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[Music] welcome back to outside sales talk today i have darius lahutifah with me and we're going to be talking about qualifying prospects with the medic sales method which i'm sure you've all heard of welcome to the show darius it's really great to have you here today honestly thank you for having me steve yeah and uh so just to introduce you to the group that for people that haven't heard who you are darius is a coach a trainer and a mentor of sales teams sales leaders sales executives and he's the founder of the medic academy um and and frankly an expert in the medic sales methodology as well as um similar uh sales methodologies that also make sales people successful he's also um the author of the amazon bestselling book always be qualifying medic so he's definitely the right person to hear how to qualify um qualify uh prospects with the medic method here so let's jump into it tell me darius uh what is medic and what does it stand for yeah medic medic stands for metrics economic buyer decision process decision criteria identifying pain and champion those are the six letters of the acronym of medic and um there is a version some consider newer or more complete which is med pick where the paper process and the competition have been added to it both refer to the same thing and it's not about the number of letters we add because obviously sales is not if sales was as easy as just checking a list of letters uh it would be known so uh but yeah these are um the uh elements of medic uh uh which are the focus of the of the methodology on the qualification through these elements yeah well and your book is called always be qualifying so why is qualification so important and how does that how does that relate to medic because i didn't i didn't see a queue in there that's that's uh that's very true uh so the qualification all these are uh part of the qualification of the elements of qualification always be qualifying in opposition to always be closing uh you know when you are selling a hard selling a low end product um very often retail inexpensive shot transactional maybe always be closing is a good uh motto to have when you are selling more sophisticated products higher and enterprise longer sales cycle with different people involved actually closing uh comes by itself when you do the right things at the beginning obviously uh first with a good discovery and then aligning your solution to the customer's needs and and then qualifying now qualification is something which has been ignored or downplayed uh for a long time as if it was a one step especially with the new uh newer uh sales structures that we are seeing in the companies with sdrs versus aes qualification is often considered wrongly as a one step okay this prospect is now qualified let's put all our efforts on it and close this deal uh it's not working that way i've even heard aes say oh i don't really qualify things because by the time the sdr passes me the deal it's already qualified that's the whole point of their job is to qualify it and and i completely disagree i think you're as you're i guess as the title of your book says you're always qualifying throughout the entire sales process absolutely and a deal is more or less qualified and actually literally we have a score calculator at media academy that we offer to our students which is the medic score calculator which asks you about a hundred questions and you say yes or no and at the end you have a radar chart of you know uh how qualified is your opportunity and where are the gaps uh do you have a champion dude have you done the right work meeting with the economic buyer and and understanding what his or her requirements are uh so um qualification not being binary in one hand and the other thing is that uh not being a a great closer obviously is good being a great detective and understanding the customer's needs uh discovery is up obviously good what is good about qualification when you're you're a good qualifier is that if you take two salespersons with within the same company same performance of the product same skills uh or same same knowledge or same number of hours of work with these two sales person the one who is qualifying better is the one who will have a higher win rate by definition because they are working on the deals which close so their performance is skyrocketing without necessarily being twice more hard worker or better closers or anything else so that's why uh qualification is something which has been kind of hidden uh downplayed but which is absolutely key in uh sales performance yeah qualification is why some sales people seem not to work that hard but have really great results because they they only work in the deals that are going to close and especially in in environments where only that where they're you know it's not a high transaction volume but it's more of uh you know fewer but larger deals the reps that have that are they're spending their time on qualified deals they end up closing more of them and and if reps don't qualify well they end up wasting a ton of time ah absolutely and and and an example which is uh i'm going to give an example in retail uh most of salespeople us we sales people very often i mean we um i i i have been several times a syrian entrepreneur uh running companies ceo so i have been a buyer several times and still am sometimes a buyer but many salespeople don't have the experience of a buyer that's why i'm going to take an example of of being a buyer in in a retail situation when you're going to you know buy clothes in in in a store or something if you notice there are some sales people who are naturally good in in in qualification and they come and ask you a question or from far check on you and spend time with you or don't