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[Music] foreign [Music] there's a reason why you're at the finale my friend this is something I've been very very much looking forward to um for those who don't know this is Richard Duffy the cro of Arcos Labs Richard I think I'm right saying like you know you're jet setting at the moment I think whereas you told me in the last week you've been to what uh Vegas Australia uh San Francisco and you're now back at home in Newport Beach in Southern California I've got that right that's right mate it's been a uh it's been a bit of a whirlwind but uh but that's what we that's what we do and it's what we enjoy you've got to love it and uh and embrace it but it's uh it is nice to be home for a few days before heading off again next week and and great to be here no rest for the wicked my friend no mate all right I'm gonna I'm Gonna Leave You so you've got to talk about this topic that I'm I'm just gonna go pull up a chair and get my notebook ready for this so Champion building during a downturn I'll hand it over to you take it away my friend all right thanks a lot well um hey great great to be here on medicon 2 uh as Andy said I've been traveling uh around the world meeting with a lot of our teams and and customers and Prospects uh but I always get to come home and have another strong copy in my my medic cup I I tell you this this cup I think uh adds adds to the caffeine um phenomenal show just want a quick kudos to Annie and Pam and Beth and the whole team over at uh medic uh these sessions are fantastic you know one of the things I'm going to touch on through this session is the importance of community and uh and for those that are on here listening to this uh you know the community of medic has just been fantastic um I thought that was a great last panel uh you know women in medic women in sales women in leadership it's it's just beyond critical and I I can occur with a lot of what was said in that some of the absolute best sales people that I've ever worked with have been females and we absolutely need more females in sales so if there are females out there listening that uh that want to move into sales we we do have open roles so uh you know I feel like there's a bit of a bookend today with two Richards we started with Sir Richard and we're ending with Little Richard um so uh yeah I I appreciate being here but definitely hard sharing a stage with Sir Richard but uh I'll do my best so uh so let's jump in so uh Champion building during a downturn um as Andy said I'm currently the chief Revenue officer at Arcos lab labs a bot management company out of Silicon Valley we're an Australian founded company uh from Kevin Kevin gostalk and uh we're now in San Francisco as well offices all around the world serving customers like Amazon Twitter LinkedIn uh snap uh Airbnb just just a few small companies that I'm sure most folks listening along have heard it's been a phenomenal ride nearly two years here and uh just having such a great time with with an amazing team before that I spent uh I I did a couple of other startups I spoke about that in a in a recent uh podcast with Andy so I'm not going to bore you uh and cut my teeth got a lot of my training at Symantec where I spent eight years started as an AE in Sydney and was moved over to the us back in 2007 where I held various leadership roles and uh yeah right before I went over to my first startup app direct which was interesting shifting from a uh my my last quota at semantic was 1.3 billion and I I moved over to app direct where uh we were doing a million dollars in Revenue so I was about to go on an Executive MBA program at Symantec uh and decided to take the real world MBA and that was just a treat we we grew zero to a hundred in in about three and a half years so and the rest is history but now over at Arcos uh the next 100 million dollar ARR so let's jump in who the heck stopped the music uh everything was going great the last decade has just been phenomenal selling is never easy but it was it was pretty good in the last decade Tech was on the rise we had that little hiccup called covert we realized pretty quickly it was actually a great thing for for Tech not great uh don't don't edit it like that Andy um but but for Tech it ended up actually being a a huge um a huge Tailwind um but then something happened um the bubble burst right I've been selling for about 22 years this this to me is by far the toughest selling Tech environment that I've experienced um dick touched on this major cost cutting at every company uh we're seeing by buyers move around and this is not something I've ever seen at this piece but buyers are moving coaches Champions economic buyers it's only making it harder when you think you've got through you know a good deal and you know the the chair gets pulled pulled under pulled away from you fomo the fear of missing out drove a lot of the last decade um everything from investments in Tech the fear of missing out VCS didn't want to miss out all cool new tech buyers didn't want to miss out no matter who the buyer was a cro or a CMO a chief security officer whoever your buyer was everyone wanted the latest and greatest tools and the budgets were plentiful and available so people could have and and have more or have a defense in-depth strategy have a sales in depth a market in-depth strategy uh but that's been replaced that's been replaced with all the budget cuts all the tech layoffs with fomu fear of messing up and what that has led to is a little Panic a little fear uh and what that has led to is it's a lot harder for Champions to raise their hand and put their name on your solution and take it up the flagpole so what that has led to is a lot of indecision and Status Quo and individual coaches and champions they're kind of stuck right and you know Shep has this great graphic you know a leader saying