Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. We're here with Julien Cerutti. I don't know if I pronounced that one correctly.

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. Always. Always. It's a running joke.

Janis Zech: I always pronounce names very poorly. Julien, great to have you. Welcome on the show.

Julien Cerutti: Thank you. Really excited to be here and excited about the topic we're gonna get into.

Janis Zech: Absolutely. We're gonna go deep on sales methodologies and qualification frameworks today. But before we do that, you know, who are you? What do you do?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. So my name is Julien Cerutti. I work at Meltwater. I'm the VP of Revenue Strategy. And so for me, it's basically looking at the holistic customer journey and architecting go-to-market initiatives, programs around that.

Janis Zech: Awesome. I mean, we actually met through Theth, right, who we had here on the show talking about RevOps and FP&A. He recommended to reach out, and now we're here actually two weeks later. So that's awesome. We love that. You know, I always say, like, choosing a sales methodology is easy, implementing it is really, really, really hard. So maybe that's the kickoff for our topic today. Just went through this process. So today we wanna talk about how did you find the right methodology for you? What were the steps in introducing those and how do you implement them and how do you make it a living project? So maybe let's kick off with why did you actually wanna do it in the first place? Why did you feel you need a sales methodology?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is just contextually where Meltwater was at the given time. We had a new CRO step in and similar to a lot of companies, we started to say, we're going to start moving up market, we're going to be focusing on the enterprise. And as we were looking at basically redesigning the enterprise go-to-market motion, I just felt like it was that time and place to say we really need to put our foot down and say there is a sales methodology and there's a consistent way for us to create operational learning as an organization to really develop. And so when I spoke with my CRO, I just said, you know, this is gonna be something that we have to hit on front and center. And a lot of that was basically a byproduct of it was a bit of a wild west, or what you call hero ball, where you just had top performers and everything. So it just seemed like as we were growing as an organization, it was a maturity thing in terms of just stepping into something much more structural as an organization.

Janis Zech: Yeah, and then I think you mentioned, I mean, you've been working on this for a bunch of months. When did you kick off the process? How long has it been so far?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah, no, it's been like two, three years now since the very beginning stages of it. And so, you know, I initially, when I came into enterprise, I actually adopted the MEDDIC methodology, and I am well versed in that and knew the ins and outs of it. But then as we were looking at the go-to-market design for enterprise and thinking about future implications for Meltwater, you know, I obviously wanted to see what else was out there. And so one of the big things that we were thinking about was the GRR and thinking about the entire customer journey. And I think because it was about rearchitecting the entire customer journey, it started to speak to me in terms of a holistic way of, hey, if we're gonna rebuild what we're thinking about in the enterprise, let's not just zero in on the sales methodology. Let's look at an architecture that makes sense that can also really influence and impact our GRR because that was one of the key things that we wanted to drive with it.

Janis Zech: And what did you end up choosing in terms of methodology?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. And so we chose Winning by Design, so I'm sure some of the listeners are familiar with that, and selecting SPICED as part of that framework. And the key thing was that holistic architecture, which in many ways, it was selected, and I think there's still implications as to things I can build in the future that are already preset there, saying, hey, we already have those fields in Salesforce, so now I can integrate and provide that information to product marketing or hand that to the onboarding team for CS to do x, y, and z. So it just seemed to be very well rounded in terms of a holistic architecture. And I think, you know, a lot of the trends has been the focus on the post-sale and how you need to focus on NRR and everything. I just felt like it was very tightly integrated in terms of having that holistic focus versus us just primarily focusing on increased conversion, ASP, you know, all of those things on the sales side.