and uh they are doing naturally they have not been into medic because obviously in retailers don't do medic but they are naturally good in qualification they don't spend time with you if they don't feel that you are going to buy from them and you mentioned the checklist evaluation process could you talk more about the checklist and how that works right so so medikits is a is is not really a checklist but it looks like it checks by the definition of the acronyms uh is helping us thinking about this it's it helps us uh even when we are driving to the customer okay what are the things that i know for now and what am i missing uh they sent to me their decision criteria it was a three to three pages document they mentioned that and we look good that they are looking into a solution where we have our differentiators are being shown so decision criteria check uh but who's my champion here this guy that i'm going to meet again for the third time uh seems very nice to me talks to me etc but i have asked a few things and i still don't have answers to those i'm still not getting that meeting with the economic buyer or so ask questions and remove those pinky glasses and be realistic ask questions is this person my champion uh why do i think that this person what is he or she winning from this deal uh what is their uh personal win um in in this context so um so of course that checklist champion uh is there to remind you but there are a lot of reflections and that's one of the myths about a medic is is that it's not just um thinking of having a champion or having a champion but everything which is being behind or under uh that that champion that you need to be able to uh uh understand uh observe and see yeah i mean i had never actually heard of medic until maybe i don't know five years ago or so um and uh but it was funny when i first learned about it and learned what it was and how it was structured i was like oh back when i was a sales rep this is totally what i did i had i think i had about i had a i had a google doc that i would use and uh and before that it was just a regular word doc um but i i had this it was kind of like a template and i would you know customer name at the top and you know and and then it would it had a who who are the champ who's the champions with all the players involved and then it had probably 20 questions that i would work into different conversations with the customer so i wouldn't just like drill through them i'd kind of hop around and and as i learned things i would fill out the questions and you know before before a deal was really qualified all right and before it would close i would always know the answer to all the questions there were there were some things were just like checking like things that i had to do like translate this translate what the deal into roi for them and what it's going to be worth for them in terms of real dollars if you had that conversation with who and i would just kind of keep track of all that stuff and in a doc and then then when i first heard about medic i was like oh someone just made made this a lot more organized and and smart i get it that's it that's it steve and you mentioned it you said you you heard about medic only five years ago that's about the time uh when i founded uh medic academy while medic is out there since over 20 years we we built it in in the 90s uh at ptc really it really i feel like it really blew up like five years ago i just started hearing about it all the time and that and that's exactly the reason and that's what what puts medic honestly aside not not because it's my baby but it's a reality the fact is that medic is the only methodology which has been ground up it it has been practiced first widely practiced then became a methodology for everyone else to know and learn from it not that a guru or academician or something you know someone as a strong consultant thought about something and i and nothing wrong with those but but it's not this um you know thinking about a a concept writing a book about it and then marketing it and then inviting everyone to apply no that's the contrary it's the it's actually uh you know compared to uh great methodologies miller heyman is a great methodology spin is a great methodology to for discovery i i'm not criticizing any of those but but medic is is the contrary and and the the way it happened is that pttc um that it built really a sales machine with uh hundreds of really successful sales people trained this way they became vps at salesforce at oracle at sap at different enterprise uh software companies and they they continue the diffusion that's how medic got known because otherwise the book the first book on medic wrote it last year only uh so it's only now that it had become you know a uh some sort of academy and literally medic academy and and teaching it and and so on um and and by the way in that talking about that is uh if we look at the history the reason uh we we had medic articulated and created pts that we had a big challenge of growing fast and ramping fast we were the the first or the only vendor in our industry to hire sales from outside the industry so for instance compared to a methodology which is the challenge or sale which is about knowing your problems and being smarter than the customer in knowing those problems and challenging the customer with those things well that requires a lot of knowledge of that industry you cannot do that by hiring people from outside the industry and three months later expecting them to do quotas doesn't happen with medic it does happen that's that's how we built medic in order to articulate the things to do literally list of the things to do so that a new sales rep who is good at execution of course the sales up needs to be good at execution being able to ask questions