MEDIC, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC – Please, give me my MED!
Feb 28
13 min read
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From intuition-based to Data-Driven Qualification
This blog focuses on exploring the benefits of adopting a qualification framework like MEDDPICC. It includes practical tips and recommendations for effective implementation, along with a curated list of AI-powered promising tools designed to automate the process and provide insightful analytics.
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According to a recent benchmark published by Ebsta[1] and Pavilion, after analyzing $54Bn in revenue and 4.2 million opportunities, “85% of opportunities are poorly qualified.”
This figure is so substantial that it should prompt a moment of reflection for any sales and marketing professionals. How is this possible?
In July 2012, Mark Roberge from HubSpot published an article in the Harvard Business Review[2] about “The Science of Building a Scalable Sales Team” that has resonated with me ever since. At the time, he had joined the software company —a then relatively unknown organization—as the head of sales, despite having never managed a sales team before. Rather than relying on non-existent prior experience, he leveraged his MIT engineering background to adopt a scientific approach, developing a quantitative analysis to shift from gut-feel decisions to a more data-driven strategy. This method, applied across hiring, training, lead generation, and more, spurred significant growth for his company. The team expanded to 200 employees and secured 7,000 new customers, propelling HubSpot to the #33 spot on the Inc. 500 List of Fastest Growing Companies in America at that time.
The transformation of sales from an intuition-based practice to a data-driven science, focusing on scalable, predictable revenue growth, represents the core value and objective of methodologies like MEDDPICC. In this blog, I've chosen MEDDPICC as an example due to its widespread adoption. However, my primary focus here is on the advantages of employing a qualifying methodology in general, rather than on the specifics of MEDDPICC itself, although I will explore its details later on.
Discovery, Qualification or Sales methodology?
Firstly, it's important to clarify that MEDDPICC is not a sales methodology like Challenger Sale or Force Management; rather, it's a qualification framework. It offers a structured and uniform approach for sales teams to thoroughly discover and qualify potential deals in the pipeline, ensuring a dependable, more data-driven method for forecasting. That's the essence of it!
Qualifying is a Journey, not a Destination.
Traditionally, sales organizations have made a distinction between the Discovery phase, which precedes the Qualification phase. I do not. In my opinion, and particularly in the case of complex sales, you are always in a qualifying mindset, and you keep discovering essential information you need at the different stages of your sales cycle. If you are an SDR or BDR, sure, you are in discovery mode, but you also qualify your conversation to decide whether it is worth proceeding to the next step or not. That is why SQL or MQL are called S/M Qualified Leads. Once sellers take over, they decide to accept or reject the xQL, which is often called SAL for Sales Accepted Lead. That's qualifying too.
Ultimately, sellers transition their SAL into opportunities in their CRM. At that very specific milestone, you could declare that your qualification is done. Yes, this is an important moment in the life of your deal, but you will keep discovering and qualifying further your opportunity to uncover more critical information needed to close that deal, or walk away. The criteria your organization uses to decide that a lead is 'qualified' to move to the opportunity stage is very important, and it will depend on your business, whether you are in a transactional, short-sales cycle business or dealing with complex deals with long sales cycles. As you gather more data points into your CRM, a framework like MEDDPICC can help you refine your criteria for decision-making.
Of course, there are many reasons you might lose a deal that aren't apparent in the early qualification process, with indecision being the largest factor in lost deals today in enterprise sales. This is why sellers should continuously qualify their opportunities, even as they progress through the sales cycle. Walking away from a deal after investing months of time and resources is a tough pill to swallow. We've all made the mistake of ending up empty-handed. Guilty as charged. However, deals are not always lost forever. Sometimes, customers need to pause for valid reasons and may restart the process months later. In such cases, it's wise to return the opportunity to the nurturing phase and check back periodically, but use this time to concentrate your efforts on your most promising deals.
Don’t Rush
If you are a seller reading this blog, you will appreciate what follows. Your organization will pressure you to create a minimum number of opportunities per week or month. Your boss has a KPI for this, and so does the boss above them. Your natural instinct might urge you to skip some important steps in your qualification review to meet that KPI number and please your boss at your next QBR. Don’t! This is how 'crappy' opportunities end up in the forecast. Resist the pressure and choose quality over quantity. You will be rewarded with consistency, as people will recognize the reliability of what you include in your forecast.