hey my my hat's on fire don't just stand there what are you doing and the team member being like I don't know what to do for the last time I spilled water and you yelled at me that's that's indecision that's just status quo now what does that mean for you as a seller look the data backs it all up okay so this time last year pipeline dropped 47 quarter on quarter and it hasn't recovered since this is this is across the industry this is from ebaster and uh and Pavilion uh who analyzed you know millions of sales calls and data this is an Arcos this isn't one or two companies this is this is millions of sales interactions average deal value dropped 32 and win rates decreased uh I I from from what I'm hearing anecdotally uh from some councils that I'm a member of that win rate has actually reduced even more dramatically now I I got excited because I saw some good news here I saw a Plus finally so 32 increase I got excited things are turning around and then I realized that was actually our sales Cycles getting longer so not not a good thing at all I shouldn't laugh um but it's better than crying right I need to make matters worse the number of people involved in a deal is getting bigger by 33 as both on the customer side or the prospect side and on your side and you've seen this today Finance is getting more involved right legal is getting more involved on on the buyer's side there are more stakeholders there there are more detractors there are more people to get involved but 33 and that's leading to that increase sales cycle length as well so don't despair though there are still real problems out there we know that we're all seeing them every day there are needs that need to be solved and companies are still buying we're seeing that ourselves here at Arcos we just have to do things differently we have to be better and we cannot stay status quo or we will fail so that's kind of a little frightening I can imagine you sitting there thinking wow the prospects have fear hey I'm in sales I have fear and that's that's okay it's okay to have fear but there are two types of fear this stands for two things one forget everything and run and that's what a lot of people are doing right now right that's bearing your head in the sand doing things the same way you've always done them or you can face everything and rise now the fact that you're on this session the fact that you are investing three hours with Andy and the team here that says to me that you have a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset and you're going to fall into this second category you're going to say how do I get better what are the things I can do and I've been watching the chat since the beginning and just phenomenal questions I love the vulnerability and authenticity of a lot of people on here asking good questions and wanting to get better and those are the people that are going to be in the group that face everything and Rise right the customers some of your prospects might be trying to forget everything and run but that's what we're going to address today okay so let's let's Jump Right In here are some of the questions that you are probably thinking about right now what do I do right what what do I do do I do I keep doing things the same it's not working it's getting harder yeah it's tough do I really need a champion spoiler alert the session title is how to build a champion so yes you do but how do I do that okay it sounds easy I'm a little bit confused still there's coaches there's Champions there's you know dick was talking about how important is to get access to the economic buyer so we'll talk about all of that okay the first thing I think we all need to do and this is a lot of the advice I've been giving my team and we've been brainstorming about this daily for the last six months go slow to go fast I'm going to be talking about a champion in a moment and this is something that he reminded me of go slow to go fast so there are many letters in Medic or medpic you know depending on which one you use we use medpic at uh at our Coast um but these are the three key ones that I think are the most critical as part of going slower to go fast the first is we have to spend more time up front in Discovery we have to focus on quality of leads and quality of deals that we're working on and we do that by spending more time in Discovery to find and implicate what I refer to as company level pain right I was on a call late last night with with a prospect in Japan and one of the questions I asked fairly late into the call was hey this look it seems like this is this is really painful for you it has a lot of impact but on a scale of one to ten across the impact of your whole organization the first being um there's many airlines so I'll just say the the first being the airplanes are stuck on the ground because of mechanical issues and can't get I mean that that's a priority one through to Priority 10 we don't have enough paper in the printers can someone go get more and asking those type of questions around implicating the pain is so critical right now because it makes your prospect think about is this just plain for me or the whole company uh Andy Andy presented to our sales kickoff earlier this year and I loved how he articulated the difference between cool want and need many people will think your technology is cool maybe a lot of people want it but do they need it right we've all heard the old adages vitamin painkiller we've got to find and build that champion no champion no deal we all know that but so the trick is is this a champion and how do I find one and build one faster and the last that I really focused on right now is delivering proven metrics to provide a direct Roi but Roi is not enough that's a that's a scapegoat that's everyone that's that's tweeting and linkedining about ROI ROI isn't enough right A lot of people don't believe