Introduction
Generating leads and qualifying sales is not an easy process — especially for B2B. But if your sales team is trained and familiar with the MEDDIC sales process, you'll have an efficient and effective sales strategy.
MEDDIC is a powerful framework for generating sales. It helps the sales representative to ask their prospects the right questions at the right time.
In this article today, we will explain what is MEDDIC and how to implement it as a B2B sales qualification methodology.
What is MEDDIC?
Crack your knuckles and let's get to work! MEDDIC is a powerful framework for the B2B market. It is a sales framework that focuses on six key factors at the different stages of the sales process.
MEDDIC is a lovely little acronym that stands for:
- Metrics.
- Economic Buyer.
- Decision Maker.
- Decision Criteria.
- Identify Pain.
- Champion.
The framework is an incredibly helpful solution to an often overly complex sales process. MEDDIC allows the sales reps to gather prospect data by asking relevant questions.
As a result, it's easier to convert prospects into paying customers while improving the sales life cycle. The sales reps can significantly increase leads and sales while saving time, effort and money.
Sounds like a win-win to us!
The history of MEDDIC
Jack Napoli introduced the MEDDIC framework at PTC Software Company in the United States in 1994. Using the MEDDIC sales process, Napoli and the his team were able to triple their sales in three years.
It's no wonder other companies are jumping to get started themselves.
MEDDIC makes the sales process easy and simple for a large number of businesses — especially B2B SaaS companies. It helps them through different stages of the sales qualification process.
Why is MEDDIC so powerful?
There are a lot of sales frameworks and formulas in practice today, and MEDDIC is one of the powerful sales processes. Here’s why:
- MEDDIC is a simple yet powerful process that makes the complex sales process easier by allowing sales reps to ask relevant questions in the sales qualifying process.
- MEDDIC ensures you have complete information about all the stages of the sales qualification process.
- MEDDIC provides the fundamentals of sales in an in-depth manner. So even if you don't have any sales background, you can learn and start implementing the very first day.
- The process can increase your leads and sales significantly while saving time, effort and money.
- While MEDDIC is considered very useful for big enterprises like B2B SaaS companies, small businesses and individuals can also use it to get quick sales.
- MEDDIC helps you quickly understand your buyers and develop a plan to capture leads and sales.
- This sales process can help you convince your prospects by answering all the questions and addressing their concerns.
How to implement the MEDDIC sales process in 7 steps
Here are the seven important steps you must take to implement the magic MEDDIC sales framework... and get maximum benefits.
1. Train your sales team
Since there's so much competition in every industry, today's sales have become a huge challenge. Even with an amazing product, you need a talented team of salespersons. Your sales managers and representatives must have the skills to generate successful leads and conversions.
Sales teams fail to complete their target, not because of a lack of finances or technology, but due to insufficient skills and a lack of understanding of how the overall sales process works.
Train your team on your tools and processes. You can use tools like Scribe to document workflows and develop training materials, standardizing how work is followed and shared across your all the team members for a seamless sales process.
Here's a Scribe in action — that only took 30 seconds to make.
Hold 1:1 meetings with each team member to help them understand and execute the best practices of sales. Use a training guide template to create training manuals effortlessly because regular sales training is inevitable for sales success.
2. Review the sales objectives
Get crystal clear about your overall sales objectives. During the sales process, the team will be asked questions regarding price tags, contracts or the credibility of your business. Review the sales objectives and train your team to answer these questions with confidence.
3. Run a win/loss analysis
Run a win/loss analysis to find whether or not the MEDDIC sales process is the right fit for your business. Discuss it with colleagues, and peers, to identify any possible losses or wins. Identify whether you are able to run a successful sales campaign. Are you achieving your targets? Or do you need to change the sales strategy based on objectives?
Once you get the hang of all this, make necessary chances to have a winning sales strategy.
4. Update the buyer personas
If you're a salesperson, building personas shouldn't be hard for you. However, identifying your target customer and building a profile is the first and fundamental step. Your personas define to whom you want to sell your product or service, and the demographics like gender, age, geography, job titles, and more importantly their pains and motivations.
It is important to regularly update and maintain a buyer persona for your business. These buyers' personas will help you understand your customer's problems and at what level your product will solve their problems for them. Having a buyer persona makes the overall sales process efficient & effective.