Disqualifying is Qualifying
Since sales is not an exact science, the main objective is to eliminate as much subjectivity as possible from the qualification process. This helps in disqualifying opportunities early enough so that the sales organization doesn't waste resources, time, and money on deals that are unlikely to close. In every study on the attributes of top sellers, one characteristic that consistently appears is their ability to disqualify opportunities early. This allows them to maximize their time and resources on prospects with the highest likelihood of closing. According to the benchmark published by Ebsta[1] that I mentioned earlier, “top performers are 366% more likely to close an opportunity at the ‘Discovery’ stage", and “324% more likely to win a deal if MEDDPICC is completed by the 'Solution Presented' stage.” Instead of creating opportunities based on hope, they meticulously use a method like MEDDDPICC to disqualify them early, ensuring their time is not wasted on businesses that are unlikely to close.
Develop your Intellectual Curiosity
I am often surprised by the lack of curiosity among sellers or even sales leadership. Frequently, sellers are so pleased to have uncovered a solid prospect that they take much of what they hear from the customer at face value. Why does a customer decide they want to buy a product like yours? Did they wake up that morning thinking, 'Hey, I need to buy something!'? And why now? Customers often describe the problem they want to solve by outlining the solution they think they need. If you do not delve deep into the problem, peeling back the layers to its core and getting down to the root cause, you risk missing critical information, weakening your position and diminishing your chances of taking control of the sales cycle. In his book "The Qualified Sales Leader - Proven lessons from a five-time CRO" by John McMahon, the author singled out 3 “why?” questions:
1. Why do they have to buy? This question aims to uncover the underlying reason or problem that necessitates a purchase. It's about understanding the prospect's pain points, challenges, or goals that your product or service can address.
2. Why do they have to buy from us? This question focuses on differentiating your offering from competitors. It's about identifying what unique value or solution your product or service provides that aligns with the prospect's specific needs, making your solution the best fit for them.
3. Why do they have to buy now? This question seeks to establish the urgency of the purchase. It involves understanding any time-sensitive factors that might be influencing the prospect's decision to buy, such as end-of-quarter deadlines, budget cycles, or escalating problems that need immediate resolution.
Be curious, keep asking “why?”. Make a habit to develop your intellectual curiosity. Be that kid that keeps asking questions about anything.
Just one more note before we delve into MEDDPICC. As is often the case with well-intentioned initiatives, they start with enthusiasm but can falter due to a lack of discipline. The challenging part is execution; to succeed, you will need to develop a culture of fanatical discipline.
So, what is MEDDPICC?
As previously mentioned, it is a qualifying framework, a method better suited for complex enterprise deals. However, they are a few variations like MEDDIC, which may be used for more transactional activities, such as SPICE for SaaS vendors with short sales cycles and low-ticket items. Use the method that is best suited for your business, but make sure to use one!
MEDDPICC is based on a pragmatic checklist and subsequent actions items providing a consistent and uniform language for evaluation across the organization. MEDDPICC stands for:
M for metrics that are the quantifiable measures of value that your solution can provide.
E for Economic Buyer, the person(s) with the overall authority in the buying decision.
D(p) for Decision Process -the series of steps that form a process of which the buyer will follow to make a decision.
D(c) for Decision Criteria -the various criteria your buyer will use to select your solution.
P for paper Process -the series of steps that follow the Decision Process your buyer will follow up to contract signature.
I for Implicated Pain -means you and the customer have identified, indicated and implicated and agreed upon the pain your solution solves for your customer. In plain English, this means: (1) you have identified pains; (2) you have Indicated the cost of the pain(s) to you customers and (3) you have Implicated the pain onto your customer, and they feel the negative impact it is having upon their business.
C for Champion -a person who has power, influence, and subsequently, credibility within the customer’s organization.
C for Competition -any person, vendor or initiative competing for the same funds or resources you are.
Wait, there is one more!
R for Risk -This one is either the result of your own risk assessment, or the cumulative scoring of all the criteria within the MEDDPICC acronym. It highlights the identified risks that could lead to the loss of your deal or result in significant impacts, such as major delays.
Tips and recommendations when using MEDDPICC
I do not claim to be the ultimate expert on MEDDPICC. However, what follows are actionable insights drawn from countless sales meetings I care to remember, which you can use to make the method work for you.