rois right um we have to remove the risk of foma by doing more than just Roi and the last the last thing I I love data because we all have opinions it's one thing we all have but I love when it's backed up by data why do we do this well because when we do fully utilize medic our win rates increase by 311 percent High performers were 437 more likely to use medic and fully complete the qualification criteria okay so that's that's what we need to be doing okay and I'm pretty sure most people have gone through the training so let's talk about what do we need to do to build a champion um again just quick recap we all know this a champion has power and influence right not just one but both they have influence they have authority and uh we know that they act as an internal seller for us okay when we're not there they are they're selling for you and I think probably most important they have a vested interest in our success right and I've look I've I've copied and pasted this from the website right I want to keep this all consistent but they have a vested interest do they seem excited what what's in it for me um and I saw some links earlier Andy's got a great presentation on on with them right what's in it for me I was on the phone uh very briefly on the weekend with the great John McMahon who's been referenced many times today uh famous quote by John right to win big deals we've got to find those Champions on the inside to help that person has to be thinking in terms of business value not technical value not one not cool but need value how is this going to solve major issues and transform how that company does business that is the narrative that we're trying to drive towards and we know that the champion is really important because top performers that leverage a champion are four times more successful than low performers it's it's hard distinguishing between a coach and a champion a technical champion and a business Champion is really hard 90 adoption with successful deals when a champion is identified and used so I want to talk a little bit about going from maybe a little bit of theory into reality I want you to meet someone called Nick so Nick Riva leads security engineering at snap I'm pretty sure everyone knows what Snapchat is all around the world because they have 375 million active users that communicate with friends build relationships Play and Learn in fact I'll tell you a little bit later on the only other mug I use outside of my medic mug is the one that Nick built for me which is my my Snapchat mug that's that's that's the one that has my broker in it every day so when first met Nick and the team at snap and Nick needed to ensure that his customers always had an amazing user experience but it wasn't that wasn't enough they also needed to keep all the bad guys out the Bots and remember I mentioned our Coast is the global leader in bot management so we started speaking he wanted to do those things to have a dramatic impact on revenue and user experience and the two circle around and go hand in hand better use your experience better usage more ads more Revenue okay now with the volumes of attack a lot as you can imagine on a global internet mobile brand like Snapchat we were confident we could help we'd already done it with many other Snapchat like customers and that's really important right have I done this for someone before we heard Pym and Andy talking about the the um the order example right the first step was to build confidence with Nick and build a champion with Nick we had a really good feeling from engaging with Nick that this was the guy we wanted to be our champion he understood the technical piece really well Snappers and engineering-led Company and Nick had this amazing philosophy the quote on the left here is Nick's LinkedIn profile and he he just has such an amazing growth mindset and you know he's really focusing on value creation and we wanted to be a part of that with him so I wanted to share a little bit with you I'd love to have longer to go into this because I have to Breeze through this um but maybe maybe Andy we can uh I can record a longer version of this and we can post it but um what the journey look like um you know as I go through this on paper this looks really easy um and candidly the process itself is easy once you see this map it's like a tube station map in London right it's it's pretty easy to follow along the the trick is do we do the things at each step right and in the right order and to the right level of detail right now I believe it's more important to go deep than wide I would be focusing on less prospects than more because right now if you don't have the bandwidth and time to go into every one of these details in detail uh I don't think I don't think that results in a in a great outcome for you so obviously obvious stuff right many Discovery calls um we have a goal here where the customer speaks at least 60 of the time we use a call recording tool to do that we we track that we work with our teams to make sure we're doing more listening we want to listen to understand so that we can then customize things like demos to their workflow using their language so then we did that obviously introducing a lot of rm1 metrics talking about where we've done this before early on building that credibility really early on not talking about our product the tech the features so much but here is the pain that we've seen before that maps to this and let me share with you right away here's a case study from Adobe here's a case study from Airbnb same pains look at the outcome look at the pre-look of the post that looks really interesting Rich let's let's keep talking we think we might want to do a POV that's great we'd love to do a POV with you when people do a POV with our Coast they buy but before we do that POV Nick team we'd like to agree on some things that we call decision criterias