but what questions which questions to ask and when and how that we teach it in in the courses and workshops and as a salesperson how do you determine whether medicaid will be valuable to you and your industry and your role how how do you know who it's for and who it's not for right um it this is not a binary either many can be applied um 100 percent or 90 uh depending on on customers but if you are selling a an inexpensive product with a sales cycle of two days uh with one person making a decision you don't need medic because you don't need to qualify either you sell or you don't you have to spend this this time with the prospect anyway you try it doesn't uh you sell or don't sell you walk away to the next one transactional high volume low value [Music] that's not medic but on the other extreme high value smaller volume longer sales cycle means that different people are involved in that decision making means that you are going to spend time on on that prospect and that's a long safe circuit doesn't mean necessarily several months sometimes even six weeks or eight weeks sales cycle is long enough for you to justify the use of medic as as an entrepreneur i have always noticed that you have politics inside inside your own startup as soon as you hire the third person no politics with two persons the third person comes in politics well that's it's the same thing with the with the prospect when there are different people involved in the sales decision then the power base starts to work and and then you need medic you need to know who is suffering from these pains that we have listed in the discovery cause issues if you are not talking to the people who are having the pain you will not find the champion or the economic buyer you will just have someone who will take your resources and your time and you will not progress in the account just to give one uh one example yeah i that makes a ton of sense to me and and tell me you mentioned med pick which i've also heard a bit about and that that's adding what is that that's adding a p and an extra c d descri are these the same things medic and med pick or is med is med pick just adding some more acronyms what's uh what's going on right yeah the the two letters are uh the first one is uh paper process uh we we mentioned uh decision process um in the original medic and but the decision process is basically this the steps or stages that the prospects want to walk you through before they place a uh purchase order or signing a contract um and those decision process you know they could be in tech it could be demos uh could be proof of value proof of concept those are the steps or the process they want to take you through but there's also uh the the the legal process the paper process the po procurement if you are a in enterprise software uh auditing um uh the the it review the security review these are all paper process which are different than it's your your champion cannot change these things they your champion can help you know these steps uh and and accelerate them but they are there as they are while you're a champion you can convince them that there's no demo is necessary or that proof of value could be one week instead of one month so in that regard paper process is slightly different than anything else in the decision process for those who are applying medic without mentioning the p they are obviously doing doing that p as well obviously they are um taking care of the paper process and the other aspect in the paper process is that when you don't um you don't pay attention to it uh you may downplay it and it become a big problem towards the end of the sale cycle typically towards the end of your quarter and you have not done your homework meaning that you have not met with the legal people you have not understood what they are going to check in the it review for instance so it's important that from the quite early in the sales process you understand what is exactly this company's paper process before they can place an order or sign a contract so that's that's why it it deserves uh a letter uh ing to to um some some of my ex-colleagues at ptc including myself i mean i've i've no religion uh with or without those letters uh i'm so focused on the fundamentals behind these letters and and helping salespeople to understand what is behind and i will mention a point on on that that the letters themselves um i i really don't care i i use both uh alternatively uh the second one is is competition and and competition same thing those who don't mention it doesn't mean that they they uh ignore the competition no they they the competition is already present in other elements of medic for instance decision criteria um i have a value triangle where um i expose the the customers need us and then the competition the uh summits of the the triangle and how we need to read into the decision criteria when they are expressed by the prospect to understand with this criteria who is this favoring who is this criteria for or who in the account has pushed so that this criteria goes to the top of the list of their criteria because this criteria could be the reason for them choosing us versus our competition so so the whole point about criteria decision criteria understanding and evaluating is versus the competition if you are uh selling tesla versus mercedes and the number one uh criteria is uh sustainability or uh renewable energy uh obviously there is no point to compete with because that criteria means i want tesla it's not written but it's that's what it means so um we talk about um having the playing field level or not is the playing field level the decision criteria is all about understanding that playing field are we playing in in a fair environment or um or unfair advantage for us because we have worked well before