What is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC (for metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, and champion) is a sales qualification framework. The goal is to focus on the prospects most likely to become customers while not clogging up your sales funnel with those who are unlikely to convert. MEDDIC is especially suited to B2B sales and other situations with complicated buying journeys.

MEDDIC sales process history

If you read online, there seems to be a bit of controversy around who developed MEDDIC. Three names are associated with its creation: Jack Napoli, Dick Dunkel, and John McMahon.

Some articles claim Jack Napoli and Dick Dunkel created MEDDIC in the 1990s while working at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC). Others claim it was the brainchild of John McMahon, a legendary salesperson who is a Board Member at MongoDB and Snowflake.

However, Monica Evans, who was working in sales at PTC during the formation of the MEDDIC sales framework, says the truth is they were all involved in its development. Here’s how she puts it:

“I believe John McMahon (and anyone else from PTC at the time) will agree with the following:

• MEDDIC/MEDDICC/MEDDPICC is John McMahon’s sales brain codified;
• Dick Dunkel was the first to write it down;
• And then Dick and Jack told everybody at PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation) about it.

So that being said, the actual "biological" father of MEDDIC is Dick Dunkel.” ~ Monica Evans, SMG

Who should use the MEDDIC framework?

The MEDDIC sales methodology can help businesses of any size or industry better identify and qualify prospects. However, it is especially useful for complex B2B sales, which have longer cycles and require more resources (usually with more money on the line).

Six-step MEDDIC sales methodology

The MEDDIC sales process is designed to gather lead qualification details to make sure sales teams focus on the right businesses, the right person in those businesses, the right product and service offering, and the right benefits of using the product or service.

MEDDIC is formalized around six steps of lead qualification, and each step uses specific questions to get the right information.

Here’s the MEDDIC acronym.

MEDDIC acronym

Here’s a simple summary of each step in the MEDDIC acronym:

1. Metrics: These are the KPIs your prospect is looking to improve with your product.
2. Economic Buyer: Only the decision maker can onboard your tool, so you need to make sure you are speaking with the right person.
3. Decision Process: Every company purchases new products and services in a different way.
4. Decision Criteria: Every company evaluates a new purchase differently.
5. Identify Pain: These are the specific pain points a company is currently looking to resolve with your product or service.
6. Champion: These are the influential people within the company who already like your product or service and will push the company to choose it.

Let’s take a look at each step in detail, including what you are trying to find and the questions you can ask to get that information.

Metrics

Businesses are looking for return on investment (ROI). Whenever they invest in a new product or service, enterprises are looking for that investment to pay off in some way.

That ROI can come in many different forms, from money and time savings to faster revenue growth. It’s possible that your service can provide all of these things, but you need to focus your sales message on the specific needs of the customer.

The way you focus your sales message is to find out exactly which KPIs your customer wants to improve, by how much, and over what time horizon. Some customers will give you a very precise metric, such as “sustain our 6% monthly revenue growth for the next 12 months.”

However, without prodding, most businesses will be more vague about their goals, for example: “we are expected to keep growing our department’s productivity without hiring any new staff.”

Understanding the metrics of interest gives you the ability to prove the economic benefit of your product or service. If the metrics you’ve been given are more accurate and specific, then your economic benefit messaging will be even better.

Economic buyer

Economic buyer is the term used in the MEDDIC methodology for the person who can actually authorize spending on your product or service. They are the final decision maker. Depending on the cost of your product or service and what it does, this could be anyone in the company, a senior manager, or a person performing a specific task such as VP of Sales or Head of IT.

Whenever possible, you should be speaking with the economic buyer because anyone else will ultimately not lead to a sale. However, as you’ll see under “champion” below, there is still value in speaking with another person if you can’t immediately locate the economic buyer.

When speaking to the economic buyer, be sure to ask them about their personal goals, metrics, decision process, etc. Sometimes they are different from that of the company as a whole, and you want to appeal to both the company’s best interests and those of the economic buyer as well.

Decision criteria

Companies rarely onboard the first product or service they see. Even when there is a ticking clock, companies want to compare multiple products before deciding which one to purchase. They do this evaluation based on varying decision criteria.

Some MEDDIC sales courses separate decision criteria into technical decision criteria (TDC) and business/commercial decision criteria (BDC). TDC are about how the product works, while BDC are about the budget impact.

