Implicate the Pain

In MEDDIC, the I stood for Identify Pain. In my book it stands for Implicate the Pain, and the difference is the whole game. Identifying pain is noticing the customer has a problem. Every seller on earth can do that in the first call. Implicating the pain is when the customer themselves connects the problem to what it costs them, what it will cost them if it continues, and what fixing it would mean for them personally. Identified pain sits in your notes. Implicated pain sits in their stomach.

The question it answers: why would this customer change anything at all?

The mistake is to stop at identification and start pitching. The seller hears “our reporting is manual” and launches into the dashboard demo. The customer nods, says it looks great, and does nothing, because manual reporting has been annoying for three years and nobody has been fired for it yet. Annoying is survivable. You have to help them see what else is true: the board decision made late on bad data, the two analysts who quit, the forecast miss that followed. Pain without consequence is a feature request.

How I use it. I ask what happens if nothing changes. Then I ask again, one level up, until I reach a consequence somebody with a budget would lose sleep over. That consequence, with a number attached, becomes a Metric. The person who feels it most becomes my Champion. Urgency in a deal is an emotion, the same as it is in a team. You cannot message it into existence. You implicate it, and then the customer brings it to the meetings for you.