Why I excel at Sales (MEDDPICC notes) - pt1

2021, life turns 34. The next few years are mission-critical.

In order to fulfill the “Whys”, I MUST hit milestones each year that I can leverage in the next.

1, Ownership from running my business.

• Hunter.

  No leads were given. I collected the contacts in a spreadsheet then started reaching out one by one. I prioritised the largest accounts and developed strategic partnerships. Then leverage the references to open more doors.

• Organised.

  I standardised paperwork and the engagement process - success stories of how fast our delivery was, a required documents checklist, how we provide follow-ups and tracking. It’s professional, and reduced the time spent on verbal communications. 

• Ownership from “prospect to close to chase up payments''.

  No base salary, I needed to be hungry and disciplined. But not many people can work without knowing if paycheque will come in, even after all the good work and signed contracts. Sometimes my customers are not being paid themselves. Some offloaded their operation to a new company that delays payment. Some can just take your advantages. Face the problem and focus on solutions - these valuable lessons matured me to better handle fear, uncertainty and become realistic yet optimistic in a complex sales environment.

• I have closed 670k running my business.

2. Structured sales process (MEDDPICC) and Proactive

• I took it upon myself to qualify based on the MEDDPICC method. As I know that is what my customers (AEs) were required to do, and what I need to be great at in order to progress complex projects and to forecast accurately.

• The extra effort gets good feedback. More time was spent on calling, diving deeper, and putting notes together. This on multiple occasions was recognised by the Country manager due to unsolicited positive feedback from AEs, and once directly recognised by the VP.

• The senior director of inside sales once commented “AL, you are like a Ferrari. A racehorse ready to get out of the gate.”  

  If something is categorised as a must, I’d rather get it done sooner.

(notes from the 1st call)

3,  Justify the solution in dollars

The business leaders who approve budgets don't think in features but in cashflow and returns.

Take Cyber security for example, the values generally come in 3 ways

• a, Efficiency. Automate manual tasks

  • For eg. Management dashboard.  Used to take 2 persons (50/hr) to manually produce the report, 10 hours each month. That is a saving of 500 monthly,  6000 annually.   

• b, Loss Saving. ROSI (Return of Security Investment)  

  • For eg. Annual loss expectancy (ALE) from cyber incidents is 100k. The solution is expected to mitigate 70% of the incidents.

  • Annual cost of ownership for this solution is 10k

  • ROSI = (70k -10k) / 10k = 600%

• c, Increase revenue and facilitate business objectives. Open doors to more contracts, address customer concerns and hold better value in attracting investments.

Formula =

1, Use success story/metrics + comparable loss of their industry peers to build a baseline

2, Coupled with analyst reports that validate your solutions from the 3rd party perspective.

(avg cost of breach 2020 - IBM&Ponemon report)