Virtual Sales Talks: How Acrolinx Uses MEDDIC on Salesforce to Navigate and Guide Sales Processes
In this episode of our Virtual Sales Talks, we sit down with Lesia Kalley, Enterprise Account Director at Acrolinx, to talk about how the iSEEit Opportunity Management Tool has helped her follow MEDDIC on Salesforce in a structured way to help identify gaps in her sales process and what she needs to do to push her deals to closure.
Watch the interview below and find out more as Lesia shares how iSEEit has increased the synergy within sales teams at Acrolinx and why the additional admin work of entering data into iSEEit is worth it and important for growth and success.
A full transcript of this interview is also available.
In today’s episode we cover:
- Introduction to Acrolinx
- What are the Challenges of Developing a Brand New Territory?
- How Does MEDDIC Help in Qualifying the Deals in Your Pipeline?
- How Has Your Usage of MEDDIC Changed After Using iSEEit?
- How Does iSEEit Support the Wider Team at Acrolinx?
- How Does iSEEit Enable You to Leverage the Information of Your Team Members?
- As a Salesperson, How Does the Admin Work of Entering Data into iSEEit Benefit You?
- Implementing MEDDIC on Salesforce
Introduction to Acrolinx
Lesia Kalley: My name is Lesia Kalley and I’m an Enterprise Account Director with Acrolinx. I support the Benelux and Nordics regions around Europe. Companies will use Acrolinx AI to improve their customer experiences by creating high quality, globally aligned content that strengthens their brand voice.
I moved from the US to Amsterdam to take this role and support the Benelux and Nordics. it’s a new territory for me and for many salespeople, you’re focusing on adjusting to new industries and technologies as you move around. For me, it’s also moving countries – going from supporting the Pacific Northwest of the US to now 7 countries around Europe.
What are the Challenges of Developing a Brand New Territory?
Lesia Kalley: I invest a lot of time in building pipelines, driving deals and what I often find is that when I lose a deal, I only see the gaps at the end and what I see is “What did I miss?”. Did I not have a real Champion? Did I not get access to the Executive Sponsor? Did I neutralize the Competition? If I did so, how? Before iSEEit, a lot of it was happening after the deal was lost.
But now with iSEEIt, I get to see those elements in real time. What are my gaps? How can I mitigate this risk? And that’s a big piece for us here at Acrolinx because we manage our territories like it’s our own business. So, I need to look at the gaps in my territory and in my deals and I need to mitigate that risk so that I’m building a very confident pipeline that my CRO and leadership team have have confidence in.
How Does MEDDIC Help You in Qualifying the Deals in Your Pipeline?
Lesia Kalley: MEDDIC is a place for me that provides grounding. It can be sanity in a very chaotic world. I come back to those elements in MEDDIC on iSEEit that we use as our integration in Salesforce. It delivers all of the questions that I need to be asking through this process.
Let’s say I’ve had an hour meeting with a prospect and multiple stakeholders. I can take all that information I’ve gathered and bring it back into iSEEit and I understand exactly at that point where I am, where I need to go and what are my gaps. iSEEit really helps me navigate and guide the sales process.
How Has Your Usage of MEDDIC Changed After Using iSEEit?
Lesia Kalley: I’ve used MEDDIC for years and in the past it was a lot of you do it right at the beginning, you do it right maybe in the middle and you see where you’re at. You have a conversation with your boss about it – Is there a Pain? Is there a Champion? Yes or no? It was really light and high level and iSEEit really puts legs on it and brings it to life so you can see it. I use it to navigate my sales process and look at where I am in a deal.
Another piece I’ve experienced in previous companies is that deal stages weren’t as clearly defined. You didn’t quite know where you were and sometimes you didn’t even really understand what the stage was – if you’re in it or if you’re in another stage.
In iSEEit, we have our MEDDIC elements and the questions we need to uncover aligned to deal stages so it helps massively with deal progression. I know if I have to build a Business Case and I have gotten the sign off from the Economic Buyer, I am in the Consensus stage.
So that just provides clarity to me and also helps me because we have really clearly defined Exit Criteria. This compliments me well because a lot of our Exit Criteria is “Why do anything?“. It’s a really challenging question for salespeople to ask because you’re afraid it’s going to blow up your deal. For me, it is a scary point but the MEDDIC piece in iSEEit always encourages me to ask that question so it helps me areas that I’m weak in so I can progress my deals faster – that’s one key piece.
The other is that our leadership team uses it to understand the progression of deals and their confidence in it. We use our progression scores and view those weekly with our CEO and we see how our deals are progressing across each person in our team, quarter over quarter. It’s really a guiding factor for the confidence piece in those deals
As we look at it, if our deals have a score of 60 – 70% completion around the MEDDIC elements, that’s a confident deal. That’s something that we can say “I know this will close” and we have all of that in place to show that.
How Does iSEEit Support the Wider Team at Acrolinx?
Lesia Kalley: In these complex deals, I work with a Customer Success Manager if it’s for growth or expansion, I work with a Sales Solutions Engineer to help validate a lot of the components and build a Business Case. There’s a lot of people that come together around these deals to make it happen, it’s not just the salespeople. iSEEit is a great place to bring your people around so everyone at a quick glance can see where we’re at and what’s missing. We’re going into a meeting – what critical pieces of information do we not have that we need to uncover or that we’re really weak in, we can strategize around and strengthen.
In addition to that, it’s really the handover. Closing and winning a deal is incredible but when you need to hand over a customer successfully, those MEDDIC elements give my Customer Success Manager and implementation team all the information and the criteria for a successful handover. They know all of the elements that I’ve spent the last 6 to 18 months trying to uncover.
How Does iSEEit Enable You to Leverage the Information of Your Team Member?
Lesia Kalley: There’s one really key piece and that’s sharing best practices. When you’re onboarding new team members into your sales organization or are ramping up and want to understand your most successful customers:
I look at MEDDIC and spend a certain amount of time every week going into other reps’ deals and looking through their MEDDIC criteria because maybe there’s something that I didn’t think about asking. Maybe there’s a Metric I didn’t realize we can impact. So when I want to understand the success of current customers and how we build these really strategic partnerships, I go and look through the MEDDIC in iSEEit to see what we captured in these components that I can then use to take into my opportunities – Ask those questions, have strategic conversations that put us in a place of massive growth and success.
As a Salesperson, How Does the Admin Work of Entering Data Into iSEEit Benefit You?
Lesia Kalley: I think most salespeople don’t enjoy the admin effort of putting information into Salesforce. It’s been one of my worst traits. I think other bosses could tell you that – I had it in my notes and in my head but everything was incomplete.
Until we got iSEEit, I didn’t know what was in it for me – that was the question. “What’s in it for me to put this information in?”. iSEEit has completely shifted that. I put it in because it helps me make sense of it and understand where I’m at and how I’m going to close this deal. For me, this has just really massively improved my admin efforts – I went from being really poor at it to being really good at it – which is why I’m sharing this information with you. So for us salespeople, iSEEit really provides focused guidance on where we’re at with a deal and what specifically we need. There isn’t any guessing – “I think I need this, I think I need that”. We know what we need, it’s right there in front of us and it helps bring everyone together to support that.
Implementing MEDDIC on Salesforce
Click the link below to learn more about implementing MEDDIC on Salesforce today!
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