How the MEDDIC Sales Methodology Can Help Close More Deals

14 May

What We’ll Cover:

Overview of MEDDIC Methodology: Explains how MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) helps sales teams close more deals by aligning with customer needs and refining sales processes.
Importance of Understanding Customer Needs: Highlights the need for sales teams to understand customer metrics, challenges, and pain points to tailor solutions that align with the buyer's decision-making process.
Role of the Economic Buyer: Discusses the significance of identifying and effectively communicating with the economic buyer, who has the budget authority and strategic influence in the purchasing process.
Strategic Sales Processes: Details how MEDDIC can be used to develop targeted sales strategies for different industries and buyer personas, ensuring more personalized and effective sales approaches.
Benefits and Challenges of MEDDIC: Outlines the pros (such as improved qualification of leads and focus on valuable deals) and cons (like the need for alignment with complex buying processes and difficulty in finding a champion) of implementing the MEDDIC methodology in sales processes.

MEDDIC assists with identifying visibly recognized needs and further developing that most sales are invitation only. Without this proven alignment to recognized needs and an agreeable solution that is robust enough to illustratively articulate in the form of a value proposition, a salesperson will be restricted to partnering with a champion while trying to defy the status quo. It's crucial for sales and marketing teams to be equipped with MEDDIC to refine sales qualification criteria existing systems and processes, ensuring they are well-prepared to adapt and support the sales funnel effectively.

Metrics are about needs and challenges. By understanding each of these, a salesperson can align solutions across the needs and ensure that the best-fit answer can be crafted. At an elementary level, identification deals will result in wasted energy and time if there isn’t a solution that solves the economic buyer’s recognized need. Large deals will die at the negotiation stage if there isn’t a solution that opens on the customer’s needs and challenges in a way superior to that of rival solutions.

One of MEDDIC’s most significant strengths is its ability to accurately forecast based on stages of the sales methodologies and gauging the veracity of the success of achieving each stage, which accelerates moving leads down the sales funnel. This proprietary view into the buyer’s universe creates an uneven advantage over the competition.

Prospects can appreciate a salesperson with an established approach that is going to get them what they need. MEDDIC is an abbreviation that represents Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion. This methodology of selling is designed specifically for salespeople who are selling high-end, enterprise solutions and need to find effective ways to manage complex sales. By gaining insight into the buyer’s perspective at each phase of the sales cycle, this methodology creates an environment that is conducive for maturity in the sales process.

How the MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) sales methodology can help sales teams successfully close more deals by providing a comprehensive framework to navigate the complex buying process and effectively address customer needs and concerns. With its emphasis on understanding the metrics and objectives that drive customer decision-making, MEDDIC enables sales professionals to align their sales strategies with the economic buyer’s priorities and make compelling value propositions. By systematically evaluating decision criteria and mapping out the decision process, MEDDIC helps sales teams identify potential roadblocks and create targeted solutions that drive customer success. Through the diligent identification of pain points and the cultivation of a champion within the customer organization, MEDDIC empowers sales professionals to build strong relationships and trust, ultimately leading to increased deal closure rates and improved sales performance.

Why use MEDDIC?

So, the main goal of Meddic is to help sales to qualify better which opportunities are worth pursuing and, from a management perspective, what’s the most advanced status of that very opportunity. As Meddic is a process created mostly for large sales/enterprise ones, i.e. where a situation has a multi-thousand-dollar deal, with very complex and competitive products, industries, or strategies, then it applies mostly to what are called Solution Sales. More generally, Meddic applies for larger opportunities or enterprise ones, where no single person could decide to go for the solutions, hence a structured process and methodology is needed to qualify the role of the various stakeholders involved, engage all of them in person training and at the right moment, address all their various business drivers, ask the good questions, position your solution in the best way, and let the sales champion help you do the sales.

Meddic is a sales methodology, a structured process that is focused on qualification, i.e. how to qualify an opportunity to avoid chasing bad deals. It helps salespeople to concentrate resources, time, and efforts on closing deals that are worth pursuing, hence avoiding wasting them on deals that will not close. Therefore, it is applied mostly in situations when many people in the company are involved in the sales process: solution architects, business architects, members of professional services, marketing... and you want to make sure they are involved with the right deals. As it is used mainly to qualify opportunities, then it is especially useful to weed out those deals not worth investing time and resources in. According to Meddic, to qualify an opportunity as a good one, a salesperson will have to investigate several aspects, which are represented by the acronym Meddic itself. There are other important items (e.g. competition, paper process) that salespeople have to manage and control, but what Meddic does is helping them select those opportunities that are worth working and in which we have a high probability of success and, for sure, the first filter to eliminate poor ones. From a management perspective, the goal of Meddic is to institutionalize the best practices of sales discussions, communication between sales and other functions, etc. It dramatically increases the chances of winning the right opportunities with no need for discounting to win them.

