Some sales leaders and practitioners claim MEDD(P)ICC, the infamous sales methodology is dead

“An outdated methodology. A relic from the distant past. Not customer-centric and therefore not of use anymore”

On the other hand, we know that the best BtoB Enterprise sales departments at the fastest growing companies such as MongoDB, Cybereason, Snowflake, Sprinklr, and Lacework are using MEDD(P)ICC very successfully

Some of these organisations only hire people who are proficient practitioners of the methodology. And nowhere else can you earn more money as a sales rep. Needless to say, they employ the best salespeople in the world

Other methodologies such as BANT and SPIN suffer the same fate. Many sales leaders call them outdated. Others are still using them

So what should we think or do about this present state of affairs in regards to sales methodologies (or frameworks)?

One thing is clear: Humans either think it is really valuable or it is absolutely useless. We like the extremes. Our brains are programmed to make decisions easy for us. That is why we quickly either like or hate something.

In this article, I would like to take a different approach: I want to explain where some of those methodologies are coming from, and in what circumstances they have been used and are still used today. As with many other sales “tools” (a methodology is a tool), frameworks can help sellers become better performers if used frequently and the right way.

Additionally, we will learn that there are more than a dozen frameworks we could be using. Instead of showing which one is best, I want to show what they all have in common. If we are using the common denominator, we can build a powerful and potentially universal methodology, which can be adjusted and modified if necessary.

Using a framework requires practice. They are not easy to implement, especially if your sellers have been doing sales “their way” for years. Change is tough. It took me more than 1.5 years to thoroughly implement SPIN (a methodology you will learn more about soon) in my own discovery calls. And I only truly achieved it after changing jobs and implementing it from the start again. That is why I also want to give a few ideas on a successful implementation.

So, what is the story behind sales methodologies?

Let’s go back to MEDD(P)ICC first

In 1990, MEDD(P)ICC (or its other forms MEDDIC, MEDDICC) has been developed by John McMahon (SVP of Sales) and his team at PTC.

Why did they come up with it?

PTC lost a lot of deals. They did not have the strongest win rate. And they did not know why exactly they lost all those deals. They knew they did not have the best product in the market. But John doubted that was the only reason they were losing.

So they analysed all the lost deals, and found seven main reasons:

👉🏻 A Competitor got the deal

👉🏻 Not the right Champion, or none at all

👉🏻 No access to the Economic Buyer

👉🏻 No thorough knowledge of the decision process

👉🏻 They had not influenced the decision criteria

👉🏻 No thorough knowledge of the pains

👉🏻 No business case

That is how the acronym MEDDICC was formed. PTC wanted to reduce the risk of losing deals

From that day on, all their sellers constantly had MEDDICC in the back of their heads. They used it as a GPS in the sales process. They were constantly assessing if they covered all criteria and if they knew what was really going on.

An example: They knew they need a champion. So they tested their prospective champions by asking the following questions:

🔎 Did they have a selfish interest to help me close this deal?

🔎 Do they have access to the economic buyer?

🔎 Do they help me get introduced to the economic buyer?

🔎 Are they only pushing my solution and mine alone?

If all those questions could be answered with a clear “yes”, they knew they had a champion.

They asked questions to uncover all the information around MEDDICC so that they really knew what was going on.

The result?

Higher win rates, larger deals, and faster sales cycles. Literally, all key sales KPIs have been improved.

That alone does not mean you should be using MEDDICC now. We get to that a bit later. Let’s first look at the history of a second, and probably equally famous framework called BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline)

IBM invented the framework BANT in the 1950s. That makes the methodology the oldest ever used in tech. So this one must be outdated for sure? Not so fast… A lot of Aristotle’s ideas also remain valid up to this day.

Why did IBM invent BANT?

Back in the 40s and 50s, IBM invented a lot of emerging technologies. They had a strong brand and were basically alone in the market. No other company had a comparable offer to IBM. The company has been flooded with inbound leads. Every seller’s dream, right?

Definitely not the worst situation to be in. However, they also faced challenges with inbound leads.

Inbound leads are not all equally valuable. The quality differs a lot. Some people are “just interested to see what they offer” while others “need to solve a problem in the next 2 months”. Therefore, the sales department at IBM needed to make sure that they filter those leads effectively. The KPI they needed to optimize was the salespeople’s efficiency

IBM received most of those leads through the telephone. So they implemented the framework BANT for those first qualification calls. Salespeople at IBM needed to ask those four questions:

• Do you already have a budget for the project?
• Can you make a decision?
• What exactly are you looking for?
• What is the timeline of the project?

