MEDDIC Focused Enablement

What Your MEDDIC Says About Your Enablement Needs

Annual planning is underway. SKO is on the horizon. Your sales and revenue operations colleagues are likely reviewing data from the past year to plan for 2024. This is a great opportunity to review your own MEDDIC. MEDDIC notes can tell you a lot about where enablement is required.

I know. I know. You’re shaking your head and thinking I’m crazy. You don’t have the time to review the MEDDIC of every deal. If you’re a large enterprise, yeah, you’re right. But a random sample of 100-200 deals takes only a few hours to quickly review, categorize, and assess where more work is needed. You want to go bigger? Awesome. Delegate the categorization part and review it at the end.

Three objectives to the review.

• Establish a benchmark and rule. I seek out better than 60% of won deals containing robust notes for each component.

• Identify those MEDDIC components that require improvement.

• Find exemplary documented componenents. Make note of the component, deal, and sales exec.

What to know my recipe? Take Action

Now that we have a good understanding of our situation and where to target our enablement, let's review each component. Every team can always benefit from MEDDIC refreshers. Here, we'll describe some of the deficiencies you may encounter and provide some ideas on how to improve

	You may observe	Filling the gap
METRIC	vague, subjective or qualitative terms technical metrics not related to organizational objectives inconsistent and irrelevant to Identified Pain inconsistent with what your platform/solution provides	Consider providing more industry and commercial understanding related to your ICP. Review use cases. Your team may not be armed with use cases expressing how the solution contributed to delivery of organizational objectives and strategies.
ECONOMIC BUYER	Name only with little to no notes about them Not positioned as high as expected Don’t recall the name, possibly never met them Same name as the Champion	Remind the team about the virtues of executive sponsorship and alignment between vendor and prospect. Create a masterclass panel discussion leveraging those sellers that have managed to create strong relationships with c-suite decision makers
DECISION CRITERIA	Vague decision criteria despite 6-month poc “See SE notes” and nothing else No indication of an evluation plan	Re-emphasize the impact on post-sale success and customer adoption Technical documentation is great, best practice, but worthless if no one can find. Include a link to deal content repo
DECISION PROCESS	Procurement contact name only No chronological summary of the major steps	Document the detailed Decision Process, save in a shared deal folder, & provide a link. Re-emphasize the impact this detail can have on renewal. Don’t make the CSM start from scratch.
IDENTIFIED PAIN	Acute pain expressed, applicable to only Champion Technical pain only, nothing afflicting the broader organization  Pain not relevant to your platform	Make sure sales plays & battlecards clearly articulate the sort of pain ICP is likely to express Connecting the Dots: Ensure sales colleagues can tie pain to solution capabilities
CHAMPION	Name only, not intelligence about them Name not appearing in CRM nor listed as a contact against the deal.	Reiterate the importance of reference selling and the need to recruit advocates Bring customer success and services colleagues in to talk about the importance of building good relationships with the Champion post-sale.

These are just a few tips. What's most important is the review and identification of gaps and exemplary practices. You'll be amazed by how much you can learn about your team's enablement needs simply by reviewing your MEDDIC. It's never too late to start.

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MEDDIC offers a structured approach to identifying and addressing technical and business pain points. Understanding the difference and connecting these pains empowers presales professionals to offer compelling solutions and drive successful sales engagements.

🎬 Take Action

Want my recipe? Here’s what I’ve done in the past. 

• I started with a spreadsheet where each row is a won deal with each document MEDDIC component distributed across the columns.

• I categorize each component for quality. Don’t categorize any blanks, where nothing is document. You’re only interested in the seeing the poor relative to good and finding those exemplary notes. Only three categories are needed required:

  • Poor – the notes indicate a weak qualification and possible poor understanding of the component

  • Good – simply put. The opposite of poor. Strong qualification indicating good understanding of the component

  • Example – Textbook, best practice, great examples of that component. Yes. These will also be in your good pile. However, you will need these for enablement purposes. So, we mark them for later use.

• Next, I made totals. For each component I look for the ratio of Good (including your examples). Better than 60% is a good rule I’ve followed. That is 60% or better of your won deals contain robust notation for that component. 

• Lower than 60% tells me there may be a learning opportunity. I go back and review the “poor” notes. I use the combination of the ratio and what I learn from the “poor” notes to prioritize the needed enablement.

• Final step, I look back through the “example” notes. I pull out three or four I’ll use in future enablement as examples of what I’d like to see.