MEDDIC or MEDDPICC—which is right for you?

MEDDIC is a sales qualification technique that is widely used in B2B sales organisations around the world. 

Originally created to aid the qualification of the early-stage pipeline, MEDDIC was designed to help sales organisations standardise their sales language, drive greater efficiency into the sales engine, increase deal sizes, shrink sales cycles and increase revenue.

So, what is MEDDPICC?

Within some organisations, certain elements of the sales process carried extra risks to the success of the deal and warranted extra focus. So, they decided to extend MEDDIC to MEDDPICC. The extra letters highlighted specific steps in the qualification process, making sure that these critical risk areas were addressed. 

What does MEDDIC and MEDDPICC stand for? And what are all the additional letters and spellings?

MEDDIC:

• M is for Metrics .
• E is for Economic buyer.
• Dc is for Decision criteria.
  
• Dp is Decision process.
• I is for Identified pain. Often, I is called Implicated pain. 
• C is for Champion. (Do you remember the four traits of a Champion?)

The extra letters in MEDDPICC and occasionally MEDDPPICC:

• P can stand for Partner.
• P can stand for Paper/Procurement process.
  
• C (or Co) is Competition.

Some of the newer implementations also include MEDDPICCR - to include the identification of risks.

If you want a refresher of each letter, we went into detail in our blog "What is MEDDIC/MEDDPICC?"

When might you use some of these additional letters? And why?

For very channel and influencer led businesses P for Partner, helps to ensure the partner process is front of mind. 

With extra teams and organisations involved, miscommunication, complexity, and unexpected delays creep into a sales cycle. Adding P for Partner creates awareness in the qualification for capturing and planning to mitigate some of these delays. 

When used for Paper or Procurement, this P often features in complex IT sales. These sales tend to have a large services engagement for which a detailed statement of work or related contract needs to be created.  

Paper or Procurement P is also used when selling into the Public Sector or heavily regulated industries—where the paper process elongates the sales cycle.

In these cases, the procurement and paperwork processes can be organisationally separated from the business owners, perhaps outsourced to a third party. Separating out this area of the sale makes sense in this case.

Competition is covered within Dc of MEDDIC, but some organisations want to call it out as a separate letter to ensure it gets the focus required. 

This is particularly important in highly competitive scenarios. Competition is flagged up front to ensure the team sets the differentiated agenda early. Competition can be locked out and pricing is set for a value-based negotiation.

So, which one should you adopt for your organisation? 

Remember, MEDDIC covers all the elements that MEDDPICC does, it just doesn’t separate out some of the letters/areas.  

When deciding to implement either MEDDIC, MEDDICC, or MEDDPICC as a new qualification process into your organisation, we are advocates of focus.  

Training your teams is only just the start. To be successful, you need to fully embed the qualification process into your go-to-market organisation, as we explained in our recent blog "The A-B-C of MEDDIC implementation"

New to MEDDIC? We recommend that you drill down on just two letters (Identified pain and Champion) and then add the others as your teams become more confident in using the process.  

Do you think you need some of the extra letters in MEDDPICC? 

We suggest you build organisational muscle with MEDDIC first. When you are confident with this, you can then expand to use the letters that will benefit your specific offerings and target market. 

There will be several things that influence which extra letters you use, including:

• What markets you operate in (regulated, public sector, specific geographic nuances).
• What the competitive landscape looks like. (Do you need to focus on specific competitors?) 
• Your typical sales cycle and process. (Do you need additional focus in certain areas?)
• How much you use partners. (What role do they play in the process?)
• How your target customers contract with suppliers (direct, indirect, framework contracts).

Ultimately it will come down to your knowledge and understanding of your specific offerings, customers, and market dynamics. 

It’s important to remember MEDDIC (or MEDDPICC) is a sales qualification technique. It’s how you qualify your business, not to be confused with what you do in sales.

MEDDIC / MEDDPICC is all about creating a common language for a go-to-market organisation to help make the sales process more efficient. Efficiency creates time and choice, ultimately driving better qualified pipeline and conversion of deals.

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