What is MEDDPICC? Explained by MEDDIC’s Creator

What is MEDDPICC? (And how it extends MEDDIC)

MEDDPICC is a sales qualification framework used to assess whether a complex B2B deal is real – and whether it’s actually winnable. The letters stand for:

• Metrics
• Economic Buyer
• Decision Criteria
• Decision Process
• Paper Process
• Identify Pain
• Champion
• Competition

The 8 letters, and where MEDDPICC came from

MEDDIC was created by Dunkel at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in 1996, as a way to standardise what PTC’s strongest sales leaders already did instinctively: identify the problems a prospect genuinely cared about, prove the value of solving them, and work out who actually had the authority to buy. Dunkel describes the environment that produced it:

“The problems that our customers were facing were things like, how do we design better products? How do we get our products to market faster? … So, you know, it was about increasing sales efficiency and improving really the quality of our sales engagements.”

 

MEDDPICC adds Paper Process and Competition as their own letters – a variant that emerged across the sales organisations that adopted MEDDIC in the years since, rather than a separate framework Dunkel built from scratch. He’s clear it doesn’t change the substance:

“In the original version of MEDDIC, paper process was actually part of decision process… and competition is sort of omnipresent… Look, they’re exactly the same. It’s just a question of… the advantage of having maybe a couple of extra letters is that you’re saying, okay, look, we wanna place a special emphasis on this thing.”

Straight from its creator – it really comes down to three things

Eight letters can look intimidating on a slide. Dunkel’s own simplification cuts through that:

“If you really simplify it, there’s really three elements of MEDDPIC: the value that you deliver to the customer… the process that you’re navigating through with the customer, and then the stakeholders that need to be involved.”

Metrics and Identify Pain are the value you’re delivering. Decision Criteria, Decision Process and Paper Process are the process you’re navigating together. Economic Buyer, Champion and Competition are the stakeholders who determine whether the deal happens at all. If you’re ever unsure where a piece of information belongs in the framework, that three-way split is the fastest way to place it.

Why teams adopt MEDDPICC over plain MEDDIC

Dunkel has run the original exercise that produced MEDDIC – mapping out every reason deals are won, lost, or slip – many times since, with different companies. The result doesn’t change:

“I’ve redone the original exercise multiple times, and every time it’s the same answer: it’s either MEDDIC or MEDDPICC… ultimately, to me, the thing that matters is that the company deciding to implement it makes a decision: this is our version.”

In other words: which acronym you use matters less than making sure your team actually agrees on what “good” looks like for each element, in your specific sales motion.

Why a three-decade-old framework still works on today’s complex deals

MEDDIC turned 30 in 2026, and the obvious question is why a framework built in 1996 still holds up against modern buying behaviour – longer buying committees, more silent stakeholders, and far more research happening before a rep is ever contacted.

Part of Dunkel’s answer is that MEDDPICC was built to sell against inertia as much as any rival vendor – a point covered in full under Competition below.

The “juice worth the squeeze” test

Change is always difficult, Dunkel argues, and MEDDPICC exists partly to force an honest answer to a simple question before you invest more time:

“Is the juice worth the squeeze? There is going to have to be some squeeze in order for you to ultimately get the benefits out. How much better do we have to be? And what are the metrics that we’re going to use to measure that difference?”

Why this matters more with today’s buying committees

Dunkel points to one constant underneath thirty years of changing tools and channels: human decision-making itself hasn’t changed.

“There are so many things that change… but the things that haven’t changed are the reasons why people are willing to make a decision.”

With more stakeholders involved in a purchase, and far more of the buying journey happening before a rep is looped in, MEDDPICC’s job – forcing clarity on who actually has influence, and what they actually care about – only gets more valuable, not less.

Working through MEDDPICC with real buyer signals

Every element of MEDDPICC depends on information – and increasingly, some of that information is visible in how an account behaves on your website long before a discovery call confirms it.

Metrics & Economic Buyer

Metrics means identifying what the customer will measure to judge success, and sizing the problem in terms they care about. Economic Buyer is the person who ultimately signs off. Dunkel notes this is rarely a single fixed level in an organisation – it depends on deal size:

“The size of the opportunity is often going to determine how high the economic buyer is. What’s the economic buyer’s decision criteria? How soon is it gonna happen? And how confident and sure are they that the team can deliver the value that’s being proposed?”

This is where account-level visibility is useful, not as proof but as a prompt for discovery: seeing a target account spend time on pricing, comparison, or ROI-related pages doesn’t tell you who the economic buyer is or confirm a metric, but it’s a reasonable cue to go and ask. That’s the kind of early signal website visitor identification tools like Lead Forensics surface – which named companies are visiting, and which pages – as a starting point for the conversation, not a substitute for it.  It’s also a useful leading indicator for forecasting which deals are genuinely moving, rather than just sitting in a stage.

Decision Criteria & Decision Process

These cover what the customer needs to see to choose you, and the steps – on both sides – to get there. Dunkel is specific that this has to be mutual:

“The key word in mutual action plan is mutual. Both parties have to be participating in the process willingly.”

Paper Process

Paper Process is the letter MEDDPICC adds most visibly to MEDDIC, and it’s easy to under-explain: it isn’t just “getting the contract signed.” Dunkel defines it as the practical mechanics of how money actually moves once a decision is made:

“The P is for paper process… that’s really understanding what’s the source of the funding, who owns the budget, who’s the executive that’s gonna ultimately make that decision.”

In practice, that means mapping procurement steps, legal and security review, data or compliance requirements, and who needs to sign off, well before you need the answer. Dunkel points to his own experience selling AI solutions as a case where skipping this can sink a deal late, after everything else has been won:

“When you’re selling an AI solution, there are lots of questions and challenges about data rights… paper process becomes very important – we have to understand how we’re gonna navigate through these critical contract [terms].”

