The Connector Podcast - Unveiling Fintech Sales Success: James and Richard on Leveraging MEDDPICC...

Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen van der Huydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.

Welcome to another podcast of the Connector, and today I've got a very, very, very special guest with me. It's Humble Tech. all the way from London, and it's Richard and James. Can you please introduce yourself and also the company?

Hi, very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us on your podcast, Koen. I'll start with myself. My name is James Dawson. I'm the founder of Humble Technology. I set Humble Technology up in 2021 after a bunch of CEOs in my network were continually asking me to help them and teach them how to sell, how to scale their sales organizations and all that. And I'd done that because, you know, up to 2012, I was working in a very big financial firm called ICAP. And one of the projects I led, we built a credit default swap trading platform and we went from 0 to $400 million revenue in 3, 3 and a half years. Wow.

Impressive.

And because I did that, I thought I was a total rock star and I left and I joined a very early-stage startup with zero revenue, product not built yet. And I spent, I spent 5 years there. And that was an absolute baptism of fire, learning how to do enterprise sales with no big brand behind you, selling software to banks.

Well, I told you it's gonna be a special occasion today because that's really the space we're in as well. So that's why I'm so keen to learn a lot about you guys as well.

So, so the real truth is, like, for the first few years, I just completely messed it up, ran around having tons and tons of meetings and working 16-hour days. And managed to get some stuff done. But if you fast forward to 2020, when I wanted to set up my own business, when I'd been a very successful, you know, CEO of a fintech, CRO of a fintech scaling from $0 to $10 million, you know, that first million being excruciating and then the $1 to $5 getting again and then the $5 to $10 is kind of easier and then the $10 above that, I think, you know, that's where you don't need me anymore because then it just becomes a machine. So when I wanted to kind of create something where I could teach other people how to do it, I went and looked at big tech success stories and I did a ton of research and I spent a whole year reading about like, how did MongoDB go from $30 million ARR to $800 million ARR in like 4 years? I mean, that's phenomenal, right? If you look at big tech success stories like MongoDB, Sprinklr, Snowflake, Ad Dynamics, AppDynamics, all those kinds of companies. There's a methodology that they use. If you see the interviews for the CEO of MongoDB, Dev Ichuria, he makes it very clear that there's 2 things that are absolutely essential if you want to scale. One is you have to have a good product, world-class. And the second thing is—

Market fit, I guess.

You have to have a world-class go-to-market and sales strategy. And that's kind of through all that research how I discovered MEDIC and all these methodologies that these people use. And that's what we use today. And it's just absolutely game-changing.

Yeah, I'd love to go into that MEDIC approach. But maybe, Richard, can you also introduce yourself a little bit?

Firstly, yeah, thanks, guys, for having James and myself on the pod today. Really excited to collaborate with you guys. Just about myself, 20 years in financial services, 10 of those years at a big consulting company, learning the trade, not just from a sales point of view, but also getting in there and making certain things stick on the client side. After that, I jumped out into the big blue ocean thinking that it was a good idea to get some different stripes. I set up my own consulting company, Scale Up Consulting, where I provided services into the fintech ecosystem and also into big banks around various things in transformation. Off the back of all of that work that I was doing, especially in the last sort of furlough of scale-up consulting, I realized one of the big things that— the big pain points that existed in the fintech ecosystem was the fact that sales was a misnomer. Everyone was thinking about product, product, product, product, product, and focusing on how product could get to market. But the little engine that actually matters the most was sometimes not really nurtured. As I exited Scale-Up Consulting, I fortuitously was introduced to James. Between us over the last couple of years, in a way back and forth, and then more so over the last year or so, I realized that actually there was a marriage made in heaven. And decided to jump in and, you know, just work and partner up with James and really drive out sort of the Humble Technology story. And obviously, James mentioned the medtech stuff, which is a cornerstone to all of what we do.

I thought that was the baby of the marriage.

That is someone else's baby.