Here are some common decision criteria:

• Good user experience/user interface (UX/UI) (TDC)
• Easy to use, easy to learn (TDC)
• Effectively solves the issue (TDC)
• Integrates into current technical architecture and/or standard operating procedures (SOPs) (TDC)
• Good customer support/success reputation (TDC)
• Meets the budget for the project (BDC)
• Will reach positive ROI within a specific timeframe (BDC)
• Has a capital expense (CAPEX) or operation expense (OPEX) pricing system (BDC)

Decision process

While the decision criteria are how a business evaluates which product meets their needs, the decision process is the way a company selects the product and approves the new spending.

Just as there are technical and business decision criteria, some MEDDIC sales systems break down the decision process into two buying decision components. Technical decision making (TDM) is how the company confirms the product or service will work within the company including security and IT personnel signing off on the project. Business decision making (BDM) usually follows TDM and is the process management follows in approving the new budget line. TDM includes all of the paperwork, any board approval, and the legal checks on the contracts to make sure there are no privacy concerns.

Understanding the buying process of your prospect helps you keep track of each stage of their procurement process and forecast when the deal is likely to close.

Identify pain

“Pain point” has become a common internal phrase when developing or building new products and services. In the 1990s when MEDDIC was first created, it was a novel idea to focus not on what your product can do but rather the specific difficult issues faced by your customer base and how your product resolves them.

Pain points can be issues suffered by a business as a whole, but they are often the issues causing the individual stress as it is their KPIs and career being personally affected. That’s what makes solving pain points such a powerful sales and retention message.

Pain points are the things about which people say “if you could solve X, I’d sleep better at night.” They are the issues behind the metrics you hear about under “metrics.” Again, if you can get a prospect to describe their pain points in detail, then you can better tune your sales message. You can work with “we have productivity issues,” but “productivity issues are costing us $100,000/month” helps you build expectations and a case for ROI.

Champion

A champion is someone inside the prospect company who will push for them to use your product. A champion does not have to be the economic buyer, but they should be someone at least loosely involved with the project. For example, the person who will actually use your product or service can champion the buying decision to leadership on your behalf.

The ideal champion is well respected, hardworking and influential.

How to implement the MEDDIC sales methodology

Here’s a five-step strategy to implement MEDDIC with your sales reps today.

1. Review your previous sales calls. Most people start the MEDDIC sales process because they have a sales qualification problem. Getting your sales managers to go back and listen to previous sales calls will help you understand whether you’ve been pursuing the wrong leads or leads in the wrong way.
2. Catalog the common objections. Objection handling is one of the hardest but most crucial jobs for a sales rep. It’s important to identify the pain points and metrics your prospects are interested in and then showing how your product or service addresses them. Listen to the objections to get a list of the ones that can be handled and the ones that are disqualifying.
3. Update your buyer personas if necessary. After your sales managers have listened to previous calls, it’s time to update the buyer personas. This might mean targeting different companies or different people within those companies.
4. Visualize the MEDDIC process. The MEDDIC sales process requires a lot of research, on the phone with a prospect as well as before. Disqualifying leads early reduces the amount of wasted effort. Consider creating a flowchart of how and when you should get different pieces of information, and what answers are disqualifying.
5. Get your account executives to document their sales calls using a customized MEDDIC template. MEDDIC requires meticulous note-keeping. Whether your sales reps do this by hand or in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, they should be filling in information before their first call and updating it after every interaction.

Here’s an example MEDDIC sales qualification template:

The pros and cons of the MEDDIC framework

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using the MEDDIC framework.

The advantages of the MEDDIC sales methodology:

• It’s easy to learn, so ideal for onboarding an inexperienced sales team.
• Allows measuring closed deals versus expected deals based on level of qualification.
• Salespeople perform self-evaluations, which helps with their growth and development.
• Makes the sales cycle easier to map and predict.
• Gives companies the ability to make more accurate sales pipeline forecasts.
• Sales efficiency is improved with a higher close rate.
• Gives your entire sales team a common language.
• More qualified leads don’t require discounts to close the deal.

The disadvantages of the MEDDIC sales methodology:

• It requires a lot of work.
• Takes full buy-in from sales leaders and reps to implement and document in your CRM.
• Some leads might be improperly disqualified.
• Has a high organizational overhead that might require small teams to invest in new software.
• Some qualifying questions might come off as invasive (which is another reason why you should use verified strategic relationship management tools like Databook to research customers before you sit down to introductory meetings).