and and and educated those who are writing these decision criteria in our favor or uh they our competitor has done a good job doing that and it's already lost before we even start because the criteria are not in our favor so so all that is about competition uh we don't necessarily need to mention the competition as a letter to uh notice that yes makes perfect sense to me yeah and and i think that this the exact letters and adding kind of subletters like this um you know the the extra c or or the understanding the legal decision making process um i i think every company needs to adjust the the base level like every company's going to be dealing with those core letters but then there's probably 10 more questions or concepts or areas and just depending on what you're selling i mean you know like the legals for example that can be super important depending on what you're selling right depending who you're selling to how risky it is how how are you selling a new security system that the the the the sizzo this chief security officer is gonna have to sign off on yeah if you sell cheap you know new new security software to uh to large corporations you're gonna have to get that's that's gotta have its own letter and if it's something that's going to have complex you know legal negotiations around it of course that's going to get their it's its own letter if you're in a super competitive space you know even which competitor you know it in it really all this stuff comes into play and and i uh i forget how many things that i really felt were important for every deal to like really make sure i'd have had had a conversation with the with my sponsor at the company about but you know things like legals i did i would have to bring that up and i'd have to bring it up early so i could run things in parallel right if you don't bring if you don't bring up legals early enough then you end up kind of closing the sponsor and then they're like oh but but you can't you can't forecast the deal appropriately if the sponsor's gonna say oh actually you're not gonna be able to uh we're not gonna be able to get the sign for a year and by the time we passes through legals you're like a year i i forecast this for two months from now like so i think this this basic framework needs to be you have to rethink it for your individual area and company and your and your role at the company i guess let's talk about that how much do you think you should customize this process for your individual role in sales or role in sales management and uh so yeah how much should it be customized and and how do you go about figuring out what should be added or subtracted what what thought what's the thought process there yeah customization let's talk about it and and the the point i wanted to refer to which is close to this one one i'm answering to this question is about those tools so some some people um uh come uh to us and saying you know we we want to do it with it too uh and and it's it's amazing i mean i have done all my career uh in software and sas so trust me i believe in tools and and tools help for sure automating things obviously is is the thing to do but in sales please stop with the tools we have done too many tools and and i mean i i also provide a platform my platform is a tool you are providing a tool at your company it's a tool but but guys if you want if we want our sales people to be successful we need to make a pause on the tools and work on skills i'm seeing too many sales people especially younger sales people who don't know how to do things and and they rely on tools medic i have a few partners who have done medic plugins i would call them on salesforce where you have stages pre-set so that you can say okay how am i doing with my champion or have i met with the economic buyer and those are stages in salesforce and and they are extremely dangerous because um uh sales people think that they have checked that box and it's done and uh you know we know i know that it's not working that way we can write whatever we want in those tools and input into the system uh only inside us we know exactly and sometimes we don't even know because we haven't asked ourselves the right questions but at best uh we we know if we have that champion if that champion has it these things are not in the tools and and learning for instance learning how to identify a champion we are one of the exercises in in in my workshops is we are in a discovery call first time with the prospect five persons are in the room or in the zoom call and those are their their titles and we have a one-hour conversation on the discovery and we do also a very short brief presentation of 10 minutes of what we're doing how do we identify a potential champion right there what should we be looking for among those five persons and how do we identify you cannot do that with a tool there's no tool you can build in the world which will help you with that the most advanced ai won't do that um yeah i mean and and sales takes judgment right and you know computers or computers are real good at adding and subtracting but they don't have judgment yet um and and i i could see how an organization might over tool this you know you try to you know just boil medic down to you know the m field in salesforce and the e field and or whatever crm the e field the d field the second d field you know and that's not what this is about i mean i i feel like this is uh a dynamic series of questions and things to areas to understand and have conversations about and take notes on those conversations so you can remember what what happened i i feel like it's much more like a free-form note-taking exercise on top of a bunch of questions that are already set and maybe there's a great way to do that in in your crm system and obviously you want to capture