4 Top Sales Methodologies: Which Fits Your Organization Best?

Challenger. Miller-Heiman. Sandler.
If you’re in sales, you’ll want to tune in and learn all about the different sales
methodologies that are out there.
Let’s dig in.
In this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, VP of marketing for Unbounce and Insightly.
Today I’m joined by sales coach. Jeff Bajorek.
Welcome to the show, Jeff. Hi, Val.
Thanks for having me.
Jeff, there are a number of sales methodologies on the market today,
and most companies choose one and adopt it across their team.
I’d like to use our time today
to talk through a few of the bigger names and get your take on them.
Does that sound good? Sure.
There are a bunch of them out there.
It seems like there’s a new one popping up every day.
Even though these older, more established brands,
if you will, seem to have a foothold in the market, I think there’s.
I really think that’s because there’s a lot of validity to them
and each of their different approaches.
But, yeah, let’s let’s dig in.
All right.
We’re going to start with one that I am personally trained in.
And that’s Miller-Heiman.
I used this methodology when I was at a company
that was firmly mid-market, but I would say enterprise aspirational.
I think, when I think Miller – Heiman,. I think enterprise,
and when you go back in time and you, read the books,
you know, the strategic selling or conceptual selling,
I mean, these are Miller – Heiman constructs that I think illustrate how big
and profound the sales process has to be in some of these enterprise accounts.
And, you know, whenever I think of the word enterprise, I think big.
And that’s, to me, what comes to mind when I think about Miller – Heiman.
It’s very thorough in terms of mapping out
all of the stakeholders, mapping out all of their desires.
You know, the blue sheets that they put together and created
so that people can keep track of all these things.
It’s it was really,. I think, the first of its kind to do that
intense of an investigation into all of the ins and outs of the sales
process and, you know, one of the ways that and I don’t know
what Miller and Heiman were doing,. I should ask, actually,
Alice and Liz, are actually both legacy. Heiman.
Their their dad was Heiman in, in the, in the Miller – Heiman pair there.
I should ask them
what he was thinking with this and if he really was the first person
to put all this together.
But,. I think, I think about reducing risk.
I think about, you know, we’ve all been involved in deals where
something out of nowhere, out of left field comes in, wrecks it,
or there was a decision maker we weren’t aware of that
comes and spoils the whole thing, even though we’ve done so much hard work.
And,. I think for them to lay out that process
and be so thorough with it, it can be a little bit labor intensive.
It can be a little much if it’s a simpler sale that you’re, pursuing.
But the process of mapping out those stakeholders, identifying
each of the individual smaller sales you need to make along the way,
I love it for how thorough it is.
I think I see those blue sheets in my nightmares sometimes
because they were, like, very tiny prints.
And you had to do everything right.
I think Miller – Heiman was interesting because they had the concept of a coach,
which is somebody
who’s on the inside of the organization who was actually helping the sales person
kind of make headway within the org to move the sale along.
Everybody needs a little bit of help from their friends.
And that is a, a concept that you either learn early
or you learn very in a very hard way.
As far as identifying the people who can help you move a deal forward
coaches, champions, economic buyers,
you know, understanding
all of the little cogs in the gears system that make the sale happen.
And, it’s just as someone who,
you know, thinks about rethinking the way they sell, this was the first system,
if you will, that taught you to think through the aspects of the sales
process versus here are my features, here are the benefits, here are the outcomes.
And that’s why I love it.
Yeah. Here’s my logo slide.
Do you want to buy right. Exactly.
Yeah. What’s taking you so long?. Why don’t I already have a PO?
Exactly.
Okay.. Well let’s jump to another methodology.
And this one’s, really popular one called Challenger.
It’s familiar to me because I’m a SaaS marketer, and, I feel like,
Challenger speaks to, like, doing everything faster, better, cheaper.
So it just kind of fits.
Well in the SaaS marketplace.
You know, Challenger is one of these, methodologies that,
you know, as far as the handful
that I know we want to go through today, this one speaks closest to me.
It’s nearest and dearest.
And I think, it’s no coincidence that this is the most modern
or the most recently developed, that we’ve seen in the marketplace today,
if you will.
And, the idea that you have to build relationships and sales is not a new one.
My question has always been, okay, based on what?
Right.
