MEDDIC: a working guide for sales leaders
What MEDDIC actually is
MEDDIC is a qualification framework: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion. It was developed at PTC in the 1990s to bring discipline to complex B2B sales, and it remains the default inspection language in enterprise software.
For a sales leader, MEDDIC's real value is not rep behaviour — it is inspection. Six letters give you six concrete questions to ask about any deal in the forecast, and a deal that can't answer them is not a committed deal.
The six letters, as inspection questions
- Metrics — can the rep quantify the business impact the customer expects?
- Economic buyer — have we met the person who can actually release budget?
- Decision criteria — do we know, in the customer's words, how they will judge vendors?
- Decision process — do we know the steps, dates and people between here and a signature?
- Identify pain — is there a concrete, costed problem, or just polite interest?
- Champion — is someone selling for us when we're not in the room, and can they?
Running MEDDIC as a leadership cadence
Score every qualified deal against the six letters — red, amber, green is enough. In forecast reviews, don't relitigate the whole deal; go straight to the red letters and agree the single next action that turns each one amber or green.
The pattern to watch: deals rich in Metrics and Pain but missing Economic buyer and Decision process. Those slip. A calibrated forecast weights them down until the process letters firm up.
Where MEDDIC breaks down
MEDDIC qualifies; it doesn't teach reps how to create demand or challenge a customer's thinking — pair it with a selling motion for that. It also gets ritualised: boxes ticked with stale answers. The fix is dated evidence — a letter is only green if there's something recent behind it.
SaleSonicAI runs MEDDIC scorecards automatically as part of Deal Inspection when MEDDIC is set in your Commercial DNA, so every deal review starts from the same six questions with evidence attached.