MEDDIC

As contract sizes grow, so does the buying process on the other side. Your contact may love the product, but a department head has to look at it, a security review attaches itself, legal rewrites the contract, and finance confirms the budget. From the selling side you are talking to one person while six or seven people are shaping the decision.

In that setup the common failure isn't rejection — it's nothing happening at all. The contact keeps saying yes, a meeting gets booked every month, and the deal sits on the quarterly forecast for a year. Look into it later and the contact never had spending authority, or the company had already picked a vendor and brought you in to produce a comparison price.

MEDDIC is the checklist that came out of sales organizations working backwards from that experience and asking what was present in the deals that actually closed. Put the won deals next to the ones stuck for a year and six things separated them: whether the customer had a number for the outcome, whether anyone had spoken to the person who controls the money, whether the comparison criteria and the steps to signature were known, whether there was a problem the customer called painful, and whether anyone inside the account would explain the product when the vendor wasn't in the room. Those six are the letters.

Write what you heard from the customer into six slots and fill the empty ones in the next conversation. It usually takes two or three calls. The slots go in this order.

1. Metrics — the customer has a number for what improves and by how much. "The team spends 40 hours a month cleaning up meeting notes and wants to cut that in half" fills the slot. "We need to be more efficient" leaves it empty.
2. Economic buyer — the person who actually approves the budget. Often not the contact you've been talking to, and if you've never met them the slot counts as empty.
3. Decision criteria — what the customer compares vendors on. Concrete items: holding a security certification, integrating with tools already in use. Leave this empty and you end up pitching strengths at the wrong target.
4. Decision process — the steps to signature and how long each one takes. Written out as department head approval, three weeks of security review, two weeks of legal, quarterly budget meeting. Only a filled slot lets you say when the deal closes.
5. Identified pain — something the customer is living with and would pay to remove. Different from nice to have.
6. Champion — someone inside the account who argues for you. The test is whether they'll raise your name in a meeting you're not in; a friendly contact doesn't qualify. A champion is usually whoever suffers most from the problem.

The state of the six slots decides where the deal sits in the sales pipeline, the list of in-flight deals arranged by stage. Keeping a deal that fills fewer than half the slots off the quarterly forecast is the practical reason teams run this at all. An empty slot is not a signal to walk away — it's the list of questions for the next call.

Use it where filling six slots is cheap relative to the deal: large amounts, many people involved, months to signature. On a $75,000 annual rollout, three months spent without knowing the decision process costs far more than the checklist does.

It doesn't fit a $40-a-month team plan. Aim six slots at a deal that closes in one call and the customer fields questions they have no reason to answer, while the rep defers a perfectly good deal over slots that stayed blank. That situation belongs to the four-item BANT.

There are three limits. The first is that this is a checklist, not a way of talking. Asking the six items in order turns into an interrogation, so the answers should surface while you listen during a discovery call — the first call, where you hear the customer's situation instead of presenting the product.

The second is that the champion slot behaves differently from the other five. Metrics and decision process are things you confirm; a champion is something you have to create when there isn't one. Carry a deal forward with that slot marked "none" and your price sheet sits in an internal meeting with nobody defending it.

Third, six full slots guarantee nothing. Most of the value shows up in disqualification — dropping the deals that don't fit, early.

"I still haven't met the economic buyer on this one. I'm taking it off the pipeline."

One of the six slots is empty, so the deal comes out of this quarter's number.

"Did you ask about their decision criteria? If security review comes first we need to reorder."

Knowing what the customer compares on determines the order you present in.

"The contact likes us but he isn't a champion. He doesn't bring us up in their meetings."

Warmth and arguing for you internally are not the same thing.

At Pagedeck this is the table Sofia works through on enterprise deals. A team lead at a 300-person company reached out first and the demo went well, but filling in the six slots left economic buyer and decision process blank. She asked the lead who normally reviews a contract this size, and learned it needs division head approval plus a security review, with budget landing next quarter.

So the deal moved to next quarter and the time went into meeting the economic buyer instead. The security requirements that came out of that meeting went to Theo in advance, which cut the review from three weeks to one.

The most common mistake is treating six filled slots as the goal. It looks like a form, so removing blanks looks like the job. But the table is a set of notes about what to ask next, not a document to complete. Manage slot completion as a performance measure and reps write in plausible answers they never confirmed — the tool fills up with perfect six-slot records while the win rate stays exactly where it was.

Seeing it as a tool the rep uses alone is the other common mistake. Decision process and economic buyer rarely come from one person's digging. Pulling security requirements early takes an engineer; sketching the post-rollout target numbers takes someone from the product side. Half the slots get filled with other functions in the room, which is why the table doesn't live only inside the sales team.