5. Refine sales qualification — it's time to use MEDDIC
As we discussed above, refining sales qualification is a crucial part of the overall process. You'll face huge challenges if you use old traditional sales methodology.
MEDDIC brings you a proven framework for effective sales. You can refine your sales qualification using the following process. Each step of the process allows the sales representative to ask relevant questions and to get a step closer to converting a prospect into a customer.
Here is the step-by-step MEDDIC framework.
Metrics
Metrics are the numbers that decide business performance. They're measurable results. While doing the sales meeting, you can ask your client about the important metrics which really matter. If the KPIs aren't doing well, offer your product or services and convince them how you will help them improve KPIs.
Here are the questions you can ask to qualify your prospect:
- What goals do you want to achieve?
- How would you measure success?
Economic Buyer
The economic buyer is the one who is responsible for all the financial and economic decisions in any business. They are the core decision makers in any organization. For example, an economic buyer could be the CEO of any business, CFO, project manager, product manager, and more.
You can ask good questions like the ones below to grab their attention in the sales process. The answer to these questions will help you understand how your prospect's financial decisions are made.
Questions to ask:
- What does success look like for you?
- Is anyone else involved in the financial decision?
Decision Criteria
Decision criteria help you understand how important technical and business decisions are taken in the prospect's business. These decisions can further help you identify whether the prospect can be your customer or not.
For example, is your prospect's technical infrastructure ready to support your product? Are they prepared to upgrade it? What are their current revenue and net benefit? What is the budget allocated for your services? The few questions below can help you uncover important factors in the sales qualification process.
Questions to ask:
- What are the most important criteria for you when making a decision?
- How might you justify the purchase?
Decision Process
The decision process defines how buying decisions are taken. This includes all the functions that can influence the buying decision. At this stage of MEDDIC, you will understand how the technical team and business teams make decisions. What are the important factors they consider before they buy? How do they do all the paperwork for negotiations, and how much time will it take? Moreover, the answers to these questions can help you understand all the important decision-making processes to help you generate a qualified lead. You should ask
Questions to ask:
- Who do you need to talk to and finalize the decision?
- What kind of paperwork needs to get published?
Identify Pain
Great sales teams know what their prospect's pain points are. Identifying your customers' pains is the most important secret to becoming a successful salesperson. You can only offer the solution after knowing what problems your product should be solving. You can ask the following questions and then pitch your product to a prospect. Famous sales gurus write many books about how to identify customer pains. I am sure this step will be a game changer if done properly.
Questions to ask:
- How does [problem] affect your business and what’s the bottom line?
- What happens if you do nothing?
Champion
A champion is someone in a prospect's business who will get the maximum benefit from your solution. This person is very important to you since they can advise and influence the sales deal. You must ask a few questions like the ones below to identify your champion. Moreover, you can target the champion with your sales campaigns.
Questions to ask:
- What is this person’s interest in your product or solution?
- Can they accurately explain the product’s benefits as they relate to the company?
Once you're able to get answers to all the questions by implementing the MEDDIC sales process, you will be able to gather data and valuable information about your prospects for a successful sales strategy.
For an efficient MEDDIC sales process, it’s great to use software to enable sales representatives for better decision-making and monitor performance.
6. Use software to enable sales reps
The sales process is challenging, and it’s important to create an efficient sales process in a hybrid environment. To empower your salespeople, you can use software that can help them access sales processes, training, playbooks, and project management tools easily.
Integrate the software with your CRM, slack, or email for better qualification and lead conversion while boosting client retention rates in the long run. You can choose a tool like Scribe to build up your teams with easy-to-use and share training documentation.
7. Monitor performance
To maintain a successful sales campaign using the MEDDIC framework, it's important to monitor the performance of:
- Team members.
- Sales.
You can do weekly review meetings to discuss the progress. This will help you brainstorm a new ideas that you have, update the new employees about the overall sales process and and refresh the MEDDIC sales process and buyer personas.
How to implement the MEDDIC sales process
The MEDDIC sales framework is a sales process that helps you understand clients by asking different questions in the sales qualification process. MEDDIC is a six-step sales formula to identify clients' problems at different stages and enable you to qualify leads with this while saving effort, time, and money.
