How to automate MEDDIC sales methodology using generative AI

You’ve adopted the MEDDIC sales methodology to qualify leads better, shorten sales cycles, and close more deals. But how do you know to what extent reps are following the process? Are they prioritizing the right leads or still wasting time on unqualified ones?

You cannot rely on reps’ assessments that may be rife with their own biases and subjective opinions. Without a clear, objective way to track MEDDIC implementation, it’s nearly impossible to identify and address gaps, improve reps’ performance, and confidently forecast your pipeline. 

This is where AI steps in. By streamlining and optimizing the MEDDIC framework, AI empowers you to improve your lead qualification process, engage with prospects more effectively, refine sales strategies in real-time, and generate a predictable sales pipeline.

In this post, we’ll show you how generative AI can make MEDDIC implementation simpler and smarter. But first, let’s quickly revisit what MEDDIC is all about.

Understanding the MEDDIC sales methodology

MEDDIC is a popular sales framework designed to help teams qualify and prioritize leads. It’s a structured approach that enables you to gain a deeper understanding into your buyers, streamline lead qualification and sales process, and build effective strategies that help you close more deals. 

So, what does MEDDIC stand for?

MEDDIC is an abbreviation that stands for:

• Metrics
• Economic Buyer
• Decision Criteria
• Decision Process
• Identify Pain
• Champion

Let’s look at what each of these means:

1. Metrics

Metrics represent the economic value or impact your prospect aspires to generate from using your product or service. You can identify these metrics important to your buyers by asking them questions related to increasing revenue, cutting down costs, improving team efficiency, or any other measurable KPI that your solution aims to solve. Once you understand their priorities, you can highlight specific capabilities of your product that directly address their business goals. 

2. Economic Buyer

The economic buyer is an individual or multiple stakeholders with the authority to make the purchasing decision on behalf of the organization. You want to identify and engage with the decision-makers from early on to ensure you’re spending your time and energy on the right people who have the power to move the deal forward. 

3. Decision Criteria

What factors do prospects consider when making a purchase decision? These could be anything ranging from budget to ease of implementation, compatibility with the existing tech stack, and product capabilities. Find out what criteria are important to your prospects so you can tailor your messaging to what they care about. 

4. Decision process 

While criteria outline prospects’ requirements, a decision process focuses on the steps an organization takes before making the purchase decision. Every company has a different buying process, so you need to understand who will be involved in these decisions, the estimated timeframe, and any blockers that can potentially delay closing the deal.

5. Identify pain

‘Identify pain’ means understanding buyers' challenges, pain points, and objections and how your product can solve them. Knowing the buyers’ specific pain points helps you qualify leads quickly and create a sales pitch for how your solution can solve their problems. 

6. Champion

The last step in the MEDDIC sales qualification process is identifying internal champions. This could be anyone within the company who can make the decision-makers see the value in your product. Identifying and building a relationship with a champion can help you build credibility, accelerate decision-making, and significantly improve your chances of closing the deal. 

Comparing MEDDIC with other popular sales methodologies

Like MEDDIC, there are other sales methodologies you can use to qualify leads. Though it’s a popular notion that MEDDIC is for enterprise B2B sales teams, SMBs can also greatly benefit from using the MEDDIC sales methodology. 

In any case, we’ve listed two other popular methodologies you can look at: 

MEDDIC vs MEDDPICC 

MEDDPICC builds on MEDDIC with an additional P (which stands for Paper Process) and C (which stands for Competition). Paper process refers to the legal and administrative steps required to finalize the deal. Competition, on the other hand, is evaluating the competition that your prospects are looking at besides your organization.

But the question here is, when should you choose MEDDPICC over MEDDIC? 

MEDDPICC is a more suitable option for qualifying prospects with a long and complex sales cycle involving lengthy contracts, bureaucratic processes, and stringent legal and compliance requirements. 

Competition is another metric to consider here. You need to understand how your competitors are solving prospects’ pain points and meeting their requirements. Based on this, you can estimate the risk and bake in relevant points that can help prospects see more value in your product. 

MEDDIC vs BANT

BANT is by far the simplest and easiest lead qualification framework to put into motion. It relies on four parameters to qualify buyers: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. 

The reason to employ BANT is because it tells you which leads to pursue quickly. This is especially useful for B2B organizations with a shorter sales cycle who want to engage with qualified leads and move the process forward as fast as possible. 

Conversely, it also makes it that much easier to disqualify leads that aren’t a good fit, ensuring reps spend their time only on opportunities that have the potential to convert. 

The role of AI in automating MEDDIC sales methodology

If you’ve ever tried implementing MEDDIC sales methodology, you know how time-consuming and complex it can get. Reps need to gather information for each prospect and manually update data—which is riddled with their own personal biases and subjective opinions. 

