MEDDPICC for Founders: How to Qualify B2B Deals

Your pipeline looks full. Then one deal stalls in procurement. Another loses its main contact, who left the company. A third reaches the economic buyer, who has never heard of you.

Each of these could have been spotted early.

MEDDPICC is how you check for them while you can still act. Below is each letter, what it means for a founder running their own deals, and what to ask.

What is MEDDPICC?

MEDDPICC is a B2B sales qualification framework. It is a checklist of eight things you need to know to forecast a deal with confidence:

• Metrics
• Economic buyer
• Decision criteria
• Decision process
• Paper process
• Identify pain
• Champion
• Competition

It grew out of MEDDIC, a framework from enterprise software sales. MEDDPICC adds two letters: the paper process and competition.

Why founders should care

In founder-led sales, every deal lives in the founder's head. That works for the first few deals. It breaks when the pipeline grows, when investors ask for a forecast, or when you hire your first salesperson.

MEDDPICC makes the gaps visible. It also gives you a shared language to hand over when you build the team. A good time for that hire is after you have sold roughly half a million to a million dollars yourself, across five to ten deals.

M: Metrics

Metrics are the numbers that show what the problem costs and what solving it is worth.

Without them, your price has nothing to stand against. I saw a founder quote 100K to 150K before discovery, and the client shut it down on the spot. Against a problem that costs the client 1M a year, 150K sounds reasonable.

Ask: What does this problem cost you today? How would you measure success? What is it worth to fix it this year?

E: Economic buyer

The economic buyer is the ultimate decision-maker. The person with the discretionary budget who signs the check.

Once you have scoped the pain and know what it is worth, get in front of them. Agree on the success criteria for the evaluation, and get their commitment that meeting those criteria means a deal. Align on the price range too, so you are not picturing 300K while they are picturing 30K.

A startup's time and resources are too valuable to pour into an evaluation with no commitment behind it.

Ask: Who owns the budget for this? If the evaluation succeeds, who signs? Can we get 30 minutes with them before we start?

D: Decision criteria

Decision criteria are what the customer will judge you on. Technical requirements, business outcomes, integrations, security, price.

They are not set in stone. Get as many of your strengths into the list as you can, and as many of a competitor's weaknesses. Work through your champion to change and add criteria. This is how you win more competitive deals.

Ask: How will you compare the options? What would make you choose one over another? Is that list written down?

D: Decision process

The decision process is how the customer actually buys. The steps, the people and the order.

You cannot change how a customer buys. Your job is to fit your sales process to it. Decisions are rarely made by one person. Even an economic buyer with the budget still has to build a coalition inside the organization, then clear procurement and compliance before anyone can purchase.

Ask: Walk me through what happens from here to a decision. Who else needs to be involved? How did you buy the last tool like this?

P: Paper process

The paper process is everything between "yes" and a signed contract. Procurement, security review, legal, and the MSA with its redlines.

In a large organization, the legal track alone can take weeks or months. Founders often discover it at the end, when the deal is supposed to close this quarter. Start it early, in parallel with the evaluation.

Ask: Once you decide, what does the contract process look like? Who from legal and procurement is involved? How long did it take last time?

I: Identify pain

Without a pain, there is no deal. And not every pain is enough. It has to carry serious consequences, and buyers have to be willing to pay to fix it.

Identifying pain is the work of discovery. Our guide to sales discovery questions covers how to find it, and how to help the customer feel it instead of just describing it.

Ask: What happens if you do nothing? Who feels this most? Why solve it now?

C: Champion

Sellers don't close deals. Champions do.

Many founders call whoever they talk to most their champion. That is a mistake. A real champion has three traits:

1. Influence. They have influence over the people who make the decision.
2. Incentive. They have a personal reason to fight for your solution. Sometimes it is money or their own targets. Sometimes it is personal values. Part of your job is to work out what drives them.
3. Intel. They share what you cannot see: what competitors are offering and what their boss is thinking. A champion with intel can tell you whether a 100K offer will land or blow up internally, before you send it.

Sellers don't close deals, champions do. Go back through your pipeline and ask whether each deal actually has one.

The relationship runs both ways

While you qualify your champion, your champion is weighing you. Before they spend their own credibility on your deal, they check six things: your authority, your influence inside your own company, your understanding of their world, your teamwork when they need you, your transparency, and their own internal risk if the bet goes wrong.

Teamwork shows up under pressure. In a strategic Walmart deal, the champion, Stacy, sent a Thursday-night email. She had been pulled into a Monday executive meeting, unprepared. The team worked through the weekend so she walked in ready. After that, she knew she could rely on them.

Ask yourself: Does this person have influence over the decision? What do they personally gain if this closes? What have they told us that we could not have learned on our own?

C: Competition

Competition is anyone the customer could choose instead of you. Other vendors, an internal build, or doing nothing at all.

Your champion is your best source here. Use what you learn to shape the decision criteria, and to position against the alternative the customer is really weighing.

Ask: What else are you looking at? What happens if you keep things as they are? What would make you build this yourselves?

Put MEDDPICC into your CRM

A CRM stage called "Demo" breaks your forecast. A demo is something you did. It is not a signal from the buyer.

Tie each stage's exit criteria to verifiable customer events, actions the buyer actually took. For example:

Then audit your pipeline. For each deal, check which events actually happened. The deals that look advanced but have no customer events behind them are the ones that will slip.

A MEDDPICC deal review in eight questions

1. Do we know, in numbers, what this problem costs the customer?
2. Have we met the economic buyer, and did they commit to a path to a deal?
3. Do we know the decision criteria, and have we influenced them?
4. Can we describe every step from here to a decision?
5. Do we know what legal and procurement need, and has it started?
6. Is the pain serious enough that doing nothing is not an option?
7. Does our champion have influence, incentive and intel?
8. Do we know who and what we are competing against, including doing nothing?

Each "no" is the next thing to work on, not a reason to drop the deal.

Qualification is a core part of the WINGS Sales Program for Founders, and of our work on discovery and qualification. To pressure-test your own pipeline, book 1:1 sales consulting with Raz.