1. Hello friend. They tell me you’re new here. Well, if that’s the case, welcome to Splunk.
They also tell me you might need a little refresher on MEDDPICC. Or, you might not have
heard of it at all. Either way, I aim to please.
My name is Tom Peterson and I was a sales leader here at Splunk for about four years before
moving to Global Field Enablement. I now run the highly capable Global Productivity Team and
our job is to try and help folks like you sell more and make some money.
So, without further ado, let’s get into this.
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2. Before we jump in, let’s briefly touch on what MEDDPICC is. In a word, it’s an acronym that was
designed in the 80’s by a PTC sales rep to help him remember the details of the deals he had in
motion.
3. This rep’s name was Dick Dunkle and I worked with him for a few years. Dick told me that he was
frustrated by his boss asking him a million questions about his deals and wanted to come up with
an easy way to communicate whether a deal was qualified or not. Back in those days, at places
like PTC, if you forecasted unqualified deals, it was a quick way to get fired, sometimes on forecast
calls.
It was originally MEDDIC, but we’ve added a few letters along the way. In EMEA, they’ve even
started to shorten this to MICE, reducing it down to its most important components. More on that
later.
Dick is a great guy, but he never expected his little acronym to become such a phenomenon in the
sales world. Little did he know that almost every sales rep in the tech industry would come into
contact with MEDDPICC in some way, shape or form.
I’m going to go through these in order, so let’s get moving...
4. First up, Metrics! I really like this one and it’s the first letter in the MICE acronym I mentioned
earlier.
Metrics are everything to a great sales rep. When a great rep finds an opportunity, they
immediately start asking questions that are number based. “How many security analysts do you
have?” “What’s the cost of a P1 war room?” “In total, how much did that security breach cost you
last year?” and “What’s the cost to the business when that app your logistics group uses goes
down or gets slow?”
They’re building the foundation for the deal they’re getting ready to pursue. Once they understand
the most important metrics, and combine that with the pain (you’ll hear more about this shortly)
they have the beginnings of a Return on Investment or Value Proposition. I know lots of great reps
that won’t even engage with executives at the prospect company until they have this foundation
built.
Metrics are not just to be gathered either. Once you understand what’s important to your customer
or prospect, you need to provide them with metrics that have been proven out at other companies.
Can you imagine going in to talk to the CFO of Delta Airlines and start your conversation with
something like “at two other major airlines we reduced their overall FTE cost by 40%, saving them
an average of $31M a year, and increased the uptime of their reservations systems from 91 to
99.999%?” That’s a conversation the CFO would be very interested in. Without the metrics
though, it’s not nearly as interesting.
5. So, don’t just think about collecting metrics from your customers. Always be thinking about
how you can deliver interesting metrics to help build the case for your solution.
Next up, the Economic Buyer..
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6. Back in my day, there was typically one Economic Buyer. Companies were smaller and there was
usually one big cheese on every purchase. I remember when I did a deal with Sprint in the late
80’s, the only guy we had to convince was the COO, and he had complete authority over the deal.
Not only did he make the final decision, but he also signed the PO (with no other signatures
needed) and the contracts. Legal wasn’t involved, purchasing weren’t involved. It was just Big Al,
and I was the guy he was buddies with.
Anyway, that’s not the case any more. Now you have multiple economic buyers in almost every
deal, big or small. My definition of an economic buyer used to be all about who had the money and
approval to spend it. Now it’s more about who can scuttle your deal at the drop of a hat. If you’re
working on contracts and come up against a super sticky issue, can their head lawyer scuttle your
deal. Damn skippy they can. Can someone from the CFO’s office (or the CFO themselves) scuttle
your deal. Word to your Mother. How about vendor management? Yuppers.
I think you get the idea. You have to identify all the characters in your deal early and often. Be
asking lots of questions of your champion so you can understand who’s who in the zoo. Use your
partners (hey I think that’s one of the letters in MEDDPICC!) to triangulate your information. When
it comes down to crunch time, you’ll be thankful you understand exactly who needs to approve,
sign and deliver the deal.
One more thing about this one. Do not forget to get an executive from Splunk engaged with one or
more of the economic buyers at your account early. Do not wait until the last minute when you
need a hail mary to save your deal. Our executives are some of the best in the business, and
7. being able to tap into a relationship or two when it counts will be really, really important.
Remember, it’s not Economic Buyer anymore. it’s Economic Buyers, plural. Your Champion
(ohhh, there’s another letter!) should be able to help you with this.
Now we’re heading to the two D’s, and to be honest they’re my least favorite. Let’s cover them
anyway.