It used to be that it was, a boys club and it was, you know,
all about who you knew, and it was who had the corporate expense account
or the corporate credit card that they were going to use this time.
And you could buy somebody time.
And through that time you could hopefully exchange a little influence.
I grew up in my sales career
at a time in medical devices when you weren’t allowed to do that.
Not only did
I not have a corporate expense account,. I wasn’t allowed to pay for meals.
I wasn’t allowed to take people to concerts.
I wasn’t allowed to take people golfing and doing those things.
And so I really had to understand
what value I brought to the relationship.
Instead of a piece of plastic with 16 digits on it
that someone else would pay the bill for.
And it made me think differently
about how I could earn that access instead of just paying for it.
And so I actually took a couple years longer than anybody else did to read
Challenger, because what I heard about it was really familiar to me.
And I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, that they wrote that book about me
because that was very much the way that I sold.
They didn’t know it.. I didn’t know it at the time.
But give me language to use for how I think,
you know, modern enterprise selling needs to be done.
You need to provide insights.
You need to earn the role of the trusted advisor.
You don’t do that by trying to be nice and trying to make friends
with someone first.
You do that by challenging some of their long held beliefs,
challenging some of those sacred cows, providing them with insights
that will help them.
I call it, you know, giving them the feeling that you, as the seller,
know something they don’t know,
and they’d be a lot better off for it if they did know.
So a conversation with you is worth having.
I refer to just in broad terms,
as being someone worth talking to and having something worth talking about.
That’s Challenger and putting those insights
in front of people in a way that necessarily doesn’t offend anybody.
You’re not trying to be adversarial, you’re just trying to be a resource
and prove that a meeting with you is going to be worthwhile.
I do feel like a Challenger rep has to have a lot of confidence.
I think that’s kind of what you’re describing.
I would go
further than confidence and call it belief.
You need to believe that a meeting with you is going to be worthwhile.
You need to believe that
a call from you out of the blue is going to be worth the interruption.
It takes a lot of that feeling to get out there every day
and put a hypothesis in front of someone that you don’t know.
I mean, selling at its essence and marketing helps with this,
but selling at its essence is putting yourself in front of strangers.
What’s going to make it worth that call?
And if you don’t believe you’re worth that, call,
you’re going to have a hard time calling.
You’re going to have a hard time delivering that insight or those insights
when your turn comes up and it doesn’t tend to go well, right.
And so as somebody who talks a lot about this,
I’ve written a lot about this belief and swagger and,
you know, your willingness to sell like only you can sell,
it all has to start in the mirror every day.
More so than just mapping out an account strategy or understanding
what the steps in the process are.
Do you believe that you can pull this off?
Do you believe that you can make the first sale?
And do you believe that you can make it again?
That’s where it all has to start.
That makes a ton of sense.
Let’s move on to Sandler.
And I actually admitted in our pre call that this one is new to me,
but from the way you described it, it made sense because I’m more of a B2B
mid-market enterprise marketer, and it feels like this one might be
on the starter end of the market, or may have just been around a lot longer.
It’s been around since the 70s or 80s.
I don’t remember exactly when, David. Sandler wrote, but he’s the
the name of the book was “You can’t teach a kid how to ride a bike at a seminar.”
And I’m not quite, it’s a clever name for a book.
I’m not quite sure
how it relates to the methodology itself, but as I have worked
with a lot of small businesses,
many of them are very well familiar or even indoctrinated into Sandler.
And as I’ve spoken with people,. I’ve spoken with trainers,
I’ve spoken with, solopreneurs and freelancers who
once they’re exposed to these concepts, it’s like their mind
is blown, like, oh my gosh,. I got a call from a friend one time.
He said, Jeff, have you ever heard of the upfront contract?
And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m just agreeing on the next meeting
before the current meeting is over.
I mean, setting an agenda for a call.
He’s like, Jeff,. I couldn’t believe this is
where all of my meetings were going to die.
I never had next steps.
And, you know, I have a bias.
As someone who’s been selling for 20 years, you just know what you need to do.
Going into the call, I didn’t take Sandler training to learn that,
but most people don’t get formal sales education.
So to be able to put into simple principles the steps of a sales process,
what needs to happen, what will help earn it will help you earn that next step.
And to put it into parlance, that
just about everybody can understand.
It’s a very difficult thing to do.
