MEDDIC

What it actually means

MEDDIC breaks deal qualification into six questions you should be able to answer before you call something a real opportunity:

• Metrics: What quantifiable result is the buyer trying to hit?
• Economic Buyer: Who actually signs off on the spend?
• Decision Criteria: What requirements will they use to compare options?
• Decision Process: What steps, approvals, and timeline get them to a signature?
• Identify Pain: What's actually broken, and what happens if it stays broken?
• Champion: Who inside the account is selling on your behalf when you're not in the room?

Jack Napoli and Dick Dunkel developed it at PTC in the 1990s and used it to take the company from $300 million to $1 billion in sales over four years. It's held up because it forces reps to separate deals that are moving from deals that just feel like they're moving.

Why it matters

Most lost deals aren't lost on price or product. They're lost because nobody could name the economic buyer, or the champion turned out to have no actual influence, or the decision process had three more approval layers nobody mapped. MEDDIC exists to surface those gaps early, before they show up as a stalled deal three months into your pipeline.

The misconception

MEDDIC gets filed under "enterprise sales tool for six-figure deals with procurement committees," and reps selling faster-moving or smaller-ticket B2B write it off as overhead. That's backwards. The framework isn't about deal size, it's about deal complexity and risk. Any sale involving more than one stakeholder or a real budget decision benefits from knowing who the economic buyer is and what their decision criteria actually are, whether the deal is $8,000 or $800,000.

How it shows up in practice

Good discovery and sales call content already maps onto MEDDIC without anyone naming it that way. A rep asking "what's this costing you right now" is chasing Metrics. "Who else needs to see this before you move forward" is Decision Process. "What made you take this call" is Identify Pain. If you're recording and reviewing calls, you can score them against these six fields directly and see exactly where a deal is thin, which is usually more useful than a generic "how did the call go" debrief.