What Is The MEDDIC Sales Process? Why Should You Use It?

Closing sales is challenging for big and small businesses and companies alike. Sometimes it seems that regardless of the method employed, sales aren’t improving. One of the best ways to solve this problem is the MEDDIC sales process.

What is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. In a nutshell, MEDDIC is a methodology that works as a sales qualification framework. The primary purpose of MEDDIC is to increase sales and make the whole process of closing deals a lot more effective.

Although widely talked about lately, MEDDIC isn’t a new strategy. In fact, Richard “Dick” Dunkel created the MEDDIC methodology in 1996 when he was at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC). He was going through deals that their sales teams won or lost and realized that six characteristics kept appearing in all of them. Major contributions to the evolution of MEDDIC came from John McMahon, CRO at PTO, and Jack Napoli, known as the Godfather of MEDDIC.

How does the MEDDIC sales process work?

Technically speaking, MEDDIC is not a sales process per se. Instead, it’s a framework that allows sales teams to qualify opportunities. The mechanism of action is simple, and it revolves around six qualification steps:

• Metrics – learn more about the goals the customer wants to achieve. The goals should be quantifiable; this makes it easier to describe your service’s or product’s benefits. If you’re not familiar with the customer’s goals, you won’t be able to direct their attention to the solutions you provide
  
• Economic buyer – find out who has the authority at some company to make financial decisions. Get to know that person’s mindset. Remember that is the person you need to convince to buy products or services. Knowing this information helps save time you’d spend targeting the wrong people in a specific company. One of the biggest targets for your sales representatives should be a person that’s in charge of purchasing and other financial decisions.
  
• Decision criteria – learn as much as possible about the company’s criteria in the decision-making process. Customize the message about products and services to meet their needs. Failing to understand decision criteria increases the risk of making wrong moves that rule out your products and service. But, when you get more information on this subject, you can avoid this problem and meet their criteria. Remember, every business has its own set of decision criteria.
  
• Decision process – find out how the company makes decisions and follows them through. That way, the sales team knows how to handle the deal and close sales successfully. Without an understanding of the decision process, it isn’t easy to make the right moves that would close the sales.
  
• Identify pain – determine the customer’s needs (pain points) that your products and services can solve. Basically, this step involves identifying their key problems and describing how your product helps solve them.
  
• Champion – look for a person within that business or company that’s driven and goal-oriented. That person wants the company to succeed because the above mentioned “pain” affects them the most. They want to resolve the problems, which is why they’re a great asset for closing sales.

Why is MEDDIC necessary?

Regardless of your products and services, MEDDIC can greatly help close sales. You need MEDDIC because the sales team can easily know where they stand with a specific customer. More precisely, the sales team can determine whether the customer is ready to close the sale or not and act accordingly. 

Thanks to MEDDIC, sales teams save time and effort they’d spend on customers who aren’t ready to close the sale. At the same time, they can focus on customers that are ready to make the purchase. As they close that sale, the sales representatives can also shape their message to appeal to the customer’s decision-makers to close the sale with companies that previously weren’t ready.

Why aren’t companies making sales?

The best way to understand why you need MEDDIC is to learn more about failed sales. Many businesses struggle to make sales, and several reasons could be to blame. Small businesses’ main issues are failing to satisfy specific needs, lack of financing, bad business plan, inflexibility, rapid expansion, and wrong location.

Inadequate sales techniques, targeting wrong buyers (or people that aren’t decision makers), and bad timing are also factors that explain why you’re not making sales.

It’s also useful to mention that around 67% of lost sales occur because sales representatives don’t qualify leads properly.

A similar situation is among bigger businesses. While factors are numerous, we can bring them down to one thing – failing to meet the needs of potential customers or having an inadequate sales strategy.

If you take a closer look, you can notice something interesting. Yes, you can easily see that MEDDIC can solve some of these factors. Thanks to MEDDIC, you can describe products or services in a way to meet specific needs, develop business plans more effectively, improve sales techniques, and target the correct buyers. Plus, MEDDIC allows you to contact a particular customer at the best time, thus eliminating failed sales due to poor timing.

Businesses of all sizes can use MEDDIC to shape their sales strategies to turn more leads into customers without losing them or having stagnating contacts.

Benefits of MEDDIC for your company

We briefly mentioned the benefits of MEDDIC for your company above. MEDDIC acts as a checklist for your sales team, giving you the necessary information to develop the strategy and turn your efforts into success.

What makes MEDDIC important is that it allows businesses or companies to sell products or services without using cheap tricks. This methodology isn’t about tricks but about gathering information and building knowledge.

All members of sales teams learn with MEDDIC and build a sales pitch or customize sales strategy using information they have. The goal is to address customers’ specific needs and target people who genuinely make a difference in closing the sale.

Many companies make mistakes by refusing to alter or modify their sales strategy when necessary. As a result, they don’t “speak to” potential customers. A potential customer sees no value and doesn’t know what a product or service can do for them. With MEDDIC, it becomes easier to solve this problem. You adapt the sales process to respond to each customer adequately.

Through the six steps of the MEDDIC sales process, you learn a lot about the customer, people who play a role in sales, decision-makers, needs, problems, and other information. You can use all this information to forecast your sales and determine whether a customer is ready or not.

Also, MEDDIC allows you to identify pain and emphasize it with metrics. This creates urgency. In some cases, it’s possible to take control of the criteria or processes wherein customers make decisions. You can also use MEDDIC to empower or encourage stakeholders to understand the benefits of your products and services.

Who can use MEDDIC Sales Process

Generally speaking, MEDDIC is for everyone. All businesses can benefit from such a simplified approach to qualifying sales and achieving more success by attaining knowledge and information. However, this methodology works best for enterprises or companies with complex sales processes. If your business or company has a complex sales process that doesn’t provide expected results, MEDDIC is a practical solution.

How to implement MEDDIC Sales Process

To implement MEDDIC, you need to take some time to visualize the whole process. This will allow you to create a flowchart that helps sales representatives navigate their way around MEDDIC and identify champions and pain.

Using Spreadsheets is practical at this point. It allows you to create separate columns for every step and enter specific information into each row. Spreadsheets are easy to understand and make it easier for a sales representative to know whether or not a particular company is ready to close the deal.

Most importantly, implementing MEDDIC means dedicating time to educating sales managers about this methodology. The sales department needs to know everything MEDDIC stands for and what information to obtain or qualify.

Or you can work with professionals.

To get the most from MEDDIC, which offers a lot, you need to implement MEDDIC properly. Therefore, the best thing to do is rely on professional solutions. Spinify is the solution you need. Dedicated to increasing employee engagement, boosting workplace productivity, and helping you make more sales, Spinify provides easy tools for a seamless experience. Spinify makes implementing MEDDIC simple by gathering information, qualifying it, and analyzing its value for a specific purpose.