What is MEDDIC?

Why it matters

MEDDIC was developed at PTC in the 1990s and is credited to Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli. It became a standard for complex B2B deals because it asks the questions that decide whether a deal is real, not whether the buyer is friendly.

The six letters each cover a reason deals slip:

• Metrics: the measurable gain the buyer expects.
• Economic buyer: the person who can approve the spend.
• Decision criteria: what the options will be judged on.
• Decision process: the steps and people between now and a signature.
• Identify pain: the business problem that makes change necessary.
• Champion: someone inside who sells for you when you are not in the room.

A deal with gaps in MEDDIC is not lost, but the gaps tell the rep what to find out next and tell the manager how much weight to give the forecast.

Example

In a second call with a manufacturer, the rep is working through the open letters. At 22:48 the operations director says, “I like it, but the CFO signs anything above this amount, and she has not seen it yet.”

That one sentence fills in two letters: the economic buyer is the CFO, and the decision process includes a finance sign-off. It also shows the operations director is a likely champion. The rep asks, “What would she need to see to say yes?” The answer gives the metrics: lower scrap and fewer overtime hours.

How Drummer handles it

Drummer scores every call against a MEDDIC scorecard automatically. Each letter gets a verdict, the reasoning and the timestamp where the evidence sits. The rep’s AI twin also writes the MEDDIC fields back to the CRM, so the qualification is current after every call, not filled in before the forecast meeting.

Use the ready-made MEDDIC scorecard template as is or adapt it to your playbook.