Sample frameDay 040·Sales · Qualification

Morning. Not every deal deserves a quarter of your year. Six letters tell you which ones do.

Sales.

MEDDIC

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Which deal in your pipeline right now has no named economic buyer, no metric the customer would defend, and no champion selling for you when you're not in the room — and given that you already suspect which one it is, why haven't you asked it the six questions that would tell you whether it's real?

The idea

MEDDIC is not a theory; it came out of practice at PTC, the Boston software company where Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli codified in the 1990s what the strongest reps checked before committing serious time to a deal. The result is a six-part audit: Metrics — the quantified result the customer expects; Economic buyer — the person who can actually release money; Decision criteria and Decision process — what you will be judged against, and the steps between interest and signature; Identify pain — a problem sharp enough to force action; and Champion — someone inside who sells when you are not in the room. The uncomfortable claim underneath is that a deal missing three of these is not early — it is imaginary. Most people qualify on enthusiasm, because a warm contact and a good meeting feel like momentum; MEDDIC replaces the feeling with evidence, and treats qualification as a standing audit you re-run as the deal moves, not a box ticked at the top of the funnel.

The framework

01
Quantify the pain, or watch the status quo win.
Get the customer to state the problem and the expected result in numbers they would defend to their own CFO — hours lost per week, revenue at risk, cost per incident, margin recovered. Pain that has never been measured rarely forces action, because your real competitor in most deals is not another vendor but the status quo, and the status quo wins every contest decided on comfort. If they cannot or will not put a number on it, treat that as data: the pain is probably not severe enough to displace anything.
02
Find the economic buyer — the person who can release money.
Your enthusiastic contact and the economic buyer are rarely the same person, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in enterprise sales. Ask directly: 'whose budget does this come from, and have they agreed to spend it?' Then work to get in front of that person, or at minimum secure a named commitment from them through your champion. A deal in which you have never touched the economic buyer is not a deal; it is a rumour with a close date.
03
Learn the criteria and the process before you are judged by them.
Ask what a winning solution must prove — the decision criteria — and what steps sit between a yes and a signature: technical evaluation, security review, procurement, legal, a board meeting. Write the process down, read it back to your champion, and ask what you have missed; deals rarely die on the criteria you knew about, they die on the step nobody mapped. If the criteria favour a competitor, discovering that in month one is a gift — you can reshape them early or walk early, and both beat losing late.
04
Build a champion, then test them with a task.
A champion is not a friendly contact; a champion has a personal stake in your success and enough standing to sell for you when you are not in the room. The test is behavioural rather than verbal: ask them to do something — arrange the economic-buyer meeting, circulate the business case, share the internal scorecard — and watch whether they act. Someone who is warm in meetings but never moves is a coach at best, and a pipeline full of coaches is how a quarter disappears.

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