It was a beautiful birth. Beautiful, right?

Can you tell us a little bit more? Because you obviously got me very, very curious about the methodology. What does it entail?

So let me, let me take you, I'll take you to the history a little bit because that's quite interesting. So if you go back to the 1990s, there's a company called PTC. It's the first private software company to hit $1 billion in sales, right? Okay. And the guy who was running that sales engine was a guy called John McMahon. And him and his co-founders were relentless, you know, American execution artists wanting to build revenue and scale and like very, very professional about it. And they wanted to understand 3 answers to 3 very important questions. Why do you, why do deals, you know, why do we win deals? Why do we lose deals? And why do deals slip? Why do they fail? They wanted to answer those questions. So they created MEDDIC as a methodology, which is an acronym. There's a whole bunch of acronyms that we're gonna go through and explain exactly what it is so that they could have a common language in the sales team and they could always be on the same page and that they could very accurately qualify deals in and out of their pipeline and know exactly what to do in all of their deals at all the time and know which stones need to be turned over and which not. So it's a very scientific kind of framework for running your sales pipeline. So that's kind of effectively where MEDDIC came from. The acronyms we can go down in a little bit, but, you know, the, it's basically the M stands for metrics, the E stands for economic buyer. Then you've got 2 Ds, one for decision process, one for decision criteria. The I stands for implicating the pain, the problem that you're solving. The first C is the champion who runs the deal. The second C is the competitor. And then if you want to, you can put the P in the middle, MedPic, and then you get the paper process, which is very, very important when you're selling to banks, is to understand the detail of that. So in a nutshell, that's MedPic. But, you know, I could run a 5-day workshop on teaching someone how to use it.

No, sure. And maybe that should also be for those that really like to go into depth. That could be the next step after this podcast, that they contact you guys and just get a more deeper understanding. But what I'm interested in is, is it It is a methodology, but why does this framework particularly work well for fintech companies?

Yeah, so it's basically, it's an excellent framework for enterprise deals. Anything that's big, long, complex sales cycle that has multiple people you're selling to, this is a very excellent framework. There's tons of other frameworks out there like BANTT and SLIPS and Scotchman and Miller-Sandler, Millerheim and all that kind of stuff. There's tons of other frameworks. But this framework is used by all the big successful tech companies like Sprinklr, MongoDB, AppDynamics, Snowflake. I mean, you name almost every, every, every very successful software company is using MEDDIC today. So, you know, that's why it's like super useful kind of to integrate into your, into your sales process.

Also, just to sort of add to that, I think, you know, a lot of the challenges come in sales is, I guess, one of the things is a common language is making certain management onside all the time, right? Or at least there's a vent or pipe that shows people what's going on. And this is what Medic provides. It allows not just the sales team, but also marketing and customer success, the revenue operations team to really fully understand where we are, what we're doing, and how are we progressing or how we aren't progressing, right? which allows the revenue team to accelerate deals. It also, because you're asking specific questions at specific points in the sales process, like early on in the sales process, you're able to shorten sales cycles. As an example, we aren't going to go out and just randomly give a demo. We first want to validate our champion is our champion. Then we also, before we even start going down that path of demos, we want to have a conversation with the economic buyer and see exactly what their pain points are and whether that pain is solvable inside our solution. Then we go down the next step. We always qualify and always asking questions. This ultimately leads us to that improved consistency and enhanced sales execution, and then that communication that allows us to start pushing forward on the most important deals.

So would that mean that your sales pipes are also aligned with all the steps in the MAPIC or not?

It's kind of, it's slightly different. So if I try and explain the difference to you, your sales process is like a map. If you were gonna drive from London to Amsterdam, there's a bunch of towns you have to go through. That's your sales process, right? And it's like a map. Now, your qualification methodology like MEDDIC is more like a compass or a GPS. If you get lost or you miss one of the towns, you end up in the wrong town, your MEDDIC or your GPS will allow you to get back into the sales process very correctly.

