MEDDIC is a renowned sales methodology that transforms the way businesses approach and secure complex deals.
It emphasizes a deeper understanding of customer needs and decision-making processes — helping sales teams parse out which opportunities are worth pursuing and which ones probably won’t amount to much.
Interested?
Let’s do a deeper dive into the MEDDIC sales methodology and unravel how each element of this framework helps you create a strategic roadmap for sales success.
MEDDIC was initially developed and documented in 1996 by Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli, who were members of the sales team at the Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC).
They analyzed hundreds of PTC’s deals, trying to answer three key questions:
As Dunkel and Napoli reviewed the answers, they discovered six common threads running through the material they had collected.
They determined that when the team could zero in on all six of these areas — and there was strong alignment between the potential customer and the proposed solution across every area — they typically won the deal:
These six commonalities became the core tenets of MEDDIC, dictated the sales methodology’s acronym, and took the sales of Parametric Technology Corporation from $300 million to $1 billion in just four years.
The MEDDIC framework serves as an easy-to-follow checklist, which makes it highly accessible and fairly straightforward to implement for most sales teams.
As you start to think about how MEDDIC might be able to help your team gain efficiencies and achieve sales success, let’s take a detailed look at each part of the framework.
This is all about getting a clear picture of the numbers your potential customer is trying to hit.
Don’t underestimate the gravity here: Achieving these results and having the metrics to show for it could be a make-or-break moment for them. The solution you’re selling just might make the difference.
Aim to uncover the specific, measurable goals they’re aiming for and how those goals connect to the business challenges they’re up against.
If you understand how the customer defines success, you can give them a very targeted description of how your solution can help.
You can specifically address how it can assist them in achieving key metrics and ultimately deliver a return on investment.
Questions to ask when implementing the Metrics aspect:
Who signs on the dotted line when it comes to purchasing solutions like yours? You’ll need to know, so it’s critical to understand who oversees the relevant budget and has veto power. Keep in mind it might not be your first point of contact, and there may be more than one economic buyer.
The next step is to focus on connecting the economic benefit for the buyer. If you have trouble getting in touch with the economic buyer (or buyers), tap your internal contacts to help you navigate the economic buyer’s mindset so you can craft a sales pitch that speaks to them.
Questions to ask when implementing the Economic Buyer aspect:
People usually explore multiple options almost every time when they consider buying something. This means they pit your product against competing ones, review a certain set of factors, and decide which solution is the best fit.
This set of factors is their decision criteria. By figuring out those factors and speaking to them directly, you can help the customer understand why your solution ticks all their boxes and trumps other choices.
Questions to ask when implementing the Decision Criteria aspect:
What is the step-by-step process the business uses to arrive at a decision?
If your point of contact can provide insight into the decision-making timeline and key milestones, you can proactively help alleviate bottlenecks.
This helps you reconnect at moments that make sense, collaborate on a mutually beneficial action plan, and have a clear picture of what stage the deal is in at all times.
Also make sure you get a sense of any extra logistics and action items involved in the decision process.
This includes administrative tasks that need to be completed, key stakeholders who need to weigh in (and when they need to do that), and approvals required to get the deal across the finish line.
Questions to ask when implementing the Decision Process aspect:
This serves as your initial engagement point with a prospect.
After all, an initial determination of how well your product can address a customer’s pain points is crucial to understanding if they’re a qualified lead.
Do a deep dive here so you understand the pain points in detail.
From there, design a sales pitch that clearly shows how your product can alleviate those pain points.
Questions to ask when implementing the Identification of Pain Points aspect:
Your champion is the person in the business who will fight to get your solution in place. This could be your initial point of contact, but it also might be the person who is experiencing the effects of the pain points most acutely. It’s someone who will do the heavy lifting for you to sell your product internally.
Make sure your champion — or team of champions (the more the merrier) — is someone who is well respected in the organization. This person needs to have the capacity to influence the economic buyer’s decision.
Questions to ask when implementing the Champion aspect:
Now that you know everything about the MEDDIC method, let’s help you determine when it’d be best to apply it to get optimal results.
Consider using the MEDDIC framework if you’re facing these issues:
Let’s now uncover the advantages the MEDDIC sales methodology brings to sales teams.
Implementing MEDDIC can have a positive influence on much more than just your bottom line.
Here are reasons why it’s worth considering:
More than three-quarters of customers say they expect consistency when communicating with different teams in the same organization. The MEDDIC sales method can help deliver on that. Also, covering standardized topics that you obtain from the MEDDIC methodology facilitates the rapid identification of reasons behind lost deals.
With a full view of this sales methodology under your belt, you might be considering how to use MEDDIC across your sales team.
Get started with a few tips:
Before you activate the MEDDIC sales qualification method, keep in mind that your revenue team needs to have a clear understanding of your buyer personas. Without that, it will be difficult to train new members and ensure sales reps are able to gather the most useful information.
Beyond buyer personas, consider these six ways to give the MEDDIC sales method a go within your team:
Wondering which tool can make it easy for you to use the MEDDIC sales methodology?
Scratchpad is the answer!
If you’re considering implementing MEDDIC in your sales processes, you need to modify your CRM and other sales tools to align with this sales methodology.
This might entail introducing new fields, creating custom reports, or integrating new tracking metrics.
Fortunately, Scratchpad can be an essential instrument in your path to mastering the MEDDIC sales methodology.
What is Scratchpad?
It’s a Salesforce add-on that helps sales teams collaborate more effectively and swiftly within Salesforce.
It simplifies and enhances the efficiency of pipeline management, deal inspection, coaching, and forecasting — leading to a more streamlined sales process.
