Always Be Qualifying

MEDDIC, MEDDPICC

By: Darius Lahoutifard

Narrated by: Samantha Novak

Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

In the past few years, companies large and small have called on Darius Lahoutifard to get help with their non-performing sales teams. The described symptoms are different from one company to another. Some suffer from shortages in revenue. Others complain about unreliable forecasts, with deals slipping constantly from one quarter to another before being lost or even abandoned a few quarters later. Some CEOs notice unproductive sales teams with an unusually high number of non-quota-carrying people needed in the sales force, hitting the bottom line hard.

Darius noticed that all these symptoms are related to the same illness: the inability to qualify. Since most sales teams put in place organizations, including SDR (Sales Development Representatives) or BDR (Business Development Representatives), who qualify leads for account managers, there is a wrong, unstated assumption, widely spread, that once a lead is qualified, the inside sales or field sales will have to work on them until they are won or lost.

Ongoing qualification is often the issue. Qualification is not a binary step of the sales process. Qualification is a mindset and a habit to apply all along the sales process, from the first call to closing.

This book covers both the why and the how of sales qualification. The author was an early sales leader at PTC, where the MEDDIC methodology took shape. He is also the founder of MEDDIC Academy, the first platform to bring the qualification methodology online. This book describes the MEDDIC (also known as MEDDPICC) sales methodology in-depth. This is not a book of theories, research, or academic concepts, but it is pure execution, techniques with practical recipes.

At a high level, MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) is a checklist that helps sales professionals to reveal the gaps in an opportunity and to execute properly to fill those gaps and close the deal or drop it early.

©2020 Darius Lahoutifard (P)2022 Darius Lahoutifard

Content OK - Narration, not so much!

The content was not bad, although quite generic. I think I got 1 or 2 nuggets that I can use. I'm guessing that I could have gotten them those from a Google search vs. spending a credit. TONS of 3-letter acronyms (why). - The reader was almost unbearable. The hard S's could have easily been fixed in the editing. Not her fault.

Very good book, unlistenable narration

Before you purchase this title, be sure you listen to the sample. I should have. I've watched videos featuring Darius Lahoutifard speaking and it absolutely baffles me why he didn't narrate his own book (as so many other business related book authors do.) It would have been far more preferable to this performance.

The content of the book is very good, filled with most of what you need to know about MEDDIC/MEDDPICC. I paid to purchase this audiobook to "read" it over the course of a long drive. And believe me, it was a long drive.

As others have noted, the sibilance (S-sound) is so pronounced in the course of this title's three hours, it becomes distracting and I cannot understand how it ever passed the publisher and QA without sending it back for the simple fix it requires. Much of this book sounds like Parseltongue.

There's the endemic shift in proper emphasis in word pronunciation. Or, as John Whitney put it in "View From the Top," the narrator "put the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle." Again, it is distracting -- an undesirable quality in an audiobook. Examples: so-LU-shun becomes so-lu-SHUN, communi-CAY-shun becomes communicay-SHUN, and situ-AY-shun becomes situay-SHUN. emPHASsis, sylLABle. The publisher and QA let this pass, too.

Once you get past that issue, you are faced with a non-stop barrage of vowel substitutions; short-e sounds are replaced by short-a. This is actually worse than the sibilance problem. Example: step becomes stapp, prospect becomes prossPACT, and process becomes prosSASSS(ssssssssssssss).

Then there are the mispronounced words. For example, criterion becomes criteriAAAAHHHN. I thought it may have been a cultural thing, so I researched it. Nope. It was simply pronounced as it's spelled and no one in QA caught that, either.

We are constantly told (warned) how AI is going to destroy so many jobs. This performance is the poster child for why audiobooks will soon be "narrated" by AI voices trained by people who can speak the English language properly and effectively. This makes me happy and sad because I don't really want some AI "voice" to channel the incredible performance of Frank Muller. On the other hand, Muller remains the gold standard in listenable, engaging, and pitch-perfect narration, whether fiction or non-fiction. This performance is the complete opposite.

I've no doubt someone, somewhere will consider this review to be mean-spirited and it is most certainly not. I've been listening to audio books for over 25 years now and I know what "good" sounds like. This ain't it. When the publishing company and QA approve performances like this, they communicate to narrators that their work is acceptable. They then become part of the problem.

Performances like this are not acceptable, even if the price was $0.00 because the three hours it takes to get through this comes with its own cost. No one wins and the quality of audiobooks goes down and the whole mess makes the argument in favor of the coming AI narration. Not good. Not good at all.

Audio

(S) sound is to strong on the audio. Recommend they run through a filter. Would love to listen to it.