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The Connector Podcast - Unveiling Fintech Sales Success: James and Richard on Leveraging MEDDPICC for Strategic Growth with Humble Technology
What are the secrets behind skyrocketing sales in the fintech world? Join us for a thrilling conversation with James and Richard from Humble Technology as they unlock the mysteries of scaling sales in the ever-evolving fintech landscape. You’ll hear firsthand from James about his incredible journey from a successful project at ICAP to launching Humble Technology and learn how a world-class product and strategy are just the beginning. Richard, with his vast experience in financial services and consulting, sheds light on a crucial yet often neglected aspect of fintech success: a robust sales engine. Together, they introduce us to the MEDDPICC methodology, a cornerstone of their approach that deciphers why deals triumph or falter.
Navigate the complex terrain of B2B sales with the MEDDPICC framework as your compass. Discover how this strategic tool ensures sales teams stay sharp and pipelines remain robust, especially when venturing into unfamiliar markets. We explore the stark contrasts between B2B and B2C sales and why MEDDPICC is your go-to for intricate, long-cycle enterprise deals. Facing the challenge of entering new markets with low brand recognition? James and Richard offer insights into aligning sales efforts with strategic goals to fuel growth and success, proving that with the right approach, even the toughest markets can be conquered. Tune in and transform your sales strategy with the invaluable wisdom of our guests.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Cohen van der Hooydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another podcast of the Connector, and today I've got a very, very, very special guest with me. It's Humble Tech, all the way from London, and it's Richard and James. Can you please introduce yourself and also the company?
Speaker 3:Hi, very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us on your podcast. Kun, I'll start with myself. My name is James Dawson. I'm the founder of Humble Technology. I set Humble Technology up in 2021 after a bunch of CEOs in my network were continually asking me to help them and teach them how to sell, how to scale their sales organizations and all that. And I'd done that because, up to 2012, I was working in a very big financial firm called ICAP and one of the projects I led we built a credit default swap trading platform and we went from zero to 400 million revenue in three and a half years Wow, Impressive. And because I did that, I thought I was a total rock star and I left and I joined a very early stage startup with zero revenue product not built yet, and I spent five years there and that was an absolute baptism of fire learning how to do enterprise sales with no big brand behind you, selling software to banks.
Speaker 2:Well, I told you it's going to be a special occasion today because, uh, that's really the space we're in as well. So that's why I'm so keen to learn a lot about you guys as well so.
Speaker 3:So the real truth is like for the first few years, I just completely messed it up, ran around having tons and tons of meetings and working 16 hour days and managed to get some stuff done.
Speaker 3:But if you fast forward to 2020, when I wanted to set up my own business, when I'd been a very successful CEO of a fintech CRO, of a fintech scaling from zero to 10 million that first million being excruciating, and then the one to five getting a gain, and then the five to 10 is kind of easier, and then the 10 above that I think that's where you don't need me anymore, because then it just becomes a machine.
Speaker 3:So, um, when, when I wanted to kind of create something where I could teach other people how to do it, I went and looked at big tech success stories and I did a ton of research and I spent a whole year reading about, like how did mongo db go from 30 million arr to 800 million arr in like four years? I mean that's phenomenal, right? If you look at big tech success stories like MongoDB, sprinklr, snowflake, you know, appdynamics, all those kinds of companies there's a methodology that they use. If you see the interviews for the CEO, ceo of mongodb, dev itcherya. He makes it very clear that there's two things that are absolutely essential if you want to scale.
Speaker 3:One is you have to have a good product world class and the second thing is you have to have a world class go-to market and sales strategy and that's kind of, through all that research, how I discovered medic and all these methodologies that these people use and that's what we use today and it's just absolutely game changing yeah, I love to go into that medic approach, but maybe, richard, can you also introduce yourself a little bit firstly, you know, you know, thanks guys for for having james and myself on the pod today, really excited to collaborate with you guys.
Speaker 4:Just by myself 20 years in financial services, 10 of those years at sort of a big consulting company, learning the trade not just from a sales point of view but also getting in there making certain things stick on the client site. After that I jumped out into the big blue ocean thinking that it was a good idea to get some different stripes. I set up my own consulting company, scale of Consulting, where I provided services into the FinTech ecosystem and also into sort of big banks around various things in transformation. Off the back of all of that work that I was doing, especially in the last sort of furlough of scale of consulting, I realized one of the big things that the big pain points that existed in the FinTech ecosystem was the fact that sales was a misnomer. Everyone was thinking about product, product, product, product, product and focusing on how a product could get to market.