the information somewhere but uh but yeah i get what you're saying about things being over tooled for sure right right what about uh what about other sales methodologies how how should you layer medic in with other um classic or other important sales methodologies that that you might be employing that's a great question i believe that different sales methodologies are uh different perspectives of looking into a problem so they most of them are complementary they are not contradicting each other um i i love solution selling it's a good old methodology i love spin uh mentioned it earlier the only one i have uh some some questions about that that i love as an observation uh is the challenger sale the challenger sale i when i first read the book it's fantastic uh book i totally related to my teams uh you know this guy was a challenger this guy was a hard worker fantastic but it's not a methodology method by methodology i mean literally after a few hours of medic training self-paced and workshop and and and people on linkedin post it it's not me saying uh guys come out of the workshop saying this was eye-opening it this was a aha moment because because they are seeing that that deal that they lost is because they thought that person was their champion and for this reason that person was not the champion or this this deal they lost it because the economic buyer was the one who had the pain and they totally ignored it they talked to someone who was ready to talk not someone who had a pain to to to relieve so um but but the um the challengers say you cannot uh implement this uh in a reasonable time saying hey become a challenger no it takes time it takes years and it's industry specific medic is not industry specific it's not you you can't take uh someone who knows medic from selling crm then have them sell erp or have them sell maps or whatever they want it's it's the same thing you cannot do that with the challenges but but the there there they i think they are complementary um uh they uh medic i don't have the pretension that uh someone who learns medic uh has learned it all and there is nothing else to learn no they can they can learn better um with more focus on discovery they can learn more within their presentation skills i don't cover presentation skills and and how to deliver a great presentation for instance i don't do time management time management is key in any sales job we don't say it enough i don't cover those so there are a lot of other trainings which are totally complementary to malik what would you say the best places for a salesperson to start with metrics or with pain in their conversation with their customer with pain no doubt with pain the pain needs to be quantified and that we have half of the metrics the the other half would being the the proof points on one hand quantifying the pain and then proving how much our solution will solve that pain and and how it can be measured but the beginning uh is absolutely uh with no doubt is the uh pain points and how do you go about quantifying pain how do you what are your favorite ways to do that what what happens if we you leave it right there so what the customer says we have this problem why is it the problem what what how does it impact the ceo's goals or it's a problem because it slows us down we we're not moving as fast as we could how much it slows you down we think we could get these important projects out three months earlier if we if we did that okay that makes sense and if you do it three months earlier what what what are the consequences of that well i think we'd uh we'd acquire this many more customers over you know we would acquire 15 customers a month more if we got that out um three months earlier and that and what's the average per customer yeah everything the average per customer is 25 000 okay so here we go excellent i just want to i wanted to run that through uh you know with people because i think that's so important the the the quantification of taking someone's uh taking someone's problem and turning it into real dollar values for them absolutely and for your listeners since we are on it let me let me give another uh nugget here is who is this impacting this is something that most salespeople forget for instance you we are having this conversation with let's say it's it's on crm you're selling crm and the it guys is asking this and the it guy is a good guy he has done his homework or she has done their homework and and they have answers to a lot of questions but at the end of the day if you do not get hold of that real person who is being hurt by the pain you will not have enough motivation enough personal win and gain there so one great question in order to help with that is uh i don't remember what was what what was the case studies that we were playing with even though you felt that i have done this hundred times in my life is uh who does who is um in charge of those customers whose bonus or whose goals will be impacted when you make less of those customers i mean in this case obviously i think the answer is the cro and that's why in order to sell crm you need to go to the cro not the i.t director yeah i've got a great story that illustrates this from back back when i was badger maps only sales person this is our first uh this is probably 2012 2013 and this is our first major company that was getting on board and we had talked we had been talking to like a kind of mid-level sales manager and they put us in touch with with the it team um and we showed we were engaged with the it team showing them the kind of things we could do and they were like this is great this would definitely help the the salespeople a ton um you know we'll this is probably gonna you know it'll probably be two years before this will be an initiative that we can we can actually do