What is the MEDDPICC sales process?

All of us are always interested in finding out a new concept that we have not been exposed to, to give us the right push up or maybe find the miss in our current processes. MEDDPICC has been a concept for over a decade, if not more, but the ratio of failure to successful adoption of this concept is high since sales rest on objectives, objections, and subjective reasoning. However, the time has come to adopt concepts like MEDDPICC. The focus of the article is not on the benefit of the concept itself, but on the alignment of the complete process that we adopt to implement and place it correctly in our sales process. Concepts like MEDDPICC are required not just because of market requirements, but because the market is noisy and the decision-making process has become mighty complex. Anything that is simple to implement and makes the complexity ease in any organization or person looks for is a cornerstone to success. Does this mean the other stone required for a house is not required? Both are required, but implemented in a way that each complements the other.

Different sales processes for different industries and target audiences. Technology is changing the competitive landscape for many industries. Sales folks must evolve and adapt their sales process to navigate the new landscape. The holistic approach to MEDDPICC sales process helps build a robust process that enables optimum resource utilization and strategic focus areas as drivers rather than tactical impulses.

Why do you need a Sales Qualification Framework like MEDDIC?

In the purchase process, there is a driving envision, need or issue which motivates a purchase, and lowering the pains will ultimately get you farther ahead with the next chapter in that company or person’s success story. The question is: why do we complicate things? It comes down to cost. If you are reading this blog post, you probably find this a no-brainer, but I address the majority in this post, the more cautious sales managers. Oddly to put in the balance cost vs lost opportunity or MEDDIC is now likely to become a significant differentiator amongst competition. Even suggesting a simple approach could have some pitfalls of its own. It will most likely require “subjective judgment” and will ultimately lead to poor revenue forecasting, which, in turn, could lead to significant lost opportunities. The key question is, what is the risk associated with losing revenue? In the majority of businesses, it’s likely catastrophic.

Salespeople aren’t just one-size-fits-all—neither are your customers. They all require different needs and interact with different, and their variables are the reasons they’ll ultimately jump off the contract, surf through your competition or, worst still, buy nothing. But without processes in place to account for their interactions, you’re left picking up the pieces and spending time asking, “so, why didn’t you buy?” So if every step of a salesperson’s interaction with a customer or client is trying to be so uniform, why do you need a sales qualification framework like MEDDIC? Because even if an overall sales process appears to be a series of hypothetical cookie-cutter mold steps, the sales framework that a salesperson needs to make during those steps are anything but cookie-cutter. Emphasizing the importance of tailoring the sales pitch to directly address the identified pain points of prospects, using MEDDIC to guide the adjustment of the pitch according to the prospect's decision criteria, is crucial for making the pitch more impactful and targeted.

MEDDIC helps determine if a client is a good fit

Understanding the sales methodology that is best for you starts by defining who would buy your solution in a perfect world. What are the characteristics that a business looking to buy the needs to have? This is about the industry they are in, the kind of products they sell, the existing IT systems that they are using, and the resources they have available to themselves. This naturally will be and probably should be in a constant state of evolution. It's not to say that we can't sell our product to others, but we need to focus our sales efforts on the juiciest leads so that we can invest the 90-120 days it will take for the typical business client on the best chances of getting a reward for our efforts. A good place to start is trying to reproduce clients you have for whom you created the most value. What are their attributes? Are there others that are similar?

Your sales process will greatly differ whether or not you are selling to small businesses, to consumers, or to large industrial clients. The numerous stakeholders you have to engage with, the varying degrees of knowledge these people have, it's all changing our trade craft. Sales and product delivery truly are different in these segments. Let's hone our sales process selection process by starting earlier in the sales process. Let's assume a client is a good fit to start with and let's start with ensuring that your product actually is a good fit for a client. MEDDIC is one example of a qualification process.

Economic Buyer

The role of the economic buyer varies from one organization to another. Also, the influence that an economic buyer has can be indirect. For example, economic buyers sometimes delegate the task of selecting a supplier to lower-level employees or account managers. In other cases, economic buyers may not want to be severely involved in the process and delegate the decision to someone else. Hierarchical, consultative, advisory, delegative – there are different types of economic buyers, and the effectiveness of working with them largely depends on the salesperson's experience and communication competencies. It is difficult to develop effective communication with the economic buyer because the content and focus of the conversations vary depending on the situation. For example, a detailed product presentation will only allow you to make a good impression if the economic buyer appreciates the depth of detail. Otherwise, excessive enthusiasm can scare a potential customer off.

