The Point: When should you call a MEDDIC to improve your sales procedure? Yes, we meant to spell it “MEDDIC” instead of MEDIC! Why? If you’re old enough to remember the television series M*A*S*H (or a Hulu Plus subscriber), you know the benefit a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital for the front-line position. We would argue that Business Sales/Marketing is similar to wartime, inasmuch you most likely will have casualties. Instead of these casualties being life/death, they are go/no go for the campaigns you run as an organizational Sales/Marketing Leader. So, in this post we explore the MEDDIC sales procedure… Enjoy!

The MEDDIC Sales Procedure

An acronym, MEDDIC stands for Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion. This sales procedure emphasizes better customer qualification—determining if you should expend effort getting a prospective customer into your sales funnel.

The MEDDIC Sales Procedure

The MEDDIC sales procedure is a B2B sales methodology that was developed in the early 1990s. The process focuses on better customer qualification, in other words, determining whether you should put effort into getting customers into the sales funnel. Supporters for the MEDDIC sales method assert that pitching more qualified customers leads to a greater closing rate, which in turn increases sales performance.

MEDDIC is an abbreviation for Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion. These are the six steps concurrently utilized to identify customers within the MEDDIC sales process.

Metrics

The first step is to determine what the client hopes to achieve in gaining from your product. The gains must be easily quantifiable. For instance, the business may wish to increase the amount of products that they produce by four times the rate or they may need to bring their products out within a half-hour or to cut down at least 20% of manufacturing expenses.

These metrics allow you to explain the economic advantages from your service. Once you’ve identified this is important to the customer, it is possible to demonstrate that your solution can provide a high Return on Investment (ROI). If you are able to justify your solution from an economic perspective, in theory you’ll be just a few steps away from closing your deal.

Economic Buyer

You must know who’s the company’s buyer of economics that possesses the authority to decide and approve spending. In most cases, you’ll be speaking to someone additional in the organization than just your current contact (For example, the decision could come from a Consensus Committee). Knowing the business buyer’s mindset and their perspective will assist you in closing sales because the buyer’s veto power means they are the only one that needs to be convinced.

Plan on directly contacting the economic buyer to learn about their success metrics, their expectations, and their decision-making process. However, in certain situations speaking directly is not possible, and you must attempt to gather these details about the buyer from the person you have contacted. Utilize these details to ensure the purchase appeal to the buyer even if they aren’t going to necessarily be affected directly by the sale.

Decision Criteria

Also, you must know the business’s criteria when making its choices. Businesses are frequently faced with different options from various sources and are forced to review and choose. If you can understand why they arrive at their decisions then you can tailor your message accordingly.

The criteria for judging differ, but generally businesses consider factors such as ease of use/integration, budget restrictions, and possible ROI in making their decision. If the prospective company doesn’t have clearly defined criteria for making decisions, you could ask them to write it down on paper. This is a way to show that you meet all the criteria they have, and potentially showing them the “Why?” associated for them to not accept an offer.

Decision Process

The decision process will tell you what factors influence the decision-making capabilities of the company and the process that decision making takes as well as which are actually taken and then followed up on. The decision process should include the person who is responsible for making a decision, the deadline they work on, as well as any formal approval procedures in the process.

If you are aware of the process of making decisions, you’re less likely to miss out on the sale because of stagnation. You know precisely what has to be done for the company’s part to conclude the sale, and you are able to work to fulfill those requirements. If, for instance, you are aware that the economic buyer has ok’d the purchase but hasn’t completed the follow-up procedure documents, you may make an effort to have that paperwork completed, thus closing the deal.

Identify Pain

A client must be in need prior to deciding to seek the solution. In other words, no change will occur until the pain associated with staying the same (doing nothing) is greater than the pain associated with changing (switching vendors to you!) It’s essential to determine what that requirement is or what’s making them feel pain (suffering?). The pain may be manifested in various ways, such as high costs as well as slow production and poor revenues. Find out what pain your customer is feeling and figure out what solution you can offer to alleviate the discomfort. What happens in the event that they fail to choose the right solution, or make a mistake? What will be the solution to be able to fix the problem?

Be as precise as you can about the customer’s issues. For instance, knowing that the customer is losing money because of slow production is vital. However it’s not sufficiently specific or abstract to put into use. It is specific though if you know that they’re losing $300,000 per month due to their production process because it isn’t nearly the speed it ought to be. In this scenario, you could propose your solution with a specific and persuasive method for improvement therein.

Champion

Find a person on the inside who’s invested in your progress and who pushes to help you. The person who champions your cause is likely to be the one who is the most affected by the company’s struggles or who will benefit the greatest from the solution. Since they’re interested in your solution, they want you to succeed and will leverage their influence to market the solution internally.

Your champion doesn’t necessarily need to be in an executive or other executive position (but it sure does help), but they should be respected. A person who is known as self-centered and uninterested in advocating for you is never the best choice. However, having a champion who has influence and respect on your side could make all the difference in closing future deals.

Should You Use the MEDDIC Sales Technique?

The MEDDIC sales technique is an easy checklist for your sales operation. It will ensure that your sales are backed by all of the details that you need and the easy acronym makes it simple to recall what that you’re required to know. Since the MEDDIC sales procedure is based on learning rather than making sales through tricks it’s simple to use even for people who aren’t considered to be “salesy.”

Furthermore, the MEDDIC sales strategy provides you with the data you need to be able to precisely assess your prospects. Once you understand more about your prospective clients you will then know if they’re worth your time. This will aid in forecasting your sales since you’ll not be creating leads that won’t be profitable in your pipeline for sales.

Implement the MEDDIC Sales Procedure – Where to Start?

As you can see from the previous steps, the MEDDIC sales procedure provides specific guidelines on how to gain more information about the potential customers you are targeting to convince them of your service or product’s worth. How do you get your sales reps to use this method?

Begin by visualizing the process. It’s not only the basics of MEDDIC, but how the steps are tailored for your company. This could involve creating an outline of the collateral you should use at each step or conversation trees to aid reps in identifying winners and points of contention (These are in your Sales Playbook, right?)

Next, make sure that your sales reps keep accurate records of meetings with prospective customers and other interactions using their MEDDIC procedures to make sure they are following the entire MEDDIC process. For instance, you could add fields to your CRM that correspond to each of the steps or develop a template such as the one below.

SUMMARY

If you are able to qualify and understand your clients Your sales team will be able to focus their time on opportunities that are most likely to work and discover the value that will get this deal across the line to “Closed Won” status! If you’d like more information on how we can help you implement MEDDIC or other Sales/Marketing best practices, CONTACT US today.

Sam Palazzolo, Managing Director