When the sales ‘sat nav’ goes dark

Are you standing open mouthed at the bottom of the AI pipe? Automated everything, unlimited data, ‘zero touch’ sales cycles, what took weeks can now take seconds. Let’s park for a moment (1700 words anyway) our desire to differentiate, to have fun, to engage fully with other human beings, to add value. Undoubtedly, technology continues to create new, often transformational, opportunities.

The progress of technology has visibly revolutionised the selling, and buying, landscape. From intelligent leads coring and automated outreach to predictive analytics and personalised content generation, today’s tools and platforms streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and surface invaluable insights. While we stand open mouthed, let’s consider that the networks, infrastructure, video networking, and mobile apps we now take for granted arguably saw bigger advances in sales productivity than the tools we can now use as a result.

Yet, amidst these technological advances, a misconception can take root: that technology, and AI in particular, can negate the fundamental need for a robust, human-centric qualification framework. Qualification remains paramount, particularly in B2B technology sales where, unlike transactional sales, typical deals are characterised by

• Higher value and complexity: technology and related services often represent significant investments for clients, impacting critical, often horizontal, business functions. This naturally leads to decision making and evaluation complexity.
• ‍Long sales cycles: the decision-making journey is rarely linear or swift. It involves extensive research, internal consensus-building, budget approvals, and often, competitive evaluations.
• ‍Intangible value propositions: while customers demand tangible benefits, true value often lies in a product or service’s ability to transform business processes, enhance efficiency, or enable new capabilities. This requires a deep understanding of the client's strategic objectives and pain points, and a willingness to be organised and brave when it comes to proving value.
• ‍High cost of sale: chasing unqualified opportunities is a drain on time, effort, and morale. It inflates pipelines with "vanity metrics", assumes an opportunity cost, and leads to inaccurate forecasting.

MEDDIC provides a structured framework for sellers to systematically uncover and validate the critical elements of a potential deal, moving beyond surface-level interest to a business level understanding of the client's true ambitions and the reality of the challenges they face.

Sellers can expose and connect information and insights that will trigger a progressive dialogue with the customer to understand and satisfy ‘points of value’ that are measurable by them. This moves the sales activity beyond ‘show up and throw up’ (You won’t find that term in your LLM of choice 😀) and rewards the business acumen of the seller as they build compelling, client-specific, value propositions. The lessons learned from multiple campaigns (across products, customer types, sectors and geographies) also reduce the time and cost of future campaigns.

There are numerous acronyms for qualification frameworks. I don’t argue that MEDDIC is uniquely differentiated, but I find it is consistently the ‘best fit’ for most situations in my client projects. Here’s a reminder of the MEDDIC building blocks and their ongoing relevance:

M - Metrics: How the customer measures impact

Return on the investment must be agreed and measurable for any significant spend to be made. If a seller wants to build a long term, profitable, customer, we need to understand who cares, why, and what operational tools are needed to ensure the reporting is achievable and visible.

E - Economic Buyer: Not just the pen holder!

Table stakes is finding individual who signs off (or not!) the proposed spend. The seller should look beyond the ‘function’ and work out who can intercept established budget decisions and access discretionary funds. Success talks to personal credibility, understanding political landscapes, and effectively communicating value at an executive level.

D - Decision Criteria: Unpacking the customer’s "Why"

The specific criteria by which a client will evaluate your solution against alternatives. Volumes of internal and external data are accessible to help justify an approach to a specific situation but only experience and human endeavour can make connections with buyers and understand the formal and informal criteria that will make the difference.

D - Decision Process: Scaffold or skeleton?

Understanding the how, who, and when, of the buying process is a fundamental requirement. Standard models and activities will likely emerge but ‘winners’ figure out how to intercept the written and unwritten process to enables accurate forecasting, effective resourcing, and trusted deal management. The goal is not to align, but to influence in your favour.

I – Implicate the Pain: Unearthing the ‘to be’

Success is built on the customer’s compelling vision of ‘better’. Great sellers have the ability to understand the client's pain points and articulate the shared path to a better place – the ‘to be’. MEDDIC helps sellers organise data, experience, and customer inputs to facilitate timely conversations and remain central to the customer’s buying activity.

