Make MEDDICC Work for Your Sales Organization

Over the past few months new challenges may have forced the need for changes and shifts in your sales process. As you consider ways to help reps faster qualify opportunities, improve forecast accuracy, and increase win rates, make sure you’re looking beyond the process.

When it comes to sales qualification, simply launching MEDDICC (or one of its variants) isn’t going to be enough. What impacts the success of any qualification tool is the process of putting it to work. It’s your sales teams and your managers working together to map out deals, test the strength of opportunities, and establish plans for securing high-value margins. Qualification accuracy comes from sales leaders who establish processes to coach deals and skill while refraining from screaming at the scoreboard.

Sales organizations with strong qualification tools, like MEDDICC, and a company culture that supports it, can come out of uncertain times in a better position to hit their revenue goals for 2023 and beyond.

How MEDDICC improves sales qualification

• Metrics: Quantifiable measurements of the business benefits of the solution
• Economic Buyer: Individual within the organization who has the final “yes”
• Decision Criteria: Formal solution requirements in which each decision maker will evaluate the solution
• Decision Process: How the customer will evaluate, select, and purchase a solution
• Identify Pain: Pain is the catalyst for the buyer solving the problem within a set timeframe.
• Champions: A person with influence in the buying organization. They have an investment in your solution being selected.
• Competition: Any alternatives to purchasing your solutions including “Do nothing” and “Do it internally”

Other popular variations like MEDDPICC, include the “P” for paper process. The paper process is a specific aspect of the decision process, which includes contractual documents and signatures required to seal a deal.

How Your Sales Teams Drive the Success of MEDDICC

Understand your sales teams’ roles and responsibilities when it comes to driving the success of MEDDICC:

Manager responsibilities: to find ways to regularly reinforce MEDDICC criteria with reps. Managers should use regular deal reviews and coaching sessions to review MEDDICC principles within a deal, determine what gaps exist in their deals, and more importantly how to fill them..

Think back to the time you may have spent as a sales rep and ask yourself this, “Were you able to make a bigger impact in your deals when your managers gave you a to-do list, or when your managers helped you understand how to execute the most critical activities on your to-do list?”

How managers work with reps on their deals directly results in how well they hit their numbers. The more managers can help reps map out their deals, by helping them align to the biggest buyer pains and reinforce qualification criteria effectively, the more reps can replicate those high-value actions in every one of their valuable opportunities.

Sales rep responsibilities: understand how to use MEDDICC to qualify-in deals, instill value early on, and move deals accurately from one sales stage to the next. When reps have adopted MEDDICC principles into their sales planning and preparation they’ll be better equipped to avoid discounting and instil value early and often in their sales conversations.

For reps to effectively follow through on MEDDICC principles they need to actively map out deals with their managers and ask for the resources they need to move the right opportunities forward. We always say, it’s okay to not know the answer when it relates to how  they’re going to advance a deal, but it’s not okay to not ask for help. Sales reps need to own getting the resources they need to get a deal done. The organization owns the responsibility of helping them as needed.

Being disciplined with MEDDICC principles will ensure they’re spending their time effectively and qualifying out deals that they don’t belong in and aren’t going to happen.

To help sales reps be successful, they need the processes and internal support available to do so. This is where sales leaders can make the biggest impact by instilling the importance of voracious qualification into their organization.

Sales leader responsibilities: ensure MEDDICC criteria becomes a common language throughout their entire sales organization by providing consumable tools, training and coaching that drives consistency and adoption.

When executed correctly, MEDDICC provides sales leaders a true view of where the forecast sits on any given day. It’s made it possible for organizations to achieve nearly 100% forecast accuracy, quarter after quarter.

This ability is only achievable when MEDDICC is implemented into the sales process and supported by leaders and managers to create on-going fluency around it’s qualification criteria throughout their entire organization.

The more training, coaching and reinforcement materials sales leaders can work to provide for their sales teams, the more benefits they’ll see, as a result of their teams better adopting critical criteria into every opportunity.

How MEDDICC Impacts Revenue Recovery Right Now

Sales organizations that have enabled their sales teams to execute MEDDICC correctly in every deal will be better able to plan for revenue recovery. The structure and coaching aspects that MEDDICC can drive has allowed companies to focus on actionable plans and accurate forecasting for both the short and long term.

The biggest takeaway I hope you can gain from this is that best-in-class organizations focus on the how, not the what. They coach replicable skill, from deal to deal.

You can get there too. We’re working with teams right now, virtually to enable them to implement MEDDICC and a better qualification structure into their sales execution. Are your revenue goals worth a 30 minute chat? Schedule a call right now.