Identify Pain...
The "I" in MEDDIC stands for Identify the pain and business drivers.
Pain is the number one reason why buyers reach out to vendors. When you were a child, your parents probably took you every year to the doctor for a checkup, get required shots, and chart your growth. As we become adults, unfortunately, we fall out of the habit of going to the doctor regularly except when we are experiencing pain. This is especially true with the dentist and most people.
That said, it sounds like this would be easy to discover in your deals, right? Wrong! The trouble is frequently, as, in the medical world, buyers often will come up with what a perceived solution may be. How often have you caught yourself earning your Google MD by searching for reasons why your calf may hurt? One of my favorite examples of this I heard from Chris White:
"He who buys a shovel doesn’t want a shovel. He wants a hole. But he doesn’t just want a hole, he wants to put up a fence, or he wants to plant a tree. But he doesn’t just want a fence or a tree, he wants privacy, or he wants shade, or fruit, or flowers." White, Chris. The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers (pp. 63-64). SGTG, Inc. DBA DemoDoctor.com. Kindle Edition.
Let me give you a real-world example that I experience myself. During an initial discovery call that a business development rep previously set up with the Sales Rep and his Sales Engineer (me), the prospect described that they are looking for a reporting system that is fast and can handle a lot of data. The reason why they are looking to replace their current system is that it is too slow. EUREKA! We have the pain, a slow reporting system. On the surface, that may sound like a pain but is it? So what if your reporting system is a little slow? This is where the second part of identifying pain comes in; the pain HAS TO lead to business drivers.
Time and time again, I have seen sales try to rush through the discovery process. Hearing the prospect mention their reporting system is slow and knowing that yours is faster, sales proceeds to try to sell them on the performance of their reporting system. This is where we fail to understand the actual pain. During that call, we dug into that "pain" to uncover that their inside sales used the report that they were focusing on the performance to upsell customers with the appropriate products. The report doesn't run fast enough to give them the information to position the right products. At the same time, they have the customer on the phone, resulting in a lower-than-expected expansion rate of existing customers. Now that pain is real, costing the customer money, and is tied to an important business driver, growing sales of existing customers.
Pain without business drivers is not pain; it is just an irritant. If you can't link that pain to the business, keep digging.
The other challenge we have with pain is we typically stop digging once we uncover one actual pain. The chance that your solution solves multiple pain points is great. The more pain you find, the more business drivers you are tied to, and the more business drivers you are connected to, the more metrics you can build. Put another way, real pain with real business drivers will always lead you to a metric. The more pain, the more metrics, the more metrics, the more value your solution will bring.
PAIN
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BUSINESS DRIVER
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METRIC
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VALUE
Now that we have introduced you to what real pain is and how it must tie to the business drivers, it is time to take action.
🎬 ACTION
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