we want to agree to success Matrix M2 okay we also would like to really understand what that decision process looks like over at snap and so this is where we're now starting to build out and understand who are all the other stakeholders that we needed to to meet and so as we're building out that well this person needs to be involved this group needs to be involved well we can't do anything on mobile without these stakeholders this is great this is again all discovery more listening listening listening copious copious notes um like you know our phenomenal senior AE on the count at the time Sam Nick pay uh and and our team uh just copious amounts of notes um and we're starting to form the champion at this point because if you don't have someone that is sharing all of that with you they're not a champion right so we're testing we're testing Nick out at this point uh auditioning Nick out to be a champion for our course so then we go to the POV uh which was great so it started off really really well a lot of daily engagement and as part of that engagement we we ticking the Box we now really feel through various testing that Nick has power and influence due to his tenure and impact at snap we now believe that Nick is a champion because he is sharing under NDA obviously the the key information of who we need to talk to and what the problems are that need to be solved so so giving us the information to help him and help snap and thirdly providing access to other key stakeholders and sharing why this is important to him so it's not in the slide here this is all going amazing and then the deal nearly died gets onto life support we we push too hard we're trying to get the deal in by the end of a particular quarter and we didn't go slow to go fast and a lot of the hard and good work that had been done uh really upset Nick and and the team at snap so we had some rebuilding of trust and relationship and it was an amazing learning experience that especially in this market today you've got to go at the pace of your customer now you can impact that pace but you can't control it trying to control their Pace will backfire like it nearly did for us now we took the feedback on board we're authentic in our approach we obviously apologized and we reset the the baselines and we started again at their Pace okay now again what I mean by influencing their Pace I'm going to talk about in a moment around part of that building the champion helping them and that will will help them move faster but not just pushing them to get a deal done because it's the end of your quarter okay rookie mistake still still making them to this day we complete the POV and again super critical to be able to sit back down and take what the agreed and aligned success metrics were and do a readout of that not just with your Champion but can your Champion get you access to back the economic buyer and all of the stakeholders and that's something that we did and that went really well the results were through the roof Nick and the entire team were happy so now we write a joint business case um the team at snap are very thorough uh everything is done through a very very detailed business case that is all metric driven no slides very amazon-ish in in that regard and at that point is where we're helping build through our data build that business case build the narrative the so what the why and that was really critical and then presenting that and and that presentation of that business case had to cover two key areas it had to cover the technical value and the business value and time that all to an Roi I'm gonna go fairly fast here because I know I'm running out of time obviously then we went through the negotiations we closed the deal pop the champagne and we went live and we now have an M3 so I sat down with Nick in and in preparation for this presentation and I kind of went back and I said hey you know it'd be great to understand from you you know what's your coaching as you think about being our champion and one of the things we did through the process I explained to Nick but Nick you're you're our champion and here's what that means uh are we right thinking that this is important to you that you're our champion and he he agreed so he he shared three things the first major spending is being scrutinized hyper scrutinized and this feedback is from three days ago not from when we did the deal the economic buyer has shifted Richard it's the CFO we're a public company everything is going to the CFO so now you really have to help me sell to the CFO the second thing we have to do is we've got to drive towards those desired outcomes for us as the champion but to do that you need to hyper optimize the metrics and help provide those to me to show how this is going to improve and uh from how we've been doing it to how we're going to do it and lastly and this one was actually really great for me to hear uh because he actually highlighted something to me that I I wasn't even aware of which is I've been bucketing Solutions whether it's owls or yours or anyone else's into two buckets need or want and what he helped me understand was double down really focus on identifying what part of your solution is in need versus a one and that was really interesting to to get the feedback that your solution can be a need and a one so there are aspects of our technology that we're a want but our managed services our 24 7 sock capabilities were in need because they didn't have the people aspect of that so that's something to think about as well so huge shout out and uh and thanks I'm seeing a question around M3 I think it's being answered I love the concept of M3 and that's how I think we tie medic between sales and customer success as well so to wrap things up what are some of the things I think that we need to do there are a million things but if I have to prioritize those one of the first