Finding and working the perfect sales opportunity is an art and a science—a balanced cocktail of empathy, creativity, data, and process. The most effective sales organizations have processes and frameworks to determine whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.
It’s a given that everyone who visits your website or requests a demo won’t become a customer. Perhaps your product isn’t the right fit for them, they don’t have the budget to purchase at the moment, or they’re only in the discovery phase of the buying process. It’s critical to weed out unqualified opportunities so your sales team can focus on the most valuable prospects: those who are most likely to convert into paying customers.
But how do you do this effectively?
One of the most time-tested methods of qualifying prospects is the MEDDIC qualification framework. Introduced in the 1990s, MEDDIC is often considered the gold standard for ensuring your reps accurately identify, manage, and close the deal with the best sales leads. Read on to learn more about the benefits of this sales process and understand how to implement it in your revenue operations organization.
What is MEDDIC?
MEDDIC is a qualification framework used to determine whether customers should continue to be worked by your sales team. MEDDIC is an acronym that stands for metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, and champion.
The terms represent the key data points about an opportunity that sales reps need to understand to qualify each deal.
MEDDIC was originally developed by the sales team at Parametric Technology Corp (PTC), which experienced over 40 straight quarters of growth thanks to the technique. Over the years, the framework has been proven to suit complex sales cycles that often involve the following:
- Multiple buyers or a buying committee
- A sales champion that will help the deal through internal hurdles
- Average sales cycles lasting more than four months
- Contracts that require big budgets
- Situations where a product will require some level of change management
What are the benefits of the MEDDIC sales process?
Why do you need a qualification methodology? Pursuing deals that have very little to no hope of closing is a waste of precious time and resources. Qualifying your deals early allows you to focus your efforts on the best prospects.
By using MEDDIC to qualify the opportunity, your reps can quickly and simply identify whether a prospective company is in a good place to make a purchase with you. MEDDIC can be easily taught and mastered because it’s essentially a checklist of universal criteria, making it the go-to sales methodology for B2B sales teams.
Improving sales qualification with the MEDDIC method
MEDDIC outlines six steps to take in order to better qualify your deals for optimum sales impact:
Metrics
Work with your customer to figure out the economic impact your solution will have on the customer’s organization. What will the customer gain?
It should be quantifiable. In other words—show, don’t tell. For example, rather than saying, “Our solution will help you see more traffic,” quantify that for the customer: Does that mean 20,000 more visitors per day? 100,000?
Offer specific numbers for each benefit you’re touting. For example: “Our customers save 12 hours per week on data entry,” or, “A client of ours in your industry saw an ROI with our product within three months.”
Economic buyer
Sales reps should ask themselves: Am I speaking to the person who actually has the authority to make the purchase? In other words, they hold the keys to the checkbook. If you’re not speaking with this person, make sure you gain an introduction. And if you get an intro, you must win this person over. You’ll want to know what they’re looking for in a solution and what their pain points are.
Decision criteria
It’s also important that you understand how the prospective customer makes decisions. What are their criteria for purchasing solutions? Criteria will vary by company, but typically they are assessing how much they trust the vendor, how important the problem is for them, what the change management effort will be, and how this affects the decision maker personally (especially if it doesn’t go well).
Decision process
While it’s critical to know who makes the decisions and what considerations they’re taking into account when they make them, it’s just as important to know how those decisions are made. In other words, you’ll need to be well-versed in the process that your prospective client engages in when they make a purchasing decision. This includes understanding who the stakeholders are, their operational timeline, and any approvals needed. When you know what the decision process is, you’re more likely to be able to move the deal forward and less likely to stagnate or lose the business.
Identify pain
If you know your customer’s pain points, you can help them see how your product makes their lives easier. Talk to your customer; find out whether it’s slow production, decreasing revenue, attrition, or poor customer service that’s keeping them up at night. Highlight ways your product directly solves the pain points they are experiencing.
Champion
It all comes down to the champion, the person in the prospective company who is pushing for your product. This is the person who is the most likely to see the value in your product, probably because they are impacted most by the pain points and would personally benefit from your solution. Regardless of whether this person is the decision maker, the champion should be well-respected and have good communication with leadership.
How to implement MEDDIC in your organization
Implementing the MEDDIC methodology throughout your sales organization can streamline your sales process and take your revenue operations to the next level. What’s the best way to integrate the MEDDIC methodology into your sales team’s process?
Follow these three steps:
- Build MEDDIC into your deal inspection process
- Bake MEDDIC into your CRM, RevOps platform, and Mutual Action Plan templates
- Encourage a culture of proactive disqualification
1. Build MEDDIC into your deal inspection process
MEDDIC is an excellent way to organize deal inspections. It can even act as the agenda for one-on-one meetings. Front-line managers should build the habit of referring to MEDDIC during this process, so reps learn to come prepared to speak to each criterion. It will help them communicate a more consistent, comprehensive understanding of deal health.
Using MEDDIC to optimize the deal inspection process also makes reps feel more prepared and confident going into deal inspections and gives them more time with their manager to discuss ways to save deals in danger and identify potential roadblocks.
Remember, qualification is an ongoing process. It doesn’t end after the first discovery call. It could be useful to update and refer to the MEDDIC framework when continuing to inspect the health of an open deal over time.
2. Bake MEDDIC into your CRM, RevOps Platform, and Mutual Action Plan templates
Many organizations use MEDDIC status as exit criteria for CRM opportunity stages. For example, a deal can’t progress from discovery to validation unless you’ve identified the economic decision maker and had at least one meeting around success metrics for that specific buyer.
Knowing the deal can’t advance to the next stage without meeting MEDDIC criteria motivates reps to capture that data early. It also stops reps from advancing deals before they’re properly qualified, which will save a ton of resources spent on companies that aren’t really ready.
Your RevOps platform should have a view of each opportunity’s MEDDIC, to stop deals that have incomplete data from moving forward or being included in the forecast. If you already run deal inspections out of your RevOps platform, then it’s natural to include MEDDIC in your dashboards so reps and managers can quickly see where there may be gaps in MEDDIC.
While MEDDIC is a useful framework to use internally to qualify opportunities, you don’t want reps running through the criteria directly with customers. It’s best to bake this criteria into major milestones of a Mutual Action Plan. That way, you can be confident your reps are gathering MEDDIC qualification criteria in a customer-friendly way. If your Mutual Action Plan is integrated into your RevOps platform or CRM, then you’ll be able to automate the capture of MEDDIC criteria to save time.
3. Encourage a culture of proactive disqualification
MEDDIC is a qualification framework, but sometimes it’s useful to think of it as a disqualification framework instead. Disqualifying a deal early should be celebrated. The rep didn’t lose the deal if there was no deal there in the first place. MEDDIC simply helps identify those bad, time-consuming opportunities early and frees up reps to focus on closing good deals faster.
It can be hard for reps to disqualify deals that show even the smallest hint of life, which is why MEDDIC is a useful framework to reference when making hard decisions. There is a balance, of course. Reps shouldn’t disqualify deals because they are not 100% perfect. But if a deal is on the edge, this is a perfect time for reps and managers to use the MEDDIC rubric to steer the conversation during deal inspection and make the final call.
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