Here are the distinctive features that make Scratchpad unique:
Scratchpad’s Advanced Grid Views provide a rapid and effective way to update fields or objects in Salesforce, removing the hassle of switching tabs, waiting for pages to load, or remembering to save changes.
They also offer sales professionals an easy way to view all team deals at once, with the added ability to examine specific opportunities in more detail.
Scratchpad Tasks offers a consolidated platform for reps and managers to monitor, schedule, organize, and assign crucial tasks needed to advance deals through the sales pipeline.
Scratchpad provides the quickest way to create, update, share, and sync sales notes with Salesforce, significantly improving efficiency and teamwork in sales management.
Scratchpad’s Workflow Tiles offer easy access to Salesforce fields and data via customizable shortcuts, making workflows more efficient for AEs, Managers, and RevOps teams.
Additionally, these tiles improve collaboration, such as when AEs work with SDRs or SEs on specific deals, or when handing off a closed-won opportunity to an Account Manager, keeping everyone uniformly updated.
Scratchpad boosts sales efficiency by fostering better collaboration within teams. This leads to improved account planning, more efficient handoffs, more thorough deal inspections, and streamlined one-on-one interactions between a sales rep and a manager.
Scratchpad’s Deal Spotlights actively identify potential issues and gaps in your open sales pipeline.
This feature enables you to proactively detect and address challenges and make necessary updates independently, often before they are highlighted by your sales manager or the operations team.
Scratchpad simplifies the rollup process, eliminating the need for using spreadsheets to track deals. Its Rollups feature allows you to track how each deal progresses at various stages, providing critical insights into the history and reasons behind specific changes.
Scratchpad’s Waterfall Analytics delivers a straightforward breakdown of your sales forecast changes and their underlying causes. This ensures an accurate, regularly updated sales forecast that aligns seamlessly with your current pipeline.
Scratchpad’s Sales Trends Analytics allows you to identify patterns in the evolution of your sales forecast.
This allows you to compare current sales data with that from past months, quarters, or years. Included within Trends Analytics are Daily Snapshots, which offer a detailed historical record of daily changes in your sales pipeline.
Enhance your revenue operations using Scratchpad's no-code automations, which streamline Salesforce updates and reveal potential gaps in your pipeline.
The system includes crucial alerts for absent MEDDIC fields and blends with sales process management, employing Slack notifications to monitor sale progress, identify unfinished tasks, and facilitate proactive sales management.
Scratchpad Call Intelligence features an advanced Call Recorder with AI-assisted notes, which significantly streamlines the process of documenting calls in the MEDDIC process.
This system automatically creates transcripts and summaries of conversations using AI technology, offering profound insights into customer interactions through cutting-edge call recording methods.
Scratchpad’s Slack Automations and Sales Inbox enhances sales team efficiency with various Slack alerts and automations within your Scratchpad workflow. It provides notifications for critical updates, celebrates closed-won opportunities, and sends reminders for important sales dates.
This tool ensures teams adhere to sales methodologies, delivers instant updates on deals, and notifies the sales manager about major pipeline changes, contributing to efficient and timely sales management.
Scratchpad’s Enablement Cards enhance sales productivity by integrating key enablement materials, such as battle cards and pricing information, directly into the workflow of a sales representative.
This feature offers immediate access to playbooks and competitive intelligence within Scratchpad — eliminating the need to alternate between different systems.
The cards, equipped with intelligent playbooks and real-time keyword triggers, enhance customer engagements, and their integration with the Guru library enriches sales calls with current, relevant content.
Scratchpad rapidly improves Salesforce hygiene and compliance within 15 minutes, helping RevOps encourage proper sales representative behaviors and minimizing administrative work through automated deal alerts and customized views.
This tool boosts sales rep efficiency with no-code, adaptable processes, and instant Slack updates, and integrates vital sales resources such as playbooks and battle cards into the pipeline management system.
Scratchpad Deal Inspection provides a fast and effective solution for an executive or sales leader to comprehensively examine deals, pinpoint risks, and gain in-depth insights.
With its intuitive interface that smoothly integrates with Salesforce, it enables quick and thorough analysis of deal dynamics, stakeholder involvement, and adherence to sales processes.
Let’s take a quick look at the main features of Deal Inspection:
Scratchpad Command allows reps, managers, and leaders to access and update Salesforce workflows and create records either within their preferred web applications or directly in Salesforce. Utilizing straightforward keyboard shortcuts (CMD+J for Mac or CTRL+J for Windows), users can easily search for and create opportunities, accounts, contacts, or leads in a single click.
Still need clarity on some MEDDIC-related questions?
Here are the answers to a few common questions on MEDDIC and other related sales methodologies:
MEDDIC, MEDDICC, and MEDDPICC® signify a progressive development in sales methodologies, with each version introducing additional elements to better navigate increasingly complex sale situations.
Here’s how to differentiate these sales methodologies:
MEDDIC and BANT are both methodologies designed for qualifying sales leads, but they stand apart in their complexity, focus, and application in different sales contexts.
Whether you’re a seasoned sales veteran or a newcomer, understanding MEDDIC is key to mastering the sophisticated dynamics of modern sales. It fosters a deeper connection with potential clients and enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire sales process.
Wondering if there’s a tool that can help you easily implement MEDDIC and drive more sales?
Look no further than Scratchpad!
Try Scratchpad for free today and discover how it can support your journey to MEDDIC mastery.
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MEDDPICC® is a federally registered trademark of Darius Lahoutifard, exclusively licensed by MEDDIC Academy, and is being used with permission.
