your energy levels and what you call it, next level time management of like knowing the best time. So quick bonus tip for everyone here. There's a phenomenal book called the Power of When and there's a test you can take. It's a free test online called the Power of Win and it'll tell you your chronotype. So there are four chronotypes in life in terms of lion, bear, dolphin and wolf. And once you know which chronotype you are, it actually tells you when your peak energy levels are, when you're most creative, when you should be doing busy work versus creative work. Like it's a really, really cool test to take because I know I'm a lion. I know I'm a lion, which means my most productive time is going to be from 6am to 11. That's when I do my high energy tasks. Right. When I have the most energy. And then I do the admin things that don't require a lot of energy later. So knowing that is important. So David, my man, this was phenomenal. Where can people get more of you? Do you have, have you put together any content? Do you have a course on this? Like where can people get more of what you're putting out right now?

Yeah. By the way, a quick segue on what you just said. One of my favorite quotes along those same lines, motivation follows Action not action follows motivation. Motivation follows action. So just start doing shit and then you'll be more motivated anyways. Okay, this has been an awesome conversation. Where can people find me? Medpic CO M E D D P I C C CO I created a masterclass that does four hours of this deep dive on Medpic. Hit me up on LinkedIn, psych and sales for mental health, you know, medpic and all the stuff content I put out there, you know, to help people. My. My whole ethos on life, man, is how do I help sellers be better sellers. So I'm there for you if you want to just talk, you want to jam, I can help you with anything on, on any topic like, like that we've talked about today. Just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm here for you. I want to help you. I'm a fan of yours in your journey. Just, you know, just hit me up and put yourself out there and yeah, just let me know I can help. Oh yeah.

My man. Hell yes. Good shit, dude. This was good. And I'm gonna say this and don't take the wrong way better than I was hoping for because I, you know, I like I said like with med pick, I've got my low with me.

So I don't blame him.

So no, that was really, really good on how to actually use Medpic and how it actually can benefit this seller. So really good. My man, awesome work. And dude, we might have to come back for part two on a round of this as well, like how to go even deeper. So appreciate your insight today, man. This is great.

Thanks for having me.