MEDDIC vs. MEDDPIC: What's the Right Qualification Framework for Your Sales Team?

Effective sales qualification is a powerful tool for driving consistent revenue and growth in complex B2B sales environments. Qualification can help sales teams not only focus their efforts on deals with the highest chance of closing, but also navigate the sales process to achieve the best possible outcome in every deal. 

If you’re looking at implementing sales qualification training, you may have encountered several different acronyms that are variants of MEDDIC. Perhaps you're unsure about the difference and how each can benefit your team. In this article, we'll explore the meaning of MEDDIC and MEDDPIC, how these became trusted frameworks for many top-performing sales teams, and the benefits of using MEDDIC vs. MEDDPIC for your sales organization. 

What is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC is a B2B sales qualification framework used to assess the progress and viability of deals. The MEDDIC framework primarily works by aligning sales activities with how customers make their buying decisions. Here’s a breakdown of the acronym and what each letter represents: 

1. Metrics: Quantifiable measurements of the business benefits of the solution.
2. Economic Buyer: An individual within the organization who has the final “yes”.
3. Decision Criteria: Formal solution requirements in which each decision maker will evaluate the solution
4. Decision Process: How the customer will evaluate, select, and purchase a solution
5. Identify Pain: Pain is the catalyst that prompts the buyer to solve the problem within a set timeframe.
6. Champion: A person with influence in the buying organization. They have an investment in your solution being selected.

Originally developed in the 1990s at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), MEDDIC helped the new company meet revenue targets for more than 40 quarters, demonstrating the framework’s potential for driving predictability and growth. 

The purpose of MEDDIC is to ensure that your selling activities are aligned with how your customers evaluate and ultimately purchase your solution, creating a shared path to decision-making success. That alignment is about more than just checking boxes; it’s about understanding your buyer and their mindset along with their decision process and the internal dynamics at play in the customer company. This understanding reveals to sales teams the gaps in their deals — whether that’s asking the right questions, finding bigger pain or tying their solution differentiation to buyer value. 

MEDDIC is not a selling methodology. It doesn’t prescribe solutions for how to move a deal forward or successfully close it. Instead, as a qualification framework, MEDDIC helps sales teams determine: 

• Whether a deal is a good fit for their company 

• What the timeline to close looks like 

• Possible challenges or obstacles that could arise in the sales process 

• What the requirements to close are from both the buyer and seller sides 

Because MEDDIC is a qualification framework, its power multiplies when paired with a strong selling methodology like Command of the Message. Force Management Founder John Kaplan, a MEDDIC veteran from the 90s PTC sales team, often compares MEDDIC to an X-ray in its ability to identify needs and challenges in accounts. “You can’t fix your deals or solve your forecasting issues without having both the x-ray to identify gaps and the treatment so you can fix them,” he says. That treatment is prescribed by your sales methodology. 

What is MEDDPIC? 

MEDDPIC is a version of the MEDDIC sales qualification framework that incorporates a “P” to represent the customer’s paper process. The paper process refers to the legal, procurement, and administrative steps required to finalize a deal. 

In many MEDDIC frameworks used by B2B companies, the paper process is implied within the D for decision process. In these cases, the decision process covers the requirements for customers to officially sign a deal, including procurement, legal reviews and contracts.  As Force Management Facilitator Brian Walsh describes the decision process: “It’s about getting the right people from both sides of the deal engaged at the right time to move both the decision and paperwork forward.” 

So, why do some teams choose to use MEDDPIC over MEDDIC?  

Some teams add the “P” for Paper Process to MEDDIC when selling into industries with complex procurement or legal workflows, such as government agencies. For those teams that have a more rigorous paper process tied to their ideal Customer Profile,  calling it out can help keep the formal requirements top-of-mind to align resources earlier and avoid deal stalls in closing. It also provides managers with a means to inspect these critical components of the decision process, ensuring they remain focused on them amidst broader sales activities. Companies likely choose to separate it because it has been a qualification pain point for them in the past, and there’s a need to pay particular attention to it.  

MEDDPIC isn’t the only additional version of the framework that has evolved throughout the years. At Force Management, you’ll often see us use the MEDDICC or MEDDPICC acronyms to include Competition, which adds depth to deal qualification and strategy. 