C - Champion: Cultivating internal advocacy

A champion is personally invested in your success and has the platform to actively advocate for it internally. They understand the value proposition, can navigate internalpolitics, and remains motivated to intercept events and activities you cannot see. Cultivating a true champion is inherently a human endeavour, dependent on emotional intelligence, strategic guidance, and consistent effort. 

Not only but also...

I’ve often adapted the acronym to force a disciplined consideration of specific points of value, or win themes, relevant to target customers. The benefit of flexibility here is to avoid drowning in a sea of data and soundbites and focus on the core purpose of the investment which is to increase the probability of repeatable success for you and the customer.

The core of the framework remains consistent although the references and the ‘so what’ might change. For example, The Decision criteria and Decision process are clearly fundamental topics but, I would argue, are often facts to be discovered unless you are at the top table influencing their design. Alternatively,‘Differentiators’ – distinctive factors you can control, raise competitive barriers, and are recognised as valuable by the customer – need to be designed, articulated, and proven, and should therefore command a disciplined approach. Fail to differentiate and the decision criteria and process become less important no matter how well you can describe them.

Why modern tools don’t remove the need for MEDDIC

The idea that AI ends the need for qualification frameworks such as MEDDIC rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both AI's capabilities and the nature of complex sales.Investors and exec teams are bombarded with news of tools that ‘guarantee’ faster, cheaper, repeatable, sales results at rip speed. They are sold! They want it now! If the business is addressing problems worth solving, then a healthy filter should be applied to how the messages are heard.

• Automation informs strategy, humans deliver: great news that pattern recognition, historic data processing, and automation of repetitive tasks are machine led, although success is dependent on the quality of the original human input and the conclusion drawn at the point a decision needs to be made. Cultural relevance, empathy, critical thinking, and communication, remain firmly in the human domain. MEDDIC forces a disciplined approach to these human-led activities and keeps the strategy relatable for stakeholders.
• MEDDIC puts data into context: we can generate a wealth of data about a prospect and their business - their industry, size, recent news, competitive landscape, or even propensity to buy. MEDDIC helps separate signal from noise - providing the interpretive lens, guiding salespeople to ask the right questions, connecting disparate data, and building actionable insights that lead to a trusted qualification environment.
• You can’t just swipe right: Complex B2B sales are built on relationships, trust, and mutual understanding. We have an array of tools to communicate, create content, and commission products and services, but the tools cannot forge the deep, empathetic connections necessary to uncover unspoken pains, navigate political landscapes, or cultivate true champions in the volatile and fast changing world in which we compete.
• Tools improves efficiency,MEDDIC improves effectiveness: tools boost efficiency by automating initial qualification, data entry, and outreach. This frees up salespeople to focus on what matters most: effectively progressing truly qualified opportunities. MEDDIC, therefore, becomes even more valuable, ensuring that this newfound efficiency is directed towards effective sales efforts, with the right people, at the right time, every time.

Yeah, but AI is a game changer

Indeed, many games have been changed by AI, and the trend continues. Rather than being adversaries, MEDDIC and AI are powerful allies. Imagine a sales organisation where:

• AI-powered lead scoring identifies high-potential accounts, but MEDDIC then guides the salesperson to systematically validate that potential by understanding the Metrics, identifying the path to the Economic Buyer, and uncovering the Pain.
• AI delivers real-time insights during a sales call, flagging keywords related to Decision Criteria or potential competitive mentions, allowing the MEDDIC-trained salesperson to develop smarter questions to challenge and coach the customer.
• AI automates CRM updates by transcribing calls and pulling out key MEDDIC components, driving data accuracy and relevance, and saving the salesperson valuable time. This offers a stronger platform for forecast accuracy based on the Decision Process and Champion activity.
• AI generates personalised content based on identified win themes, which the salesperson, armed with their MEDDIC understanding, then strategically deploys to nurture the Champion and influence the Decision Criteria.

Marginnotes

As sales environments respond to take advantage of new tools and platforms, it's crucial to distinguish between technological enhancement and fundamental strategic imperative. The continued development of sophisticated tools, task automation, and data surfacing at scale, is already realising significant opportunities for efficiencies and productivity.

However, it should not be forgotten that the same opportunities exist for all suppliers! As such, the attributes that influence complex B2B sales – understanding human motivations, navigating organisational complexities, and building trust while intercepting norms and routines – remain inherently human and I continue to advocate that MEDDICoffers the best framework to address this agenda.