MEDDPICC Didn't Fail Your Team. You Failed MEDDPICC.
Every quarter, I hear the same confession from another sales leader.
They lean back, cross their arms, and sigh.
“We tried MEDDPICC,” they say. “Brought in the consultants. Reworked our CRM. Built beautiful dashboards. Certified every rep. Hell, we even laminated pocket cards.”
Then comes the pause.
“And?” I ask.
“A couple of quick wins while it was fresh… but forecasts stayed unpredictable. Deals still slipped. We lost time, money, and credibility with the field.”
The conclusion is always the same: “MEDDPICC just doesn’t work for our business.”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
MEDDPICC didn’t fail your team. You failed MEDDPICC.
What MEDDPICC Was Built For
Somewhere along the way, MEDDPICC was marketed as a checklist for reps. A set of fields to fill. An inspection tool for managers.
That’s not why it was created.
MEDDPICC was designed to help managers answer three deceptively simple questions:
Why do we win?
Why do we lose?
Why do deals stall?
It’s not about efficiency.
It’s not about “filling in Salesforce.”
It’s not even about reps.
It’s a management system; a shared language to evaluate the health of a deal and make better decisions, faster.
When that purpose gets lost, the rollout is doomed before it begins.
The 2025 Data Tells the Story
According to the 2025 Ebsta CRO Collective Sales Qualification Report, only 14% of opportunities are well-qualified at every stage.
The rest? Missing champions. Unclear decision criteria. Economic buyers never contacted.
And the payoff for getting it right is enormous:
Well-qualified deals have win rates more than 3x higher than poorly qualified ones.
Opportunities with a verified champion are 53% more likely to close.
Companies with disciplined qualification have slippage rates nearly 50% lower.
The problem isn’t that MEDDPICC doesn’t work.
The problem is that most teams never actually use it as intended.
How Companies Break MEDDPICC
The most common failure pattern is treating MEDDPICC as something you add on top of everything else - Bant, Sandler, deal scorecards, old CRM stages.
It’s like renovating a house without removing walls you no longer need. You end up with complexity instead of clarity.
Another failure mode: inspection without coaching.
Managers pull up dashboards, see empty fields, and scold reps. Reps type in the fastest answer possible just to “complete” the record. The CRM looks full, but the data is hollow.
And it matters. If you’re not coaching to uncover and develop champions, you’re just watching deals die in slow motion.
The insight doesn’t live in the CRM.
It lives in the conversation, in the coaching session where a manager helps a rep untangle a deal.
Skip the coaching, and you’re just decorating the scoreboard.
The Missed Opportunity
When MEDDPICC works, it’s because leaders treat it like a camera, not a clipboard.
It captures a clear, consistent picture of where a deal stands — the champion’s influence, the economic buyer’s priorities, the decision criteria in play.
That picture tells managers where to focus their coaching.
It tells leadership whether the forecast is built on sand or stone.
It gives the entire company a common way to talk about deals.
And here’s the part leaders forget:
In top-performing companies, most forecasted deals have a verified champion. In underperformers, that number is a fraction of that. That’s not methodology luck. That’s disciplined management.
If You’re About to Roll Out MEDDPICC…
Don’t start with a certification program for reps.
Start by training your managers.
Make them fluent in the language. Show them how to use it in real conversations. Hold them accountable for coaching to it.
And before you launch, ask yourself:
What will we retire to make room for MEDDPICC?
How will we make it impossible for managers to skip coaching?
How will we measure behavior change — not just field completion?
If you can’t answer those, you’re not ready.
Stop Blaming the Playbook
Sales leaders love to chase the next methodology when results dip. But no framework will save you if your managers aren’t reinforcing it and your systems aren’t built to support it.
The issue isn’t MEDDPICC. It’s management.
Fix that, and you’ll finally get the return you thought you were buying.
