What you need to know about a prospect before a sales call — and where to find it
Learn the following 5 things about your prospect to make sure you’re prepared for your call.
B2B salespeople, you know how limited your time is. You can’t “woo” everybody, so you must ruthlessly prioritize how and where to invest your time.
And just because the marketing team passes a prospect your way doesn’t mean that person is actually sales-qualified. Misalignment between what counts as “qualified” means you might spend (read: waste) your time with someone who will never buy.
Top performers avoid this problem, which explains why they spend 10% less time selling than their average counterparts. So, if you’re struggling to talk to the right people and close deals, it might be time to implement the MEDDIC sales process.
Let’s discuss the MEDDIC sales qualification framework, how it works, and what the implementation process looks like.
MEDDIC is a sales framework used by sales professionals to qualify prospects and identify potential buyers. It’s a method to mitigate wasted time and close deals faster.
MEDDIC stands for:
Under this sales methodology, you’ll go through the acronym, asking questions that correlate with each letter. At the end, you’ll discover whether or not a prospect is suitable for your solution.
Why should sales teams implement MEDDIC?
After all, countless other sales methodologies similar to MEDDIC make grand claims to improve close rates and grow revenue, too. MEDDIC differs because it concentrates purely on the lead qualification process.
Here are four benefits of leaning on MEDDIC as your go-to lead qualification framework:
On average, 79% of marketing leads never turn into sales-qualified leads. MEDDIC streamlines the lead qualification process by empowering marketers to ask a few targeted questions before sales professionals waste hours cultivating relationships destined to go nowhere.
Naturally, when marketing disqualifies more dead-end leads before they get to sales, there’s a stronger partnership there. Lead qualification, at its best, is a collaborative effort involving the marketing team passing quality leads to the sales team. MEDDIC establishes a baseline for what counts as a “qualified lead” that both marketing and sales agents can follow. The collaboration between sales and marketing teams is why MEDDIC effectively reduces lost time and revenue.
Spending time on leads that aren’t the right fit for your product or service reduces the overall effectiveness of your sales team. Implementing a formal sales process like MEDDIC makes it easier to prioritize leads with the highest likelihood of closing by learning more about your customers from stage one.
Instead of sifting through hundreds of leads at random from your contact list, hoping to sell a high-ticket product, MEDDIC focuses your sales efforts on only the most qualified prospects. As you can imagine, this works wonders by:
The MEDDIC sales methodology follows six steps to qualify leads and pinpoint the right customers. It involves asking critical questions at each step to learn more about your leads.
Here are the six stages of this process, including why each one matters and which questions you should ask.
What does your prospect hope to gain from your product or solution?
This is the first question top sellers figure out the answer to. Seek to uncover the quantifiable gains a prospect wants from you. For example, maybe they want a solution to get their products to market in half of their current time. Or maybe they’re hoping to reduce operational expenses by 20% in the next 18 months.
Learning about a prospect’s end goal enables you to describe how your product or service could help them get there.
Additionally, it shows you what your prospect cares about so you can decide if they’ve got a solid business case for your solution. If your product aligns with their goals, you can economically justify your solution and close the sale.
There’s nothing worse than spending weeks discussing a solution with a buyer only to discover they have no authority to make purchasing decisions. Knowing who the economic buyer is (and their mindset) is crucial because they are the last word in purchasing decisions.
Sometimes, this won’t always be possible, especially in larger companies with more extensive hierarchies, but if possible, use your contact to learn more about the economic buyer and their motivations.
The economic buyer is the final decision maker. Do your best to talk directly with them consistently throughout the deal cycle. Convincing someone that your solution is the best has little meaning if they don’t actually have the power to buy.
How does your target company make decisions?
Companies are inundated with potential solutions and often compare vendors before making a choice. Uncovering the criteria your prospect is using to make a purchasing decision lets you position your solution as the best option and tailor your sales approach.
Different things matter to different people. Knowing the criteria a sales lead is using empowers your sales team to focus on the boxes a prospect is trying to check. It could be potential ROI, fitting within a limited budget, or integrating well with existing processes.
Demonstrating that your solution meets their criteria establishes suitability and positions you to convince them that you’re the perfect partner.
Decision criteria tell you the factors a prospect considers as they make a decision. Their specific decision-making process informs you how they come to a decision. You need to know who’s making the final decision, their timeline, and formal approval processes.
In other words, this part of the MEDDIC framework tells you which pieces must be in place within the decision process before a prospect is ready to close.
Insight into a lead’s buying process prevents deal stagnation because you have the data you need to help them through their decision-making process.
For example, if you’ve got the green light from the economic buyer, but there’s been no follow-up on the paperwork, your team can push for that specific paperwork to be taken care of instead of passively waiting around.
Why does a customer need your solution?
This is where the real relationship building and selling now begins. Discover what challenges your prospect is looking to overcome and analyze whether or not your solution could adequately address their pain. Said differently, there’s little point in selling increased marketing efficiency if what the customer really cares about is lowering shipping costs.
Selling is all about offering excellent solutions to problems.
Identifying a customer’s pain lets you see what they’re looking for in a solution. It’s about qualifying whether you have the solution to overcome a customer’s primary challenge or not.
Last but not least in this framework, find a champion within your prospect’s organization. This will be the person who pushes for your solution to be the decision maker. This individual doesn’t have to be a decision maker, but they do have to be someone well-respected enough to influence other decision makers on the inside.
Rarely are you selling the merits of your solution; you’re selling why your solution is better than the other solutions your prospect could choose instead.
Finding a champion for your cause gives you someone who can advocate for you, which is always more compelling than you advocating for your solution.
Implementing the MEDDIC framework works best at customer-centric organizations. If you’re a sales leader at a company like that, here are a few essential steps to help you weave MEDDIC into your lead qualification process.
Start with formal training. Your sales team must understand the six steps from a practical standpoint. Training provides opportunities for you to show sellers how each step works in practice through roleplay or even discovery call reviews.
Be sure before you roll out any sort of formal MEDDIC training that you have buy-in from your sales management and enablement counterparts. You’ll undeniably need to explain why MEDDIC would benefit the sales organization and aid in improving your go-to-market team’s revenue efforts. Make it a collaborative, exciting pivot for your salesforce.
MEDDIC is designed to assist your qualification framework, not replace it. However, integrating it into your existing sales processes may require shifting your team’s approach and mindset.
Remember, MEDDIC is a set of principles embedded within the traditional sales funnel, not a new method. This is why you’ll need to take the time to determine how it impacts other parts of your sales machine, including buyer personas, training materials, your customer journey, and sales qualification templates.
Like any solution, measuring its impact is critical to getting the most out of MEDDIC. Establish a system for tracking its impact, spotting unexpected pain points, and addressing any issues or concerns you hear from sellers.
Leveraging technology often streamlines the MEDDIC implementation process. Which technology you should adopt will differ from team to team, but some examples may include:
Optimizing your sales framework, whether you’re implementing MEDDIC or not, means staying organized and tracking the progress of every relationship. CRM tools like Streak are designed to capture every prospect interaction and boost deal efficiency.
With Streak, there’s finally a great way to pull all of your digital conversations, deals, and KPIs into one place, right within Gmail. Our customers take advantage of innovative features like funnel reports, saved views, pipelines, and more to make their sales functions more efficient and store more helpful information about their prospects.
If you’re ready to join the 750,000+ other happy customers using Streak, go ahead and request your free 14-day trial today and get ready to transform your sales pipeline.