Right.

So it creates a way of cleaning your pipeline so that there's not a lot of messy stuff in there. It qualifies stuff very carefully so that you always know what you're doing. And if you think about most pipelines, if they're not using Medic or something very experienced like this, the deals in the beginning of the pipeline are quite easy to understand because that's all the new leads, the new opportunities we're trying to get. The ones at the end where you've already sent the invoices and you've already sent the, you know, you've done all the work, right? And you've got through procurement and you're talking to them. Those are easy to understand. You can predict that those are like 95% gonna close. It's all the stuff in the middle where salespeople are saying, oh, that's 50% likely, that's 60%, that's 70%. That stuff is all just in the fintech space at the moment for people who are not using Medic. That's more of a wish list rather than reality. Medic allows you to qualify those deals so that they become much, much more likely to close, much more accurate.

Much tighter.

So that you don't have a huge mess of stuff in your pipeline that keeps slipping from one quarter to the next, never closes. Wastes everyone's time and all that kind of stuff.

So it's actually a tool to, to focus and to calibrate, if you want, your sales teams. Now you speak a lot about enterprise sales, and I get that when you actually compare an enterprise as a bank, it is definitely an enterprise. But a lot of the fintechs nowadays, they also go B2C and somehow also B2B2C, so to the smaller organizations within the industry. Does it make sense on the C, and does it make sense on the middle part? Think about payment institutions that are very young and so on and so forth.

So for B2C, Medic doesn't make sense at all. Like, you wouldn't use it. It's a marketing play. You have to get very good at marketing and very good at product to sell B2C. And you only use Medic for B2B, for enterprise deals that are complex, that take 6 to 12 months to close, that require me to sell to, like, the business person who likes it, then the technical person who needs to validate it, then the procurement team, then the COO, then the CFO who needs to sign off on it. If it's a big messy deal like that, you need medic. If it's a very quick deal where someone signs and pays on a credit card, you don't need it at all.

It's a marketing thing. No, no, no, that makes sense. That was what I was thinking as well. Now, We as the connector, we are focusing a lot in 2025 on all the things that— well, I'll rephrase myself. What we see is a lot of the companies that we help, they're world famous in the place where they're coming from, but they're rather unknown to the place they want to scale to. So a lot of the work that we do as the connector, we help them to get brand exposure, to help them with the first steps of sales, because we realize that if the brand is unknown, if people don't know the product, There is not even a conversation. It just blocks off. So how does Matic participate with this type of thinking?

So Matic wouldn't help you with that at all. I mean, if you're unknown, you're unknown. Like, so like in our consultancy, we can only really help scale-ups. So someone who's got stuff in their pipeline already, they've got like some revenue, they've got some product market fit, then you can start applying this. But if in early stage product awareness and stuff, that's like something that's more like marketing and relationships and stuff like that, you can't use medic to build that.

So it's literally in a moment where things are falling into pieces, where when using your earlier words, James, you said it's very hard to get from 0 to 1, and then from 1 to 5, that's also tough. I guess then medic starts to kick in between the second part of sales. Is that correct?

Or think about it, you know, it's also, you know, just to, you know, make it a bit simpler for the listeners out there. You know, you are a founder. You maybe are scaling up, and now you're thinking you might have raised. You might have done a Series A, ten million, twenty million, whatever that is. And you're thinking, okay, I need to you know hire in a sales team. I need to do a lot of different things. But the the first the the first thing is you obviously need to make certain you you have that that right infrastructure set up internally in order to. make certain that the team you hire in actually can perform, right?

Mm-hmm.

This is when we start, and this is when James and myself, when we start getting involved, moving away from founder-led sales to enterprise-led sales and building out that leadership philosophy, that culture, also obviously that let's call it in inverted commas, that infrastructure or that methodology, that framework that allows this team to pick up the reins and start moving forward. And Medic is the wraparound that James obviously, and the navigation system that James is alluding to. Obviously, things like sales processes, etc., need to be part of that as well.

