Know more about your customers’ needs and meet them.

Becoming a great sales person relies on more than just a good personality and a deep knowledge of the product you’re selling. Gathering in-depth information about your customer, their needs, and what information is helping drive their decision making is critical. Luckily, there’s a sales methodology that fits those criteria — MEDDPIC.

What is MEDDPIC?

At its core, MEDDPIC is a business to business (B2B) sales qualification methodology that helps enterprise sales teams determine what’s already known, what needs to be figured out, and who you should really be discussing value with, within an organization.

Created in the early ‘90s by Dick Dunkel at Parametric Technology Corporation, MEDDPIC is an acronym that helps explain the sales process. By knowing what each part of the acronym means, you can better understand how the sales methodology works.

• Metrics. Metrics are the quantifiable measures of value your solution can provide the prospect. M1s are business outcomes you have delivered for existing customers. M2s are the specific outcomes an individual customer is looking for and the quantified impact of that outcome on their organization.
• Economic buyer. The economic buyer is the person you need to meet who has the authority to make a purchasing decision and controls the company’s purse strings. These people manage the company or department budget. Do everything you can to determine the Economic Buyer’s preconceptions about your solution and address those right away. Hint: The Economic Buyer typically makes decisions based on confidence, time to value and return on investment.
• Decision criteria. This is what the customer uses to determine whether they’re going to go with one solution over another. By knowing their criteria, you can help meet the company’s budget needs, technical challenges, or highlight your solution’s return on investment capabilities. If your prospect doesn’t have decision criteria, work with them to build this.
• Decision process. It takes more than one person to come to a decision about whether or not to buy something for a company and you should know that process. By understanding how a company comes to a conclusion, you can cater your approach to match their purchase decision making process.
• Paperwork process. During this part of the process, both your company and the purchasing company will likely need to have various contracts signed and completed before a purchase can be made. You should understand your prospect’s process, including exactly whose signatures are needed, in order to streamline the paperwork.
• Implicate the Pain. Determine how and when the problem they’re trying to solve becomes an untenable situation. Ask what happens if your buyer doesn’t solve their problem and truly understand the pain associated with a lack of delivering outcomes. Some typical points of pain include economic or financial issues, efficiency issues, or dips in productivity or morale.
• Champion. Knowing who your champion is will be a huge help. This person may not necessarily have the purchasing power, but they are the person who’s gunning for you and your product to get selected. Usually, you can find your champion among the individuals who will most likely benefit from what you’re offering. By having them involved in the process, even by giving them documentation to help sell your solution internally, they can be your voice at the table.

In some circles, this sales qualification method includes a second ‘C’ to stand for “Competition.” In those instances, competition stands for needing to determine who your competition is for that client’s business’s attention. Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll have to explain to your prospective client how you differ from your competition. Be completely honest when describing how your solution compares to alternatives.

What Are Some Best Practices for Implementing MEDDPIC?

When implementing MEDDIPIC in your team’s sales practice, it’s important that you consider its use through each stage of the buying process.

In the early stage, you will learn more about the buyer and their needs. In some cases, you won’t be able to determine the economic buyer right away — that’s fine, work with your champion or some other contact in the company to work on other parts of the plan.

In the middle stage, you’re getting closer to the company by interacting with the economic buyer and learning more about the decision process. You’re getting a clearer and clearer picture about how your solution can help the buyer and finding an avenue toward your ultimate goal of solving your customer’s problem and closing on a deal.

In the late stage, this is where you’re putting the pedal to the metal. Your metrics will be under intense scrutiny, so you’ll be forced to hammer down how much value you can provide the buyer. You’re also asking the economic buyer to commit to your item, and you’ve convinced people in the company that your solutions are the best compared to everyone else. Your champion helps carry you and your solution across the finish line.

As a sales leader, how you implement MEDDIPIC is just as important as why you’re doing so in the first place. Proper implementation of this sales framework can be a timely benefit to your department. First and foremost, you have to describe how important MEDDIPIC will be to your team’s overall success over time. Failing to do so could result in your team starting out excited for the new process and then not following it in key moments. To combat that, you want to establish proactive prompts that ensure your team members are keeping their information up to date and following through. You’re also going to want to continually coach employees who may feel confused about this change. Nothing’s worse than a team member not knowing what they’re doing and feeling completely disengaged from the task at hand.

Finally, you want to regularly inspect how the team is using the MEDDPIC framework. Managers should be keeping a close eye on things, while representatives should be following up on prospective agreements with potential clients. With a little extra know-how and follow through, your time with MEDDPIC as a business leader can be a lucrative and fruitful one, as long as you yourself follow through and keep your sales team engaged in the sales framework.

Best Practices for Learning a New Methodology as a Sales Person

It’s important to note that MEDDPIC is nothing but a series of guidelines. It’s not a sales playbook that fits every sales team or individual customer exactly the same. As such, your business will have to cater each step to fit your company, your customer, and the sales individuals that get deals done. As a sales person, you can more easily understand how MEDDPIC works by understanding what each step means. As long as you know that Metrics deals with your customer’s outcomes, and that you need to implicate the pain, and you understand that it may take some time for you to get to talking with the economic buyer, you will know how and when these steps come into play.

One way that makes it easy to understand where you’re at when implementing MEDDPIC is to use a color-coded system. Red means that section needs more attention or information, Yellow means that you have some of the information you need, and Green means you’re 100% positive you have everything you need to move forward. By focusing on those colors and working toward Green, you can push your strengths as a sales member to the next level with MEDDPIC.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, MEDDPIC is just a qualification framework. It’s a tool to help guide your sales team to more fruitful engagements with potential customers and could ultimately help you get your solution sold to more clients. By properly understanding how it works and where it fits in the sales process, you can ensure those gains work for you too.