Janis Zech: I'm curious about, like, you know, that you've been on it for such a long time now, and I wonder if we could go back a bit to the beginning. You know, how that actually worked out — starting to talk about SPICED. I think there's this discussion that you have more on the frontline level, you know, individual contributors, kind of getting their buy-in, but then there's also the managers, sales leadership. How did that go down?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. So, you know, at Meltwater, we're a fairly large organization. I think our sales force is around six to seven hundred people, seven fifty, right? So you have to think holistically, like how do we get our champions? How do we have influence that people don't think of this as flavor of the month, right? It's like, oh, well, some of us know MEDDIC and down market, lot of us like BANT. Like why are we going to take this head on, right? So I'm sure it's what everyone else is thinking for the most part, where you have to have executive buy-in. You have to have the executives ready to go and understand what it is and speak the language. And then the bottoms-up approach, which with Winning by Design, a lot of the stuff we did in designing the programming was developing playbooks and motions, but it was essentially co-built by being very selective around key champions around the global ecosystem — sales, CS, and so on. And so if you're co-building with a lot of the champions in that broader ecosystem that you know have leverage, have that presence in certain offices, super areas, and so on, then that helps create a lot of the adoption. And so, you know, I pulled out all of those levers, and it's not to say it was the most perfect thing ever, and then everything changed overnight. And I think what I'm experiencing now two, three years later is the continued evolution and iteration that needs to occur and looking at the data and deciding, like, what is the next step? What are we seeing to improve upon that? Touching on the frontline manager piece — that's like, I have a lot of commentary in that. I joke, like, if I was gonna write a book around go-to-market, it would be about how the frontline manager makes or breaks, especially for a large organization like Meltwater where you've got the entire global ecosystem. Right? We have offices from Tokyo all the way to LA and Europe and so on. Right? So the thing is, we can educate, we can coach, we can teach, we can give all of the enablement full three-sixty programming, and I'll talk about probably operational cadence in a bit because that's just absolutely significant because we want to create habits. But the truth is someone can look at one document and the other person can look at the same document and interpret that differently. And so even though you said, hey, we've created a unified way of understanding how we look at our customers and how we evaluate deals and we break it down to modular components, every manager looks at it differently, they coach differently, and then the outcomes become different. And that's something I'm still constantly battling, which I'm happy to talk about too.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I love that. I love that also, like, the piece about how things can make or break it with the frontline managers. Definitely, I think also our experience with introducing a tool like Weflow — it can be change managed, and you need to have champions in your organization. You need to convince the frontline managers as well. I'm curious about the cadence piece because I think that's such an important point on introducing this, particularly with the frontline managers. Right? Because they own some of those cadences. So if they don't start using SPICED in your case during those meetings, then it's never really gonna work out. So yeah, curious, like, what you did to incentivize that, or if you did, or maybe the opposite of incentive.

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. I'll kind of break it down. I mean, one of the key things in that rollout was actually designing a frontline manager playbook, and a core pillar of that was basically introducing the concept of operational rhythm, operational cadence, and saying, we're gonna look at your week, we're gonna look at your month, your quarter, and structurally, this is how you need to approach your business. And, you know, there's something called deal inspections. In the past, there would be a lot of forecast calls where the inspection would happen in the forecast calls. But maybe you guys have experienced this too. Right? The forecast call turns into, hey, so what's up with that deal? Okay. And what's the next? Okay. Great. Next. Right? There's no real inspection. There's not the time nor the calmness, and then the room is too full. And everyone is sitting silently on the side waiting for their turn, looking at the pool and typing away.

Janis Zech: That's me.

Julien Cerutti: You know? I'm sure everyone's laughing at that point because it's just like, that's exactly it. Right? So it's like one of the simplest things was just saying there is a separate call that should be around deal inspection. You should choose, on this criteria, you should choose these type of accounts, these type of reps. You need to have everyone come together and coach and learn together. There's simple things like Three and Me from Lindsay Byatt at Winning by Design — it's like, before you become the savior as a manager, you first ask, well, Philipp, what do you think? Janis, what do you think? Before I answer. Because you wanna get that collaboration. You want people critically thinking about things. So anyway, with the cadence, we were just introducing you need to create this, and what we wanted to do was create habit-forming structure to the organization. That says, this is what I do. It's just typical, right? Every Tuesday, I do this for an hour or two hours or whatever it is that they do structurally. So that was some of the operational cadence stuff that we brought into the organization. And again, you know, that's where a couple months later, you ask your frontline manager and it's like, are you — oh, well, I do it on my one-on-ones. You know? And then you start getting that unified approach, and then it starts to dismantle. And then you start going back to iterating again saying, alright, how do we solve for this? How do we create scoreboards and rankings and anything else that we can modify and or tweak in the ecosystem that would ask a manager to say, hey, I need to look deeper into this. Right? And what's really validating is that those who have taken on a lot of the methodology — and, you know, I have deal scoring that's tied into Salesforce, so I could look at someone's pipeline, I know the average score and what's the lowest score, if we have economic buyers engaged, all of those things — some of the best performing managers right now are the ones that are champions of it. And their scores are super high, their conversions are way better than anyone else year over year. There's someone in EMEA that's had, like, seventeen percent, announced thirty-one percent from Q2 to Q2. You know? It's substantial. And then you have other ones that are flat or kinda declining, and then you ask, and then there's a breakdown somewhere in that process. So it's all validating. And even the deal scores I have in Salesforce, the higher the score goes up, the higher the conversion rate. We've looked at all the historical analysis. We have everything. So it's funny. The data is compelling, but you still find the cracks. And that's, you know, maybe where I could talk about 4DX and lead measures and other things that we're trying to do with it.

