Can the MEDDIC Sales Process Be Improved?

If you’ve ever worked with the MEDDIC sales process, then I’m sure you’ll never want to live without it. It’s simple and clear, focused on the fundamentals of sales and very effective.

I’ve personally had crazy growth rates of 50% and higher in times where my competitors were experiencing negative growth. However, MEDDIC only works if you and your team live it. As great as it is, it could be even more effective.

Here are some issues with MEDDIC that we’ve identified and how to address them.

#1 – The Effort

As with many other sales processes, keeping track and documenting all of the changes that MEDDIC requires is a lot of work.

You end up using a ton of offline documents and spreadsheets just to track the qualifiers, activity reports, and forecasts. That effort adds up, especially when you have to keep track of five or six opportunities at a time, meaning you usually end up with outdated information that maybe gets updated before a sales review.

How to Improve          

Find a way to automate your sales process. Use a structured, centralized, web-based app that is easy to update, let’s you collect all relevant information, and replaces all offline documents and excel sheets with a single deal sheet that contains all of your deal relevant information.

#2 – The Coaching of MEDDIC

Even the most motivational MEDDIC training loses its spirit after a couple of weeks. Once sales reps are back in the field and implementing what they’ve learned for the first time, it’s tough to maintain the same level of inspiration.

In fact, according to SPIN Selling author Neil Rackham, without on-the-job coaching, 87% of the content learned in sales trainings is lost after just 30 days. That’s scary!

In order to address this, first line managers need to be trained to coach their teams and lead from the front.

If you don’t have first-line sales managers who are experienced with MEDDIC, you won’t have anyone able to handle any objections or provide an example of what it looks like to successfully live the process.

Unfortunately, many saddle-fast sales managers do the opposite and enforce a “Don’t Ask, Just Do” policy. In these cases, 1-on-1 sessions with freshly trained sales reps often end up resembling a confrontational interrogation rather than a guided discovery process.

As a result, sales reps end up making a lot of avoidable (and expensive) mistakes, and both reps and managers end up feeling frustrated.

How to Improve

1. Allow sales reps to constantly review what they’ve learned in training while on the job. Does the sales software they are working with provide them with playbooks and discovery questions that let them work through the MEDDIC process and fill in the gaps as they prepare for customer meetings (or even during the meeting)? (Check out our free 3-Minute Deal Health Check for a MEDDIC-based review of your deals)

2. If your team is working with tools that let your team easily keep all the deal-related information up to date, then managers will be freed to focus on coaching their reps to success rather than hounding them for information.

#3 – The Not-so-Inspiring Inspection

In the MEDDIC process, sales managers should be finding the flaws in their reps’ campaigns by focusing on the fundamentals of MEDDIC.

I’ve personally been in a lot of sales meetings where some of the managers just went through a yes-or-no checklist that didn’t reveal any insight:

• “Do you have a champion?” – YES
• “Great, Have you met the EB?” – YES
• “Ok, good. What’s the next step?”…

At the end of a quarter, when the pressure is on and a sales manager is sweating whether his team will hit the forecast or not, a NO to any of these questions usually ends up with a devastating rant of how stupid and untalented a sales rep is when it’s really the manager who lost control over his forecast.

Even the best first-line managers who do ask great exploring questions often forget to follow up. They’ve got so much on their plate that they leave open issues hanging and often end up asking the same questions again a week later.

How to Improve

1. Have managers, sales people and their peers jointly dismantle the deal, identify actions to close the gaps and track them until closure. Rate the completeness and have this information at hand for reviews and forecast calls.

2. Make sure everyone on the team stores and shares all deal related information and actions in a central interactive deal sheet, where they can jointly develop the opportunity.

Conclusion

Ultimately, if your sales team isn’t enjoying using MEDDIC (or any other sales methodology) to discover how to close their deals, your team won’t be anywhere near as effective as it could be.

Automating your sales process and making sure it’s as easy as possible for your sales team to implement your process will go a long way in ensuring long term success.

UPDATE: We’ve taken the key elements from the MEDDIC sales process and created a free 3-Minute Deal Health Check. Find out the exact status of your deal and the steps you need to drive it to closure.