An economic buyer is the person in the sales process who has the economic or budget authority. This is the person who can approve expenses and it is also the person who has input into the company's strategic direction or is responsible for company operations. The level of authority can change depending on the size of the organization, the complexity of the product being sold, the length of the sales cycle, and other factors. In some small companies, the CEO has complete authority. In some companies, the budget holder approves up to a certain amount, and in other companies, the decision-making power is divided between two people. It is essential to know who the economic buyer is and the degree of authority and influence this person possesses.

Decision Process

This occurs either through selecting the person to respond to issues that emerged during the decision process or with subsequent visits to discuss possible partnership aligning the strategy of business to be implanted. Complication in this context is not restricted to the technology solution. Hiring the supplier of the equipment that will provide the solution is also a point of valuable alignment. Only ten percent of the worldwide marketing companies based on technology have the perception of the customers of their capabilities to effectively address the customer's business issues. In the purchasing decision-making process, some suppliers depending on the size of the company are involved in the purchase decision and in the sourcing the provider, the sections can be considered diverse in sectors and technologies which would have the money consideration. Another case scenario is composed of large companies that are more traditional in your corporate culture and as a result have a more bureaucratic sequence to be followed in final purchasing decisions. In order to reduce risks not to discuss or before the concretion, the goal is to select companies renowned due diligence phase in solicits answers the possible supplier that should be completed with the steering committee the preferred suppliers list, which should be ranked according to the weight and belong to the process of analysis.

Topics of interaction and negotiation can still affect the purchasing process. The estimated process is that the client interacts with almost nine vendors and obtains practical information with the sales involved. Here is a decision process that is usually addressed by the company. At this point, the client has already studied and evaluated the solution for the problem that it wants to solve. It is time to understand the strategy of the company for the particular situation. Different questions are developed in the decision process, many provided by various employees of the company, such as the financial, information technology, and technical departments. The main objective is to verify conformities with organizational processes and the general strategy of the company. To purchase a solution that creates a differential in the market. Create confidence in the vision of technology of the company that will provide the solution based on the basic technical criteria that will be searched for or required. According to pioneers in the purchase, know how to identify presentations. Will ask for information, will require presentations, and will seek differentiated strategies from the others. completed the process of purchase since all essential questions have been clarified. Usually, ask their suppliers to facilitate cooperation that will occur in the selection process.

Decision Criteria

The more quickly a company can understand how people want to make a decision and then enable that process, the more quickly they can generate revenues. In particular, gaining insights into a potential customer's self-education process and then creating and publishing compelling sales and customer engagement content that directly maps to the prospect's self-education journey is key to supporting a low-touch sales model with high velocity. Further, increasingly, the combination of initial self-education and self-service purchase platforms that also include a process for self-onboarding will allow the company to generate revenues à la the Atlassian model. While this is true, the company is not finished once it has enabled the self-education and self-service purchase models. Successful marketing in a low-touch environment not only means providing information your prospects want and need at each stage of their journey but it also means propagating a great deal of awareness.

Choosing a go-to-market strategy is one of the most important decisions a new firm can make. It sets into motion the way the company will appear to the world and the mechanism through which it will acquire revenue. Since there are many possible alternatives, founders must be clear on a number of issues as they begin this work. First, they need to think about the target customer and how they prefer to buy. Typically, this includes understanding the customer's demographic profile, where they obtain information about new products and services, how they prefer to interact with potential sellers, and what their preferred mode of payment is. Second, the founders must consider how the exercise of sales affects the firm's cost structures and the margins with which it could operate. Typical considerations include understanding the importance of the 'trust factor' and tools to establish trust in the remote sales process – particularly important for e-commerce-oriented startups. On the other hand, 'baking' traditional sales and account management estimates tend to lead investors to penalize forecasts with excessive expense growth in these areas.

You'll know exactly the steps that go into decision-making

Given this, Sales 3.0 considers the more expanded universe of the Information Society as a vast mix of contact channels, content touchpoints, and purchasing management. Thus, much guidance in relation to ICS considers the most common types of industry and target audiences, mainly to define the concepts that will be needed to be presented in several B2B interaction situations. The modern sales methodology can be either strategic or tactical. With Sales 3.0, participants understand the buying stage in which their potential customer is actually at and what they are looking for on the Internet at the moment: a popular demand model search, a product characteristics or brand usage question, etc. To cater to this demand, the sales area should have their public pages based on this search intention model; perhaps produced according to Geo Targeting standards. After the online presence is firm and impeccable, they should travel according to the Notes concentration needs, indicative points of use and reaction, interests, and demand in commercial ways.

When did you reach a decision to start using a certain brand? Most likely after a number of ads in which you first noticed a brand, then became interested in it, inquired about the characteristics, the variety of models, etc. In some cases, we tend to come to the conclusion that we should become users of a culture upon receiving a business proposal. Just think about it: if you're an employer who needs to present the brand concept as part of their human resource sales process to a candidate who still does not know much about it. The decision route will be quite different individually. Therefore, I took off the simplified parallel between the two processes just to serve as an example to explain each one.