Based on the answers, leads have been connected to a salesperson or pushed through a different funnel

IBM did not need to educate the market with their salespeople. They only wanted to push those leads through the funnel, who actually already launched a project internally

So BANT was created to filter inbound leads, whereas MEDDICC has been used as a framework to reduce the risk to lose opportunities throughout the whole sales cycle. Two very different applications, even though they are often thrown into the same basket (called “sales methodologies”). And that is the case with many of those frameworks: They have been implemented for different purposes

Let’s look at another one: The Challenger Sales (Teach, Tailor, Take control)

A team of analysts defined 5 different profiles of salespeople: The Lone Wolf, the Challenger, the Relationship Builder, the Reactive Problem-Solver, and the Hard Worker. They used data from the midst of the financial crisis of 2007-9 to evaluate which of these profiles was the most successful one.

The result?

The Challenger sales made the race. Challengers are salespeople with profound industry knowledge who were able to show a problem the prospects have not thought of. Something completely new. They took a case from one of the prospect’s competitors and showed what problem they had and how they solved it (Teach)

Certainly useful, especially in an economic downturn. That is when people are most open to radical ideas. It probably makes a lot of sense that those were the most successful

What else does the methodology imply?

1️⃣ Salespeople who use it need to have a product that solves a problem in a way that has not been thought of before

2️⃣ Salespeople who use it need Industry knowledge, and therefore very complex problems

3️⃣ You can easily transfer the case of one customer to another (in a complex environment!)

Is that the case for every sales organisation? Certainly not

Can you use that Methodology in combination with MEDDICC? Yes you can

All the frameworks we have seen so far can be used for different stages and teams within a sales organization. So you might not even need to decide what you go for. You may only need to understand what your biggest pain is: Filtering leads? Win-rates? Long sales cycles?

There are many more frameworks we have not been talking about yet

Here are a few methodologies widely used today:

SPIN

NEAT

ANUM

SPICED

Value Selling

Sandler Selling

Inbound Selling

Solution Selling

Conceptual Selling

Consultative Selling

Customer-Centric Selling

I do not want to go deep into these. I will do the opposite: Find what they all have in common. We basically compile a framework out of all the above.

Before we do that, we also need to understand this: Some of the frameworks above are not used in the whole sales cycle (as we have seen with BANT). They cover only some parts of the sales process, depending on whether we talk about a transactional, SME, Mid-market or Enterprise process.

Let’s look at an enterprise sales process (see below). You can see the specific meeting types that take place from Qualification to Procurement (and ultimately, signature – I am not going into the details of the procurement process):

(Image 1: Enterprise Sales Process with specific meeting types and stage of qualification methodologies)

NEAT, BANT and ANUM are basically qualification methodologies that are used to qualify new leads in the first meeting. Usually, there is a hand-over between the Qualification and the second call (SDR to AE), in which those criteria need to be communicated.

SPIN, SPICED, Sandler, and Inbound Selling are usually used for SME processes (10-50k), because in an Enterprise Sales Process they lack important factors in later stages of the process. That is why I marked them only from Quali to Demo in the process above. They do not add much value afterwards.

The remaining Methodologies can be used throughout the enterprise sales process. They are way more sophisticated and exhaustive.

So what criteria do a lot of those methodologies above have in common?

1️⃣ All those frameworks are using an acronym to highlight the importance of focusing on the Need/Pain/Problem of the prospect. The “N” of NEAT, the “P” of SPIN, The “P” of SPICED, and the other framework also use it in their approach. In addition to pain, something that is often neglected, however, is that not all products solve pain, but sometimes help the prospect achieve something, realize a gain

2️⃣ Most of the frameworks use an acronym or a word that describes the impact of not solving a problem, or a quantitative business case. They stress that the prospect and the salesperson should know what happens if the problem is not solved. In the end, every BtoB buying decision needs to be justified mathematically with a value-cost estimate

3️⃣ Most frameworks highlight the importance of a salesperson knowing with whom they talk. They use words such as “Authority”, “Economic Buyer”, “Decision maker”, Champion” or other roles. It makes sense we put some importance on this. What roles make sense? That depends on the size of the deals. Sometimes a Champion and the Economic Buyer is one person

4️⃣ All frameworks highlight the understanding of the process and/or timeline to get the signature of the prospect. Some only use “timeline”, others use “Decision Process” and a third group “Mutual Action Plan”. The Mutual Action Plan (or sometimes “Closing Plan”, which is not very customer-centric) is basically a summary of all the steps that need to be taken to realize the ROI for a project, with the dates when those steps happen (incl. signature of the contract)

