MEDDPICC Didn't Fail Your Team. You Failed MEDDPICC.

Aug 11

Every quarter, I sit across from another sales leader telling me the exact same story.

They sound defeated. Frustrated. A little embarrassed.

"We tried MEDDPICC," they say, shaking their head. "Brought in the consultants. Reworked our CRM. Built beautiful dashboards. Got every rep certified. Hell, we even laminated pocket cards."

They pause, waiting for me to ask the obvious question.

"And?"

"A couple of quick wins while it was fresh, but we did not get the lift we anticipated. Forecasts remained unpredictable. Deals slipped. We lost time, money and credibility with the field.”

Then comes the inevitable conclusion: "MEDDPICC just doesn't work for our business."

Here's where I have to deliver some uncomfortable news.

MEDDPICC didn't fail your team. You failed MEDDPICC.

The Great MEDDPICC Misunderstanding

Let's start with what MEDDPICC actually is—because most people get this fundamentally wrong.

MEDDPICC wasn't built to make your reps more efficient. It wasn't built to populate fields in Salesforce. It wasn't designed to give you something to measure in your weekly sales meetings.

It wasn't even built for reps.

MEDDPICC was built for one person: the sales manager. And it was built for one purpose: to help them answer three deceptively simple questions about every deal in their pipeline:

Why do we win?
Why do we lose?
Why do deals stall?

That's it. That's the entire job.

If your managers can answer those three questions with ruthless honesty and surgical precision, you can run a predictable, high-performance sales organization. You can accurately forecast. You can allocate resources intelligently. You can coach with purpose.

But somewhere along the way—probably around the time someone figured out they could charge $200K for a "MEDDPICC implementation"—this got lost.

MEDDPICC became a "methodology." A checklist. A compliance exercise. Something you hand to reps during onboarding and then measure by completion percentage in your CRM.

And when you do that, the entire value proposition evaporates.

The Checklist Death Spiral

Here's what happens when you turn MEDDPICC into a rep-owned task list:

First, it becomes performative. Reps fill in fields because they have to, not because the exercise sharpens their deal strategy or uncovers blind spots. They're checking boxes, not thinking critically.

Second, the data becomes static the moment it's entered. Someone fills out "Economic Buyer: John Smith, VP Finance" in Stage 2 and never touches it again. Three months later, John Smith has left the company, but your CRM still shows him as the decision maker.

Third, managers develop a dangerous false sense of security. They look at dashboards showing "95% MEDDPICC completion" and think everything's under control. Meanwhile, their pipeline is built on assumptions, wishful thinking, and information that expired weeks ago.

This is what I call the checklist death spiral. And once you're in it, MEDDPICC becomes nothing more than an acronym everyone can recite but no one actually uses to win deals.

The Results Don't Lie

Let me be brutally direct here:

If your MEDDPICC rollout didn't improve win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal quality... you don't have a MEDDPICC problem.

You have a management problem.

I know that stings. But it's true.

CROs love to talk about the three levers they can pull: People, Process, Technology. The problem is, most leaders pull the lever that worked at their last company instead of actually diagnosing what this company needs right now.

They'll spend months evaluating new sales engagement platforms, or bring in expensive consultants to redesign their sales process, or hire three new reps—when the real issue is that nobody in the organization knows how to properly qualify a deal.

And here's the thing: for most B2B sales organizations, the fastest way to move the needle on win rate, deal velocity, and forecast accuracy isn't another piece of technology or another enablement program.

It's qualification.

The Data Doesn't Lie Either

Don't just take my word for it. The research backs this up.

According to a 2025 study from Ebsta and the CRO Collective, deals that are rigorously qualified:

Win 30% more often
Close 25% faster
Are 1.9x less likely to slip from their committed close date

That's not a "nice-to-have" improvement. That's your entire job as a sales leader distilled into three metrics.

If you're a VP of Sales or CRO and you're not personally inspecting how your team qualifies opportunities, you are literally hoping your forecast is right. And hope is not a strategy.

Why Managers Fail MEDDPICC

When MEDDPICC implementations fail—and they fail a lot—it's almost never because the framework is broken. It's because the management layer wasn't built to support it.

Here are the four failure modes I see over and over:

1. Zero Manager Enablement

This is the big one. Companies will spend weeks training reps on MEDDPICC methodology, but managers get a 90-minute overview session and a dashboard tutorial.

Think about how backwards that is. The people who are supposed to coach MEDDPICC, inspect MEDDPICC, and enforce MEDDPICC get the least amount of preparation. It's like training surgeons but not training the surgical supervisors.

2. Dashboard Addiction

Managers fall in love with their MEDDPICC dashboards. They see green lights and completed fields and think, "Great, everything looks good."

But they never pressure-test that data. They never challenge the assumptions. They never ask the follow-up questions that separate real qualification from wishful thinking.

A MEDDPICC dashboard is like a speedometer—it tells you how fast you're going, but it doesn't tell you if you're heading in the right direction.