Speaker 4:But the little engine that actually matters the most was sometimes not really nurtured. And as I exited Scala Consulting I, you know fortuitously, was what introduced to James and you know between us over the last sort of couple of years and way back and forth and then, more so the last sort of you know year or so, I realized that actually there was a marriage made in heaven and I decided to jump in and, you know, just work and partner up with James and really drive out sort of the Humble Technology story. And obviously James mentions the MedPick stuff which is a cornerstone to all of what we do?
Speaker 2:I thought that was the baby of the marriage.
Speaker 3:That is someone else's baby.
Speaker 4:It was a beautiful birth, beautiful birth.
Speaker 2:MedPick for.
Speaker 4:FinTech.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us a little bit more, because you obviously got me very, very curious about the methodology.
Speaker 3:What does it entail so let me take you. I'll take you to the history a little bit because that's quite interesting. So if you go back to the 1990s, there's a company called PTC it's the first private software company to hit a billion dollars in sales right, okay? And the guy who was running that sales engine was a guy called John McMahon and him and his co-founders were relentless American execution artists wanting to build revenue and scale and very, very professional about it, and they wanted to understand answers to three very important questions why do we win deals, why do we lose deals and why do deals slip? Why do they fail they?
Speaker 3:Why do we win deals? Why do we lose deals and why do deals slip? Why do they fail? They wanted to answer those questions. So they created MEDIC as a methodology, which is an acronym there's a whole bunch of acronyms that we're going to go through and explain exactly what it is so that they could have a common language in the sales team and they could always be on the same page language in the sales team and they could always be on the same page, and that they could very accurately qualify deals in and out of their pipeline and know exactly what to do in all of their deals at all the time and know which stones need to be turned over and which not. So it's a very scientific kind of framework for running your sales pipeline.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of effectively where Medic came from. The acronyms we can go down in a little bit, but you know it's basically the M stands for metrics, the E stands for economic buyer. Then you've got two Ds one for decision process, one for decision criteria. The I stands for implicating the pain, the problem that you're solving. The first C is the champion who runs the deal. The second C is the competitor and then, if you want, you can put the P in the middle MedPick. And then you get the paper process. Which is very, very important when you're selling things to banks is to understand the detail of that. So in a nutshell, that's MedPick, but I could run a five-day workshop on teaching someone how to use it.
Speaker 2:No sure, and maybe that should also be for those that really like to go into depth. That could be the next step after this podcast, that they contact you guys and just get a more deeper understanding. But what I'm interesting is it is a methodology, but why does this framework particularly works well for fintech companies?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, so it's basically an excellent framework for enterprise deals. Anything that's big, long, complex sales cycle that has multiple people you're selling to. This is a very excellent framework. There's tons of other frameworks out there, like Bant and Slips and Scotchman and Miller, Sandler, Millerheim and all that kind of stuff. There's tons of other frameworks Sandler, Miller-Hyman, all that kind of stuff. There's tons of other frameworks. But this framework is used by all the big, successful tech companies like Sprinklr, MongoDB, AppDynamics, Snowflake I mean you name. Almost every very successful software company is using Medic today, so that's why it's super of to integrate into your sales process.
Speaker 4:Also just to sort of add to that. I think you know a lot of the challenges come in. Sales is I guess one of the things is a common language is making certain management on site all the time right, or at least there's, there's, there's a, there's a vent or pipe that shows people what's going on and this is you know what's what medic provides. It allows, uh, not just the, the sales team, but also marketing and customer success, the success, the revenue operations team, to really fully understand where we are, what we're doing and how we, how we progressing or how we aren't progressing right, which allows the revenue team to accelerate deals. But also, because you're asking specific questions at you know specific points in the sales process, like early on in the sales process, you're able to shorten sales cycles.
Speaker 4:So, as an example, we aren't going to go out and just randomly give a demo. We first want to validate our champion is our champion, and then we also, before we even start going down that path of demos, we want to have a conversation with the economic buyer and see exactly what their pain points are and whether that pain is solvable inside our solution, and then we go down the next step. So we always qualify and always asking questions, and this ultimately leads us to sort of that improved consistency and enhanced sales execution, and then that communication that allows us to start pushing forward on the most important deals right.