Bonus: Many frameworks also highlight the importance of Relationships, Rapport, or Trust. We all agree that selling without some form of trust is not possible. This is the part that is really really hard to teach and standardize. That is where authenticity comes into play, and where salespeople need to find their way. One of the salespeople’s key qualities is to build a trusting relationship as quickly as possible. I refrain from recognizing that aspect in a methodology

If you adopt a methodology that highlights and focuses salespeople’s attention on 1️⃣ – 4️⃣, you are likely to reduce the likelihood of losing opportunities and ensure that your people focus on the opportunities that are most likely to close

If you want to add some other focus areas for your specific situation, you also learned an easy method to find what is actually important: Analyse why and where in the process you are losing your deals with your team

That is how I developed my methodology

For SME & Mid-market deals, I am using P/GI(M)EDCC

P/G = Pain/Gain

I = Impact

(M) = Metric or Business Case (in brackets because it is not as crucial as with larger deals but always beneficial)

E = Economic Buyer

D = Decision Process

C = Champion

C = Competitor

And for Enterprise deals, I am using P/GIMEDDPCCR

P/G = Pain/Gain

I = Impact

M = Metric or Business Case (necessary with large enterprise deals)

E = Economic Buyer

D = Decision Process

D = Decision Criteria

P = Paper Process

C = Champion

C = Competitor

R = Risks

Why the differences?

The framework for smaller deals does not have Paper Process, and Decision Criteria, and may or may not need a quantifiable business case.

The three acronyms D (=Decision Criteria), D (=Decision Process), and P (=Paper Process) could also be combined into “Mutual Action Plan”. Because we are losing some information by only using MAP, especially for new practitioners, I keep the outline of all three. The MAP for enterprise deals is absolutely necessary. Not so with smaller deals. You can use a slimmer version for SME deals, but the decision process (and timeline) definitely need to be known

The first three acronyms (P/G, I, M) need to be uncovered in the first part of the sales process. The pain, and impact, and therefore understanding of the urgency for the customer need to be captured early in the process

Now let’s tackle another objection I hear from many people regarding sales methodologies:

Is this methodology actually customer-centric?

I answer that question with a very strong YES!

Why is that?

Our prospects need to understand exactly the same factors so that they are purchasing technology that is actually helping them advance their business:

☝🏻 They need a business case and a thorough understanding of the impact of a challenge so that they can justify the value-cost equation to the leadership

☝🏻 They need an internal Champion and someone who is spending the money, otherwise, a project can never be successfully purchased and rolled-out

☝🏻 They need to understand the Decision Process and plan every step thoroughly so that they can reap the benefits of the implementation in time and navigate the complex political structures of businesses

☝🏻 They have to compare your product with that of a competitor. That is part of every sane procurement process

Thus, our methodology is actually helping the customer to make better evaluations

We are almost done

I promised at the top that I will show ways that simplify the implementation of the methodology

Those methodologies are really difficult to learn and change management with people is hard. It is almost impossible to implement a methodology that is used by 100% of your staff perfectly. And that is ok. Individual deviations are good

Six points that helped me implement the methodology:

1️⃣ Clear outline of the sales process and the meeting types (as in the slide above)

2️⃣ Connecting the acronyms to the meeting types. Describe in what meeting salespeople talk about what.

3️⃣ Provide a set of questions for all the acronyms salespeople need to be asking

4️⃣ Coaching, coaching, coaching. Salespeople should be going through the methodology in their 1on1s. Exactly the same questions from the bullet above should be asked in these sessions

5️⃣ Self-Coaching by using technology: Below you see a screenshot of the software we are using. Reps can filter their opportunities (here: deals) and check the so-called “Q-Score” of these opportunities. Built into that Q Score is the methodology. In the example below, for instance, the tool shows a Q-Score of 70. At the stage of the deal, the only roadblock to a higher score at this stage of the opportunity: The rep has not talked to the Economic Buyer yet. How do we know? The technology learned from all conversations and emails.

(Image 2: Screenshot of our software)

I hope those ideas help you as well

Let’s get to the conclusion of this article:

Sales methodologies are neither outdated nor can they be used by all sales departments in the same way. They have been implemented with a purpose, and that purpose is important to understand before using one yourself.

We have seen that those methodologies have some differences, but even more so in common. Helping your salespeople focus on Pain/Gain, Impact, and Process (MAP) and characterise whom they are talking to (Champion, Economic Buyer) can reduce the risk of losing business and keep the team focused on what matters. Make sure you provide a set of questions to the criteria above and teach your team in practice. That is the only way the change can be successful

Thirdly, I learned that technology can make my life much easier, and that of salespeople as well. It can show blind spots directly to the practitioners without the need of for leadership to take action. That fosters self-reliance.

Good luck implementing your methodology!