How relevant is MEDDPICC to today’s sales teams?

Sales is changing. A seller that once met a client at the beginning of their buying journey is now often meeting them at a much later stage. Salespeople still have to close the deal, but to use a football analogy, they’re not so much the quarterback anymore, but the wide receiver in the end zone.

If that comparison stands, then some old plays might not be fit for purpose anymore. MEDDPICC, the sales qualification that has long been the standard checklist for sales teams to evaluate if a deal is worth pursuing, was once the gold standard. Is it still relevant in today’s fast-changing, AI-fueled ecosystem? Standing for metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identify pain, champion, and competition, the system originated in 1996 as MEDDIC. So, should it now be banished to room 101 of the sales world? We asked two business leaders what they think.

Old sales charm: “MEDDPICC is still a good structure because it holds to the universal aspects of persuasive salesmanship,” said Edward Moore, co-founder of Olelo, an AI platform that analyzes phone calls, in an email statement to Revenue Brew. “You will always need robust discovery to understand your prospect’s deepest pain points, discover who the decision-maker is, communicate how your product delivers relief or adds value, and within large organizations, secure multiple internal buy-ins.”

However, some sales leaders think the qualification needs to evolve as customer behavior and AI automation have shifted processes and priorities.

“Parts of it are still relevant, but not the way that it’s used as a checklist,” said Joshua Nuu-Steele, co-founder and CRO of research platform Ideally. “Some of the letters are still definitely right, but what’s changed is some of those letters carry the deal…The discipline behind MEDDPICC is what’s most important. Instead of going through a checklist and just making sure you’ve ticked the boxes, it’s actually understanding which stage you’re at within the acronym to then decide the next step, because that’s the most impactful way of using it.”

Meeting the customer: Nuu-Steele said he’s seen the “identify pain” component of MEDDPICC become obsolete as more customers are doing their own research and reaching out to companies to address their pain points. Especially with AI, customers are more informed than when MEDDPICC first originated.

“Not every customer is buying the same way, so absolutely people will evolve,” he said. “There will be fundamentals within the frameworks that stay, but with AI now being such a large search engine for buyers when they’re looking for software, they’re already coming in educated with the pain, understand some of the price, so they already come in with a shaped opinion of your organization.”

A new model: Ideally has moved away from MEDDPICC and adopted SPICED, which stands for situation, pain, impact, critical event and decision, as it accommodates buyer behavior better.

“Gone are the days where you can apply one-size-fits-all, and so we map where inside their stage gates we sit, and so the champion has a reason to buy, and it’s dated to their calendar, not ours,” Nuu-Steele said. “That’s the most important differentiation.”

He also believes that AI automation has made parts of MEDDPICC outdated, but that human judgment is still a crucial component of any sales qualification.

“It’s replacing the paperwork, but not the judgment of the human,” Nuu-Steele said. “There’s a real risk when AI is automating all of these fields in your CRM, and it doesn’t have that human layer to it.”

Meeting in the middle: Like many disciplines under the revenue generation umbrella, there is a middle ground where old and new worlds can coexist and even thrive. The sales world is changing fast, and capturing that change means occasionally looking backward at what once worked, and dusting it off for the utility it can still provide.