1. Why there isn't a B for Budget in MEDDPICC?
That is usually one of the first questions people ask when starting with the framework. MEDDPICC differs from older methods like BANT that are too simplistic in today's sales complexity. This doesn't imply that budget is irrelevant; rather, it highlights that sales can still be made in its absence. For example, if you are selling a breakthrough technology in an early market, potential customers most likely will not have a designated budget for your product category. However, you can still secure a deal by reallocating budget from another initiative. Conversely, in an established market, verifying the budget is advisable since you'll likely be vying for the same funds as your competitors. In either scenario, budget information is pertinent to the Economic Buyer category of MEDDPICC, but it can also inform the 'Metrics' and 'Competition' sections.
2. About Metrics:
A good way to identify these metrics is to envision yourself six months in the deployment of your solution, after winning the deal. How would your customer measure the outcome of your solution?
Surprisingly, many customers either fail to clearly identify such metrics or choose not to share them with you. If your organization has developed an ROI model, the best metrics to use are your own, and you should suggest that your customer adopt them for their project. Give it a try; it works!
Some adaptations of the MEDDPICC framework expand on the original components to address additional aspects of the sales process, which might introduce variations like "M1" and "M2." These variations are not standard across all interpretations of MEDDPICC, but they could represent different focuses within the Metrics component that may be relevant to your business. For example, "M1" might stand for the primary Metrics that demonstrate the direct impact of the solution (such as ROI, cost savings, revenue growth), while "M2" could represent secondary Metrics that might include indirect benefits (such as efficiency gains, customer satisfaction improvements, risk mitigation). Others, like meddicc.com, use the following classification which I like: M1 are your own metrics representing the business outcome you have delivered to existing customers ─what you typically use in your ROI model; M2 are the metrics personalized and specific to the business case of your customer; and M3 are the metrics you have delivered after the implementation of your solution, and verified with your customers (something many companies do not do nearly enough). M3s will help you to fine-tuned your M1s.
3. About Pain
If you are selling in the early market, at the beginning of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, you will most likely encounter 'latent pains'; meaning your customers may not even be aware that they have such a pain, let alone have a budget allocated for it. This is actually good news! Why? Because it allows you to engage your prospects in a constructive discussion to help them uncover opportunities to increase revenue, reduce costs, or mitigate risks in ways they have themselves not yet recognized. The best conversations are those where your prospects feel they are learning something from you.
How severe is the pain? When you visit a doctor, they invariably ask you to rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10. However, sellers rarely pose this question to their customers. Why not? Pain is subjective. What happens if that pain is not addressed? Do people suffer severe consequences? Do they face job loss, or does nobody care? Is the severity of that pain graded the same across your customer's organization? The same applies to the Compelling Reason you may have identified for your customer to act now, or a deadline by which their project must go live. What happens if they miss that deadline? Do you ever ask this question? Next time, ask your customers (champions, influencers, technical buyers, all of them) to rate the pains you have identified and agreed upon with them from 1 to 10, or to rate the consequences of missing their deadline. Be curious! Their responses might surprise you!
A final note on pain: regardless of what you sell, you are expected to be an expert on your solution and the market you are selling into. Therefore, you should be familiar with a set of generic pains experienced by your customers. Arming you with these insights is the responsibility of product marketing. You can begin with these and then validate which ones are most relevant to your prospect. And if your are correct, you will get instant credibility.
4. About Decision Criteria
How about ensuring your own criteria are used by your prospects? Collaborate with your product marketing team to create a vendor-neutral document that outlines a set of key capabilities and criteria for selecting a solution like yours, and share it with your prospect. If they are working on an RFP, they might use your document to complement their own version. Of course, ensure that your unique features—those not offered by your competitors—are included.
Another effective technique is to link these decision criteria with the metrics you've identified. This will ensure greater consistency in the business case you help your customer develop. If you can suggest compelling ROI and metrics, then the Decision Criteria will likely work in your favor.
5. About the Champion
You can categorize your interlocuters into two categories:
The Talkers: These individuals do just that: they talk to you but won't take any action on your behalf. They might be pleasant people leading you nowhere, motivated solely by personal gains, or simply blockers who prefer to maintain the status quo. You will not find your Champion in this category.
The Mobilizers: These are the individuals who, as the name suggests, mobilize others on your behalf. They are driven by the desire for organizational improvements, or they enjoy sharing ideas and are often sought out by colleagues for their insights.