because you know we're just so busy on the it team we don't have time to implement stuff like this and i said okay well i'm glad you like it and then sure enough i went to the vp of sales and uh and and walk through these types of talk paths where it's like okay so you know i i understand this would be useful but how how how useful what would it be and we backed into how much more their reps would be able to sell in his estimation if uh if they had if they had this tool making them more efficient and and i was like oh wow so you're losing that many hundreds of thousands of dollars every month from from this inefficiency and he's like yeah and i was like well i mean i think i think that deal was 100 grand a year so it was just a total slam dunk for him um and so but but that that deal does not take two years to uh to get to get looked at um as as the it team thought it was going to it took uh about two weeks after i talked to the ceo it was being it was being uh it was in trial so that's that's one of the best moments in sales that i love and and even even now after 30 years of uh career uh i love these moments because uh things change drastically when you talk to the right people and and the challenge for salespeople is that especially uh nowadays when a lot of you know our lead traction systems are on the on on our website so we receive a lot of incoming uh leads um is that someone has come to us and the the um passive or lazy if i can use that word approach by sales is to stick with that person without that the person is interested why should i change the person is asking questions they reply to my email they are returning my calls so why should i change it doesn't even occur to their mind to to change but that person is just you know taking uh the role of being a communication someone else in the organization has expressed a need or wants this go find that someone else go talk to them and you will see as you mentioned magically your two-year sales cycle gets down to two weeks and the the size and the scope of the deal grows and so on yeah it's really uh one of the best parts of sales is that you know so sales people unlock value for for their customers right their customers wouldn't do the thing that you're selling unless unless it was going to help you you know or help them rather they're people are smart and they're smart enough to figure out is this going to help me or not which is why it's so important to work for a company that really creates value because it's real hard to sell things that don't create value or that they have competitors that create more value you know it's uh but sales people are really the lubrication of the entire economy is the way i i think of it because all these companies out there are doing things slower than they could less less well than they could using the old machine using the old technology and it's a sales person that comes in and shows them hey you're gonna you guys are gonna do better if you add this to to your mix and uh and so they're it's really uh it's it's almost they bring the knowledge to the table and then and the deal wouldn't happen deals don't happen if they're not worth it for everybody involved right right right i heard the company yesterday actually it was announced yesterday company came out of some veterans uh uh syrian entrepreneurs uh with the seat found of 50 million dollar and the company's name i don't know if you heard that in the news yesterday is devrev and devrev is basically development and revenue and and and it comes from the idea that um you know these are the two most important part of in a company and and connecting this uh together how to uh leverage um revenue from the customers and and and do developments which are in mind and and that made me think that this is the reality there are two things uh which are really at a higher level than anything else in the company product development or whatever it is product that the customer but that we built for the customer and sales where we translate the need of the customers into dollars which is vital for any company everything else is is a lower with all respect for marketers for hr for finance uh great people but everything else is secondary to these two yeah i uh i i a phrase that reminds me of that that uh that i don't use myself but uh the a philosophy i heard uh propagated years ago was you make the or you sell sell the or you are those are the options and i don't believe that myself but that i that's a that's an old business saying that that i i've heard used many times but uh but i i do think it does there's a lot of wisdom to the importance of sales and a lot of companies don't realize how important it is i think um for that for all the sales managers out there tell me how effective and how much how does medic help them at sales forecasting how does how does having medic occurring on your team improve forecasting oh drastically uh that's that's the number one benefit of of of medic the reason is simple is that when we help sales managers and i by the way i believe first line manager the most strategic role in any company more than the cro more than the sales people first line sales managers why because they need to be at the same time tactical and back up the team uh play uh as a doer while being strategic enough in hiring in envisioning the future and and doing strategy anyway uh so sales managers uh we have trainings for them uh met peak for managers and in in those training we help them asking questions within the framework of medic to their reps in order to qualify their forecasts in order to help them qualify their project it's coaching and giving tips in coaching and the the key is that for instance just just just an example is this person your champion what proof do you have that peers person is a