MEDDIC Needs Customer Data

The idea behind the "ball don't lie" phrase is this -- when a player misses his free throws after a questionable foul call, that's the basketball gods' way of saying the refs made the wrong call. Therefore, the fouled player will not be rewarded with points he didn't rightly deserve. - Insider

MEDDIC was first started in the 1990s by sales legend John McMahon as a methodology for selling strategic deals in a B2B environment.  The discipline of sales essentially has a line in the sand before and after MEDDIC was created. 

MEDDIC has evolved over time as the sales motion has become more complex and the acronym has reflected it: 

• MEDDIC – original (that is a big acronym)
• MEDDPIC – the P was introduced (ok….)
• MEDDPICC – an additional C was added (holy wow, is it going to keep on getting bigger?)
  

MEDDPICC is where we stand today, with the letters working out to:

• M: Metrics
• E: Economic Buyer
• D: Decision Criteria
• D: Decision Process
• P: Paper Process
• I: Implicate the Pain
• C: Champion
• C: Competition
  

Think about where MEDDIC started in the 90s and where we are today—living in a data-driven and connected world. This can be seen with the amount of technology that GTM teams are adopting and also to the solutions they are selling, which increasingly are digital. We covered this in a prior post, but as you start to sell digital solutions, the amount of data you can generate about a customer—often captured as MEDDPICC fields that are manually updated in Salesforce—is far exceeded by how much they can generate about themselves (as they do research, ask questions, use your product, and a host of other activities that leave digital bread crumbs). Below is a chart that tries to illustrate the data you can create with MEDDPICC v the data that can be created by your customers. 

The question becomes, how do you incorporate this first-party data into your MEDDPICC methodology? We are working hard on this solution and we think it is the key to unlocking the next great generation of sellers that augment their qualification criteria with data that their customer generates. This ideally leads to more quantitative sales stages, more constructive pipeline meetings, and a seller that is more informed on how a customer defines their needs and what they are looking for in a solution. 

Are you up for extending MEDDPICC? I think it needs another C, with that C standing for Customer Data. What is the definition? 

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Doing > Saying. Understand what your customer is doing, not just what they are saying. Collect customer data throughout the qualification process via your digital interactions with them and their interactions with you, your company, and your product.

A customer saying something is great but knowing with data is better. Just like the ball don’t lie in basketball, the data from your customer will showcase your potential with them both now and after you close and expand them. 

Don’t want another C but you can see the value in weaving customer data in to your MEDDIC or MEDDPICC process? Let’s talk about it. 

Thanks to Mike Argo, Laura Erdem, Joe Gannon, Ian Hopping, Adam Griffin and Andy Carlson for reading a draft of this post.