Sales Teams Before MEDDIC

The term "better" is here used only to avoid wasting time determining which is the best of all. The MEDDIC process has been developed over many years by the company PTC, through several books written by all its co-founders and business leaders. MEDDIC was born in a company focused on large environments and very complex sales processes. However, over the years, many other companies in equally niche and industry-focused markets have created or developed their own specific sales process. What could be isolated situations to justify the creation of these sales processes may be a revelation when added to the 136 sales processes that already existed and of which the majority was not even mentioned.

Sales and sales professionals have been around since the beginning of private trade, that is, getting what you offer is not a child's game. Different sales processes have their particularities and already at the beginning of this article, it becomes necessary to define due to the confusion resulting from the use of these two terms in the context of professional activity: sales. The American company GainCerv is responsible for a highly accurate job of translating articles that deal with sales processes. In one of its blog posts, it listed no less than 136 different types of sales processes. In the number of articles I found, the MEDDIC process was being quoted as the best sales process. But wouldn't it be better to label it as a better sales process?

Identify Pain

If you are in technology sales, you might realize that a tool may solve a lot of problems a company may face, but that company may not be interested in spending a big amount on purchasing that tool that might solve a problem they have not yet been affected by. However, a utility company may spend millions per year for a field failure, and they might be interested in purchasing a tool that would reduce or eliminate those field failures. There may not be a big enough check for people to spend on a problem they might suffer from in the future. The larger the company, the more likely it will have already suffered from the problem/pain (sooner or later). What will they pay? I would hope that ten dollars in reduced risk and reduced operation cost will generate more than one dollar of revenue. The reason for this is the higher the risk, the lower the revenue or basic operation cost/profitability. A ten to one "future" investment is perhaps a good thing. The challenge would be to convince them of future risks that your solution will avoid.

If you are a sales professional or business owner, you should know that the single most important thing you could do is to go through your sales process and product and list out all the pain your product (or service) can solve or get rid of, and for every piece of that pain estimate what dollar amount the prospect's companies would be willing to pay to have that pain taken away. Express those "pains" in money and return on investment terms. If you are selling something that is of high value to a big industry, the industry normally has big check amounts laying around ready to spend on getting rid of their pain.

You can build a better buyer's journey

What this buyer's journey looks like as well as their specific pain points will change depending on these factors. And the sales strategies will change as these pain points change. Modern buyers are much better informed and are interacting with potential solution provider firms much later in the customer buying process. So we have to see and hear them when they finally show up at our doorsteps. Our strategic and product offering playbooks get built and become much more effective when we understand the pain points of the specific buyers who will consume our offerings. Rather than sell below-average solutions to highly knowledgeable SMB audiences, we strategize what it would take to sell leading-edge solutions which lead to measurable and concrete outcomes to our SMB audiences. This differentiation is not limited to buyers because each market segment involves different seller approaches.

If you are like most modern B2B sales leaders, you are constantly wondering where you could sell more cost-effectively. And in today's world, some sales leaders are realizing that, yes, you could bring in higher sales outcomes if you sold more cost-effectively. For your organization, that may mean different sales processes for different industries and company sizes (SMB to large enterprise, as an example) because different buyer personas require different sales processes. Just the mere contemplation itself that there could be different effective sales processes for different buyer personas becomes intriguing to many. We get to be better salesmen and women when we first acknowledge that there are different buying patterns and requirements present in the first place. So if we agree that there are different buyer personas and those different personas require different motivations and therefore different sales processes, we can become that much better once we understand what it is that motivates the different personas that we sell to. Your buyers are experiencing things differently since they lead different departments, have different titles and seniority levels within the organization, and must solve for different challenges.

MEDDIC is a Common Language for your entire Revenue Team

Many other companies use what is called MEDDIC, which is a sales process that appeared with Documentum, which has since been bought by EMC and has been part of Dell for a number of years. What I like about MEDDIC is that it is applied at a high level in the organization, meaning that it becomes a common language for the entire revenue team. Many large companies have engineering teams, presales teams, partner management, sales, post-sales, people from the customer success business unit, and from professional services. MEDDIC is a set of pivotal moments, and the delivery is set so that the entire organization can operate with harmony and speak the same language. As such, I have decided over the years to have MEDDIC be our sales process along with every startup that we have been coaching. This article will give you an overview of all the sales processes that are relevant depending on the industry that you are in. The purpose of this article is to allow you to score your current existing sales process and improve the way that you are aligning internally within your startups. At the end of this article, I'm also going to give you a couple of warnings as to things that you should pay attention to, as usual with a checklist.