champion okay if after two three four questions regarding champion you figure out that this person is not a champion and we don't have a champion i i don't want to to see any deal in the forecast this quarter if we don't have a champion done uh it goes back to the pipeline okay and then when the when the forecast is reduced at the first qbr or let you know two weeks into the quarter we see that the forecast is is not that strong it will force sales people to go and and find deals which are better qualified or bringing deals from the pipeline into the forecast by qualifying them going and finding the champion and we give them tools uh methods uh in order to uh find the right champion it's very very easy actually um uh is is is not simple to do uh uh but but easy to uh find the method uh for the for the champion so forecast um become very fast uh extremely solid uh because they shrink uh they immediately shrink uh you haven't asked a question but if i may i can give you other uh metrics on on when you when you implement medic yeah yeah yeah great the the other one and that that's uh a a uh gaffa customer uh from two weeks ago uh who got their training in in march and during q2 they measured uh they have 20 percent a shorter um sales cycle and um 15 higher average per opportunity um increasing the average size because when you have champions um and you have developed that relationship uh you you you are not obliged to uh stage more the deal you can do more at each stage so you can you can sell more and of course uh sell shorter again this goes hand in hand with uh medic if you have identified the decision process if you have been early in finding the paper process and and worked in parallel uh from the beginning with contracts uh legal and and procurement um all these help you reduce and also obviously a champion um one of the things that's another nugget for our listener is do not ever put a deal in your forecast before sharing that with your champion hey mr mrs champion i'm counting on this deal i'm committing to my manager for this deal in this quarter am i doing right do you support do you what what's your advice what what do you tell if the champion says no first thing remove it from the forecast then ask the champion why not what should we do in order to bring it back but inside you even if you don't share that with the champion inside you for your manager remove it until the champion says for sure it's coming and and and of course if the champion says yes then the follow-up question is that so can i count on you if this is uh we if we both feel that it's sleeping so that you make you take the right actions on it to help me doing it so engage the same way it's it's it's really it's a coaching it's the same way your manager does this with you do it with the champion so yeah if if people took nothing away from today except for that it would be a it would be a valuable day because that is such great advice and and forecasting is so hard and um and and what a great way to make it more accurate just to you know level with your champion you know let them tell you if they think that you can get this done within you know the next two months because that's if they don't think so then it's certainly not going to happen right absolutely think think about it we are making assumptions sometimes a million dollar deals in ourselves we keep it perhaps for ourselves we don't ask the champion is this coming i'm counting on it my life depends something or or my wife's vacations depends on it right right might as well be your life well let's uh let's do the next section is sales in 60 seconds so quick questions quick answers tell me what are the top myths of medic okay um so one of the methods that i have a medic spreadsheet or a plugin on salesforce or any crm and i'm i'm then applying medic wrong uh it is a high chance you are just checking boxes and and you're not doing what you should the other the other myth is uh it's a checklist uh yeah uh i i know uh uh there is a champion there uh and but but wait wait is the champion doing what they should do is have you met the economic buyer thanks to the champion is the champion sharing with you where you stand how competitive how your competitors are doing and is it is it transparent communication the other myth is yeah i have metrics because i know that this pain is costing them a million dollar every six months so i i i have the metrics well uh you have half of the metrics uh you you know uh why they should look into something but you don't know why they should buy your product uh the the three questions uh medic help you ask customers and prospects is why anything and that's pain why now that's your forecast and why us uh that's why we're winning so why anything why now why us um and what would you say the the most common mistake that you see sales people make during the medic processes um it's taking a coach uh for a champion uh because someone is talking to us and is nice and returns the calls and replies to emails uh but that person is either not influential enough or not having the personal win enough doesn't do the job of a champion can you ever make a coach into a champion um no i think because i think a lot of a lot of sales people try right right a a coach um i mean the way we define it a coach is necessarily someone who does not have access to the economic buyer does not have that that that influence so you cannot change that you can you can change a a stakeholder and influential person in the account transform them into a champion that definitely yes someone who is not friendly with you it's not not an enemy usually enemies have reasons to be enemies but someone who is neutral doesn't talk to you is is hard to get access to um it's indifferent uh and but but they are influential they have