MEDDIC

What Is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC is a qualification framework. Six letters, six things a rep must verify before calling a deal real. It came out of PTC in the early 1990s, when a unit led by Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli grew the business from $300M to $1B in four years selling complex CAD software, and the operators codified the discovery checklist that made it repeatable for everyone who came after them.

The letters stand for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. Each is a question with a specific answer required from the buyer's side. If a rep can't fill in the blank with named humans and quantified outcomes, the deal isn't qualified — it's a wish.

How MEDDIC Is Calculated

MEDDIC isn't a number. It's a checklist with binary answers per letter — verified or not — and a deal is "MEDDIC-complete" only when all six are filled with information sourced from the buyer, not the rep's hopeful inference.

Some teams score each letter 0–2 and require ≥10 of 12 before a deal moves to commit forecast. Others run pure binary. The framework descended from MEDDIC — MEDDPICC — added Paper Process and Competition because enterprise procurement got worse.

Worked MEDDIC Example

An AE working a $480K deal with a Series C fintech reports: M = $3.2M annualized fraud loss, E = the CFO Maria Chen (rep met her twice), DC = SOC2 + sub-200ms latency + Spanish-language support, DP = security review June 12, procurement July 1, board approval July 18, ID = current vendor contract auto-renews August 4 with a 22% price hike, C = VP Risk who introduced the AE to the CFO and forwarded a competitor's proposal. That deal is MEDDIC-complete. A deal where four of those six are blanks or "the team" is a stage 4 hallucination that crushes win rate when it inevitably slips.

When Sales Teams Use MEDDIC

Enterprise B2B teams with deal sizes north of $50K ACV, multi-quarter cycles, and 6+ stakeholders use MEDDIC almost universally — Datadog, Snowflake, MongoDB, and most of the post-PTC enterprise SaaS lineage. VPs of Sales use it to gate forecast calls. RevOps uses it as the spine of opportunity scoring in Salesforce. Champion-letter coaches build entire courses around just the C. Finance uses MEDDIC completeness to discount the bookings forecast when more than 30% of pipeline has missing letters.

Common MEDDIC Gaming Patterns

The framework gets gamed three ways. First: ghost champions, where the rep names a friendly contact who has never actually advocated internally and has no access to the economic buyer. Second: checkbox theater, where the Salesforce fields get filled with the rep's guess instead of the buyer's stated answer — the field turns green, the deal still pushes. Third: pain manufactured at the eleventh hour, where ID gets back-filled the week before close with a fabricated consequence to justify the discount. A clean MEDDIC review run by someone with a nose for sandbagging and a no-decision rate target catches all three; a self-reported one catches none.