One of the exercises that I've found to be useful over the years is to engage with team leaders and understand what their sales process is. Quite often, clients ask vendors whether their sales process is compatible with the one that the client is using or if it would be compatible with the vendor's coaching. Some sales processes are quite complex, like the one used at Oracle, which has dozens of steps depending on what the customer has done before, who the contacts are inside the organization, and the geography of a specific account.

Implementing the MEDDIC Methodology

The best practice is to tailor both your sales message and your sales stages based on your solution, your target customer satisfaction, customers and their companies' strategies, your target users, their needs, and the business strategies, and knowing that you are selling to the best possible opportunities. While some decisions in the MEDDIC process are identical from one industry to another, coming up with customized and precise sales stages and sales messages will define a very specific plan of action aimed at generating more precision and effectiveness in the selling process. The Value Message or Value Proposition is well-known and has always been the key opening discussion message. However, there may be specific points to have in mind according to the industry and the level of decision-makers involved.

It is universally recognized the importance of a sales process/conversation that is aligned with the buyer's decision process. Salespeople need to customize their messages for their audiences, but too often the if-then statement is not clear. Without this valuable asset, a lot of selling time is wasted on the wrong sales stages or focusing on the wrong sales message. To better tune your sales approach with the MEDDIC process, check out the following insights. The MEDDIC process is designed to get from a lead to a deal in every possible complex sales cycle, so-called Deal Execution. There are common patterns and different steps in other sales methodologies SaaS vs License Software Sales vs Hardware vs Services Sales, and depending on other factors. The approach should be customized, or if you prefer tailored, in order to have more effectiveness. Such tailoring will make sense if we consider the below main aspects.

Different sales processes for different industries and target audiences ensure organizations can effectively cater to the unique needs and preferences of diverse markets. By tailoring sales strategies to specific industries, businesses can align their approach with the distinct characteristics and dynamics of each sector. This customized approach enhances the chances of capturing the attention and trust of industry-specific prospects, maximizing sales opportunities. Simultaneously, adapting sales processes to different target audiences allows companies to address the preferences and expectations of various customer segments, ensuring personalized experiences and higher conversion rates. The ability to modify sales processes enables businesses to optimize their engagements with industry specificities and customer desires, ultimately driving growth and success.

Your team will need to learn more about customers

The following may be involved in the the approval process: doctors, distributors of the final product, pharmacies. In the case of Spain, we would be talking about pharmacists, hospital administrators who would act in the case of the United Kingdom. Each country will require certain professional roles that will have more impact than others. The success of sales is based on the Sales Force's ability to attract these through: proving to them that our products are better, making those responsible for recognizing our products aware of their quality. Our representatives must keep up with the latest news in biochemistry, know the results of the scientific studies carried out with our products, benefits in terms of clinical therapeutic efficacy, safety, and quality.

You will identify the characteristics and needs of your target audience. In other words, you will find out what your customers need and how you can satisfy those needs. Don't forget to look at the age, gender, tastes, habits, and customs of your potential clients. Your team will need to learn more about your customers so they can better understand them and satisfy their needs. Such information can be inversely proportional to the knowledge of the customer about the product. It only means knowing the real needs of the customer, the salespeople adapting better to those needs.

Symptoms you need MEDDIC

Average selling price is high and higher - with higher average selling prices, complex deals with multiple decision makers will often require deep relationships and strategically-timed messages at multiple levels within the client organizations. Not understanding this relationship hierarchy, an untimely message or a faulty message can make or break a deal. Missing out on the message that touches the resolving factor of key decision makers, and personas can be a deal breaker. Extended sales cycles - you need to be patient and understand the steps and personas before you can expect results, especially if you are a Challenger Rep. Prospective clients underperforming in the current fiscal environment - MEDDIC focuses on impacting the customer's P/L statement; which today, with the lingering impact of the pandemic, has taken on more urgency than ever.

Challenges with the sales process: complex buying centers with numerous decision makers - understanding all of the stakeholders that drive a deal forward can be just as important as understanding the decision makers. Engaging the decision makers in the right order with the most compelling message that speaks to their unique objectives often requires an exceptional amount of research and creativity. Thinking meetings are consensus - your evaluation team will be formed based on a variety of personas in the trenches and the power structure in your decision-maker team. These personas will have varying agendas and coming together as a consensus in one meeting and creating a one-call close scenario to close a complex deal is nothing but wishful thinking. Meeting objectives, agenda and outcome cannot be the same when talking to a user, technologist, influencer, financial approver or budget owner. Objective of the first meeting is to identify your personas and players and to set an appropriate game plan in subsequent meetings.

