How to use and not use MEDDIC

A lot has already been written about MEDDIC and all its variations but in observing sales reps and leaders I still noticed quite a bit of misunderstanding and flat-out abuse of this very useful opportunity qualification framework. Throughout the various sales leadership roles, MEDDIC always was instrumental to our success so I decided to create this 9 post blog series. 

If you’re new to MEDDIC I’ll cover each element but overall the letters stand for Metric, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identified pain/need, and Champion. Over the next few days, I’ll post a more detailed description of each element and in the end I’ll share a handy cheat sheet.

For starters, MEDDIC is not a sales methodology. Often when speaking to salespeople about their sales process or methodology they refer to MEDDIC. That’s a huge red flag as MEDDIC is neither, it is purely an opportunity qualification framework so you have a structured way to assess the progress and state of each deal.

 Ultimately it helps you answer the most basic questions:

• is this deal real?
• is my forecast plausible?
• where are my risks & strengths of this opportunity?
• am I working with a genuine champion?

In short, it will help you to qualify deals in or out, where to spend your time and resources.

Why do we need an opportunity qualification framework?

Let’s be honest, missing your quota can happen, if you never ever missed one I’d argue you haven’t been challenged enough! But missing your own forecast means you’re not on top of your business. And that is bad!

So for your own credibility and sometimes sanity, you need to be sure you’re looking objectively at your deals and you can make informed decisions on where to spend your energy. Which deals are feasible for the quarter and where are your gaps that can pose a risk?

As a sales leader, having a documented framework will help you establish a common language across the team. Soon enough you’ll start to see patterns emerge on won and lost deals so you can course-correct and drive actionable behavior towards repeatable business.

Many variations

Over time sales teams have come up with their own variations and added additional letters to pay attention to specific challenges they are facing. Popular additions are:

• P for Paperwork
• C for Competition
• C for Compelling event

It’s totally fine to add these or any other letters as long as you feel these additions are essential to cover the main questions mentioned above. Over the last few years, I personally have gravitated towards MEDDPICC. Completing paperwork has become an increasingly challenging step (for customers) often dictating the timing of the deal. The extra C stands for competition, we’ll cover more on this in the dedicated post.

So why not compelling event? To be frank, most solutions don’t benefit from having one. Old school sales managers will drill their teams to uncover the compelling event but in reality there are only a few solutions and situations out that there that are truly hinged to one. So in the end it becomes a bit hit and miss.

How to implement?

Like with any initiative you need to do a proper roll-out, make sure it becomes part of the day-to-day sales culture and incorporate it into your onboarding.

First, you need to agree on the variation you’d like to implement. Less is more — so don’t include any letters if not needed. It's best to include some of the team and to review several won/lost deals and identify key indicators for success or failure.

Ultimately you want to drive the right behavior so it’s important this becomes part of the daily routine therefore I always incorporate MEDDIC into the CRM solution. Every letter is defined as a field that reps are supposed to complete as they uncover information. If you’re working with salesforce.com or some other advanced CRM solution then aim to implement these 2 suggestions, believe me they will help you:

1. make the people fields (Economic Buyer & Champion) look-up fields to contacts in the CRM. This forces people to create those contacts and to be specific. Otherwise you’ll get a lot of CXOs as Economic Buyer without the actual person being identified.
2. create a calculated field that shows a summary of which letters are filled in. If there’s a value you show the letter, otherwise a “-”, so you get values like M-D--I-,--D-IC, … Now you can use this field in your opportunity reports and at a glance you know where things are.

Then you’re ready to train your team. There are a couple of elements to include in the training:

• why are we doing this?
• theoretic definitions of the various elements
• specific questions and roleplays on how to uncover the information
• set the expectations on what information is absolutely required at each stage of the sales cycle and how it will be captured (CRM)
• have each rep prepare and present a MEDDIC review of a number of deals (e.g. a recently won deal and your top deal, top 3 deals, …)

Lastly, document everything and make it available as training materials. Make sure you incorporate the training in your onboarding curriculum for anyone joining afterwards.

Who to train? Everyone on the sales team, so SDR/BDRs, sales reps, account managers, customer success managers and sales engineers. It may even be good to include some selective marketing people and some of your peers, or at least provide them with a condensed session. Getting a common language across the organization about your sales pipeline can only help you. It will also enable those other departments to identify where they could possibly assist the sales team.

How to use MEDDIC?

ALL THE TIME! New business, renewals and upsells. It has to become a daily routine. Unless you like to play roulette and that’s how you prefer to call out numbers for your forecast. Every rep should think about completing and improving the coverage of the various elements. It is very much an iterative process.

So on every forecast and 1-to-1 call the expectation should be set that the information is up-to-date, known, and can be discussed. How deep you want to dive into each individual opportunity is up to you.

Depending on your sales velocity and how you have set targets you should do MEDDIC deal views on a monthly & quarterly basis. Again you can leverage your CRM here and include MEDDIC information on Won Deal emails for full visibility. And it's again another driver for reps to complete the information. If you have a sales ops person or team they should group all the captured information and look for patterns on a regular basis so you can identify bottlenecks, leverage points and challenges.

Coach yourself and your team to come up with a plan on how to gather the missing elements and validate some of the already uncovered information. The more you can iterate and tri-angulate throughout the sales process the more natural your closes will happen.

In some cases, you can mandate that certain MEDDIC elements are covered before a rep can advance a deal to the next stage, or before access to certain resources is granted. For example, no sales engineer will be made available until you at least have identified some pain or a need. Or you only support a technical evaluation (custom demo, trial, POC, ...) unless a sales leader has engaged with the Economic Buyer (EB). And if you are to engage with an EB it's a perfect opportunity to validate some of the uncovered information.

What to avoid?

Fluff! I will call people out every time I see an element filled in for the sake of being filled in. You absolutely need to nurture a culture where weak MEDDIC information is not allowed. It’s much better to see an empty spot (or ‘-’) than to create the illusion of having the element covered. This is basically lying to yourself. A large part of the responsibility sits with the sales leader here, if you are going to come down hard on your team for missing certain elements then you'll steer them towards covering up. Gaps aren't necessarily bad, they are indicators of what you still don't know and where you all should focus on in terms of information gathering.

Also, don’t be that sales leader who only uses MEDDIC at those quarterly sales review events we all “love” so much.

One observation I made is that mediocre reps will push back and call in the “too much admin” excuse, good reps will talk about the strong elements and how great their discovered metric or so is. Top-performing reps will be borderline paranoia about the things they don’t know yet. And it’s that level of skepticism that will harden your forecasts and improve your sales execution.

As mentioned over the next few days I’ll cover the individual elements for some more practical tips. If you want to receive the cheat sheet at the end then let me know by leaving a comment or DM. I’m also very curious about your experience and lessons learned — the good, bad & ugly…