MEDDIC: the six criteria, the questions, and where deals break

MEDDIC is a sales qualification framework for complex B2B deals, built around six things you should be able to answer before an opportunity earns a place in your forecast: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain and Champion. It was created at PTC by Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli, and became the default qualification language of enterprise software. This article takes each criterion in turn: what it actually requires, the question that surfaces it, the evidence that proves it, and the specific way deals break when it stays blank.

What separates a rep who says a deal is going well from one who can prove it? Six answers, and the honesty to admit which ones are still missing.

Where MEDDIC came from, and why it spread

MEDDIC was created at PTC by Jack Napoli and Dick Dunkel, the two co-creators who contribute the foreword to Andy Whyte's book on the methodology. What the six letters have in common is that each names a blind spot that shows up when a complex deal is lost or slips, and that is what carried the framework out of one company and into enterprise software at large.

Its longevity has a simple explanation. Every letter describes something about the buyer rather than about the seller, which makes the framework almost impossible to complete with optimism alone.

The six criteria, one by one

Metrics

Not your product metrics: the numbers the buyer uses to describe the problem and would use to judge the solution. Hours lost per week, percentage of deals with incomplete records, cost of a failed audit. The question that surfaces them is what this problem costs today, in a unit they already track. Without Metrics, you have interest but no business case, and the deal dies quietly at budget time.

Economic Buyer

The person who can release the money, which is rarely the person who booked the meeting. Ask who signs a purchase of this size and whether they have signed off on something comparable recently. A deal that reaches proposal stage without a conversation with that person is not late, it is unqualified.

Decision Criteria

The explicit list against which you are being compared, including criteria that have nothing to do with features: security review, existing vendor consolidation, internal politics. Ask what the shortlist is judged on and in what order. Reps often assume their strengths are the criteria, which is how a technically superior solution loses.

Decision Process

The sequence of steps between today and a signature: who reviews what, in which order, with what lead time. This is the letter that most reliably separates a forecast from a hope. Legal, security and procurement rarely appear on their own, so ask what happened the last time they bought something similar.

Identify Pain

A problem the buyer has stated, with a consequence attached. A pain you inferred from their website is a hypothesis. The test is whether the buyer can describe what happens if nothing changes, and whether that answer worries them enough to justify a project.

Champion

Someone inside the account who has power, sells for you when you are not in the room, and has a personal stake in the outcome. Liking you is not the criterion. The evidence is behavioural: they introduce you to people you asked for, they tell you things you were not supposed to know, they defend the project internally.

Metrics and pain: the two letters teams keep confusing

This confusion is worth naming, because it costs deals. Pain is the problem: records are incomplete and forecasts cannot be trusted. Metrics quantify it: fifty-eight percent of opportunities missing a close date, four hours a week per rep spent on data entry. A conversation with pain but no metrics produces sympathy and no budget. Metrics with no pain produce a spreadsheet nobody feels responsible for. You need the pair, and you need the buyer to have said both out loud. Salesforce's overview of the framework makes the same point from the metrics side: quantifying the impact is what turns a preference into a business case.

MEDDIC or BANT: when the extra rigour pays

The two frameworks answer different questions. BANT asks whether this lead deserves your time, in one conversation. MEDDIC asks whether you understand the deal well enough to predict it, across the whole cycle. On transactional deals with one or two people involved, MEDDIC is overhead. Above roughly five stakeholders and a quarter of cycle length, it stops being overhead and starts being the only thing keeping the forecast honest. Our comparison of 12 sales frameworks places both against the alternatives.

Where MEDDIC-qualified deals still break

• The criteria were captured once, at discovery, and never revisited when the buying committee changed.
• The Champion was assumed rather than tested, and nobody asked them to do something that carried internal risk.
• Competition was never a letter, so a late-arriving alternative reset the Decision Criteria without warning.
• The Decision Process stopped at the verbal yes and ignored the paperwork behind it.

The last two are exactly why the acronym grew: MEDDICC and MEDDPICC exist to close those gaps. And knowing the six criteria is a different problem from applying them consistently, which is what the MEDDIC sales process addresses.

How Praiz keeps MEDDIC filled with evidence, not opinion

The weakness of any qualification framework is that it relies on the rep to report on their own deal. Praiz removes that dependency. The MEDDICC Summary agent extracts what the prospect explicitly said about each criterion from the recorded conversation and writes it into the matching CRM fields, so a criterion is only marked as covered when something was actually said. The MEDDIC Scorecard agent then evaluates how well the rep covered the six criteria, call after call, turning coaching into a targeted exercise. Both live in the Praiz AI agents library and adapt to your own definition of each letter. Praiz customer teams report a +20% win rate on deals where these signals are exploited (internal data). Onboarding and agent configuration are done with you rather than left to you, which is where most rollouts of this kind stall.

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