Your sales rep gets a lead. She emails, meets the prospect on Zoom for an hour. Then, more emails follow. More meetings. The opportunity is forecasted to close in the quarter. She spends countless hours following up, answering questions. And then… crickets.
Turns out, the potential buyer wasn’t really that serious.
If that happens once or twice a quarter, sure — but for a sales team to consistently sell to people who don’t have the inclination, budget, or authority to buy… It’s a business killer.
For years, this kind of frustrating inefficiency was a fact of life for sales teams.
Until MEDDIC.
Meet MEDDIC: The Business Killer… Killer
In the mid-1990s, a step-by-step methodology known as MEDDIC was developed to take on the many problems of sales qualification.
At its most basic level, MEDDIC is a checklist that instructs what information should be obtained as soon as possible from a lead. Each letter is simply another box to check by a rep asking the right questions. The data from this process is then used to decide whether a lead is worth pursuing or not, based on past data. In this way, MEDDIC helps revenue teams make smarter choices about who to keep talking to, and who to drop.
Over time, sales teams saw that MEDDIC did more than freed them from time wasters: it established a common language among teams, highlighted data gaps, created predictability — and ultimately, it shortened sales cycles.
For this reason, MEDDIC is still commonly regarded as one of the best qualification methodologies in the world.
What’s MEDDIC mean?
MEDDIC stands for:
- Metrics — Establish the metrics your prospect needs to meet with your solution. Sales reps are encouraged to get hard numbers here.
- Economic buyer — Identify the party authorized to approve to buy and or. who controls funding. Reps should meet with this individual as soon as possible.
- Decision criteria — Understand what a potential client values in order to make purchase decisions.
- Decision process — Understand the process a client will be using to make their purchasing decisions.
- Identify pain — Identify the lead's problems, then develop solutions to their problems that your solution solves.
- Champion — Identify and connect with your champion, or find another internal ally to promote your wares. Start by qualifying the relationship (is it a good fit?), developing rapport, and testing how well you both can communicate your company's value inside their business, in an authentic and compelling way.
Sometimes, it’s worth noting too, MEDDIC is referred to as MEDDPICC, adding a P and C:
- Paper process — Understand the process to budget, releasing funds, obtaining board / committee / legal / contract approval, signature.
- Competition — Know the competition’s strength, weakness & differentiators, including their relative power and influence on your champion.
Keep in mind, however, that at its core MEDDIC is simply a methodology.
The data collected in the process needs a “place to live” so that it can be stored, analyzed, and acted on at-scale.
Centralizing MEDDIC documentation in Salesforce
With its power and adaptability, Salesforce is an ideal CRM to meet the needs of most revenue teams’ chosen qualification methodologies, including those who prefer MEDDIC.
To implement MEDDIC in Salesforce, an admin typically creates custom fields in the Opportunity object to capture information.
If you’re here because you’ve already implemented MEDDIC in Salesforce and are pulling your hair out, read on.
The challenges of MEDDIC implementation
Salesforce is a fantastic CRM. MEDDIC is a fantastic methodology. But the glue that holds these together is the willingness of your team to do what you ask them to do, and do so consistently.
RevOps experts know this term as process adherence. And, ultimately, even a “perfect” sales methodology and CRM mean little without it, especially as revenue teams grow.
MEDDIC needs adherence. But as sales reps forget to input SFDC fields, data hygiene suffers, handoffs are bungled, time is wasted, nothing is learned or improved upon.
The good news? This problem is common. (So common, in fact, it’s a refrain common among many RevOps experts: “How do I get my reps to fill out their damn fields?!”)
Solving for SFDC-MEDDIC adoption
The first step to approaching 100% MEDDIC adherence in Salesforce often requires reframing the problem.
The truth is: reps want to sell. Their paycheck depends on it. The well documented usability gaps in SFDC (and other CRMs) make the idea of putting down the phone and context-switching into data entry mode (for the sake of what many reps see as an abstract and unnecessary process) pretty unappealing.
“No bother,” say some RevOps folks. “I’ll just create another validation rule to get them in line.”
But, as it turns out, you can’t adherence your way out of adherence problems. New rules won’t magically make old ones any more likely to be followed.
Instead, make adherence easier.
MEDDIC adherence is a breeze with Rattle
As a RevOps Automation Engine, Rattle allows you to set up automatic two-way alerts between SFDC and Slack. In literally minutes, you can set up a Rattle that reminds them to fix their fields — and allow them to fill the custom fields in the Opportunity object — all in Slack.
Check it out:
No context switching. No groans. No, “I’ll get to that later.”
We’ve made MEDDIC adherence approachable (and importantly, tied to context). And it works. For many of our clients, these customizable, automated messages have improved data capture by 50% or more. The best part? Installation takes about 10 minutes, and adoption is basically instant.
You don’t have to take our word for it. You can check out Rattle for free — and implement your own streamlined, automated MEDDIC adherence engine — with three workflows on us. Start by clicking here to create your free account.
