Understanding MEDDPICC sales methodology and how to automate it using AI

If there’s one thing sales leaders love—it’s a good sales methodology and ensuring it’s followed to the T. One such example is the MEDDPICC sales methodology, a sales qualification framework that allows you to gather detailed information about prospects, so you can prioritize deals with a higher likelihood of closing.  

In this blog post, we go deep into understanding the MEDDPICC sales methodology, why most organizations fail to implement it effectively, and how AI is making the MEDDPICC implementation simpler, faster, and more efficient. Let’s get into it. 

What is MEDDPICC?

MEDDPICC is a sales qualification methodology that helps reps rigorously qualify sales opportunities and close deals faster. It’s a structured approach for gathering in-depth information in complex B2B sales environments and streamlining deal qualification to increase win rates. 

So, what does MEDDPICC stand for?

• Metrics
• Economic buyer
• Decision Criteria
• Decision Process
• Paper Process
• Identify Pain
• Champion
• Competition

Understanding the eight pillars of the MEDDPICC sales methodology

MEDDPICC, as a sales methodology, builds on MEDDIC with an additional P and C. We’ll cover the differences between the two methodologies later. But first, let’s look at what each of these components means and how you can effectively apply them to your B2B sales process:

1. Establish quantifiable goals/benefits with Metrics

Metrics are the economic benefits your prospect hopes to gain from using your product or service. It’s critical to understand your prospects’ business goals and identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate how your solution can positively impact their metrics. 

2. Identify key decision makers with Economic Buyer

An economic buyer is an individual or multiple stakeholders with the ultimate financial authority. Identifying and engaging with these decision-makers can help you uncover the organization’s top priorities, typical buying process, and how your solution aligns with their business goals.

3. Understand buyers’ needs with Decision Criteria

This involves understanding buyers’ specific requirements that they use to evaluate different competitors. This could include compatibility with the tech stack to UI/UX, product capabilities, etc. Understanding the buyer decision criteria helps you align their expectations with your product capabilities and demonstrate the value effectively.

4. Map out the purchase journey with Decision Process

Decision process is about outlining the steps and stages a prospect goes through in making a buying decision. You need to identify the stakeholders involved at each stage, potential bottlenecks, estimated timeframe, and business challenges while evaluating this criteria. 

5. Overcome legal and administrative hurdles with Paper Process

Paper process refers to the administrative and legal requirements of finalizing a deal. This includes contractual agreements, data protection terms, legal documents, and compliance requirements, to name a few. Anticipating the paperwork involved, how to fulfill each requirement, the estimated turnaround time, and who’s involved in approving and signing the document will make it easier for you to navigate the final stages of the sales process.

6. Discover buyer pain points with Identify Pain

This stage is about uncovering prospects’ current challenges and pain points, whether it’s stalled revenue, team inefficiency, or missed growth opportunities. Once you’ve identified the exact problems, you can highlight specific capabilities and how it can help your prospects solve their issues in your sales pitch. 

7. Build internal advocates with Champion

This element of the sales qualification methodology focuses on identifying and nurturing internal advocates within your prospects’ organization. Finding such people who can be internal champions can speed up decision-making significantly, shorten the sales cycle, and help you build credibility faster. 

8. Analyze the landscape with Competition

The last step in the MEDDPICC sales process is understanding the competition involved, their strengths and weaknesses, and how you fare against them. Based on this information, you can position your product effectively and highlight product capabilities and benefits that make you stand out. 

Why most B2B organizations fail to implement the MEDDPICC sales methodology

Though MEDDPICC is a popular sales methodology, implementing it within an existing sales process isn’t as simple or straightforward. Let’s look at the challenges most B2B organizations face while implementing MEDDPICC sales methodology:

1. Extremely complex & time-consuming

Implementing the MEDDPICC sales methodology is a complex process and requires substantial time and effort. Reps need to conduct extensive discovery and fill in detailed information for each component, which can quickly become overwhelming.

On top of that, they need to update the CRM with extensive MEDDPICC details, which further adds to their workload and makes adoption inconsistent and difficult. 

2. Inconsistent application & CRM data entry

Without standardized tracking, reps evaluate, score, and log the data in the CRM in their own way. This results in a wide range of inputs, structured and documented in different ways, making it hard for managers to review deals and identify relevant patterns and trends.

Furthermore, this inconsistency in data reporting makes it difficult to forecast the sales pipeline accurately and improve conversion rates.

3. Lack of ongoing reinforcement and accountability 

Another challenge with effective MEDDPICC implementation is the lack of buy-in and commitment from the management. MEDDPICC isn’t a one-and-done activity; it requires constant training to ensure everyone is following the methodology consistently. 

Without regular ‘friendly nudges’ and reinforcement, sales reps fall back to their old habits or, worse, rely on their subjective assessments or biases to score and qualify leads. 

To ensure successful adoption, the sales methodology must be embedded into the reps’ daily routines—from deal inspection, pipeline reviews, sales coaching, and forecasting.

4. Inadequate skills training

It’s one thing to understand what the methodology means; another to know how to implement it effectively. While qualifying leads using the MEDPPICC criteria, it’s not enough to ask prospects, ‘What are your metrics?’. Reps need to know how to approach each stage with deep understanding and nuance and uncover answers to those questions naturally in a conversation. 

For this reason, managers should focus on skills training, enabling reps to develop crucial soft skills that will make it easier for them to navigate conversations and apply core principles of the sales methodology effectively. 

