They also help you understand your prospect’s pain points, challenges, and readiness to purchase so that you can create a tailored solution that addresses all of their needs.
But coming up with the right set of MEDDIC discovery questions is not easy. It takes practice and experience to understand what each question should reveal about your prospect.
These 25 MEDDIC questions are a great start to qualifying prospects on discovery calls. They'll help your sales reps figure out the prospect’s goals, needs, and challenges to identify if they'd be a good fit customer.
The 25 MEDDIC Discovery Questions You Can Use to Qualify Leads
The MEDDIC process is broken down into six groups of information you’ll want to collect from your prospects to qualify them as a lead worth pursuing.
These are:
- Metrics
- Economic Buyer
- Decision Criteria
- Decision Process
- Identify Pain
- Champion
We’ve provided a checklist of some key questions to help you uncover information for each qualifying criterion that you can work into your initial sales calls.
Metrics
1. How do you currently measure your success?
It’s important to understand what metrics the prospect uses to identify whether or not they’re successful in their role. This will help you identify what metrics you might need to tie your product/service to in order to win this potential customer.
2. What goals are you looking to achieve?
This is a simple one that can help you hone in on not just the broader pain points that your prospect is trying to solve, but also what kind of numeric goals your prospect wants to hit. This is another key metric you’ll need to craft a successful pitch around and ensure that your product or service can bring this client the results they’re looking for.
3. What does a successful outcome of these goals look like to you?
This question allows you to really hone in on what success looks like for your prospect using their own words.
4. How much are you currently spending to address this issue?
By asking this question, you get insight into how much money the prospect is spending on their current solution (if they even have one). This would help you determine whether your solution would provide a good ROI for the prospect by comparing it against their current spend on the existing solution.
Economic Buyer
5. Who makes the final decision when it comes to purchasing at your company?
This is a critical person to identify within the lead qualification and sales process because you'll need to pitch to them whether they’re in the room or not. Find out if the lead you’re talking to is the final decision maker or if they’re the gatekeeper.
6. What do you/they need to see to sign off on a product?
This question can help you and your sales team craft a winning pitch that includes the key information the economic buyer will need to see to approve the purchase.
7. What economic metrics do you/they measure success with?
You may discover this information while asking metric questions, but this is another way you can dig up those critical metrics your potential buyer will want to achieve to deem a project successful.
Decision Criteria
8. What information or paperwork would you or your stakeholders need to see to make a decision?
This will save you and your prospect a lot of time down the line and can help you get ahead of any potential bottlenecks. This answer can ensure you’re putting key collateral or contracts they’ll need to see to approve the purchase.
9. Why are these criteria important?
The “why” behind the decision criteria are often mistakenly overlooked. Understanding why a company uses specific criteria in its decision-making can give you further insight into what the company values.
10. What are the most important criteria to meet?
Whether they have a huge list of criteria or just a few key points, understanding which are the highest priorities can help you understand whether your product or service fulfills their most critical “must-haves.”
11. Who will be evaluating our services to see if they meet the criteria?
This question can provide you with an opportunity to research or meet with additional stakeholders who will be involved in the decision process.
Decision Process
12. Can we walk through your decision-making process?
This question can help you understand what hurdles you may need to clear throughout the decision process and better understand the company's structure.
13. How much time does a typical decision process take?
Getting a pulse on how quickly this company moves to work with new vendors can inform your follow-up strategy and give you some additional clues to the company's inner workings. Are they an agile “let’s do things now” team, or do multiple layers of stakeholders need to review the information before making a decision?
14. When can we expect to sign the deal if approved?
Similar to the question above, this gives you a rough timeline to help you time your follow-ups and prime your team for onboarding.
15. What type of paperwork will you need?
If you asked the question about what information will be needed in the Decision Criteria section, you can probably skip this one. However, this is a good alternative that allows you to prime your team to have the correct paperwork in place to avoid a delayed close.
16. Who will finalize the decision?
This is another great question to reveal additional decision-makers and key stakeholders within their company.
17. Are there any other options you’ve considered?
You want to know if your prospect has done their due diligence and explored other products/services. This question also allows you to get ahead of any objections related to how your company stacks up against competitors.
Identify Pain
18. What is the biggest problem you face in your role?
This is one of the most important things you can uncover about your prospect. Understanding their pain points is sales 101. Without knowing their problems, you have no way of knowing how you really need to position your company’s product/services to this specific person. If feature X doesn’t address their problems but feature Y does, your demo/pitch should really only focus on feature Y.
19. Can you give me a brief history of the situation?
This MEDDIC discovery question can help you find out how their problem arose, what solutions they’ve tried, and what the current situation looks like.
A prospect’s situation is unique to them. If you want to create a solution that solves all (or at least most of) their problems, you have to understand how those issues came to be. A prospect’s history can help you understand their issues' root causes.
20. What are your organizational challenges?
Challenges are usually inter-departmental, so this question can help you determine how to deal with multiple stakeholders in your prospect’s organization. If you want your prospect to buy your product or service, you have to understand how your product will fit into their organization’s goals and challenges.
21. What is currently preventing you from achieving your goal?
This question can help you root out additional roadblocks in your client's processes or organization that you may be able to address with your product or service.
22. Is anyone resisting change? If so, who and why?
This question can help you understand if anyone in particular at your prospect’s organization is going to be the hardest to win over. You can use this information to frame your solution in a way that addresses their issues. If you are selling a solution that requires your prospect to change their ways of working, you have to address the concerns of those who don’t want to make those changes. If you can address their concerns, you can make it easier for your prospect to adopt your solution.
Champion
23. Who in your organization will benefit the most from this solution?
Finding a champion in the organization is your key “secret weapon” to winning the account, and this question will often help you hone in on that person. The people who need the solution the most will be the ones who fight hardest for your product to be implemented (assuming you hit them with the right pitch), so finding out who these people may be with a question like this is critical.
24. Are they connected to the key decision-makers within the organization?
Once you’ve identified who might want to help you fight to bring your product in, use this question to try and find out if they may be able to pull strings or bend ears with higher ranking decision-makers at their company.
25. Are they willing to discuss a strategy for getting the deal through?
This is an obvious one to take the temperature of these additional people who need to be involved and see if they may be willing to take a meeting with you to help get the deal through.
BONUS: Can they offer you “inside” information on how key stakeholders feel about the deal?
This is another key function of having a champion inside their company - insider information. If someone inside the company is passionate about getting your product or service on board, they may also be willing to give you additional “hidden” information about the structure or stakeholders that can help you win the deal. This can be a substantial competitive advantage.
Key Takeaways
So, do you need to make sure you use each and every one of these questions in every intro call? Absolutely not, in fact, you probably shouldn’t, or you risk totally overwhelming your prospect and making your first introductions seem more like an interview than a conversation.
You should strategically draw from this list to help you begin to put the pieces together on what this prospect may want and need and how you can not only provide them with a solution but also best demonstrate its value. Keep coming back to this list in follow-up calls to draw out new information as you progress along in your sales process and fill in any gaps in your MEDDIC framework.
And if you need help enforcing MEDDIC across your team, check out Rattle. Rattle will send your reps an alert in Slack or Teams when any MEDDIC fields are missing for a deal in the pipeline, and they can update their records right from there.
