When a business first buys Salesforce, it often struggles to define its sales process. The thinking goes: "I just bought Salesforce, so my sales process is Salesforce." Your process will run on Salesforce, but every part of it still has to be designed there. Out of the box, Salesforce gives you a list of sales stages and a few basic fields, with no controls, such as requiring a rep to enter key information before an opportunity can move forward.
So the real work is defining your sales process and methodology. As we design it, we decide which data we want to collect, and which data we have to collect, to understand and improve how the process performs.
One methodology we have seen succeed again and again is MEDDPICC (also called MEDDIC or MEDDICC). Each letter is a key element of the opportunity. Built into Salesforce, it gives you data you can analyze across your entire sales process.
What MEDDPICC stands for
Metrics
The measurable goals the customer wants to achieve with their purchase.
Economic Buyer
The person or group with the authority to make the purchasing decision, and what motivates them.
Decision Criteria
The specific factors and requirements the customer uses to evaluate possible solutions.
Decision Process
The steps, stakeholders, and timeline in the customer's decision.
Paper Process
The internal policies and procedures the customer must follow to complete a purchase: legal review, procurement, security questionnaires.
Identify Pain
The customer's pain points, and how your solution addresses them.
Champion
An internal advocate who will support and promote your solution inside the customer's organization.
Competition
Who else the customer is evaluating, and how you are different.
Making it easy for reps
That can sound like a lot of data to collect, and a lot of work for your sales team. The answer is to put MEDDPICC right on the opportunity in a form reps can fill in quickly, with a visual indicator that shows how well they understand each deal.
Once that data lives in Salesforce, you can act on it. For example, you can stop an opportunity from moving to a later stage until the related parts of MEDDPICC are understood. You can also report on which elements are missing from deals you lose.
The benefits
With MEDDPICC built into your Salesforce, common problems for even strong sales teams become easier to manage:
- Qualification and focus. Reps qualify opportunities consistently and spend their time on the deals most likely to close, not on unlikely or unprofitable prospects.
- Better understanding of the customer. The framework pushes reps to understand the customer's goals, decision process, and pain points, so they can tailor their approach and address concerns early.
- Stakeholder mapping. Reps identify and engage the key people in the customer's organization, building relationships and internal champions.
- Risk reduction. Understanding decision criteria and the paper process surfaces roadblocks early, while there is still time to deal with them.
- More accurate forecasting. A consistent way to assess opportunities makes the forecast more reliable, so you can plan resources and set realistic revenue targets.
- A shared language. Everyone on the team qualifies deals the same way, which makes coaching, collaboration, and handoffs smoother.
MEDDPICC is one of the sales methodologies built into our Sales Cloud accelerator, configured so your own team can adjust the rules as your process changes. If you are looking for a framework to guide your sales team, book a free strategy session and we will map how it would fit your process.