MEDDIC sales process alternatives

MEDDIC is just one sales process that can be used to organize your salespeople. MEDDPIC and MEDDPICC are alternatives that add one and two steps, respectively, to the basic MEDDIC framework.

SPIN (for situation problem implication need-payoff) and BANT (for budget authority need timing) are similar in that they are acronyms where each step pushes you to ask certain questions from your clients.

Sandler and Miller Heiman are based on the teachings of the companies and founders that share their names. They are also step-based systems.

Finally, Challenger argues that AEs should emulate the great sales professionals of the past to improve their sales calls. In that sense, it is more of a sales strategy than process.

Here are some of the main MEDDIC alternatives.

MEDDPIC sales framework

MEDDPIC adds one new step to the standard MEDDIC framework:

1. Metrics
2. Economic buyer
3. Decision criteria
4. Decision process
5. Paper process
6. Identify pain
7. Champion

Paper process

There are always paper processes involved in a sales deal. The original MEDDIC system doesn’t separate this part from the decision process step. MEDDPIC makes it a separate stage.

Getting ahead of the legal department by filling out any paperwork will speed up the sales cycle and make sure that no deals fall through between the verbal yes and the deal being signed.

MEDDIC vs. MEDDPIC

The major difference between MEDDIC and MEDDPIC is that paper processes are part of the decision process in MEDDIC but made a separate stage in the MEDDPIC sales system. By separating paper process from decision process, MEDDPIC gets sales reps thinking about the paper processes earlier, which can shorten the sales cycle.

MEDDPICC sales framework

MEDDPICC adds one more step to the MEDDPIC framework; that is, it has two more steps than MEDDIC:

1. Metrics
2. Economic buyer
3. Decision criteria
4. Decision process
5. Paper process
6. Identify pain
7. Champion
8. Competition

Competition

Competition refers to the other companies that are trying to win the business of your prospective customer. By learning about who your competitors are and why they compete, you can better position your product or service as the ideal solution for their company.

MEDDIC vs. MEDDPICC

Unlike MEDDIC or MEDDPIC, MEDDPICC isn’t run in a vacuum. This system understands that you are not the only business on the market and that you need to keep your competition in mind while selling.

Challenger sales process

There are five basic sales rep personalities:

• The Challenger: Challengers are a new type of salesperson. They are direct and honest in their sales pitch, which comes off as refreshing. They focus on their customer’s pain points and the value provided by the product or service they are selling. They readily discuss money and won’t shy away from other uncomfortable discussions either.
• The Hard Worker: The Hard Worker will spend all day and night doing their job and finding ways to get better. However, they don’t necessarily focus on the value your product or service provides to customers or their pain points.
• The Lone Wolf: The Lone Wolf is exactly what it sounds like. They are great salespeople who exceed their quota consistently, but they are also difficult to work with.
• The Relationship Builder: The Relationship Builder is the stereotypical salesperson. They can make friends quickly with someone inside the prospect company and then leverage that relationship to create champions.
• The Problem Solver: The Problem Solver proves their value by identifying and then solving problems, both for their prospects and within the sales team.

This sales system argues that over time Challengers end up being the most successful salespeople. In fact, most famous salespeople are Challengers, and if you want to be successful as a sales rep then you should also try to be a Challenger.

Challenger vs. MEDDIC

While MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, and MEDDPICC are qualification processes, Challenger is more a sales personality or sales strategy. In that sense, you can be a Challenger who works through the MEDDIC framework, or any other sales process for that matter.

MEDDIC can get you to strategic relationships faster

MEDDIC focuses your sales force on the best possible leads. By having your sales teams pre-qualify leads, you don’t waste time chasing prospects that are unlikely to close. When MEDDIC was first created in the 1990s, this required asking dozens of questions during the sales discovery calls to get all of the information needed to fill out a MEDDIC template.

But strategic sellers don't just bombard prospects with these questions, one after the other. Effective enterprise sellers research prospects and customers in advance, filling in as many blanks in the MEDDIC process in advance as possible. That's better for both your prospects and your sales team. And it all starts with a good plan. Learn more about the elements of a good strategy here.

To connect with other sellers successfully using the MEDDIC methodology or other sales processes, check out the Strategic Sales Network. It's a free community for enterprise sellers wanting to end mechanized sales and win bigger, better deals. There are many more templates, tips, and resources inside. Join the Strategic Sales Network today.