Whether you use MEDDIC, MEDDPIC or MEDDICC as your qualification framework, the most important thing is that you keep your buyer at the center of all deal activity and consider all aspects of their buying process to drive alignment, deal momentum, confidence and clarity. 

Why is MEDDIC Important for Sales? 

Sales qualification is one of the most critical components of a successful B2B sales strategy. Qualifying deals with MEDDIC ensures that sales teams are spending time on the opportunities that are most likely to convert and deliver value to both the customer and their business. By providing clear deal elements, MEDDIC aids in the coaching process, giving managers a universal truth to coach to and helping them identify where deals need additional support. Perhaps most importantly, MEDDIC equips sales teams and executive leaders to forecast with confidence by increasing visibility into where deals sit in the pipeline, timeline to close and what’s needed to move forward. 

MEDDIC can help sales teams shorten sales cycles by anticipating potential stalls and conflicts in the sales process before they happen. It can help teams spot common deal killers like unexpected decision makers, deal requirements or budget concerns. With an established process for identifying and testing these elements early in the sales process, teams reduce the likelihood of drawn-out approval processes. 

MEDDIC can also increase the size of deals and win rates. Many times, lost deals or last-minute discounting result from not getting high enough in the buyer organization or not attaching the solution to a big enough problem to justify the spend. MEDDIC helps win with C-level decision makers because sales reps who follow a rigorous MEDDIC protocol know they have to dig deeper on who owns buying power in the customer organization and what’s important to them. When equipped with a value messaging framework, those sellers can also effectively align their solution with those priorities from the first conversations.  At Patra, implementing MEDDIC with a value selling methodology decreased the average time-to-close by 32%, while increasing win rate by 143% and average deal size by 48%. 

How Organizations Use MEDDIC to Improve Sales

Driving results with MEDDIC requires two elements: (1) customization to your solutions and your customers, and (2) consistency in application from sellers, coaches and leadership. MEDDIC is not a one-size-fits-all approach, because the elements of the acronym can vary widely depending on the solution you sell and who your customers are. Giving your reps and managers a clear understanding of what the MEDDIC acronym means in the context of what’s proven to drive success at your company can make the difference in the results you see. 

Process rigor is key for scaling, onboarding new sellers and driving long-term results from MEDDIC. Having a consistent qualification process can help make new sellers more effective faster by providing a tested blueprint for how your team approaches deals and verifies success. With a reliable method for onboarding, coaching and measuring the success of new hires, you open up greater possibilities for scaling and taking your organization to the next level. 

Many sales teams using MEDDIC today treat it as a simple checklist. In our work with fast-growing sales organizations, we’ve seen greater revenue impact when teams treat it instead as a repeatable process; a single truth of how your sales team approaches and moves through the customer engagement process. At Force Management, we’ve seen that the best outcomes happen when reps pair MEDDIC with a common language to articulate differentiation and value. That means everyone at your company has the same language to answer these questions, in the context of each customer’s needs: 

• What problems do we solve? 

• How do we solve them? 

• How are we different? 

• What’s the impact? 

By using MEDDIC with a value selling methodology, sales teams are equipped with the framework to understand their buyers’ needs, and the language to align their solution to those needs. Here, MEDDIC becomes more than a checklist; it becomes a competitive advantage, helping sales teams qualify better, trap the competition, build stronger champions, and negotiate on value, not price.  

Start Improving Sales with MEDDIC 

When it comes to implementing MEDDIC effectively and efficiently, Force Management is the trusted partner for high-performing sales organizations all across the world. We offer a variety of highly customizable qualification training solutions, including MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, MEDDICC and MEDDPICC. We spend the time to truly understand your customers and solution to ensure new sales processes are fully relevant, adopted and impactful.

Our founding leadership was present when the original MEDDIC framework was developed, giving our team a wealth of knowledge and decades of experience driving results with this proven framework. Just take a look at some of the transformational B2B sales qualification results achieved by our clients.

Force Management brings unmatched expertise in aligning MEDDIC with value-based selling and repeatable sales processes. Our proven, value-based approach helps sales teams of all sizes make the right calls in the right deals, drive predictable revenue and scale by delivering unprecedented value to their customers. Let’s start a conversation about how we can build a custom value and qualification framework for your team to take execution to the next level.