Today on MEDDIC Monday, I will tell you a story about a company feeling pain and reaching out for help in search of a solution. It was a busy Tuesday morning in San Francisco, where Ryan was assisting with a new hire training at headquarters. A fresh batch of new hires was eager to learn how to be successful at their new job. Ryan looks at his calendar and realizes he has a call in about 15 minutes to help conduct a discovery call that his BDR has scheduled. Time to find a quiet place to have this call.
The company's cafeteria had quieted down from the morning rush and Ryan found a nice cozy, quiet corner to conduct this discovery call. Ryan joins the call with his BDR Susan, while the prospect Gary joins the call. Looking at the notes, this seems like a good call; the BDR uncovered that the prospect was reaching out initially because their reporting system is old, archaic, and slow. Ryan thinks, "Awesome, I have never run into an opportunity where we couldn't kill everyone based on performance; this should be a slam dunk!"
Gary joins, and after some pleasantries and introductions, they go right into it. Gary begins to explain how they have an embedded reporting system that they OEM within their application, which is slow. Their customers are waiting upwards of 5 minutes for the results of a report to return, which is unacceptable. Ryan is ready with some great examples of his biggest customers running billions and billions of records with an extremely fast response time. They continued their conversation, educating Gary about the technology, and scheduled a demo.
A week later, Megan, the SC, joins Ryan on the call and demonstrates dashboards, ad-hoc reports, and operational reports pulling billions of rows in under 3 seconds. The kind of demo that closes deals. After a couple of weeks of negotiating the contract and closing the deal, professional services get engaged to plan their onsite to get the reporting environment set up and what they uncover is mind-blowing. They did not have a reporting performance problem but rather a data problem that included reporting.
Rewind to that first discovery call, where Ryan started selling way to early. Now instead, Ryan sought to understand what the real problem is; here is how that conversation went:
Ryan: Gary, thanks for the time today. Susan filled me in that you are having some challenges with your reporting performance. Can you tell me a little about that?
Gary: Sure. Nice to meet you, Ryan. So currently, our clients log onto our application daily and run a daily report. This daily report keeps increasing in time, and currently, it takes 5 minutes to load. The data is information about claims that were submitted to be paid. Sometimes, it doesn't even return data, the backend crashes, and we have to restart the reporting server.
Ryan: That sounds like a very challenging issue for you and your customers. Has your company done any preliminary work to understand what specifically is causing the slowdown? I would like to understand the process underneath the covers for this issue. Is it due to the increase in each customer's data?
Gary: Well, it is not really that our client's data is growing too fast. Every time we add a new customer that slows things down.
Ryan: How is that affecting your ability to grow? How many contacts are you adding?
Gary: We have had to pause our sales because our system cannot handle it.
The customer had to STOP adding new customers; their business could not grow anymore! That pain is WAY MORE than a report that takes too long to run. The size of a problem is enough to cause them to go out of business completely. Imagine the size of the metric that this problem leads to.
Never except the first problem that you hear, drill, drill drill down into their pain, and be amazed at what you uncover.
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