The first step of your sales process, identifying a good prospect, seems like one of the most difficult parts of the sales process. This should be easier to do in the age of search engines and digital marketing tools. However, research from SiriusDecisions shows that only 38% of professionals in sales and marketing have done their due diligence before making the first sales call. This will be the most frustrating metric of this article. All the other metrics can be converted into the number of new deals, which will be reassuringly small especially at the beginning. But, this 38% metric means that your marketing is not done properly and/or you have no idea about your customer. If this metric is below 95%, you are working in the wrong industry or you are the wrong owner of the company because you do not know anything about your customers and how to get them. If you closely follow the steps, you will end up with the same figures.

Understanding your audience is essential to MEDDIC

The information used in the use of Meddic is obtained from the customer during most of the sales process. This information is then used to create a customer progression plan and validate it. While it has its detractors, most often through the choice of practitioners through reliable, quantifiable spirits as "feel" or "sales agility", no one denies that the sales qualification process is a critical success factor that helps sellers to spend their time effectively. Directors of sales often lament the lack of homework of their reps and do their best to understand the customer and decision-making process. With important qualifications taking 1% or more of total sales engineering time, it is important to be able to determine the number of checks that the prospect believes will lead to a likely close.

Meddic is a well-known, comprehensive sales qualification system and process. It is distinguished by its focus on creating and developing a buyer blueprint that can be used to develop an understanding of the individuals in the decision-making process, the buying process, and the available funding. Once those are established, the sales organization is able to develop key sales strategies: how to use the vendor's own access to customer information to establish a beachhead and how to use engagement plans to close the sales opportunity. Qualification, or "disqualification" in the vocabulary of Meddic, prevents wasted visits to potential customers which should never be customers, leads to efficient use of the sales force's time, and is the foundation for realistic sales forecasts.

MEDDIC Sales Process Pros and Cons

Cons:

A good alignment with the customer's buying process is required. Not everyone is that disciplined.
Most organizations do not have a common definition for the primary concepts such as Metrics, Economic Metrics, Decision Criteria, or Decision Process. Most of the time there is a need to "translate" these medical
Specific definitions into something more familiar. Doing so dilutes the value of MEDDIC in Sales approach. - Customers' challenges and metrics are often difficult to uncover.
It is not always easy to find a "Champion" who is prepared to guide you through to the close.
MEDDIC Qualification suffers from the same limitations as most checklist-type methods, in that medium complex sales involving non-obvious decision makers or requirements may get disqualified prematurely.
In the case where customers' challenges are not sharply defined and the sales team can't obtain a champion's sponsorship, MEDDIC deal stopping objections may be raised too late with insufficient revenues to address them.

Pros:

A good alignment with the customer's buying process is required.
A sharp focus on qualification, to avoid wasting time chasing unwinnable deals.
By quantifying value, MEDDIC Training helps you to build a strong case for the specific commercial impact of having a complete solution.
Challenging the customer's status quo the best way MEDDIC for Sales can lead to Deal Stopping Objections. By doing this early, you can address inhibitors which, in many cases, are disguised threats or risks if the customer fails to act.
Interactions are valuable, with the customer's sponsors, user constituencies, and IT deployment resources.
MEDDIC for Sales Training has the potential for reducing the cost of chasing unwinnable deals.

MEDDIC Also Allows You To:

Qualifies Leads

The steps your team should complete in this process type can either be performed in the same way as in classical semiconductor sales, as evidenced in the image above, or they can be integrated with other lead generation efforts, resulting in a process similar to what is seen in the semiconductor manufacturing process. In either of the cases, let's look closer into the specific way of using a process to turn over semiconductor sales leads - The Funnel Sales Process.

As for identifying any problems, the Qualifying Leads process is essential in detecting points to be improved in your sales cycle and finding the most suitable customers and qualify prospects for long-term business relationships.

Optimize the qualification of leads
Prioritize better opportunities
Simplify the qualification flow
Increase the chance of success
Reduce the sales process time

Benefits this process brings to your company:

Study and classify leads
Prioritize leads
Interact with leads
Follow up statuses
Assess the leads' satisfaction

With this sales process, you can use the following sales strategy:

The first of our six sales processes is the one known as Qualifying Leads. This is a type of sales process that's focused on finding the most qualified leads and turning them into most qualified prospects, opportunities, and finally customers.

3. Paper Process

In Paper-Process, all documents are uploaded to the web through the project’s admin interface. Their identification information such as the sender (teacher, coach, advisor, etc.), the intended recipient (student/guardian), the type of information (medical advice, test, ticket, service form, etc.) is also entered. This process only takes a few seconds to perform and allows the assigning teacher to distribute multiple files in an ongoing way to the student. If files are to be distributed to parent/guardian guardians, information can also be stored.

This project can be easily self-contained and can act as a great and very important tool for both student/guardian and teacher. This project is both a stand-alone and the first building process for the latter and more complex system. With the simple cell phone, teacher and parent/student subscription, Paper-Process will help students stay proactive when schools use intelligent devices more frequently.