3. Treating It Like a Stage Gate

MEDDPICC becomes a hurdle to clear instead of a thinking tool to use. The message becomes, "Fill this in so you can move the deal to the next stage," rather than, "Use this framework to pressure-test your assumptions and uncover what you don't know."

When that happens, reps game the system. They'll put something in every field just to get past the checkpoint, regardless of whether that something is accurate, current, or useful.

4. Confusing Completeness with Quality

This is the most dangerous one. Managers look at their CRM and see that every MEDDPICC field has been populated and think they have clarity on their deals.

But garbage in, garbage out. Just because there's text in a field doesn't mean that text represents reality.

I've seen "Pain" fields that read like generic marketing copy: "The customer wants to increase efficiency and reduce costs." That's not pain identification—that's Mad Libs.

The Real MEDDPICC Operating System

If you want MEDDPICC to actually work, you need to completely flip your mental model.

Stop thinking of it as a rep-owned task. Start thinking of it as a manager-owned inspection system.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Manager Training First

Before you train a single rep on MEDDPICC, train your managers until they can coach it in their sleep. They need to know not just what each letter stands for, but how to probe, how to challenge, how to spot BS.

A manager should be able to look at a MEDDPICC entry and immediately know what questions to ask to validate or invalidate what they're seeing.

Weekly Deal Reviews That Actually Matter

This is where the rubber meets the road. Every week, managers sit down with their reps and challenge the MEDDPICC data live.

Not just review it. Challenge it.

"You say the decision criteria is price, but last week the champion told you they chose their current vendor because of integration capabilities. Which is it?"

"The pain you've identified is 'manual processes,' but you haven't quantified the cost of that pain. How much time is the customer wasting? What's that worth to them?"

"You've listed three people in the decision process, but who actually signs the contract? And have you spoken to that person?"

This isn't about being difficult. It's about turning MEDDPICC from a filing exercise into a thinking exercise.

Embed in Every Conversation

One-on-ones, pipeline reviews, forecast calls—every conversation about a deal should map back to MEDDPICC in some way.

The goal is to make it second nature. When a rep starts talking about an opportunity, they should instinctively think in terms of Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, and Competition.

Measure What Actually Matters

Stop celebrating "100% MEDDPICC completion" in your QBRs. Start measuring the business outcomes that matter:

Did our win rate improve?
Are our sales cycles getting shorter?
Is our forecast becoming more accurate?
Are fewer deals slipping?

Those are the metrics that tell you whether MEDDPICC is working or whether you're just running a very expensive data entry exercise.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what most sales leaders don't want to hear:

If you've been running MEDDPICC for six months or more, and your win rates haven't budged, your deals are still slipping, and your forecast still surprises you every quarter...

The problem isn't your reps. The problem isn't the methodology. The problem is you.

Because MEDDPICC is only as good as the management layer that enforces it. If managers aren't inspecting it, coaching to it, and using it to make better decisions, then you're not running MEDDPICC. You're just wearing the t-shirt.

What Success Actually Looks Like

I've worked with sales teams where MEDDPICC transformed their business. Not because they had better reps or easier markets, but because they implemented it as a management discipline instead of a rep activity.

In these organizations:

Managers can tell you exactly why they win competitive deals. Not vague platitudes about "better relationships" or "superior product," but specific, repeatable patterns in how they identify pain, navigate decision processes, and position against competition.

They know why they lose before the deal is over. They're not surprised by competitive losses because they've been systematically uncovering decision criteria and testing their position throughout the sales cycle.

Deals rarely slip because the milestones are real. When a rep says a deal will close next quarter, it's not wishful thinking—it's based on concrete understanding of the customer's paper process, decision timeline, and internal approval requirements.

Forecasts become predictable. Not perfect—nothing's perfect—but dramatically more accurate because they're built on inspection, not hope.

This is what MEDDPICC looks like when it's working. And the difference between this and what most teams experience comes down to one thing: management discipline.

The Choice Is Yours

You have two options:

Option 1: Keep running MEDDPICC the way you've been running it. Hand it to reps as a checklist. Measure completion percentages. Wonder why nothing changes.

Option 2: Start treating MEDDPICC like what it actually is—a management operating system that requires you to inspect, challenge, and coach to the data.

If you choose Option 1, that's fine. But stop blaming the methodology when your results don't improve.

If you choose Option 2, understand that it's going to require you to fundamentally change how you manage your sales team. You can't delegate qualification. You can't automate inspection. You can't dashboard your way to better outcomes.

You have to do the work.

The Bottom Line

MEDDPICC isn't magic. It's a lens that helps you see what's really happening in your deals.

But if you're not looking through that lens—if your managers aren't using it to coach, inspect, and make decisions—then you can't see the real picture.

And when you can't see the real picture, you end up surprised by results that were entirely predictable.

So the next time someone tells you "MEDDPICC doesn't work," ask them this: Were your managers actually using it, or were they just measuring it?

Because there's a difference.

And that difference is why most MEDDPICC implementations fail.