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8. Decision Criteria is another throwback to the days of Dick Dunkle. Back when I was a young pup,
you often had teams of people with huge spreadsheets compiling tons of data about all the
vendors. They even hired consultants to help them turn any vendor evaluation into tons of rows
and columns in a spreadsheet. I’m not saying that’s still not the case, but I would argue that it’s not
as common as it used to be.
For any rep it is important to understand what’s important to your customer, especially when
you’re competing with other vendors that have similar products. Here at Splunk, we do have
competitors but our some of our capabilities make us a bit unique. The fact that we have an
incredibly scalable platform that can do logs, metrics and traces across almost any use case
makes it difficult to build a spreadsheet to track us against other vendors.
With that said though, you do need to work with your champion to understand what’s important
and how it maps our unique capabilities. If the customer is going through an RFP or RFI process,
that will give you a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for.
One thing that hasn’t changed is how difficult it is to win a deal if you haven’t influenced a
customers decision criteria. So, if I can offer you newbies a little advice, spend less time worrying
about what the customers Decision Criteria is and spend more time Influencing that criteria. In the
old days we called it flanking our competitors, but things have gotten less strategic these days, so
not sure this will resonate. I promise, if you can help define what the Decision Criteria is, you can
effectively lock your competition.
Let’s move the next D while we’re young...
9. Decision Process is again, a throwback to a simpler time. Customers would clearly define the
Decision Criteria, and then clearly define the Decision Process, and then the vendors would follow
them. The good reps would throw that out the window and work closely with their champion to do
things completely differently. Ahhh, the good old days.
Why this is important today comes down to knowing your business and your deals. I remember
asking a rep a couple of years ago what needed to get done to close the deal. His response was
something like “well, the Director gives us the nod, send us the PO and we book the deal.”
Hmmmmm, I thought. I hope it’s that easy. As it turned out, the Director simply made a
recommendation to the VP, who recommended to the CIO, who had to clear the spend with the
CFO, who had to prepare a package for the CEO to sign off on the purchase. Once the sign off
was done. procurement needed to start an AR in Ariba and it was routed electronically to 7
different people, in order. Legal had to sign our agreements, and then attach those to the AR
request before it could start routing. Two of the seven were on vacation and could not access
Ariba.
Needless to say, the deal didn’t come in at the end of the quarter, and that rep is not longer here. I
heard he’s now selling for DataBricks.
I know the two D’s are not part of MICE, but if you have the time and the inclination, they can only
help you get a better handle on your deals. Use your champion and your partners to understand
the details of both the criteria and the process and you’ll up your rate of closure for sure.
11. When I was selling, I always treated my partners like gold. I knew a lot of sales reps that didn’t. I
never understood that.
Having a great relationship with all your partners is critical to Splunk’s brand inside your accounts.
If your partners like and respect you, they’re much more likely to say good things about our
product. They’re out there building relationships with people you might never run into, so why not
increase your odds of having a good impression left about Splunk?
I always thought it was important to see the partnerships as a two-way street. You can sit around
and expect your partners to bring you business, but why not try to feed them some business and
build their expertise? You find a new prospect, bring one of your partners in to help you sell the
deal. Every time they sell Splunk, they get a little better and better at it, until one day you get a
notification that your getting paid for a deal you had nothing to do with. That partner you fed a
small deal to just sold their own deal, into an account you never even called on. That’s the way to
build a partnership.
Go ahead and take your partners out to lunch, understand what makes them tick, get to know
them at a deeper level than just waiting for them to bring you a deal. Take ownership of that
relationship and it can only help you in the end.
12. Promise me you’ll be more partner friendly in the next fiscal year.
Let’s move on to identifying pain...
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13. Identifying pain is very closely related to Metrics, which we discussed way back at the beginning.
The better you can become at uncovering pain, and really digging in on the symptoms or causes,
the closer you’ll get to defining the metrics. But I digress...
There are many times in your sales career where you’re more of a journalist, or detective, than a
salesperson. It was always the part of sales I enjoyed the most. Constantly digging for answers.
Asking a question and then following that up with three more questions.
14. You have to find the why in every deal you do. Usually, pain is the why. If it’s not pain, it’s some
kind of strategic initiative but if you think about it, companies usually come up with strategic
initiatives as the result of some pain. So we’re back to where we started. Why do they want to do
anything?
Ask your prospects and customers about the things they care about, but more importantly about
the consequences and implications of not working on the things they care about.
Hey Mrs. customer, I know you have too many war rooms right now, but what are the
consequences of that? How much is it costing you to run 200 war rooms a month? If it doesn’t get
fixed, who gets fired? Is it true that your VP’s bonus is tied to the amount of time the team’s spend
on war rooms?
You get the idea. Once you figure out the pain, the consequences, and the time frame, you now
have the compelling event. I dearly wish old Dick Dunkle had called this compelling event, rather
than Identifying Pain, but he told me he needed more vowels. Makes sense actually.