For example, if a student is absent on a test day, it is important for him/her to make up the test as soon as possible. Correspondence, transportation arrangements, the return of the test to the teacher to be checked, and a grade must be recorded. However, in this busy time of day when more than one measure is being administered, is the test being handed to the student as well as any other important paperwork process or information is overlooked?

Every day, teachers are faced with the overwhelming challenge of handing out critical papers, including but not limited to tests, reports, announcements, field trip information, etc. Often, this critical and time-sensitive information does not reach the intended student/guardian due to absenteeism or a lack of a designated person whose sole job is to deliver this information.

4. Refine your customer personas

Translate your target industries and the type of roles you’re targeting into company descriptions and individual personas. It’s common to have several different company descriptions and a handful of different personas; if you have more than one, we recommend prioritizing the largest segment of your sales. For example, a software company that has a free basic model for end users that want to explore the software before making a purchase may prioritize growing companies with less than 50 employees. On the other hand, a software company that only caters to tenured professionals at well-established companies with over 500 employees would prioritize the large conglomerate persona. Different company types engage differently online—they have different triggers, pain points, companies they seek validation from, and sources of industry information. Segmenting your customer persona and industry data will ensure that you’re able to focus on developing sequences and messaging that will yield the most positive responses.

When creating optimized email sequences or customizing LinkedIn messages for prospecting, more often than not we are speaking to a crowd as opposed to a specific individual. It’s important to keep our customers in mind as we write our content to ensure our messaging is not lost as noise in the inboxes of our prospects. This can be challenging if you’re not intimately familiar with your customer and their needs, objections, and pain points. As such, we find that a clear understanding of the customer helps not just with writing - in our email and InMail messaging - but also with value proposition and key message development.

5. Confident Sales Reps

When a potential client answers the phone or responds to an email, a less busy, seasoned sales rep can answer the client on the spot. However, companies are getting larger, staffing is getting thinner, and successful, senior sales reps are hard to find. The more realistic approach involves setting aside a time every day when a sales rep can speak with potential customers. When sales reps need to make "50" calls a day, without a preparatory framework, the actual "conversations" are not "conversations" but the continuation of the dialing and waiting game. Providing a framework for conversation that allows a sales rep to sound confident, informed, and ready to listen and respond to a potential client is crucial to avoiding procrastination and fear. And even if a sales rep is not able to close the first sale, they are still having the critical conversations that sustain successful sales development.

One of the best strategies for developing the confidence of a sales rep is by reducing the amount of uncertainty they have to deal with. This not only helps the sales rep move through their sales cycle quickly, but also increases the ratio of sales opportunities that they successfully close. One of the most effective solutions is regular, sustainable communication. In fact, one of the first tools that sales development (SDR) and account executive (AE) managers should suggest to their teams is an email service like Yesware, Salesloft, or Tout to ensure consistent, concise communication with a sales team's prospects.

6. Better Data

But it also means that sellers now sit on top of a lot of data while searching for actionable insights about events, proposals, and their relevance. We talked for a while about the specific issues of filtering, extracting, and utilizing actionable insights, specifically about documents (such as contracts and text), submission to similar options, and the relative success of decisions depending on the information provided by these instruments. Machine learning, in particular, likes structured data and, when it comes to using it for the construction of models for large-scale forecasts, the general consensus was that this was a wise move in the project because of economic benefits and the unique configuration compared to the large number of routes. Clearly in the marketplace, sales products are now moving beyond the "moving opening cost" and offer a variety of offers.

Thanks to the explosion of big data, salespeople no longer have to depend on cold calls based on little or no information or physical foot slogging. Now they can be furnished with vast reams of data to mine people's preferences, dislikes, browsing, and purchase history. Consumer buying behavior analysis will continue to be a priority with sales professionals than future sales team members uncover areas of improvement in the sales processes and eliminate bureaucracy. Everyone will have access to customer intelligence that was only available to leaders. Artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics, in addition to predictive and prescriptive analytics, will help salespeople use today's customer data while showing them new opportunities they never thought possible.

7. Review sales objections and reasons for lost deals

First, write down all the fields, making yourself familiar with the customer/client and defining the structure of the deal. When the sale progresses through the sales pipeline (from stage to stage), you fill in all the fields step by step. At the last stage, you print out/paste the record page (personalized quote) and hand it over/post it/fax it/email it to the customer/client. Discuss the proposal and get feedback. Put the proposal back in the file. Don't try to manage with simple CRM systems ("one-fits-all" solutions that can be used in any industry). Almost every transaction has specific features. A car versus real-estate-only CRM programs are offered on the market by the leaders: salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, Siebel and SalesManager XT. Feel free to contact the local distributor and arrange a web-demonstration of the program. More solutions can be found by the industry. Such software is designed for a small group of companies that offer a similar product that requires the same sales process. The popular niche systems: tours (e.g. salesforce.com), technology and computer industry (SalesManager XT).