This is a valuable framework for helping those, solopreneurs or
individual contributors to just understand what their next steps need to be.
And, that’s it’s
been around, I mean, going on 50 years now, and it’s very popular, very profound.
And there are a lot of reasons for that.
Yeah, totally makes sense.
So I brought up on our pre call MEDDICC as a sales methodology,
but you have a slightly different take on MEDDICC, that it doesn’t
fit the classic mold of a methodology.
Yeah, I think we can argue semantics about what’s a methodology,
what’s a framework,
what’s a process, what’s a checklist. I think of MEDDICC or MEDDPICC.
I’ve got a friend who refers to it as MEDDPICC
because the paper process that P in there is really important.
I think this is more of and I think it ties
very closely actually with Miller – Heiman because it’s most useful
with a profound. I keep saying the word profound.
I don’t think I’ve said
the word profound this often in a conversation a long time, if ever.
But in these big enterprise deals, because there are so many things to keep
track of, you need all of the devices you can to keep track of them.
And so when you look at and we don’t need to go through them here,
but each letter in the MEDDPICC or MEDDICC algorithm acronym
rather stands for something you need to take a look at.
It’s helping us to keep track of all the things
that need to happen in order for a sale to be made.
And I go back to the idea of reducing risk.
You know, we can take some things for granted,
and we can still win sales,
but every time we ignore or neglect one of those letters
in the acronym, we introduce risk to our sales.
So the bigger the sale, the more important the revenue, the more important
the commission check is,
the more you’re going to want to make sure that all those eyes are dotted,
all those T’s are crossed, and you’re not overlooking something in plain
sight just because you assumed it was going to happen.
So one of the things I think is really helpful, and a friend of mine,
really promotes this MEDDPICC system.
His name is David Weiss.. You can look him up.
But he actually creates a scorecard for himself and scores himself.
Is this red, yellow, or green?
Like a stoplight.
And so that the color coding of this scorecard also, helps give you an idea
of how well you’re performing in each one of these domains.
And it’s there’s
just nothing quite like a device like that to show you where you stand in a deal.
Yeah.
It seems like a really good organizational tool.
Checklist.
Like you mentioned, with, just color coding it, like, at a glance.
It would be really easy for you to see.
Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 deals working.
If you had a MEDDICC list for each one, you could just
quickly get up to speed with where you are in that particular deal.
If you have to switch gears during the day.
And I think about, you know, regardless of what you sell,
you need to think about the complexity of your work week.
Is your work week complex because you have a lot of simple deals
going on at the same time?
If you have a lot of simple deals going on
at the same time, you might just need a spreadsheet.
Your CRM, like Insightly would might be exactly the tool that you need.
If you are managing a smaller,
amount of really complex deals
and it’s,
you know, heresy to say this, but you may not need a CRM as much as you need
multiple MEDDICC scorecards, you know, to keep track of, you know, you don’t
do you need a tool to, you know, help you keep track of for deals?
No, but you need a tool to help you keep track of the 45
individual influencers of each one of those deals.
Right.
And so really think about as you go to evaluate a tool like Insightly,
think about the things that you that it will help you keep track of.
Think about how much easier it will make your sales process from
an organizational standpoint, regardless of which methodology you choose.
You know, I think when you dig into either of them, you find that or
any of the four that we’ve talked about today, you’ll find that they’re variations
on a theme of fundamentals that you just need to get right.
And if you, you know, subscribe to one or the other, there’s a lot of overlap.
But, you know, pick the one that makes the most sense to you,
but understand the complexity that you’ve chosen in your sales
career has a tool that will help you keep track of the minutia.
Keep track of the details, keep track of the things
that are going to make you successful, that are often overlooked.
And that’s where your results will really grow.
You know, Jeff, thanks so much for your insight on those methodologies.
Actually, what you just said is super interesting to me.
I’d like to go further on our talk
and, learn how you kind of sift through the options and pick the best one.
But we’re short on time right now.
Can I convince you to come back soon?
And we can continue that conversation?
If I had a nickel for every time I was on a podcast,
and near the end they said, you know what, Jeff?
You’ve been talking a while.
We should probably do this again.
I’d have a few nickels, but, yeah, I’m happy to come back.
Anytime I get asked back.
I know it’s a good place to be.
Awesome.
Okay, we will get that booked.
Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today on Closing Time.
Thanks for having me.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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