E10: 8 Critical Insights about Winning More Deals with MEDDPICC with Chris Wood | VP APAC Quest Software, Imperva

Welcome to the Switchgear Show. This is your host, Preet Sarkar, and today we've got Chris Wood with us. Chris is a technology leader who has played pivotal roles in the growing software companies like Sourcefire, where he was first in country and he built the team and revenues to 8 figures. He then went on to Imperva, and where he turned the region around from the worst-performing region to the best performing region. And now he leads the team at Quest Software across APJ with 150 people in the go-to-market organization. And his first year alone, he achieved targets and the region achieved their number for the first time in 9 years. And he has turned it into their fastest growing region. So Chris, welcome to the call today.

Thank you. Thank you for the invite. Good to see you again.

And you too. I've asked Chris to talk to us about Medpic. He has spent a lot of time leading this organization and Turning it into a very successful region. And we're always curious about all things survival, success, and significance. So Chris, tell me, what is Medpic?

It's a fascinating subject that I'm sure won't appeal to everybody, but those that get it certainly become big converts, disciples, advocates of a, what is essentially a qualification process. It's deal management process. Once you have an opportunity, You have why do anything, why do it now, and why us? Once you've answered those 3 questions, MedPick is then a framework to manage that opportunity to success.

Understood. So when did you start using the MedPick process?

I was very fortunate. I was taught the MedPick process by an organization that invented it, a company called PTC. And my boss at the time, Dave Woodcock, introduced me to MedPick. And when he first introduced me to it, I'm like, yeah, how else do you sell? How else do you manage an opportunity? Because to me, it was just what I'd naturally learned. I think one of the problems with our industry, in fact, I speak to some of my colleagues and they talk about the fact when they started in IT, they had 6 weeks training course with a major organization like IBM. That's not the case anymore. I certainly never had that training. It's more ad hoc, bespoke. how good your manager is. Yes, you might get a bit of SPIN training, or for those that remember long enough back, blue sheets, all those sorts of things.

Yes.

But there's no real training that goes on. So it's very much down to the manager and the organization to train on sales. Sales enablement is often viewed as product training, features and benefits, but how you manage your sales processes and that. So naturally did this. So when I discovered, I'm like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. How else do you sell? But when I ran through the process, when I ran through the process on some of the deals that I'd lost, as well as the ones I'd won, there was a common theme. And that theme very much replicated the process as defined by this acronym called MEDPIC.

All right. So can you expand on what those individual factors stand for?

Yes, I can. And there's various versions. There's MEDIC with 3 Cs. So there's variants of the same sort of theme. But essentially, they all cover the metrics. What are the metrics around the opportunity? Why is— there's 3 reasons why organizations do something. That's to transform, reduce risk, or achieve compliance. All right, they're the main reasons that organizations do something. So what are the metrics around the transformation? What's going to change? How is it going to get better? Are we going to save money? Are we going to make money? What are the metrics around the risk reduction? What are the metrics around our compliance? Are we meeting compliance? How hard is it to meet compliance? So that's the metrics, first of all, that's the M, and then the E is for economic buyer. And now that's the person who has the discretionary power to spend the money, not the person necessarily going, yes, I'll pick that particular solution, but often all the way up, who actually has discretionary funding on that. And again, that can be used accordingly. Economic buyer is a key part of it. Then things like the decision-making criteria, do you know the decision-making process? The P is often missed, and that's about the paper process.

Right.

And that's about procurement. And I'm sure we've all been in deals at the end of the quarter, a deal has slipped, or end of month, end of week, or whatever, has slipped because we didn't understand the paper process. Then it's identify pain, and then champion, and then of course the competition. So that's really how much do you understand about those? In this instance, 8, could be 7. What 8 areas of an opportunity that you're working on?

That is fantastic. I personally am a big fan of frameworks because they enable consistency. Because in the absence of a framework or a set of processes that you work through, people tend to fall back to their own inadequacies.

You get adequate. It's fun, but it's adequate.

I'll take a one-moment segue and tell you that in my first sales job, I spent weeks prospecting and not liking it very much. And then they offered me an opportunity to go away for a 3-day training program. And I was so excited because I got to get off the phones and go get trained. But when I came back, I actually knew what I needed to do at each stage. And that really changed my level of confidence, how to navigate through objections, situations, the whole process. And it allowed me to actually experience my first quarter ahead of quota. And I then went for the next 2 and a half years without missing a— made club quarterly contests. So I absolutely value good process. Let's get into a little more. So what are the benefits that you think both at an individual rep and a team level can be experienced by working through a process like this?