Janis Zech: I mean, as you know, Philipp and I are building Weflow that automates Salesforce data capture and then drives insights and stuff like that. Right? Like, obviously, super curious about your implementation in Salesforce. So can you tell us a bit more, like, how did you operationalize SPICED in Salesforce?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. So a lot of this was thinking about that whole three-sixty design. Like, I can't just roll out and say, hey, we're doing SPICED. You got a couple training sessions. Here's a deal inspection sheet. Go after it. So operational cadence was one of those things, but the other thing was it needs to live in our ecosystem. There needs to be data to support it. So deal scoring actually came from the fact that I used a lot of the MEDDIC playbook of win, loss, and slip deals. And what I did was it was initially more of a manual scrub. I wanted to get a sample size of deals, and I actually just sent it out to reps and had a list of questions, checkboxes, scores, everything like that, and said, give me a really deep dive into this deal as to why we won, slipped, or lost it. And then I collected all of that data and started to deeply analyze it. And then based upon that, I created a weighted scoring of SPICED and MEDDIC essentially. But then I went to the RevOps team and IT to basically say, I want to put this into Salesforce and start building it. So I had a lot of good momentum behind it because there was adoption. People were excited about the methodology. They liked the scoring, and it was really a pragmatic design in terms of like, hey, if we can have deal scores, like imagine the implications for the future. And to me, I said it's a bit of a watershed moment because it really allows for true adoption because now we have data that shows reps are doing it, they're scoring it, we're weighting it, all of those aspects are happening. So I think there was just a part of it was momentum. It's like one of my things that I always use in my arsenal is like, keep momentum. If you lose momentum on projects, it just dissipates. So, you know, it was about moving super fast. So when I collected that data, I moved as fast as I could to just create that wave of momentum, everyone talking about it, you know, that kind of thing.

Janis Zech: So maybe just to recap on the implementation side. Right? So ensuring that you have champions, especially on the frontline manager, executive buy-in, obviously champions on the rep level. Right? Illustrate success. So that's super important. Then secondly, being able to properly enable and train on a recurring basis. Thirdly, that you capture the data and you make the data actionable. What I find really interesting here is that you started with analyzing the data first to then decide how to implement it into the CRM. Right? Like, starting with kind of win-loss analysis, slip deals, push deals. Right? Like, really understanding what that is. And any insights there that you found?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. I'll tell you some of those insights. So, you know, I come from a sales background, I've been an AE, and part of me was just thinking like, how do I sell this in many ways? How do I get people really fired up and excited? So I said, I'm going to do this analysis, and I can give it back to the organization and say, hey, mid-market, hey, enterprise, these are the reasons why you win deals, why you slip deals, this is why you're losing. And going into a written document to an AE and saying, this isn't generic. This isn't a book you can read. This is about real Meltwater data that tells you why you're winning, slipping, and losing deals, and the advantages you can have having that context, and what you should do moving forward. So I wanted to create something really compelling in that. So that was kind of bundled with, and we're gonna launch deal scoring. And so now you have a modular approach to look at it, and, you know, the outcomes — I'm sure many companies see the same thing. Surprise, surprise, we win deals when we have really strong champions. They're the domino effect of getting access to power, the economic buyer, and information, which is basically the decision process, decision criteria. That's the main thing. And it was a bit of — I have other things like executive interlock for enterprise. Like, you want executives engaged beyond just the economic buyer, but you want, you know, your CEO or someone in the C-suite engaged with it. And so it incrementally increases the score if you have these other attributes, but the champion is the centerpiece. For slip deals, it's all no surprise. Right? Slip deals, guess what? Decision process. That was the score that just had the biggest margin of change when we were losing or slipping deals. And then the reason we're losing deals was decision criteria. We actually didn't really document and synthesize exactly what they were buying and creating value differentiation and saying, why us? So those were the big headlines. And what's funny is I first started in enterprise, and then I did it in mid-market and SMB, the data was almost entirely the same. So I just said, hey, this is a Meltwater use case. And, you know, I'm sure it's pretty universal what I just said, but I had the real Meltwater data to support it.