Speaker 2:So would that mean that your sales pipes are also aligned with all the steps in the MetPick?
Speaker 3:It's slightly different. So if I try and explain the difference to you, your sales process is like a map If you were going to drive from. London to Amsterdam. There's a bunch of towns you have to go through. That's your sales process, right? And it's like a map. Now, your qualification methodology like medic is more like a compass or a GPS. If you get lost or you miss one of the towns, you end up in the wrong town.
Speaker 3:Your medic or your gps will allow you to get back into the sales process very correctly, right so it creates uh, it creates a way of cleaning your, your pipeline so that there's not a lot of messy stuff in there. It qualifies stuff very carefully so that you always know what you're doing. And if you think about most pipelines, if they're not using medic or something very experienced like this, the deals in the beginning of the pipeline are quite easy to understand because that's all the new leads, the new opportunities we're trying to get. The ones at the end where you've already sent the invoices and you've already sent the, you know you've done all the work right and you've got through procurement and you're talking to them, those are easy to understand. You can predict that those are like 95% going to close.
Speaker 3:It's all the stuff in the middle where salespeople are saying, oh, that's 50% likely, that's 60, that's 70. That stuff is all just in the fintech space at the moment. For people who are not using Medic, that's more of a wish list rather than reality. Medic allows you to qualify those deals so that they become much, much more likely to close, much more accurate, so that you don't have a huge mess of stuff in your pipeline that keeps slipping from one quarter to the next, never closes, wastes everyone's time and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So it's actually a tool to focus and to calibrate, if you want, your sales teams. Now you speak a lot about enterprise sales and I get that. When you actually compare an enterprise as a bank, it is definitely an enterprise. But a lot of the fintechs nowadays they also go B2C and somehow also B2B2C. So to the smaller organizations within the industry, does it make sense? On the C.
Speaker 3:Does it make sense on theC?
Speaker 2:and does it make sense? On the middle part, think about payment institutions that are very young and so on and so forth.
Speaker 3:So for B2C Medic doesn't make sense at all. You wouldn't use it. It's a marketing play. You have to get very good at marketing and very good at product to sell B2C. You only use Medic for B2b, for enterprise deals that are complex, that take 6 to 12 months to close, that require me to sell to like the business person who likes it, then the technical person who needs to validate it, then the procurement team, then the ceo, then the cfo who needs to sign off on it. If it's a big, messy deal like that, you need medic. If it's a very quick deal where someone signs and pays on a credit card, you don't need it at all. It's a marketing.
Speaker 2:No, no, that makes sense. That was I was thinking as well. Now we, as the connector, we are focusing a lot in 2025 on, on all the things that. Well, I'll reform myself. What we see is a lot of the companies that we help. They're world famous in the place where they're coming from, but they're rather unknown to the place they want to scale to. So a lot of the work that we do as the connector, we help them to get brand exposure, to help them with the first steps of sales, because we realize that if the brand is unknown, if people don't know the product, there is not even a conversation. It just blocks, blocks off. So how does MEDIC participate with this type of thinking?
Speaker 3:So MEDIC wouldn't help you with that at all. I mean, if you're unknown, you're unknown. So in our consultancy we can only really help scale-ups. So someone who's got stuff in their pipeline already, they've got some revenue, they've got some product market fit, then you can start applying this. But if in early stage product awareness and stuff that's like something that's more like marketing and relationships and stuff like that, you can't use medic to build that.
Speaker 2:So it's literally in a moment where things are falling into pieces, where, when using your earlier words, james, you said it's very hard to get from zero to one and then from one to five. That's also tough. I guess the medic starts to kick in between the second part of sales. Is that correct?
Speaker 4:There's also, if you think about it, you know it's also, you know, just know, make it a bit a bit simpler for for the, the listeners out there, you know you are a founder, you maybe um, or scaling up, uh, and now you're thinking you might have raised, you might have done a series a 10 million, 20 million, whatever that is and you're thinking, okay, um, I need, I need to hire in a sales team, I need to do a lot of different things, but the first thing is you obviously need to make certain you have that right infrastructure set up internally in order to make certain that the team you hire in actually can perform right.
