Why is everyone talking about MEDDIC and Sales Qualification in 2021?

MEDDIC and Sales Qualification TOP COMPANIES WANT MEDDIC PROFESSIONALS

At the time of writing this article in the United Kingdom alone, there are almost 200 open vacancies that reference MEDDIC as a preferred skill on their job descriptions.

By comparison, if you compile all of the vacancies from three other sales methodologies of Challenger Sales, Miller Heiman, and Sandler there are far fewer even when combined.

SALESPEOPLE REGULARLY MISUNDERSTAND WHAT QUALIFICATION IS

Sales Qualification is often misunderstood as being a checkbox exercise, or even worse, it is used to qualify ‘Can this customer buy’, rather than ‘Does my solution provide enough value to my customer’.

First of all, qualification is not about you. If you come into the sales process with the wrong mindset and sense of qualification, then it is less than likely that you will develop a strong Champion within your customer’s organization. With no champion, you can no longer identify the opinion leaders, influencers, and stakeholders in your customer’s organization, which will disrupt your Decision Process. The Gatekeeper will keep you from getting in contact with the Economic Buyer, and because of this, you are de-prioritized in your customer’s agenda. When you are not prioritized, you cannot Identify the Pain and certainly not Implicate it. And, therefore, making it far more difficult to convince your potential customer to carry on with the sale. At the same time, this allows the opportunity for your Competition to swoop in, whether it is an alternative product or a different solution – your sale does not go through. Overall, your efforts are deprioritized, and you are left to play catch-up with the customer.

Yes, you must be qualified to be an elite seller and build authentic Champions, however, to get there, you must shift your perspective away from yourself and over to the customer.

By doing this, you do not begin by evaluating if the customer

has Budget or if they have the Authority, or whether they Need your solution, or know the Timing. Instead, you begin to evaluate what you offer – your solution – if that is valuable for the customer. This question is a simple “yes” or “no”. But getting there is an important journey in your sales process.

Let’s take a look at the three pillars that guide us upon an effective qualification mindset:

SEEM LIKE A LOT TO THINK ABOUT?

Not if you use MEDDIC!

For you astute MEDDPICC-practitioners out there, you already have spotted that each question is linked with one element in the MEDDPICC- framework:

• Who: Champion – Competition – Economic Buyer
• What: Implicate Pain – Metrics – Decision Criteria
• How: Decision Process – Paper Process

Who do you need to build a relationship with to turn them into a Champion in your customer’s organization? This critical champion can help you in identifying the Competition for your solution. Not just your closest Competitors, but the customer’s solutions to their roadblocks. By identifying the key stakeholders you can get to the all-important Economic Buyer.

By combining a smart understanding of the stakeholders within the customer’s organization and focusing on what their goals and challenges are likely to uncover pain relating to those goals and challenges. The elite salesperson Implicates the customer in the pain of these challenges or not meeting the goals and underpins the pain with Metrics which is the quantification of the value you provide.

Once you have found and implicated pain with the stake stakeholders which is underpinned via Metrics then it is time to work on the Decision

Criteria with the customer. What do they need from a technical, economic, and relationship perspective from your solution? Elite sellers know that influencing the criteria towards their own strengths is key.

Understanding the process in which the customer is going to make a decision is also key. How are they going to go from an initial idea to a concept, to a process of evaluation and validation to authorization that the deal can go ahead?

Once all of that is concluded, the paperwork and bureaucracy, or Paper Process, needs to be sorted and streamlined.

THE GOLD PANNER VS. THE PROFESSIONAL

What if MEDDIC makes us realize that this opportunity is not qualified? Read more on our website here