Yeah. So maybe if I explain it in a slightly different way as well, it'll also resonate with other people. When you want to scale your sales organization, a lot of people will go and hire, they'll raise money and then they'll go and hire a bunch of salespeople because those people know the companies they're selling to or they understand the market, all that kind of stuff. That's what they'll do, right? But the first step anyone should do, even if you haven't raised money, is you need to write a sales playbook that says like—

I would say multiple playbooks even.

Yeah. This is how we sell. This is who we sell to. This is, this is what we're selling. This is the value of our product, the business value, not the, not the features and benefits and all that stuff, the business value. So you write the sales playbook and you can use Medic to write that as well. And then once you've written the sales playbook, then you can use that sales playbook to go and hire your team. You use the sales playbook to onboard your team, to train them, to teach them how to sell, all that kind of stuff, right? And then, and most people, don't do that. They go and hire random salespeople and then just hope it's going to work out. There's no way to train them, to enable them, to teach them about the product, to teach them how to sell. And that's why there's so much failure, especially in the fintech space.

Yeah. So you're talking about common language almost, right? And sort of framework.

It's also like, you know, it's also really important to understand that getting this type of framework in or this type of philosophy, this type of culture into an organization isn't like— it isn't a training day away, an away training day, or a couple of sessions of training and hey-ho, everyone is brainwashed and now we're off to the races and this is going to happen, right? Because— No, not always. Let's be honest, it's not like that, right? It requires, in order to implement something like this, it requires really strong leadership across the organization, across the revenue organization, organization and across, you know, the, the whole organization, um, there's complexities involved in, uh, in implementing it and making certain sort of the pro— the sales process links to the, the qualification framework. Um, and also, um, as we all know in sales, you know, sometimes it's, it's difficult to implement these type of things or embed these type of things because what's, what's happening next quarter or next week? is, you know, the immediate results sort of culture is sort of, you know, is around. So you need to be able to sort of manage that and lead that as you start integrating this into your routines. And, you know, it works. The thing is, you just need to step back sometimes and say, you know, the game we're playing is this, and this is what we're doing in order to win at that game. We implemented medic or something else, and then, you know, live that and be obsessed with it and sort of drive that forward.

No, no, I agree. You know, guys, um, time is passing by quickly, especially when you talk about your passion. So I just want to get one more word from you guys before we close this podcast, and that should be a one-word advice to any founders in the scale-up space. And then afterwards, also So tell us how to find you guys, where to contact you, because I'm sure we touched upon a lot of souls now that all want to know more about how to get successful in sales. So what would be your word, Richard?

So the one word for me would be have a blueprint. If you don't have a blueprint, find a blueprint and don't rest until you have that blueprint. Then imitate it and then later on Cool.

What about you, James?

So for me, uh, it's about— this is specifically targeted at founders or CEOs— you have to own sales. Like, be, be 1,000% responsible for it. You can't outsource it until you've written your sales playbook and you're, and you're scaling and you've hit $5 or $10 million revenue. You have to own it 100%, and you have to make sure that everything is working perfectly before you hand it over to someone else.

That's a nice one. And how do people contact you guys?

Uh, you can find me, James Dawson, on LinkedIn or just humbletechnology.co.uk, but LinkedIn is usually the best.

All right, and what about you, Richard? Same thing, LinkedIn?

Yeah, LinkedIn, or drop, uh, drop me an email, richard@humbletechnology.co.uk. If you want to drop James, James is just james@humbletechnology.co.uk.

That's easy.

We're super happy to talk to anyone and collaborate with So please reach out.

Cool. Thank you both for joining this podcast. Thank you also for the audience to stay tuned and let's follow more and we're going to get more of these insights in 2025. Thank you very much.

Brilliant. Thank you, Koen.

Thanks, Koen. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com. Or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.