I gotta say, in difference to you, it was many years into my training, my sales career before I got any training whatsoever. So I didn't— I wasn't so fortunate. And my first year was spent on the phones continually. Not fun, but we got there. So what does it give you? Well, the first thing is that it gives you a lot of transparency on where we're up to with the opportunity. So, as a high level, it makes the sales team accurate, makes your team accurate, it increases productivity and generally efficiencies across the whole organization in every level, provides those trickle-down efficiencies. What I mean by accurate, if you know where the deal is, then you know how to forecast. Accuracy is about how well you know your business. As I tell my team, if you do miss your number, you better accurately predict it because you then at least do your business, right? It doesn't quite get them off, but it allows a little bit of leeway. So accuracy is absolutely key. And the first thing we have to be is— first time I joined Quest, for instance, the first thing I had to fix was the accuracy component because we were woefully inaccurate and the region had to be accurate as a first and foremost. So MedPic gives you that level of accuracy because you understand where you are in the deal at a more granular level. and what's— what you don't know. And therefore, that will allow you to have a lot more accuracy in terms of predicting when that opportunity is expected to close. Sales productivity. There's a very famous English cricketer called Geoffrey Boycott, Test cricketer, who would— who Ian Botham said he was— he scored, I think, 99 Test centuries. And thankfully, I was only there for 2 of them. But he did a wonder. He often said, a great cricketer is a son of a great cricketer, is the ones that he or she leaves to go to the wicketkeeper. And that's with salespeople. I always thought the same when I heard that quote, that the best salespeople aren't necessarily the ones that work on the deals, it's the ones they leave behind. So this gives you the productivity. And again, another thing, I hate losing more than I like winning. So I don't want to, I don't want to work on deals I don't, I'm not going to win. I want to stack the odds.

Right.

So I'm going to make sure if I haven't got a lot of, a lot of the issues, if I'm going to champion, if I don't know who the economic buyer is, I can't identify a compelling event. I don't understand the paper process, probably not going to win it, right?

Yeah.

So, why bother working on it? So, it gives you a tremendous amount of productivity. And in fact, I look at some of the deals that I've lost as well as the teams and I go, yeah, you didn't have the champion or the champion left the organization. That's why you lost. Obviously, the champion wasn't the champion you thought of. It all can come to down what's actually missing. And if we'd known that, we would have taken a different tack to the opportunity. I had one person come in the other day saying, we've got this great opportunity. And once we went through it all, I said, there's no compelling event unless these set of circumstances change. And I agree with you, they need to buy it, but unless these circumstances change, then you don't have an opportunity. Go and find something else. And then efficiencies across the organization that relates into our industry around pre-sales. Where do I put my pre-sales effort? Where do I put my marketing efforts? Where am I going to be successful? Again, understanding your business enables you to be efficient. And in the days where growth was organized, most of us worked for organizations where growth was king, profit was low, then we could probably afford to be less efficient. Now, with the emergence of private equity within the IT industry and the dominance of that, it's all about profit and less about growth. Right. And so therefore, you have to be very efficient to achieve your number.

Excellent. Thank you. That's really good. In terms of the— when you look at across a team, you have a large team. How do you drive adoption and implementation across a group of people? How do you ensure that's happening?

There's a term that I've never read in any management book, and I've got a lot of management books that I've read, a few more than you've got there. And it's a term called repetition, right? And it's about repeating the same message over and over again, not parrot style, not verbatim, but repeating the same message in a different way to resonate with different people in different environments, in different stages of their careers, their lives, their— and the culture they exist in. So it really is about being repetitive about that and showing them how it will benefit them. One of the— to me, when I saw it, I'm like, it's one of those light bulb moments that I'm like, yeah, I've got it now. This— I'm a convert. But it does surprise me how that— it always surprises me it doesn't happen to everybody. And part of my challenge has been, especially such a— through a diverse set of individuals, how do I get them converted into this and understanding how this can be of benefit to them? And understanding where they're at. So that's been an interesting challenge for me. And one of the things I realized recently with my team here is that if actually you don't even have a sales process, then how can you understand how MedPix fits within that sales process? Also, if I'm partner only, as some countries are very heavily partner driven, how do I use— how is MedPix going to help me if I don't meet these people? And so how do you adapt the system to suit the environment that you're in and the stage that I'm at? Normally MedPix is only used for deals over, say, $100,000 US. Actually, it has a lot of benefit for smaller deals, but how can I make it more efficient and less onerous in the eyes of a lot of sales reps for those smaller deals? Right? Because the fundamentals don't change, right? There has to be a reason to do it, a compelling event. There has to be an economic buyer, someone that says yes or no, ultimately, that provides the money. And you have to have a champion.

