MEDDPICC Leadership: Coaching to Decision Process
Deal slippage is a perennial problem for sales teams.
Slippage can occur for several reasons, with the most common reasons being:
- Close dates are a guess and unvalidated
- The process and steps within the timeline to make a decision are unquantified
- The paper process and its complexity are underestimated
Decision process (and Paper process as a subset) provides sales teams and leaders with clear visibility into the steps and risks associated with getting from today to signature.
The greater the validation of the Decision process, the more reliable the forecast becomes.
Jump to:
- What Decision Process Must Achieve
- Are Decision Process and Paper Process the Same?
- How to Build a Mutual Success Plan or Mutual Action Plan
- How do You Introduce the Idea of a Mutual Success Plan?
- Mutual Success Plan Top Tips
- Decision Process and Paper Process Inspection Checklist
Isn’t Decision Process Just the Timeline or Close Date?
A close date is not a Decision process. Neither is “it's with procurement” nor “legal is reviewing it.”
The Decision process is about explaining all of the steps and meetings, which enable the customer to act, to act now, and act with you.
To drive real forecast accuracy, the Decision process details required include:
- What happens next
- Who owns it
- When it should happen
- What must happen before that action
- What could delay follow-up steps
The date is often just a target; it needs to be reverse-engineered, along with the steps and dependencies, to validate that this date is achievable.
- A customer-driven close date: Is the close date supported by the customer’s Decision processes?
- A sales-driven close date: Has the team selected a date and built assumptions around it?
One of the most useful coaching questions is: "Walk me backwards from the customer’s required outcome to the contract signature."
A credible close date should emerge from that conversation, as an output of the process rather than an input to it. We're looking to understand the steps, owners, and complexities involved to assess the risks that could impact the date.
What Decision Process Must Achieve
Decision process qualification should give the sales team visibility into decision stages, stakeholders, approvals, dependencies, procurement, legal, finance, signatories, and timing.
It should make the path to purchase specific enough to identify risks before they create slippage.
Vagueness is where forecast risk hides.
Are Decision Process and Paper Process the Same?
The Decision process is everything the customer must do to decide to purchase, including every meeting to validate that the solution meets their needs, select a vendor, allocate budgets, and then contract and sign.
The Decision process is likely to include:
- Technical validation
- Business case validation
- Executive approvals
- Vendor selection
- Security reviews
- Finance approvals
- Procurement and contracting steps (high level)
The Paper process is a subset of the Decision process, focusing on the specifics of drafting, negotiating, and executing all legal paperwork to close a contract.
The Paper process is likely to include:
- Detailed understanding of contract drafting
- Negotiation of key terms with owners
- Procurement negotiations
- New supplier process and portals
- Vendor due diligence
- Legal redlines and negotiation
- eSignature processes like DocuSign
A sales team can win the decision to purchase and still slip deals because the Paper process was poorly understood or underestimated.
It’s the leader’s job to inspect both Decision process and Paper process equally in their forecast calls and deal reviews.
Many delays occur before the visible milestone. Before the Economic buyer meeting, someone may need to brief them. Before legal review, procurement may need to submit paperwork. Before a purchase order is placed, finance approval may be required. Before signature, several internal approvers may need to complete their part.
It’s important for team members and leaders to consider those steps before the milestone to identify hidden risks.
Coaching Questions to Ask or Reflect Upon
- What must happen before this step can begin?
- Who owns that pre-step?
- Has the milestone been scheduled?
- What's the normal internal SLA for each step or pre-step?
- What's the impact if the step is delayed?
Work with your Champion to understand these risks and document how each issue will be mitigated.
Remember: our job in sales is revenue with control, which means communication of risk is our primary objective to the business. Ensure any risks are adequately communicated.
How to Build a Mutual Success Plan or Mutual Action Plan
A Mutual Success Plan (MSP), Mutual Action Plan, or Close Plan is a way to document all the steps, with owners and target dates, so you can easily articulate, internally and externally, where you are with an opportunity.