Making sales strategies, marketers often lack the key information. They don't understand the nature of the sales objections and the reasons for lost deals. Often, the reasons for a lost deal are rooted in the history of the company and the industry. With this analysis, the company can reengineer before it grows or diversifies. Thus, it is recommended to write down all the useful information about the deal in the sales pipeline. Use a special software (or database) that allows to input record page (contact information) to the sales pipeline and retrieve it again. Create an integrated record page or personalized quote.

8. Implement MEDDIC sales training into your flow of work

To be able to train sales reps effectively, it is important to have an understanding of how adults learn best. When enabling your team with MEDDIC training, you should focus on delivering efficient training in short modules, repeating the training content regularly, and ensuring that the sales reps work with the new methodologies during the training, not only by knowing the theory, but also by applying it in practice and evaluating it in your specific case. MEDDIC is an acronym that stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Process, Decision Criteria, Identify Pain, Champion. Each of the MEDDIC components is trained on separately in MEDDIC Academy, after training completing with evaluations and follow-up call with the participants to ensure the quality and understanding of the content. MEDDIC can be difficult to understand, but the phased approach with practical exercises speeds up learning. During the training, we speak of best practices, but we also talk about the mistakes that we should definitely avoid to become as successful in implementing the methodology.

56% of sales teams believe that their current processes are not effective. Of course, changing these processes is not something that happens overnight; you first need to build awareness and provide them the learnings necessary to optimize their focus and the results they reach. The problem is that salespeople do not have as much time at their disposal, and if you do not apply that knowledge directly today or tomorrow, they will have to prioritize their work. To overcome this, you should slip the MEDDIC training content into their workflow.

9. Learn more about your buyers

Knowing your buyers has many other needs and helps build a powerful narrative within your prospect's business call. If you fully understand how your product helps them and thus which billing adequacy has direct ties to the most reliable type of qualification you can have. Some of the most successful businesses still rank on the Forbes 500 list because they maintain strong buyer personas. They are efficient in delivering a very directed message set known as value version messaging. If you are just starting the business or aiming for growing sales, chances are you are already conscious of how most lost sales close not because a competitor is trading with a different price, but rather because no decision is made. Once you have built a good sales process, extending sales reach in every deal and continuing to rejuvenate cash flow is as important as market research assets included in companies' product road map, especially if it accelerates closed deals. Having a strong routine to ensure you have the right omni-channel communication assets can help minimize this risk and concentrate on removing friction and changing objections. This will certainly help you stay connected with your potential buyers/prospects, increase improvements, maximize results on business calls, and be able to stay focused on the path to revenue success.

There are different sales processes for different industries and target audiences, as explained below. Inside sales uses digital assets to extend the reach of the sales, gain access to the right people at the right time, and effectively advance deals. Target audience knowledge is crucial to building an effective sales process. First, you must know your target audience. The basic premise is to effectively create and sell a solution based on their pain points. By really drilling down into these pain points, you can significantly improve the effectiveness of your sales process. Understanding their pain points and overlaying the mapped buyer's journey for each target persona gives us a map of the sales effort necessary to resonate with each target audience. So, regardless of your business, your company can use a spanning tree of sales accelerators to be more effective by ensuring you have a process that resonates with both decision makers and the different buyer personas involved in the buying decision.

10. Refine sales qualification criteria

Unfortunately, user research is typically blind to the fact that users do not buy technology on their own. There are four other personas in the account a sales rep needs to work with to close the deal: the decision makers, the influencers, the recipients, and the gatekeepers. These personas have different needs and different reasons to say no. They do not necessarily have the same challenges users do, so target different messages at them. It has been mentioned that certain topics during this discovery process can be conversational landmines if not approached with the utmost diplomacy. Asking, for example, how many other vendors a prospect is evaluating—without coming off as abrasive—is definitely an art. Other topics that require a light touch include how a purchase decision will be made, what might impede or derail the entire process, and any personal influence or biases that might affect the team.

Consider engaging your technical leadership and experts in the sales process even before the start. How do sales reps know what to target if they do not understand what to look for in their accounts? Sales qualification criteria may be the most important tools in the entire sales process. They help filter out accounts that are not a good fit for the company and prevent the sales team from wasting time on prospects who will never buy. But most companies do a bad job of defining them. There are two main reasons why. First, many organizations have the wrong target audience in their sights without realizing it. They have been taught to target user personas, the people in the account who would use their solution. They use messaging and tactics specifically designed to paint in the user's, er, yellow part of the painting.

Get In Touch

If you’re looking to implement MEDDIC (or a varient thereof), get in touch to discuss it further.

Jack Crabtree