How AI makes it easier to implement the MEDDPICC sales methodology

AI has significantly transformed how sales teams operate by automating routine tasks, extracting real-time insights, improving deal qualification, and boosting overall team efficiency. Let’s look at how you can automate nearly all aspects of the MEDDPICC sales methodology using AI:

1. Automated account research and meeting preparation

Before sales reps get to qualifying opportunities using MEDDPICC criteria, AI can help them in several ways to ensure they’re better prepared for the conversation.

For instance, AI can collect and enrich available data on prospects, such as demographics, industry, and business size, and provide relevant insights. Going into the conversation, reps can have some idea about the economic buyer or the decision-making process of the company and use this information to their advantage. This also allows them to be more targeted and specific in their approach and ask discovery questions that are likely to get pinpointed answers. 

2. AI-powered insights extraction & CRM data entry

AI can capture and analyze each interaction to extract insights related to the MEDDPICC criteria. As reps go through their discovery questions, AI takes notes and organizes the information according to the MEDDPICC format, allowing them to completely focus on the conversation.

Here’s an example of the notes populated by AI following the MEDDPICC criteria:

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Using these populated notes, AI can also generate a follow-up email and suggest potential next steps. Most AI-powered tools offer native integrations with CRMs, enabling you to sync MEDDPICC notes and key insights directly to the CRM.

In Avoma, once you create custom MEDDPICC fields in the CRM, relevant details are automatically mapped to them. Any changes to the deal activity get automatically synced and updated in real-time, ensuring both reps and managers have access to accurate and up-to-date information at all times. 

You can also get an overview of the sales pipeline, identify relevant trends and patterns, and accordingly optimize your sales strategy. 

3. Assess reps’ adherence & performance with AI-powered scorecards

One of the reasons why MEDDPICC implementation fails is because managers cannot track to what degree reps are implementing the methodology. Without an objective and measurable way to implement MEDDPICC methodology, reps rely on their assumptions and subjective assessments to score and qualify leads.

This is where AI-powered scorecards come in handy. The scorecards allow managers to gauge reps’ coverage against each parameter—Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, and Competition—and ensure objective and consistent implementation of the MEDDPICC sales methodology. 

Once you’ve set up the MEDDPICC template, AI automatically analyzes each conversation and scores the call based on how well you’ve implemented the MEDDPICC framework. You also get AI-powered suggestions telling you where you can improve to apply the best practices from the next call and improve your sales call performance.

Another thing that AI can help with is aggregating information across calls and meetings for a specific prospect and identifying trends and patterns. This allows you to instantly provide relevant insights to reps, allowing them to optimize their sales pitch for different prospects. Using this data, you can also gauge reps’ adherence to the methodology and create tailored sales coaching programs that can help them improve their performance. 

Comparing MEDDPICC with other popular sales methodologies

So, there you have it! Now you know the ins and outs of MEDDPICC and how you can start to implement it. But if you’re still on the fence and want to compare MEDDPICC with other methodologies, we’ve done the legwork for you. Let’s get into it.

MEDDPICC vs MEDDIC

MEDDPICC is an iteration of the original methodology, MEDDIC.

MEDDIC is a simpler and more straightforward sales methodology that involves no legal requirements or paperwork. It’s great for B2B organizations with moderately complex sales cycles who want to extract in-depth insights into prospects’ key metrics, economic buyers, pain points, and decision criteria. 

MEDDPICC vs BANT

MEDDPICC and BANT sit on opposite ends of the spectrum: MEDDPICC is built for complex deals and sales cycles, while BANT offers a quick, straightforward way to qualify deals. It involves assessing prospects’ budget, authority, need, and timing. 

If your B2B organization has a relatively shorter sales cycle and wants to qualify deals as fast as possible, then BANT is the sales methodology to look into. 

MEDDPICC vs Challenger

Challenger is a new sales methodology that’s still gaining traction. It focuses on understanding customers’ businesses to pinpoint new insights that can influence the buyer's decision. The idea here is to seek out different perspectives buyers haven’t considered yet and challenge their understanding to gain credibility and trust. 

This particular sales methodology works best in situations where sellers have equal or more knowledge of the prospects’ industry, technology, and service or product. 

In conclusion

In terms of deal qualification for organizations with complex B2B sales cycles, MEDDPICC sales methodology emerges as a winner. And the best part is that, with AI, implementing the MEDDPICC sales methodology isn’t a chore anymore. It’s become faster, easier, and a lot simpler. 

Avoma helps you streamline and automate your MEDDPICC implementation. It records and analyzes conversations to generate AI-powered MEDDPICC notes so reps can focus on the conversation rather than being worried about taking structured notes.

All your meeting notes get automatically pushed to the respective fields in your preferred CRM. Changes made to deal activity get automatically updated so reps don’t have to spend additional time in manual data entry, and everyone has access to accurate and up-to-date information at all times.

Avoma also provides pre-built/ready-made AI-powered MEDDPICC scorecards, allowing you to assess reps’ performance and track their adherence to the methodology. Once configured, Avoma AI automatically scores each sales call. You can quickly look at the lowest-scored calls, see if reps are asking the right discovery questions, and provide them with feedback to ensure they’re continually learning and improving their skills.

The best part is you can track reps’ performance and adoption over time, identify relevant trends and patterns, and customize sales training programs that truly help them to improve their performance and close more deals. 

Want to know how you can automate and effectively implement MEDDPICC sales methodology in your organization? See how we can help you or book a demo directly with our sales team.