If you’re like many B2B sales leaders right now, you’re wondering what you can do today that will impact your Q4 forecast so your team can make its goal this year. The answer is MEDDICC sales.
What is MEDDICC?
MEDDICC is a sales methodology and it is one of the most common strategies used by CROs in B2B software sales to help their sales teams drive urgency, reduce sales cycle time, build more pipeline, qualify and progress deals faster, and increase revenue. The MEDDPICC sales process framework is guaranteed to help your sales team continuously qualify deals throughout the entire buying process.
Overview of MEDDICC sales process framework (with definitions)
1. METRICS: Help your sellers drive urgency in deals and accelerate sales
Metrics are the key performance indicators that are aligned with your buyer’s success. It’s extremely important that revenue teams get aligned around the importance of uncovering metrics and KPIs so they can ultimately solve the biggest problems for companies. Once your reps uncover the metrics and quantify them, the likelihood that deals will close increases significantly and forecast predictability improves.
| 2. ECONOMIC BUYERS: Improves forecast accuracy |
How often does this happen in your deals? You’re working with a prospect and they tell you they’re the economic buyer, you believe them, and you’re progressing your deal and moving it forward – at least you think you’re moving it forward – then all of a sudden your prospect goes silent or the deal goes sideways or you lose a deal. And you are left wondering what happened? In today’s world you are often working with a buying committee. It’s hard for sellers to know who the real economic buyer is because the economic buyer is the one with the ultimate decision. They can say yes or no to a deal. You can avoid deals going sideways and deals getting lost and deals going silent by identifying your economic buyer. So if you’re not engaging the economic buyer early, and often you risk losing the deal.
3. DECISION CRITERIA: Qualify deals faster
Decision criteria are the principles and factors that a company is using to ultimately make a purchase decision to solve their problems. Decision criteria can be created by you or it can be created for you. The outcomes of those two scenarios are very different. If you’re co-creating or creating decision criteria, you’re gonna be able to influence the deal by leveraging your competitive advantage and differentiators. And if you’re not — then you’re coming from behind. MEDDICC training will help you uncover the decision criteria, by helping you learn the questions to ask and what to look for to uncover decision criteria.
4. DECISION PROCESS: Progress sales deals faster
Imagine it’s the last week of the month or quarter and you’re waiting for a signature on a big deal. But instead you get a text or a call from your champion. There’s one more step we have to take. There’s an apology, but you can’t get a deal done until this step is done. And you wonder, wow, how did we miss it? How did this happen? You’re banking on the deal. Now, you gotta call your manager, your manager needs to call their manager, everybody is disappointed. With MEDDICC you ensure deals don’t get stalled because your reps have uncovered all the customer steps required for customers to be able to purchase based on their decision process. MEDDPICC arms your sellers with the questions to ask to ensure that they know all the steps and they understand the who and the what for every step in the decision process.
5. PAPER PROCESS: Close with certainty
Have you ever worked a deal that required the CFO’s approval on the PO – only to find out that the CFO was on vacation, without internet and there is no way to get approved in the timeline that you hoped based on when the deal was committed and forecasted – and it ruined your quarter? What we want to do here is help you avoid that same painful outcome that we had of having a deal to get pushed and missing our number for the quarter and missing our forecast. One of the most important steps to getting a deal closed is uncovering the steps to get a signed contract, including the legal steps and the procurement steps. That’s what the paper process in MEDDICC is all about, helping you uncover those steps so you can avoid surprises when you’re right at the finish line.
6. IMPLICATIONS OF PAIN: Close bigger deals, faster
It’s extremely important that you understand your customers’ issues and impacts, and the implications of those issues and impacts. If you don’t, you miss a critical opportunity to differentiate and miss an opportunity to really add value and ultimately, the chance to close the deal. Your customer’s pain is why they are meeting with you. Most sellers today tend to focus on features and demos. Most sellers are not focused on issues and impacts and implications. They often don’t have agendas with clear timelines to focus on issues and impacts and implications. They’re not creating a space where customers can share what’s really going on in the business and they’re not asking questions that dig deeper. Asking better questions will help your reps uncover the issues and impacts and implications so they can close bigger sales deals, faster.
7. CHAMPIONS: Help you mitigate deal risks
A champion is a person on the buying team that knows how to get a deal done. They’ve got the influence, they’ve got the power, they know the steps, and they’ve got the power and influence to help get a deal done. It’s critical to earn the trust of your champion and to test your champion. If you don’t have a champion and if they’re not empowered and they’re not engaged, then you don’t have a deal.
8. COMPETITION: Boost win-rates
What’s the best way to boost your teams’ win rates? Help them understand the competition – and not be afraid of it. By having a competitive strategy and understanding your company’s competitive strengths and weaknesses, and how you are positioned against competitors empowers you to make better deal decisions. Competition can be
- Direct or indirect competitors
- Competing projects internally where we’re competing for dollars
- The buyer building the solution internally
- The buyer decides to do nothing
With MEDDPICC training, your sellers will dive deep into competitive strategy building and give them a framework to overcome a competitor’s strengths and how to plant traps around weaknesses, and how to use that information to run a deal and win every deal, every single time.
The difference between MEDDPICC(tm), MEDDICC and MEDDIC
MEDDIC is the original sales methodology created inside product lifecycle technology to navigate the complexities of multi-layer sales deals. Since then, technology and processes have evolved tremendously–mostly due to the introduction of the cloud. These advancements introduced two more complexities into sales deals:
- Increased complexity in the paper process that includes things like an increased number of subscription models, cloud hosting, requirements around security and privacy, etc.
- Increased competition due to being able to build technologies quicker and at scale–the rate of technology based sales processes and the competitors within those grew dramatically due to ease of access and setup.
These two additional elements caused the traditional MEDDIC to transform to MEDDPICC(tm) with the P standing for paper process and the additional C standing for competition. MEDDICC on the other hand includes competition but not the paper process. Which one you choose depends on the needs of your sales methodology and the makeup of your most common deals that are building your sales process. If the paper process for you is minimal to non-existent, you may choose MEDDICC and do the paper process on the side. If the paper process is complex, you may want MEDDPICC(tm) instead. MEDDIC is rarely used before MEDDICC and MEDDPICC(tm) by sales organizations. We have also seen some channel centric organizations have P represent Partners versus Paper Process and even some companies are adding another P and calling it MEDDPPICC(tm).
Training & reinforcing your sales team on MEDDICC
SalesHood’s all-in-one platform brings you MEDDICC by SalesHood – the easiest, fastest way to train and coach your teams on the MEDDPICC framework so they can build more pipeline, qualify and progress deals faster, drive urgency, boost win rates, and increase revenue. The training includes on-demand, bite-sized, content that is interactive, organized, and purpose-built to help your revenue teams quickly apply the MEDDICC framework to real deals so you can see an immediate lift in how your teams engage customers and progress deals. Learn more how to get your sales organization started on MEDDICC sales training today.