This is where AI comes in. It can automate nearly all aspects of the MEDDIC sales process, enabling you to qualify leads faster, identify buyer trends and patterns, improve team efficiency, and personalize coaching to improve adoption across the board. 

Let’s look at how you can leverage AI to automate the MEDDIC sales methodology:

1. Automating MEDDIC scoring & qualification

AI can automatically enrich available data such as demographics, intent signals, industry type, and business size and map those insights against MEDDIC parameters. For example, it can identify patterns related to the decision-making process and provide insights into likely next steps.

This data is constantly updated based on new conversations with prospects across emails, calls, and meetings. Leads automatically get scored and then re-scored based on whether buyers meet the MEDDIC criteria. This ensures reps consistently prioritize high-value leads, improve the qualification process on the fly, and engage with prospects with a high chance of converting.

Overall, AI helps to bring an unprecedented level of consistency, accuracy, and efficiency to the MEDDIC sales process—freeing up reps’ time for high-impact selling and closing more deals. 

2. Automated data collection & CRM entry

AI can continuously analyze and extract relevant information and then write down a summary following the MEDDIC structure. This ensures reps can completely focus on the conversation rather than being distracted by taking notes. 

Furthermore, it can generate follow-up emails based on your MEDDIC summary and suggest action items, ensuring you always stay on top of your deals. 

Avoma goes a step further than generating MEDDIC summary, allowing you to sync your notes & key insights directly to CRM and saving reps’ time in copying data manually. Once you create the custom categories based on MEDDIC in your CRM, Avoma will automatically map relevant details to the respective fields. Any changes made to the call notes get automatically updated, ensuring both reps and managers have access to accurate, up-to-date information at all times. 

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3. Evaluating reps’ performance & adoption with AI-powered MEDDIC scorecards

One of the main challenges for a sales manager is to understand to what degree a rep is implementing the MEDDIC sales methodology during the calls. They don’t know if they’re scoring/prioritizing leads correctly and implementing the best practices related to each MEDDIC parameter.

That’s where AI-powered scorecards come in. They allow managers to track reps’ performance and ensure consistency in implementing the MEDDIC sales methodology across the team. Using AI-powered scorecards, you can assess reps’ coverage against each parameter—Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion—and understand how reps are currently evaluating sales opportunities. 

Once you’ve configured the MEDDIC scorecard, AI can automatically score each call based on the MEDDIC framework and provide an instant overview of the reps’ performance. You can discover the questions reps covered and where they missed out. Reps can also review their own scores and get actionable AI-powered insights, which they can learn from and apply from the next call onwards.

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The best part about AI is that it can aggregate information across calls and meetings, allowing managers to track reps’ performance and adoption over time. This further empowers managers to identify relevant trends and patterns in reps’ performance and offer personalized guidance to help them improve. 

4. Ongoing optimization of the MEDDIC framework

AI can significantly help with continuously improving and optimizing your MEDDIC lead qualification framework based on your past deals. It can determine which MEDDIC criteria contribute to the most closed won deals based on data from past sales. Maybe it was identifying the economic buyers early on? Or having an internal champion within a B2B organization?

It can surface these key insights, so you know which criteria have been the significant contributors. Based on this, you can optimize and refine your MEDDIC scoring models, giving more weightage to those parameters that can lead to higher conversion rates.

AI can also continuously optimize and evolve the MEDDIC sales qualification methodology based on recent trends, performance metrics, and buyer behaviors. This ensures the system remains up-to-date, with reps qualifying leads faster, engaging with the right prospects, and improving their likelihood of closing more deals. 

Simplify your MEDDIC methodology implementation with Avoma

Avoma can help automate and streamline the MEDDIC implementation with the help of AI. It records and analyzes sales calls and generates AI-powered notes following the MEDDIC framework, so reps don’t have to worry about taking notes during a conversation.

Meeting notes get automatically pushed to the respective MEDDIC fields in the CRM. Any changes or modifications made to the deal activity get automatically updated, allowing both reps and managers to have access to up-to-date, accurate information at all times. 

The standout feature of Avoma is that it offers a ready-made/pre-built AI-powered MEDDIC scorecard. Once configured, AI automatically scores each sales call, allowing managers to evaluate reps’ performance instantly. Managers can quickly zero in on low scores, track reps’ adherence to the methodology, and assess whether sales reps are asking the right discovery questions or not. They can provide instant feedback to reps to ensure they’re continuously improving and applying the best practices on sales calls. 

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With Avoma, you can also track reps’ performance and adoption over time, identify relevant trends and patterns, and provide customized training to help them improve their lead qualification process and boost close rates.  

Want to know how you can implement AI-powered MEDDIC scorecards to improve deal qualification in your B2B organization? Get in touch with our sales team. 

You can also explore other features of Avoma here.

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