MEDDIC

MEDDIC is where it all started. Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli built it at PTC in the 1990s, out of a study of why the company won deals, lost deals, and sometimes never got a decision at all. Six things kept showing up, and they became the letters: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion. PTC went on one of the great growth runs in enterprise software with it, and it has been the backbone of serious sales qualification ever since. Dick and Jack were generous enough to write the foreword to my book on it.

The question MEDDIC answers has not changed in thirty years: is this deal real, and what do we not know about it?

The mistake is to treat the six letters as fields to fill in rather than questions to answer. A CRM with every MEDDIC box ticked tells you the rep is good at admin. It tells you nothing about whether the Champion would walk into the Economic Buyer’s office for you. MEDDIC is binary. You are either using it to interrogate your deals or you are using it to decorate them.

How I use it. MEDDIC is the base the later variants build on, and I still think of it as the minimum. If a seller cannot tell me the Metrics, name the Economic Buyer, describe the criteria and the process, explain the pain and point to a Champion, the deal is not qualified, whatever stage the pipeline says it is in. Everything that came later, the second C and the P, sits on top of these six. Learn these first.