Markets Deliver

MEDDIC

MEDDIC is metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, and champion: a checklist for qualifying a complex sale.

The questionIs this deal real enough to forecast, and which of the six checks is still missing?

Also written MEDDICC or MEDDPICC when competition and paper process are added.

Process · Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli, 1990s

Metrics Quantified result of winning
Economic buyer Person who can spend
Decision criteria How they will choose
Decision process Steps, dates, and sign-off
Identify pain Cost of leaving it unsolved
Champion Insider who sells for you

The six qualification checks. A deal in forecast is only as strong as the weakest one.

When to use it

Complex deals sit in "commit" because a friendly contact said yes, and nobody can name the buyer, the criteria, or a date.
Forecast accuracy is poor, and slipped deals all fail the same missing check once you look.
Several account teams need a shared way to inspect a large opportunity in a pipeline meeting, in minutes, not a full account plan.
A champion is doing all the talking, and the team has not met the person who can actually spend.

When to avoid it

The sale is small, fast, or already specified in a tender. The six checks cost more than they return, and the scoring criteria matter more than the influence map.
The problem is what the rep says in the room. Challenger is the conversation model. MEDDIC is a qualification filter.
Reps will fill the six boxes after the fact to keep a deal in the forecast. A completed checklist that is not true is worse than a blank one.
You need a full map of every buyer. Miller Heiman's four influences go deeper on who decides. MEDDIC asks whether you have the economic buyer and a champion, and then stops.

Overview

MEDDIC is a six-letter qualification checklist for complex sales: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, and champion. It was built at PTC in the 1990s by Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli as a way to inspect large deals in a forecast review. The choice it supports is whether a deal belongs in the forecast, and which missing check is the next piece of work.

A completed form is not a qualified deal. Each letter has to rest on evidence from the customer, and the champion has to be tested by a request that could fail. Variants add competition and paper process. Those are extras. The original six already catch most of the deals that slip.

The six checks

Metrics

A number the customer will use to judge success, such as hours saved, cost avoided, or revenue gained, in their units. "They like it" is not a metric. If the economic buyer cannot say what better looks like in a figure, the deal has no business case to defend.

Economic buyer

The person who can spend this amount, including money that is not already in a budget. There is one for a given decision. A user who is enthusiastic and a VP who has not been met is the usual miss. Access to this person is a test of the champion.

Decision criteria

The factors the customer will use to choose, including technical, commercial, and risk, and which of them can kill the deal. If you cannot write them down, they are being written by someone else, often a competitor or a technical blocker.

Decision process

The steps, owners, and dates from here to signature, including security, legal, procurement, and board or budget cycles. A month named without a sequence is a wish. A process you cannot draw is a deal you cannot forecast.

Identify pain

A problem that is costing them now, with enough detail that doing nothing is an explicit choice. Pain that is only a future aspiration sits with visionaries and slips. Quantified pain feeds the metric. Unquantified pain is a story.

Champion

Someone inside the account who has the power and the will to sell your offer when you are not in the room. Tested by behavior, not warmth. A real champion gives you access to the economic buyer, tells you bad news, and builds internal consensus. A coach who will not make an introduction is not this person.

What it is not

A score that makes a weak deal look strong. Six boxes ticked from a single contact's account of events are one person's hope, written neatly.
A substitute for knowing the buying group. The economic buyer and the champion are two roles. Other blockers still exist.
A conversation script. The letters tell you what you must know. They do not tell you what to say in the meeting.

The steps

State the decision and the date

Write what is being bought, by which unit, for how much, and by when. The six checks are against that decision, not against the account in general.
Score each letter on evidence

For each of the six, record the fact you have, the source, and the date, or record that it is missing. A name with no meeting is missing. A metric the customer has not accepted is missing.
Test the champion

Ask for something only a champion can give, usually access to the economic buyer or an internal political fact that could hurt them if they are not serious. If they cannot or will not, they are not the champion. Do not relabel them.
Go after the weakest letter

Put the next meeting on the gap that would kill the deal, often the economic buyer, the real criteria, or a dated process. Do not book another demo while those are blank.
Re-forecast from the gaps

Deals with no economic buyer, no dated process, or an untested champion leave commit. Update the six after every meeting. The output of the review is a changed forecast, not a completed form.

In practice

At a quarterly forecast review, a $420,000 implementation sits in commit for this quarter. The rep has had six meetings. Metrics: the contact said it would "save a lot of scheduler time." Economic buyer: named as the VP of operations, never met. Decision criteria: IT has a security review the rep has not seen. Decision process: "they want to decide this month." Pain: overtime on the wards, no dollar figure. Champion: a scheduling manager who booked the demos and likes the product. Score on evidence, not on the story: pain is named and not costed, and the other five are missing or untested. The deal comes out of commit that afternoon.

The test of the champion is a single request: an introduction to the VP, plus last quarter's overtime dollars. The manager delays a week and then says the VP is not involved. That is the finding. Security is contacted anyway, the overtime figure is pulled from a public staffing report so a metric can be put on the table, and the close date moves to next quarter pending a meeting the champion cannot book. The forecast falls by $420,000. Two other "commit" deals fail the same champion test the same week. The quarter's number is lower and closer to what closes.

What you leave with

A six-letter score for each large deal, with the evidence or an explicit gap.
A named economic buyer, or a record that the name is missing.
A champion tested by a request for access or information, with the result.
A dated decision process, or a deal moved out of the current-period forecast.
A short list of next actions aimed at the weakest letter, with an owner.

Failure points

Completing the form from one contact

All six boxes are filled from the champion's account. The economic buyer, when finally reached, has different criteria and no urgency. The checklist recorded a single person's hope.

Champion by affection

The friendliest contact is labeled champion. They cannot get you to the economic buyer and do not want to, and the team believes it has a route that it does not.

Metrics the customer did not accept

The rep's ROI slide is entered as Metrics. When procurement asks for the customer's own number, there is none, and the business case collapses in the last mile.

A date without a process

Close date is this quarter because the forecast needs it. There is no sequence through security, legal, and budget. The date slips by a quarter, then another.

Inspection of completeness, not of truth

Managers check that every letter has text. Reps write plausible text. The method then produces tidy, late surprises.

The failures above are usually Stakeholder Algebra: while the analysis was precise, the people who decide were not handled correctly.

Origin

MEDDIC was built inside PTC, the CAD and later PLM software company, as a way to qualify large, multi-threaded deals. Practitioner accounts, including Jack Napoli's, date the first writing of the acronym to about 1996. Dick Dunkel, then in sales development, put the six letters on a whiteboard while preparing training. Napoli, a sales leader who had come to PTC from Xerox, was there and took it into forecast reviews. John McMahon, who ran sales, backed it as the standard. The six checks came out of looking at won and lost deals, not out of a published research program.

The method spread as PTC alumni moved to other software firms, and later as commercial training under names such as MEDDIC, MEDDICC, and MEDDPICC. The last two add competition, and MEDDPICC adds paper process, meaning legal and procurement. This note covers the original six. The checklist is a field method, not a licensed worksheet in the Miller Heiman sense, though firms now sell training and software around it. Use the letters. Do not treat a vendor's scorecard as the method.