A good way to determine whether you are dealing with a talker or a mobilizer is to ask the person to organize a meeting for you with other stakeholders they can bring in, or to provide information that can only be obtained through active investigation or consultation with colleagues. If they are unable to do so, then you are dealing with a talker, and you may be wasting your time.
6. About your Competition
Never bad-mouth your competition. Firstly, you are not paid to talk about them, and doing so is unprofessional. Not the right way to establish credibility and trust.
Assuming your organization has done its homework, it should have equipped the sales team with a set of unique differentiators against your competition, which constitute your differentiated value proposition. To test their relevance, ask yourself this question: "So, what?" If you cannot come up with a clear response, chances are your prospect won't be able to either.
Who should use MEDDPICC?
Begin as early as the discovery process, starting with your SDRs and BDRs/MDRs. If you intend to standardize the way opportunities are evaluated by the sales organization, adopt this standard right from the start. However, there's only so much an SDR/MDR can glean from an early conversation. You should guide your SDRs/BDRs to focus on a list of discovery questions that partially cover MEDDPICC.
Strategic Marketing, Field Marketing, and Product Marketing should also be involved. They should determine the ROI metrics to use, identify the personas to sell to, fine-tune your ICP, and develop content targeted at Economic and Technical Buyers. They will benefit from feedback from the field, which can be transformed into valuable insights to refine the marketing message, analyze win/loss ratios, and much more.
Go All In, or Don't Do it!
If you're going to implement a structured method like MEDDPICC, then commit fully and involve all departments of your organization. Avoid a half-hearted approach, or you won't see much value from your efforts. Build or update your playbook to include MEDDPICC. If you are a seller reading this blog, do yourself a favor: adopt MEDDPICC or another method chosen by your company and do it for yourself, not to make your boss happy! Be a student of the game and always keep learning.
Scoring
For MEDDPICC to be used effectively, you need to establish a scoring system that grades each of the 8 criteria of MEDDPICC (each letter of the acronym). Based on the overall score, you can then classify the opportunity in your forecast (typically as Pipe, Best Case, and Commit). To do this, first, establish a set of 4 to 5 key questions for each criterion. For instance, for 'M' (Metric), a question could be, “Is our Champion using our Metrics?”; for 'E' (Economic Buyer), a question could be, “Have we identified the Economic Buyer?”; and for 'P' (Paper Process), a question could be, “Have we identified all the signatories required before the contract can be signed?” as examples. Then, assign a score from 1 to 10, which you can divide into 4 evaluations: 1-3 would be red; 4-6 orange; 7-8 blue; and 9-10 green. A simpler way could be to grade for 1 to 4 with the same above color-codes. You get the idea. Finally, use PowerBI or Excel to create a dashboard that visually represents your opportunities, allows you to drill down into areas at risk, and helps you coach your team to build a plan to overcome obstacles. Or better yet, consider the following technologies.
Welcome to Near Nirvana! Automate the Process and Analytics with Technology
One of the biggest challenges in successfully implementing MEDDPICC is actually the resistance from sellers to manually input data into spreadsheets or CRMs. Any sales manager, head of sales, or CRO knows exactly what I'm talking about! Use AI-powered voice recognition of each conversation your seller has with their prospect to automatically enter this input into your CRM and keep your sellers on selling.
Not everyone holds a PhD from MIT to engage in statistical modeling and process linear regressions all day. Fortunately, you don't need to. New and improved tools are emerging to not only fully integrate the MEDDPICC method into your CRM with built-in scoring and analytics. You can finally realize the full potential of these qualifying methods—the kind of success Mark Roberge achieved at HubSpot.
Below are two promising vendors that have developed such integration with automation and smart analytics. Full transparency: I have not received any sponsorship or anything else to list them here. I recommend conducting your own research as there might be other products as well:
To keep learning: two great books I recommend:
The Qualified Sales Leader – Proven lessons from a five-time CRO" by John McMahon
“MEDDICC - The ultimate guide to staying one step ahead in the complex sale” by Andy White
If you need help with your implementation of MEDDPICC or another method, schedule a call or Contact me at lvanhuffel@croforscale.com
#meddpicc #sales #forecasting #qualification
[1] https://www.ebsta.com/2024-b2b-sales-benchmarks/
[2] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/the_science_of_building_a_scal.html