Speaker 4:And this is when we start, and this is sort of when James and myself, sort of when we start getting involved right, moving away from founder-led sales to enterprise-led sales and building up that leadership philosophy, that culture also. Obviously you know that let's call it in inverted commas that infrastructure or that methodology, that framework that allows this team to pick up the reins and start moving forward right. And Medic is the wraparound. Thatames, obviously, and the navigation system that james is alluding to, um, obviously, things like sales processes, etc. Need to be part of that as well yeah.
Speaker 3:So maybe, if I explain it in a slightly different way as well, it'll be also resonate with other people. When, when you, when you want to scale your, your sales organization, a lot of people will go and hire. They'll raise money and then they'll go and hire a bunch of salespeople because those people know the companies they're selling to or they understand the market or all that kind of stuff. That's what they'll do, right, but the first step anyone should do, even if you haven't raised money, is you need to write a sales playbook that says like I would say multiple playbooks even that says like this is how we sell, this is who we sell to, this is what we're selling.
Speaker 3:This is the value of our product, the business value, not the features and benefits and all that stuff the business value. So you write the sales playbook and you can use Medic to write that as well. And then, once you've written the sales playbook, then you can use that sales playbook to go and hire your team. You use the sales playbook to onboard, can use that sales playbook to go and hire your team. You use the sales playbook to onboard your team to train them, to teach them how to sell all that kind of stuff. Right, and and most people don't do that they go and hire random sales people and then just hope it's going to work out. There's no way to train them, to enable them to teach them about the product, to teach them how to sell it's and, and that's why there's so much failure, especially in the fintech space yeah, so so you're talking about common language, almost right, and yeah, and sort of framework also.
Speaker 4:It's also like um, you know, it's also really important to to understand that. Um, you know, getting this type of framework in or this type of philosophy, this type of culture into organization isn't like. It isn't a training day away, an an away training day, or you know, a couple of sessions of training and, hey-ho, everyone is brainwashed and now we're off to the races. And you know this is going to happen, right?
Speaker 2:Because you know it's not like that right.
Speaker 4:It requires in order to implement something like this. It requires, you know, really strong leadership, uh, across the organization, across the revenue organization and across, you know, the, the whole organization. Um, there's complexities involved in uh, in implementing it and making certain sort of the pro the sales process, links to the, the qualification framework, links to the qualification framework and also, as we all know, in sales. You know, sometimes it's difficult to implement these type of things or embed these type of things, because what's happening next quarter or next week is, you know, the immediate results. Sort of culture is sort of you know is around, so you need to be able to sort of manage that and lead that as you, as you start integrating it into your routines and you know, um, it works. So the thing is, you just need to step back. Sometimes they say, you know, the game we're playing is is this and this is what we're doing in order to win at that game. We implement a medic or something else and then live that and be obsessed with it and sort of drive that forward.
Speaker 2:No, no, I agree, you know, guys, time is passing by quickly, especially when you talk about your passion. So I just want to get one more word from you guys before we close this podcast, and that should be a one-word advice to any founders in the scale up space, and then afterwards also tell us how to find you guys, where to contact you, because I'm sure we touched upon a lot of souls now that all want to know more about how to get successful in sales. So what would be your word, richard?
Speaker 4:about how to get successful in sales. So what would be your word, richard? So the one word for me would be have a blueprint. If you don't have a blueprint, find a blueprint and don't rest until you have that blueprint. Then imitate it and then, later on, innovate.
Speaker 2:Cool, what about?
Speaker 4:you.
Speaker 2:James.
Speaker 3:So for me it's about. This is specifically targeted at founders or CEOs. You have to own sales Like be 1,000% responsible for it. You can't outsource it until you've written your sales playbook and you're scaling and you've hit five or 10 million revenue. You have to own it 100% and you have to make sure that everything is working perfectly before you hand it over to someone else that's a nice one.
Speaker 2:And how do people contact you guys?
Speaker 3:uh, you can find me, james dawson, on linkedin or just humbletechnologycouk, but linkedin is usually the best all right.
Speaker 2:And what about you, richard?
Speaker 4:same thing linkedin or drop. Uh, drop me an email, richard at humbletechnologycouk, if you want to drop James. James is just James at humbletechnologycouk.
Speaker 2:That's easy.
Speaker 4:We're super happy to talk to anyone and collaborate with anyone, so please reach out.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thank you both for joining this podcast. Thank you also for the audience to stay tuned and let's follow more, and we're going to get more of these insights in 2025. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Brilliant. Thank you, Kurt.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connected Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to wwwjointhekonnectedcom or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.