Compelling events are the key to accurate forecasting. If your boss isn’t asking you what the
compelling event is at crunch time, you need to volunteer it. And be honest. If you don’t have a
compelling event, don’t make one up. If you don’t know the compelling event, spend all your
waking hours trying to figure out what it is. Understanding what a real compelling event is put a lot
of money in my pocket. It can do the same for you, if you’re honest with yourself about it.
15. When I ask a rep what their opportunity’s compelling event is, I don’t want to hear “we’re giving
them a deeper discount if they do the deal before the end of the quarter.” I want to hear, “my
champion told me the CISO will be fired by the end of August if he doesn’t get the SIEM
installed by the end of July.” When I hear that, I know a deal is gonna happen. No ifs, ands or
buts about it.
So, to summarize, don’t stop when you find out where the pain exists. Figure out what the
consequences are of that pain and when it’s all going to come to a head.
One quick final note for our friends that are starting to talk about MICE. You now have Metrics
and Identifying Pain (but really it’s compelling event…) and Economic Buyer, with just one
more to go. These three are obviously very, very important and I can’t stress enough how
seriously you need to take these letters, but next up we’re going to talk about what is, in my
estimation, the single most important thing to have in a deal. The champion!
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16. I’m not going to sugarcoat this one. Nothing, and I repeat, nothing was more important to my in
any deal I ever did than the champion. Nothing.
Back in the day, I was working on a very large deal at Motorola. The deal was north of $24M and
would have easily been the biggest deal that the company had ever done. I spent most of my time
finding, developing and supporting a champion in the deal, where as my competitors spent their
time focused on key executives who really had no stake in the game.
It took me some time, but I found a mid level manager (Kevin) who, as it turned out, was feeling
most of the pain, along with his boss, the VP. The VP was an off limits kind of guy, but I found out
through a partner that Kevin was neighbors with this particular VP and they played golf together
regularly. The VP actually brought Kevin into the company after working together at another
company in the past. As you might expect, my competitors completely ignored Kevin. I targeted
Kevin at our first meeting after realizing that the VP, whenever he asked an important question
always looked in his direction.
To make a long story short, when it came time for a decision, Kevin (who we had worked
extensively with and nobody else did) went to the VP and made his recommendation. The VP
Immediately called us in to dig a little deeper and two weeks later we had the deal. We armed our
champion with the information he needed to influence the VP, and that was the winning strategy.
Kevin got a big, fat promotion and IBM and BMC were left deeply disappointed.
17. So, look for a champion that a) has influence with the economic buyers b) has a personal interest
in you winning the deal and c) has access to the right people at the right time. If you can find
someone that has a KPI or bonus tied to the problem you’re solving, even better! Once you find a
champion, work closely with them to build the case for your solution internally. Arm them with the
information they need and make them look good. Don’t forget to test them either. The best way to
know if your champion is the right one is by asking them (at the right time) to take you to the
Economic Buyers. If they can’t, they probably don’t have the influence you’re looking for.
This is the last letter of MICE, so for those of you that want to focus on the most important
characteristics of a deal, it’s Metrics, Identifying Pain (Compelling Event), Champion and
Economic Buyer...
18. Last, but not least is the competition. This has heated up a bit for Splunk in the last couple years,
so you need to be aware of your competition and be ready to deal with them when they come up.
One of the most important things you can do in an account is find out who your competitors are
grooming to be their champions. In almost every case, if your competitor has a stronger champion
than you, they’ll win the deal. You need to figure that out early and often. There’s nothing wrong
with leaving your champion for another if they can’t take you to the promised land. if you want to
win the deal, you have to have the strongest champion. In fact, most sales experts agree that if
you can get an Economic Buyer to be your champion, you’ll almost never lose. Very hard to do,
but something to shoot for.
We’re very lucky here at Splunk in that we have an incredible competitive team. When you see an
update from them, make sure you read it and keep it somewhere you can find it again when you
need it. Use that information to inform your champion so their prepared when a competitor comes
up in a meeting.
Don’t forget to outflank your competitors either. If you find the decision criteria for a particular deal
isn’t leaning your way, make sure you change the criteria. There’s no such thing as a level playing
field, and you always want it tipped in your direction.
One last thing. You often are competing with status quo. Take this competitor very seriously.
Understand the strengths and weaknesses of status quo and work with your champion to
overcome and defeat this terrible foe. Using Metrics can really help in this cause.
19. Enough with the letters and stories. Let’s wrap this up and get you back to finding, developing
and supporting your champions!
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20. I really appreciate you taking the time to go through this course. I’m very passionate about
MEDDPICC and what it can do for a sales rep’s career.
I hope you enjoyed this session and good selling!
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