things very early on very early on is try to find a champion before you start selling so before you enter the process the easiest way to find a champion is by asking one of your current customers for example we sell to csos and heads of engineering heads of product asking some of our existing customers hey you you seem to be really happy with the platform we're providing a ton of value do you have any friends or contacts in the industry that you think would get value from this that introduction is a hundred X better than any any other lead that you can get because generally they're going to introduce you to someone at the same peer level who's now a potential champion because they've heard it from a trusted Source in the community okay so now now you've you've maybe short-circuited how you find that champion I touched on this as part of that Journey right we've got to help create that executive narrative and we do that by marrying their technical skill set your buyer knows their pain your Champion knows the technical pain better than you do but we've got to help them take that and build a business narrative so as they go up the line to economic buyer and CFO and this ties back into Dick's presentation this morning where it's big eyes right we're now focusing on major business transfer transformation and outcome we have to help them speak to the CFO we have to be metric driven so making sure that you are giving them that material what's the impact of the business right now if it's not revenue or cost I think you're going to struggle brand reputation risk and compliance yes depending on the vertical but I would really want to hope that I can impact revenue or impact cost um and you're going to do that through your M1 and M2 metrics so really making sure that you have relevant verticalized use case similar use case M1 and M2 metrics and as I've touched on fomo is out no no one has a fear of missing out everyone just has a fear of messing up right now um it's survival mode leverage all of your resources to reduce fomu here are some of the quick examples if you have a Professional Services organization how can you provide services and capabilities uh we have a new CFO at Arcos who's great and you know he's willing to help our prospects and customers be successful by including Professional Services as part of The Proposal doesn't mean you have to give it away you can structure the deal where it where it's a win-win warranties can you can you warrant anything of what you're saying we have a million dollar warranty at our Coast now for example that we will stop the attacks if we don't we'll give you a million dollars relationships again that ties back to if you have that early relationship that introduction how can you leverage that remove that firmware because a trusted friend of theirs has already said now we've used Arcos before man it's fantastic um oh okay great well okay now I know someone right and when they're meeting their executive stakeholder hey look I already spoke to someone so it's so and so okay start small I think right now land with a plan to expand right are really really critical to do that uh that the million dollar deals are still out there uh but not for everybody right it might be easier to start a little smaller go slow move fast okay be be bring your experts to the table bring your legal team in early bring your Finance team in early to have the conversations to be as compromising as possible early on to help your champion and lastly if you can if your solution allows for it proof of values they're going to help you every time okay so in summary I know that was fast the market is tough status quo won't work but don't worry go slow to go fast medic works but just like you know I was I was rehearsing this with my wife last night and it kind of dawned on me we've just started going back to the gym and it's the same mentality if I just go back to the gym once a week but still eat hamburgers and chips and cokes that's not going to help me saying that you use medic but not truly living it using the words every day as a team really thinking this through being super thoughtful it won't work okay you have to find and help build the champion not just find it's up to you to help them you're going to do that by de-risking their fomu be authentic buyers buyers don't want the the old school reputational sales person let's not do that to ourselves uh I heard that the saying earlier sales is a noble profession our job is to help be a trusted advisor and solve pains we only do that when we're truly authentic and and that we show we care about helping them right we help us by helping them and with that as Andy White says may your Champions be strong thanks for having me I I can't hear you Andy oh okay good it's not just me bad but it wouldn't be medi-con if there was an attack question can you hear me now I can I can all right so I just gave everyone I just told everyone the winning lottery numbers for this weekend but if you didn't hear them sorry I'm not going to get to know them uh what I said thank you for everyone hanging on there um what I said was that um uh that I want to share this chat with you after the event because all you've had is some incredible incredible incredible uh feedback everyone's been loving what you're saying and when you offer to do more I think people jump to that so um you're you're a an absolute Legend thank you so so much for this and you're a great great partner and a great great friend I really do appreciate it right the feeling is absolutely Mutual thanks for everything you're doing uh forever for all of us over there at medic thank you very much so right it's now just time to to do the final wrap up so uh hold hold on literally only a minute more of your time we just want to say goodbye and thank you to everyone so we'll see you in just a second [Music] thank you [Music]