an important role they can make decisions and so on well yeah you can transform them into the champion by going and helping them quantifying pain um showing the proof of your solution and those in your opinion what's the most important part of medic uh no champion no deal if you have really a good champion a strong champion and real champion as we define it that champion can fix any other element of medic that champion can help you with the metrics can get you in front of the economic buyer can influence the decision criteria so that you win can shorten the decision process and explain to you what you need to do in order to contract to be signed can talk to you about what the competitors is doing and how everything else can be done if you have a strong champion and as an actionable takeaway what should the field sales people listening today do as a first step towards implementing medic at their for themselves or for their company they should come and take courses at medic academy that's so obvious you know that i i'm sure you knew that that would have been my answer and it's a great answer well i'm going to try to summarize um i'm going to try to summarize all the things that you've that you've taught us today which is obviously a lot first medic stands for metrics economic buyer decision criteria decision process identify pain and champion and all of these are effectively elements of qualification that is ongoing throughout your your sales cycle qualification is truly important for every single step of the sales process and if you do it right then your deals will close themselves the salesperson who can qualify better will have a better win rate you can ask questions to find a champion within the company your champion should also he or she needs to be someone who is getting something out of the deal you know they stand to win or lose if this happens or doesn't happen so they they need it to make their number they need they they need it to meet their metrics they they they're the they're the person who the responsibility falls on their shoulders and that's not always the economic buyer so medic helps define which questions to ask when and how you ask those questions when there are different people involved in the sales decision it's really important to use medic so the other medic's close cousin which is kind of adds some more specificity is med pick and so this is metrics economic buyer decision criteria decision process which that's all the same and then paper process and then identify pain champion and the finals and then they add a c competition don't just rely on sales tools sales people need to work on their skills so that they can actually qualify deals with with using these questions and gaining these understandings medic can work alongside and support other sales methodologies these these aren't exclusive ask ask yourself who is impacted by the sales that by getting this deal done and work um work to get in contact with those people because they can really be your champions they're the ones that are most likely to actually get a deal over the line and not just be interested sales managers can ask their sales reps questions about their about how they've qualified their deals with medic when when they're doing their forecast and a really important point that that darius gave us about forecasting don't put a deal in your forecast before sharing it with your champion uh to make sure that they support you forecasting it so you gotta ask them hey i'm gonna i'm gonna tell my manager that this is gonna close this quarter is is that okay or this year or whatever it is depending on your sales cycle this month whatever um ask mention that to them before you do it and that you'll the because you'll get good answers there um not only do you will you uncover other objections that other stakeholders have but you'll just get their opinion on whether or not you know given everything they know whether or not what the timeline is that you can get this done and that'll save you keep a lot of egg off your face with your management team well this has been absolutely fantastic darius uh where where can our listeners read more about your work how do they learn more about what you do how do they reach out to you uh yeah medic academy's website is medic m-e-d-d-i-c dot academy so it's not a dot-com or something else medic.academy that's the website where you have a lot of information um the the blog on that same site you have regularly articles that the most recent one uh i i'm sure you will love it uh steve is comparison between the partitioned sales uh uh structure like sdr ae structure versus the full cycle sales people is it debate on uh goods and bads about those as an example so a lot of articles on the blog um and and the links to the to the book uh as well and of course all the courses are available there as connecting with me personally i welcome uh everyone on linkedin uh you need to know my email address so if you're listening my email address is darius medic.academy d-a-r-i-u-s medic thug academy well we will certainly put all that in the show notes so that people can find it because a lot of them are driving right now uh darius honestly this has been a great episode of the outside sales talk and if anyone out there listening works in field sales you'll love badger maps that's the number one rep planner helps you sell 20 more and drive 20 percent less you can get a free trial of badger maps at .badgermapping.com today and if anyone out there can think of other sales reps that would benefit from learning about medic um and what darius has had to say today for us definitely uh forward this episode on to them take care until next time everybody and and darius thanks so much for being on the show today thank you steve thank you for having me