Janis Zech: It might be universal, but it's very different to go to a rep and basically tell that story and tell this is why it matters and tell that to the frontline managers. And then basically what they are thinking is like, oh, look. This is not some fluff stuff that people tell me and put on top just to control me. This is something that can advance me in my career. This is something that can help me make more money. Right? Like, this is really —

Julien Cerutti: You're doing the sales pitch right now.

Janis Zech: Exactly. And so I think this is a really, really important thing because it really starts in the head. Right? Like, really starts in the head. Like, the people need to see that it's not just for the sake of creating a sales methodology. It's really to basically become better sellers, better managers, more successful. Right?

Julien Cerutti: Right. And it was important for me to ground it in the realest way possible, which is like, I used real Meltwater data. This is not like, hey, Julien read a book, or like, our CRO read something, and now everyone's running for it, you know, that kind of thing. Because I do feel companies sometimes have that jaded response of leadership decided this out of nowhere, or whatever it may be. Right? So I just wanted it to be as grounded as possible.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I really like that. On that, actually, I have a follow-up question. So how transparent is that? So is that something where you actively and more proactively try to create a lot of transparency around the different SPICED metrics that you track, calculate, and cover? So can any rep sort of look into that, how people are doing?

Julien Cerutti: Okay. I try to make it as transparent as possible, and there's still iterations of that, but there's dashboards that give full exposure to different teams, managers across the world. One dashboard is basically every frontline manager in the enterprise — I just have them all ranked, real-time data, commit stage versus evaluate. Given the fact that I told you champion, economic buyer, decision criteria are the needle movers, I actually have that live data in the dashboard. And like, we're gonna track towards this, which maybe is a good transition with the 4DX stuff that I'd like to talk about. But yeah, I'm trying to give as much visibility, scoreboards, rankings, so people have a sense of that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Actually, that's what I tried to do — little segue into 4DX. You know, I think, Julien, please just take it away.

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. So one of the things right now — I have that data in my hands and I knew exactly why we're winning, slipping, and losing — I wanted to find a way to continue adoption and programs to create excitement and so on. This idea actually came from a board member that we have, and he utilized it at another company that he was running. And it's called 4DX. It's the Four Disciplines of Execution. There's a book and a whole methodology around it. But to overtly simplify it, it's really about creating a wildly important goal and then creating lead measures around that. And so the whole premise is it's very noisy. Go-to-market's really noisy, and you've got so many competing priorities. Your manager's saying this, your CRO's saying this, your customers are screaming x, y, z. How do I manage all that noise? And that goes from an IC all the way to managers, to VPs, and so on. So the idea of wildly important goal is that I'm gonna spend an exorbitant amount of time on this one thing and ensure that it executes well. And so what you do is if you 4DX something, your Monday morning meeting where you all have your team — no matter what, those first ten, fifteen minutes, whatever it is, will always be 4DX. It doesn't matter if a building's on fire. We're gonna talk about 4DX. It's gonna be a priority, and you just cascade that down. And so what you can do is say, hey, we're gonna increase our conversion by ten percent. That's our wildly important goal because it's gonna create this x, y, z revenue. Right? So that's my wildly important goal. Similar to OKRs, I'm gonna have that trickle down and ultimately goes down to a frontline manager where then I'll say, okay, your goal is that you need to increase the champion score from here to there that would actually create the conversion rates that we need. So what are going to be activities that would actually move that number from a one to a two, a two to a three? And so that's what we call lead measures. Those are inputs. You know, some people do the framework of inputs and outputs. What are the inputs that would make the output of that moving up? So then you actually have to design it with your team, and you have conversations, which is already great in itself. Right? Hey, guys, how would we increase our champion criteria score? And sparring that out with the team and designing it and then just saying, okay, I'm gonna create a simple scoreboard every week. I just wanna make sure we're creating this new habit. And if we can create that habit weekly and you know your manager's gonna ask you every Monday morning, how many of those did you do, or did you follow through on this? Then it starts to create habits. And now I do it in every single deal, and then it starts increasing the champion score. So I'm simplifying all of the concepts around it just to kind of get an easy way of digesting that. But then now there's something that's called lead measures, 4DX, and managers start their calls and say, let's focus on these lead measures because ultimately that should increase our deal scores, which ultimately increases our conversion, which ultimately gets us more revenue.