The more complex the deal, the more this is needed to manage multiple risks.
Any customer-facing plan should be built around the customer’s desired outcome, not simply the seller’s close date. This is why a Mutual Success Plan is more useful than a traditional close plan, which focuses on the contract date.
Start with the business value realisation (beyond the contract date), and then work back to include:
- Any value realisation time needed
- Go-live date
- Implementation dependencies
- Training and adoption timeline
- Contracting process (commercial close)
Then work backwards to determine what must happen to achieve it.
The commercial close is just one milestone to achieve the larger customer outcome.
Remember, the customer outcome is the motivation that drives the ‘Why Now’ to create deal momentum.
How do You Introduce the Idea of a Mutual Success Plan?
Sending the customer a spreadsheet does not make it a Mutual Success Plan, nor does this sell the idea of managing the details.
Sellers should consider scheduling a specific meeting with the Champion to sell the idea and begin building the plan.
Leaders should look for evidence that this has happened and that the customer is actively involved. Regular updates to dates, added steps, identified owners, corrected dependencies, agreed-upon internal milestones, and regular review of the plan. Customer validation is important because it demonstrates qualification and commitment.
Note: Any senior executive (i.e. a Champion) will appreciate the documentation of actions. It’s unlikely they're running point on every action, so this helps the customer to manage their own people and process.
Mutual Success Plan Top Tips:
Seller activity does not necessarily mean the deal is progressing. Look for evidence that the Champion is taking action, such as involving Finance, arranging Economic buyer access, progressing Security, or engaging Procurement and Legal. Champion ownership of actions in the MSP is another strong signal.
The more the Champion is doing, the stronger the evidence of genuine momentum.
A forecast date needs to reflect how long the remaining customer processes will actually take. Validate the expected SLAs for Legal, Security, Procurement and other critical steps rather than relying on the customer's desired date. Understand which activities can run in parallel, which have dependencies and where you have contingency.
If everything has to go perfectly to hit the date, the date is at risk.
The Decision process should become more detailed as the opportunity moves towards closure. Early on, understand how decisions are normally made and who is involved; through the middle, build the Mutual Success Plan and establish milestones, owners, dates, and dependencies. Late stage, approvals, Procurement, Legal, signatories, and internal SLAs should all be clear.
The closer you are to the close date, the less room there is for vague answers.
Once an opportunity is well qualified and approaching signature, stop repeatedly re-running every MEDDPICC element. Instead, ask: “Is the close date under pressure?” Use the evidence to determine whether to commit, accelerate, pause, plan, or qualify out.
Your forecast should reflect the reality of the deal today, not the outcome you hope to achieve.
Use the following checklist in your deal reviews to ensure the steps to signature are mapped and de-risked:
Decision Process and Paper Process: Leader Inspection Checklist
- ☐ A Mutual Success Plan exists
- ☐ The plan is built backwards from the customer’s desired outcome
- ☐ The customer actively contributes to the plan
- ☐ Decision process and Paper process are both understood
- ☐ Major milestones are mapped
- ☐ Owners and dates are attached to critical actions
- ☐ The step before the step has been identified
- ☐ Internal SLAs and dependencies are understood
- ☐ Customer commitments are visible
- ☐ Contingency exists in the timeline
- ☐ The close date is supported by evidence rather than optimism
- ☐ The forecast category reflects the evidence today
A Question Worth Asking: "Walk me backwards from the customer’s required outcome to signature and explain which remaining step is most likely to move the date."
In Summary
Decision process makes the forecast honest. Successful leaders turn vague timelines into specific milestones, owners, dates, dependencies, and customer commitments. A live Mutual Success Plan gives both organisations visibility into what needs to happen and when.
When the process is clear, the close date becomes the result of evidence. When it is not, the forecast is still relying on hope alone.
This blog is one of our MEDDPICC Leadership series. Our newsletter and a live webinar accompany these blogs.
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