That's tremendous. How do you get people being coached at multiple levels? Because you've got managers and then you've got account execs. And how do you get everyone onto the same page?

There's a couple of ways. You can use an external organization. There are a number of external organizations that provide whole mid-pick training and management manuals. that are tailored to your organization and the solutions and services and products that you sell as an organization. But once that's been rolled out as such, if you're fortunate to have that, it really comes down to the most senior sales leader driving through each tier and each level of the organization to ensure that it's happening both on a sales side and a presales side and a professional services side. and even the marketing side, including the marketing side as well, because it's all relevant. But it comes down to that repetition of that senior person. For instance, I'm sure it annoys some of my staff, but I have Medpick calls with my staff at every level.

Right.

If it's over a certain amount, certain dollar value, it becomes mandatory and I sit on those calls. But what I get out of those calls is not just how well we're following Medpick, it's me understanding what's going on in the market. It gives me incredible insight about how my team's operating, how your— how the market is behaving and how it's operating. Because one of the things that has changed certainly during COVID is the fact that deals, opportunities, certain activities are getting a lot— it's getting greater scrutiny, whether that be with extra legal people looking at it or extra compliance people looking at it, or even a decision has to make at a board level. So therefore, that extra scrutiny comes in. I want to know what that is and what that looks like and what's— what has changed within the market. So it's my ability to get down to the coalface very quickly understand what's going on across a very diverse region.

Yeah, look, that sounds really good. I'm just sitting here and thinking that if I had that kind of, as an account exec, worked in an organization back at an earlier stage, it would have made me a far better seller in the long run. Because we, what I do day to day is I'm either talking to sales VPs or I'm talking to AEs. And you can tell the ones who have had good coaches, good process, and you can tell the ones who haven't. Right. And I think that some of us encounter it earlier, some of us encounter it later. But I think if we are coachable and have a genuine growth mindset, I think the cumulative benefits just beyond winning the deals back to the individual is significant.

Yes. You can't be successful unless you can define why you were successful. You can't repeat it if you can't define how you were successful in the first place. And so much of my career is trying to work out, define. I talk about winnings and learnings. If I don't win, how do I learn? What have I learned from that? But even if I do win, I don't like winning badly, right? I want to win well every time. So, how do I define and how do I build that framework up and that repeatable framework that not only I can continue that success, but also my managers can as well? And ensuring that framework And those processes are repeatable irrespective of where they might be in the world.

That's really good.

Because despite what my staff tell me, and they've given up telling me now because they know it's not true, we buy stuff for the same reason wherever we are in the world.

Yeah.

And you— I'm very big on that whole growth mindset part of it as well. And so there's only 2 types of people in this world. Hopefully, HR aren't on the call. There are those that learn and those that don't want to learn.

Yes.

And in fact, I tell people who come and work for me, I interview every sales rep that we hire because I have one of the fears. I have a lot of fears, but I won't go into all of them because we haven't got that long. But the one fear I do have is mediocrity because mediocrity and the opposite of mediocrity, which I suppose would be brilliance, is like oil and water. They don't mix. You cannot have an organization of shared values if you have such a range of people. Learning for me is absolutely key, and it's learning or not learning. And the people that I tell people, don't come here and work for my organization if you don't want to learn. It's a horrible place if you don't want to learn. Horrible.

Oh, that, you know what, that is really good because I believe with every fiber in my being that clarity Is a superpower. If you are clear about who you want around you and the kind of values that you want, you will be able to attract like people and repel people who are not suited. So I think that— Yeah, that's really good. Before we wrap up, a couple of things. What are some of the things that we need to look for? Or what are some of the critical other elements in MedPic that are more critical than others? Any comments around things that you feel are more important than others?