Janis Zech: And is this specifically, like, the cascading of the KPI — I could just call it a KPI tree. Right? You have the basic top KPI, then you have the leading measures that lead into those. Is that something that you and RevOps decide on? Is that a discussion? How do you come up with it?

Julien Cerutti: The wildly important goal would be something like I'd sit with my CRO and be like, hey, I'm looking at the enterprise. Like, what do we want as our wildly important goal? Then there would be discussions of what is the key lever here? The problem is, you start going into, well, we can do these sales plays and we need to accelerate our pipeline, we need to do this. It's like, okay, that's whirlwind. That's what the book would call it. Right? That's everything. You can't do everything. What's the one thing you're gonna do that you know is going to move the needle? And so I love the focus of it. Admittedly, after I had read that book and digested all of it, it was like, this will be part of my playbook. Even if it's not exactly to a tee, I think I will always utilize this to say, I need a groundswell of just everyone coming together and focusing on this one thing and making new habits form in the org, and then you fold it back into the whirlwind once you see, like, people know how to build champions here. No problem. Right? So that's part of the iteration, right, of just learning, bringing new ideas and concepts in because I'm sure you guys know there's no silver bullet. You can read some book out there and be like, oh my gosh. But you gotta bring your own secret sauce to it and bring the pieces, know the culture, and figure it out.

Janis Zech: Yep. Hundred percent. Is that the full 4DX? I think so — we have the focus, we have the leading measures. Yeah. We just talked about a scoreboard before. Feel like it's part of it.

Julien Cerutti: Kind of keeping it condensed for you. But yeah, there's a scoreboard — the idea is, like, I actually don't want people building complex ecosystems of scoreboards. Like, it's gotta be simple, back of the napkin. I should show you the scoreboard, and it should take you five seconds to know who's doing their job, who's not, kind of thing. You know?

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think this is so compelling because what you're basically alluding to is, like, change is just really hard. Habits is just really hard. Right? It's not something you say once and then it just happens. And I really like this term of wildly important goal. I don't know, I just heard it the first time, but it resonates with me because it's like, better than just a very important North Star.

Julien Cerutti: The north star. Right? Like, yeah. It's kind of the north star metric. Yeah. And it was funny. You initially hear it, and you're like, wildly important goal. Are you serious? Like, yeah. What do you mean? You know? But like, as you start sitting with it and structuring, you're like, okay, there's a lot more here. So yeah. It's been a really interesting exercise so far.

Janis Zech: Wow. I think we can, you know, talk a lot more about it. And I think, you know, like, with this 4DX, all the things that you talked about before — creating transparency, using your own data to build trust and really a culture that truly believes in it and loops everyone in and gets their buy-in, creating and using those cadences for accountability. Right? I think it's all these parts and aspects of it, and all of them need to be executed and focused on. Otherwise, I don't think initiatives like this one work out. Right? I mean, like SPICED — I just counted six letters. So, you know, six mistakes. Like, you can do it just with different interpretations of what the methodology actually stands for, and then different teams, like, okay, what is a compelling event? So all these definitions that you need to get grounded — like you said, I think is so, so important. You know, moving also into 2025 and beyond, I'm curious, like, has AI changed anything for you in regards to SPICED? Is AI filling out all the SPICED fields now for you automatically and no one actually thinks about it anymore, or how does that work?

