How to Scale MEDDPICC: Specific to Sales Cycle Stages

As your company grows and evolves, you'll find that you need to change the way you do things to keep up. This is especially true when it comes to sales - what worked for you when you were a small startup might not be as effective now that you're a midsize business.

To ensure a sales org scales effectively from small to midsize orgs, you must select a sales methodology or qualification framework that can scale with you. This will lead to a unified playbook and language across the org and predictability in the sales cycle.

In this blog post, we'll discuss how to scale MEDDPICC based on your sales cycle stage. We'll discuss the information you know and what you focus on gathering during the early, mid and late stages of the sales cycle.

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Also, if you're interested, here is a link to our MEDDPICC discovery call template!

Early Stage - (Metrics and Implicate pain)

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As you're in the early stages of the sales cycle, your primary focus should be on understanding three things:

- The "current state" of the business and where they're trying to get to.

- The reasons why they can't achieve that future state today (pain)

- The business metrics that they're trying to improve to get them to their desired future state.

What you should know:  

At this point in the sales cycle, you might not have a deep understanding of the business yet. Your job is to do as much research as possible to understand their business and show up to the first call ready to ask thoughtful questions. To give some guidance here, focus on finding information on:

• Your prospect(s): Their background, work history, time at the company, likes/dislikes, activity on professional sites like LinkedIn, etc.
• Their potential reports: Who might report to them, and who do they report to? Try to gain an understanding of what the org looks like and how they operate.
• The business: What has been going on in the business over the past few months? What articles can you find? Any recent funding or announcements? All of this will be helpful.
  

What you should focus on understanding

• Pain & Metrics: Asking thoughtful questions to thoroughly understand the current state of their business, the future state they'd like to get to, why they can't get there today and what metrics will change as a result of getting to that future state. This is the most important thing to focus on in early-stage deals.
• Implicate pain: The key items to understand here are simple: what happens if you don't go solve this problem? What impact will it have on you personally, your department, and the business? This will give you insight into how urgent of a problem this is.
• Good champion?: Ideally, you leave early-stage deals with a champion established. Someone who can help you navigate the org and help to make introductions.
• Who is the EB?: If your champion is solid, they'll let you know more about how they purchase software and who the ultimate decision maker is. Even better? They're willing to pull them into that next call to review the business case you've uncovered. You should leave your early-stage deals knowing exactly who the EB is and have a plan to speak with them.
  

Here is a perfect template that can help you scale MEDDPICC on Disco calls

Mid Stage - (Decision Criteria, Decision Process, and competition)

What you should know:

• Deep Pain & Metrics: At this point in the sales cycle, you should have a deeper understanding of the business pains that your prospect and company are experiencing. This should be distilled down to a singular metric they are trying to improve. At this point, it's your job to reiterate what you've learned here and why it's important - on every call.
• High level Implicate pain - This can be one of the more important pieces to driving urgency. What happens if they don't solve this problem? Do people lose their jobs? Does the company not get additional funding? Or will they just continue using the same internal solutions with minimal repercussions? This is where you can gauge how urgent this problem is and, thus, how quickly you can get a deal done.  
• Good champion? - Ideally, you've created a great rapport with your champion, and they're willing to make more introductions and help you strategize the ROI and business case as you go deeper into the evaluation. No champion = problematic deal.
• Who is the EB? - In the best-case scenario, you have a meeting booked with the economic buyer. Worst Case? You should at least know who the person is. If you don't know who the EB is, you're in trouble and should reevaluate the legitimacy of the deal.
  

What you should focus on understanding

• Deep Implication of Pain - As I mentioned above, it's your job to summarize the business pain you uncovered early in the sales cycle. After you've done that, you need to dig deeper into why this is so important to solve now and what happens if they do nothing. The biggest competitor in any deal is BAU - business as usual. If you don't dig deep on this part, it'll be a huge risk in your deal and could ultimately cause you to lose momentum.
• Confirmed Champion - You need a confirmed champion at this point in the deal. Ideally, they've purchased software before and can help to guide you.
• EB bought in? - Assuming your champion has made the introduction to the EB, your job is to focus on getting them bought into the problem you've found and the solution you're providing. You should use your champion to help you craft a narrative to accomplish this. They can even guide you on internal discussions and how best to follow up.
• Decision Criteria - If your EB is truly an EB, they'll know how they typically buy software. You can uncover important decision criteria involved in that process during the demo that you run for the team.
• Decision Process - As you uncover criteria important to the decision, you can earn the right to ask, "who else is typically involved in this decision?". This will help you uncover the steps required to move the deal forward. It'll also give you a realistic timeline on a close date. It'll be your job to document, manage and reiterate these steps.
• Competition - At this point, it's an active deal and evaluation. You should understand what other solution they might be looking at. This can include other competitors, internal builds, doing nothing, etc. This is your opportunity to uncover those options and create a narrative that will help you win against them.
  
  

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Late Stage - (Decision Process and Paper Process)

What you should know:

• Metrics, Implicate pain, Confirmed champion, and EB bought in.

What you should focus on understanding

• Decision Process - You might have a high-level understanding of the people and steps involved in making the decision, but it's your job to reiterate and confirm these facts. You should focus on this until the contract is signed. New items can pop up, and you can derisk your deals by focusing on this.

Paper Process - This is one of the final steps of the MEDDPICC qualification framework, Paper Process. This is where many deals get stalled because they don't have a good understanding of how that company's legal team works. It's important to dig into how long legal takes, what kind of review they need to do, are there redlines, who signs the contract, etc. All of this will give you an accurate idea of when the logistical paperwork can get completed and when someone can sign by. If you want to save yourself a lot of "end of month" frustration, focus diligently on this part, and your expectations will be set appropriately.

The goal in the late stage of the sales cycle is to ensure you have a clear understanding of the decision process and paper process. This will help you understand what needs to happen for the deal to close and allow you to be as prepared and accurate as possible for the steps required to finalize everything.

MEDDPICC can be a wonderful qualification framework that can help your team scale incredibly quickly while still predictably closing revenue and hitting your targets. The point of this article was to give you an idea of how can think about and scale the MEDDPICC framework. There are many ways to scale MEDDPICC, but my hope is this article gives you some ideas on how you could enable your team to follow that process.

Also, don't forget! If you're interested in an asset that can help you with scaling MEDDPICC, here is a link to our MEDDPICC discovery call template!