It’s towards the end of the quarter, your pipeline is filled with deals and now your manager is asking you detailed questions about your deals and wants to know what you’re forecasting to close by the end of the quarter and where your numbers look for the next quarter. What are the key indicators you have for forecasting a deal? Are you “gut checking it”? Do you have specific metrics that your company uses to help you appropriately forecast accurately? Here’s what some great reps have used to forecast their deals accurately.
Selling a complex solution, such as within the cybersecurity industry, many companies have adopted the MEDDICC methodology. MEDDICC standing for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion, and Competition. A complex solution in SaaS sales (Software as a Service) can be a difficult sale and there needs to be key information identified.
A recent sale of mine required me to ask questions relative to gaps in their workflow, problems with their current solution, what the greater impact of both of the problems is causing in the current state and if the prospect chooses to remain status quo what will the next 6 months look like. Identifying who the economic buyer is in the process and if I need to loop additional members or departments into the process. It’s important to ask about their decision criteria or success criteria, what are they looking for and all items are checked off during a trial/POC/POV, will they buy?
Identifying this criteria is extremely important because it will give you the keys to the kingdom. Even better if you can influence that decision criteria towards your solution and away from the competitions you have a huge advantage. For example if they are looking at your solution and your competition, but you know your solution is the only one to do A, B, and C, while the competition struggles in X, Y, Z, you want to ask trap questions and begin trying to influence that decision criteria.
Decision process is important to understand as it will give you insight into the process in which the prospect makes purchasing decisions. Who is involved? What do they care about? Are you or they presenting to a CFO/CIO/CEO/Board? In SaaS sales often once a technical win is achieved, you go into the second phase of trying to win the business. Here is where you are more often than not project managing the process. It is recommended to work backwards with the prospect on timelines. Ask your prospect when they would like to get something like this implemented, then work backwards in a sense of “if you want this by the end of October, you’ll need red lines back from legal by end of August, a PO by the 12th of September, teams organized and meeting cadence by the 20th, and we will be good by then.” Here you’ll be partnering with the prospect and working in a consultative manner.
Identifying pain is as simple as asking “why are we talking? Why is this problem important? Why is this important to solve now and not in 6 months?” There are other aspects to this but it is key to uncover all pain, as Chris Voss state’s the pain behind the pain, the Black Swan is the real gold standard of pain to uncover. Cultivating a champion allows you to move the deal along. It’s key to push your champion to get you in the room with the ultimate decision maker. If the champion can’t or won’t, then you don’t have a true champion, you’ve got a sponsor. Knowing the competition will allow you to leave trap questions, undermine their strengths, and position your solution to succeed.
If you can answer all of these questions and explain to your manager all of the detailed information requested in MEDDICC, you can accurately forecast your deal from pipeline, to upside, to commit.
TLDR
Leveraging MEDDICC helps you follow a sales formulua, drive urgency, reduce sales cycles, build your pipe with qualified opps, and increase revenue.
