MEDDICC is a way to reverse engineer the customer's buying decision
When I look at MEDDICC, I see that its elements are represented every time a customer makes a decision, whether you know it or not.
I am an engineer at heart and got into sales through the back door. The way I look at it is through an engineering mindset.
MEDDICC is a qualification framework. I think a lot of people look at it like a religion, or like something you just have to do. Then it is just another sales process. The typical thing is that a sales coach does a sales training, and you forget all about it and go on with whatever you were doing.
Reverse engineering a decision
When I look at MEDDICC, I see that its elements are represented every time a customer makes a decision. Everything you would normally qualify for happens whether you know it or not.
If you make it your job to know, you can accelerate the process, because you become aware of the things that can delay you. Even better, you start playing a game where it is all about throwing away what wastes your time. In SaaS you are very likely on a growth journey through the stages of funding. In that phase your biggest enemy is time, and time wasted.
The economic buyer and the case
I call this reverse engineering of a decision process because whenever a decision is made, there is always a bag of money that has to change hands between you and the customer. At the customer's end there is always a person with the authority to create budget: the economic buyer, the E in MEDDICC.
That person makes the decision based on a clear-cut case. It shows where we are right now, with its negative business consequences, and where we could be, with its positive business outcomes. If the delta between the two is significant, the economic buyer can create budget and buy today instead of waiting until next year.
This is where I think MEDDICC stands out from something like BANT. With BANT you look for budget, and it is your own worldview you are qualifying for. With MEDDICC you look at the customer and create a case, and the urgency comes from that case.
The identified pain
The I is where it gets really fun, because it is the identified business pain. I think this is where everything starts. As I see it, the I is the most important aspect of MEDDICC.
There are two aspects where sales teams fail. One is the I: you assume pain on behalf of your customers because you hear things that point in the right direction.
Say I sell automated lawnmowers and you have a push lawnmower. Hearing that, I assume you have a problem and of course want the automated one. But if you like the daily exercise and don't mind doing it, it might even be a small meditative task. Then you don't have a problem with it, and I am not solving anything by taking you through a sales motion.
You need the customer to express that this is a problem for them before you can conclude that it is one. I also think the pain becomes a lot more solid when you go beneath the product metrics to the business consequence of the problem. That is where you start translating it into something related to revenue, risk or cost.
Champions and coaches
The second aspect is the champion. The moment you start talking about MEDDICC, there is a tendency to call everything that has two legs and a pulse a champion.
I think you need a sceptical mindset about anybody in an organisation. Use words like potential champion, and be very worried that you might be dealing with coaches.
In MEDDICC we always distinguish between a coach and a champion, and I always think of a boxing ring. The champion is in there dealing and taking the blows. The coach is on the sideline yelling to the champion. Coaches want to give their opinion, but they don't want to be in the middle of the mess.
How to bring it in
The way I look at MEDDICC, it is your internal language about the customer in an organisation. You don't just use it from a sales perspective. You use it from a Sales Engineering perspective, with marketing, the implementation team, customer success and even product. For product it is a way to qualify whether a specific feature belongs in the product.
I strongly believe you can't go all in hardcore on MEDDICC from day one. You are dealing with an organisation that has to learn it, and adopt it as you practise it every day. You introduce it, you start speaking the language, and you have extreme patience with the people who are there.
I also think you should tie MEDDICC into your sales process. MEDDICC is not a process. It is a framework, a checklist for whether you have the right things in place. If you add aspects of it as gates between the phases, you will not end up with deals at a negotiation or closing stage that should never have been there. They would either have been qualified out earlier, or you would have had the language to identify the blind spots and start addressing them.
To be successful with MEDDICC you need to do a lot of groundwork to solidify the I. I think that is an even bigger task than implementing MEDDICC, because it changes everything about how you work as an organisation.