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. So, you know, we are using Gong for conversational intelligence and we've kind of built those trackers, which I'm sure a lot of people are doing with MEDDIC or SPICED and so on. I am thinking about the future implications of how I can augment a sales rep. And we're talking about different frameworks of how we're going to approach it. And it could be from creating some matrices in terms of high impact and low hanging fruit and all of that in terms of the holistic customer journey. But another part of me just says, what if I just looked at a sales rep or a CSM and said, what are all the jobs to be done around a CSM? And then strip those out and say, how can I create teammates, agentic workflows, assistive AIs that would basically go co-create, build programs around them? And so what we've done already with this program is I've created a deal inspection bot. Right? It knows why we win, why we lose, why we slip. It knows our scoring methodology that's all weighted, and it's a MEDDIC and SPICED coach, and it will give you a score, which a rep can say, hey, my champion's a three. I got this, this, and this, and it'll say, your champion isn't a three. You don't have these things. So it's actually pressure testing, which was a big thing I focused on in designing that. So that's exactly what I want a manager to do, right? It's like, pressure test that. Is the champion a three? Is the economic buyer engaged? I don't see that here, right? And it's been, you know, initial stages as we iterate, it keeps improving, and I've been really impressed by the fact of — you know, I'll be like, oh, you should just reach out to the economic buyer. Like, actually, my champion would lose their mind. You know, I tested that kind of stuff. I know what a rep would say, and be like, no, champion said do not reach out. And then it'll be like, oh, okay. I understand. Here are alternative ways of how you can get to build up your champion, create a champion deck to engage the economic buyer, you know, and or you can have your executive reach out via email, you know, all of these alternative paths of how you can execute on it. So I'm building the deal inspection, and then we're just talking about like, do we have other teammates, or do I fold more concepts in, like value justification, ROI calculators, all of those type of things. So right now, we're basically designing the infrastructure and the background, and there's all the discussion around build versus buy. But right now, I definitely wanna just kinda build and create points of view. I'm not sure where we're going to land.

Janis Zech: One thing I wanna add on. Right? So I think one of the beautiful things about AI — and like, I mean, Weflow, right, we also do conversation intelligence and automatic field updates and things like this. But one of the beautiful things I find when we talk about what to do with AI is it also gives you this ability to connect data points a lot easier, like on a much larger scale. You know, when you talk about SPICED, right, and another big thing is just looking at activities. Right? Like, how many meetings, response time, interactions, all of the things that are also discussed outside of those six letters. And then sort of connecting them back to what was actually discussed in regards to SPICED and bring that all together. And I think this is one of the things where AI is so powerful in actually enabling you to do that, which before was a super manual process.

Julien Cerutti: Yeah. And we know activities are such a strong leading indicator of whether a deal is moving forward, velocity of a deal. So I love all the agentic workflows. I want more data to basically really unpack it. So there's organizational learning, but also at a rep level, they start seeing those signals. There is this other piece of — I do want reps to look at a list of questions and sit down and think about them and answer them. In an agentic workflow, like I said, you don't have to fill out anything. The score automatically comes from conversations and activities logged in Salesforce, and your champion's a three or it's a two. But there is that deal inspection thing where there are questions, and I do want them to reflect. And so I feel like I'm gonna have to hit some wall or I have some time where I'm gonna have to think about what does that balance look like in the future.

Janis Zech: So I feel like this is gonna be our next episode with you, you know, where we come together because, right, like, we've seen probably now hundreds of Salesforce setups, and I think the reality is the data is very siloed. Right? You have the activity data somewhere. You have the conversation data somewhere. You have the CRM data. You might have some web data. You have some contact data somewhere else. And so we've been — actually, a big initiative for us has been, like, how do you bring this all together into one data engine so that you can carry it and you can structure