Yeah, there are. Again, it's about— MedPick is about transparency, not about blame. I've had sales reps that go, okay, what we've done, Chris, is we've done the RFP, we've given the presentation to the customer, and now here's the MedPick. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no. The MedPick isn't something you complete. You never finish the MedPick. You get the PO. It's how you communicate to it. And again, very rarely now are sales done by one individual, not like back in our day, right, when we used to sell brushes and stuff like that, when it was one person making a decision and it was one person talking to them. So it involves teams, often multiple teams, right? So medpic is a way of communicating the strategy and what each individual team member needs to contribute. So MedPic isn't a finished article, it's not a checklist at the end. It's a whole way of being able to framework to be able to discuss what's going on. But within that framework, there are certain levels of criticality. And I've had a few robust debates with people over the years on this because they always say compelling event is the most important thing. If you've got a compelling event, you haven't got anything. However, and then they talk about economic buy. If you don't know who the decision maker is, how can you know what decision they're going to make? What drives them? But it's, to me, I always win the argument as I often do. It's the champion because the champion can actually create the compelling event, right?

Yeah.

A compelling event means the customer or the prospect will buy something. But if I've got the champion, they're gonna buy my stuff. If I've got the stronger, the better champion, they're gonna buy my stuff. So, compelling event's important. The champion can create a compelling event and we've seen that a few times in my career. But yeah, the compelling event is a key, but the champion is the number one thing that you have to get hold of. And it amazes me the amount of deals I come across, or I've come across in my career that people say, yeah, they're going to buy that. And you go, what's the champion say? Oh no, I haven't got a champion. Why are they going to buy it? Look at the proposal. You're like, okay. And we need to, funnily enough.

Yes.

For me, the criticality is around the champion. What can the champion feed you? Knowledge of how to navigate around the organization, who to talk to, what the real reasons why they're buying. What's the real reason that the board, in many instances, are looking at this solution and what would make them not buy it? I had a champion at one opportunity and we thought we're gonna close this and we thought he was a great champion and we lost it. I'm like, he ticked every box. How can he have allowed them to buy the competition? Anyway, 2 weeks later, he rang me up and said, oh, Chris, I just wanna explain. I allowed them to win that because I needed them to win I needed them to give me the opportunity to go and buy this much bigger deal over here.

Wow.

It's much bigger system over here. That's a true champion.

Wow.

I didn't quite say it at the time, but after I did.

So, one last question.

All right. It's been a bit dry, I know, but we're getting through it. If you made it this far, folks, you've done well.

No, it's been outstanding. Really, it, it, there's many quotes in there. I think that could go up on the wall. But anyway, if I am a sales manager that does not have a process like this, how do I go about bringing about that accuracy, productivity, and efficiency and get that adoption either at the level of my team? Or my realm of influence?

It's an interesting question because when I started at Quest, we didn't do med pic across the organization whatsoever. So within weeks, I was rolling it out myself and training staff myself about this. But how do you— if I've never heard of med pic before, how do I find out about it? There's a lot of stuff online that you can find out about it, right? But also talk to your peers because they will experience it. Some will like it, some won't like it. I, I don't know. I, I But talk, ask around what they're doing. For a while, I did a bit of consulting work, and the amount of people I met that said, "I've given my salespeople quota and the product, and they're not selling anything." I go, "How do you manage them?" What do you mean manage them? Okay, I said, and that's often what happens, right? You have to go online. There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff online around Medpic. I know because I googled it recently. There's a lot of stuff on there that give you that. Medic is another one. M E W medic, and peers will know because a lot of peers will have gone through this and. Yeah, if you have issues, you can reach out to me and I can give you some guidance in that respect. It's not hard. It's just a lot of hard work, right? But it's a damn sight easier than losing deals.

Yes. Yes.

I find.

Yes, absolutely. The pain of loss is probably the greatest thing that you can experience as a leader or a sales rep.

So it is, it is. And if you can tolerate loss, then you're in the wrong game if you're in sales.

Oh, that's good. That is very good. Chris, this has been an absolute treat and a masterclass. You're frank, you shoot from the hip, and I appreciate you so much for spending time with us today.

No, not a problem. I appreciate it. And thank you for reaching out and having this chat. It's good.

All right.

Go Medpicks.

Thank you indeed.

See you. Bye.