As Dunkel agreed when I put it to him on the call, a paper process gap like that “can become a deal blocker on its own,” with no competitor involved at all.

Identify Pain & Champion

Identifying pain means finding a problem significant enough to justify change. Champion is where Dunkel sees the most confusion in practice – enthusiasm is not the same as influence:

“Champions are people who have influence. They’re change agents, which means that they know how the company runs – they know who can make funds available.”

And a champion without real influence won’t get you anywhere:

“They may love you, but if they don’t have the juice, then they stop returning your calls.”

Dunkel also drops in a related aside worth remembering – and this one’s about the rep, not the champion:

“One of my favorite sayings in sales is that you get delegated to who you sound like.”

In other words, how senior and credible you come across shapes who you get introduced to. A rep who sounds junior or purely transactional tends to get handed off to junior, transactional contacts; a rep who can speak to strategic priorities and challenge the prospect’s thinking is more likely to get pulled up to the people who actually have the juice. It’s a reminder that qualifying the champion is only half the equation – the other half is giving your champion a reason to want to take you higher.

Competition

Dunkel frames this letter as having two layers. The first, and the one that’s easiest to miss, is that the real opponent in a deal is often not another vendor at all, but the customer’s own inertia:

“We consider the status quo as competition. You can either continue to bump along with what you’ve been doing, or you can make a change and really improve things.”

That framing matters because it changes what “Competition” in the framework actually means. It isn’t only about the other vendors in the deal – it’s about whether the customer is convinced that changing anything is worth the disruption at all.

The second layer is the one people expect: making sure the customer can recognize – and say back to you – why you’re different and better than any rival vendor in the room:

“When you’re selling a differentiated solution, one of the things we want to accomplish through the sales cycle is that we want the customer to recognize why your product is different and better.”

That differentiation isn’t only product features. Dunkel is explicit that it can sit at a more holistic level too:

“The differentiation can also be in the caliber of your company, the caliber of your people, the quality of your service, your customer satisfaction rating, your customer retention rate, your executive thought leadership.”

Whichever level it sits at, the discipline is the same: know specifically how you’re going to separate yourself from the competition before the customer has to ask.

Scoring MEDDPICC: Dunkel’s 0–3 framework

To keep MEDDPICC from becoming a vague gut feeling, Dunkel’s team scores every element on a simple scale:

“Zero, you don’t know. One is the thing has been identified. Two is that we’re aligned. And then three is validated.”

Where AI scoring helps – and where it doesn’t

Dunkel’s team automates the generation of this score, but he’s candid about its limits:

“For a salesperson to be successful, they have to own their opportunity. You can’t look at the AI generated MEDDPIC score and be like, hey, everything’s super sunny. The AI generated score is just an assistant. You have to own the score – don’t let that be a shortcut for really taking the time to think through what are the risks, what are the gaps.”

Red flags: the gaps that should make you nervous about a deal

Dunkel is direct about the point at which a rep should stop and reassess:

“If you’ve had five meetings with the customer and you’re still not really sure what the sequence of events is, or if you have a champion, or who the economic buyer is – you might wanna step back and think about, okay, are we spending our time wisely?”

One tactic his team uses for exactly this situation is what he calls the breakup letter:

“We actually send the customer a breakup letter: hey, look, it just seems like maybe the time isn’t right. And half the time that we send those letters, we get a response back that says, you know what, we’re sorry – we still are very interested.”

The underlying point isn’t to manufacture urgency – it’s transparency. As Dunkel puts it, MEDDPICC done well “really creates an environment where it’s really more of a mutual engagement process,” where either side can honestly say the fit isn’t there yet, rather than quietly letting a deal drift.

Beyond the deal: why MEDDPICC also applies to retention and expansion

One extension of the framework that’s easy to miss: Dunkel applies the same thinking well beyond the initial sale.

“It’s not just for sales – it’s for retention and expansion, because the reason why customers buy is the same reasons why they stay. Instead of having hypothetical metrics, now you’ve got real metrics that demonstrate the value that the customer has achieved.”

For account and customer success teams, that means the Champion you developed during the sale, the Economic Buyer’s priorities, and the Metrics you agreed on don’t stop mattering at close – they’re the foundation for spotting genuine expansion and renewal opportunities later, rather than guessing at them from scratch.

MEDDPICC certification and training – is it worth it?

Third-party MEDDPICC certification and training programmes exist, and they’re a reasonable way to get a team speaking the same language quickly, especially for new hires or a sales org that has never used a formal qualification method before. They’re worth it when the goal is baseline fluency: everyone on the team knows what “Economic Buyer” means and can hold a MEDDPICC conversation in a deal review without a glossary.

Where Dunkel’s own practice suggests certification alone falls short is the step after that – actually wiring the framework into how deals are run. He’s explicit that MEDDPICC only pays off when it’s tied directly to the sales process itself, not bolted on as a separate scoring exercise:

“You really need to think about them as being married from the get go. Every sales stage should have an outcome that is related to MEDDPICC.”

That’s work a generic course can’t do for you, because it depends on your own deal sizes, sales cycle length, and what a validated champion or a credible metric actually looks like in your market. In practice that means: use certification or training to get shared vocabulary and reduce ramp time, but plan on a separate, internal pass – led by sales leadership – to define what “good” scores on each letter mean for your specific business, and to attach a MEDDPICC outcome to every stage of your own pipeline. Skip that second step and a certified team can still end up filling in the acronym without the discipline behind it actually changing how deals get won.

Putting it into practice: a simple MEDDPICC scorecard template

A lightweight way to start: for each open opportunity, score every letter 0–3 using Dunkel’s scale, and require a one-line justification for any score of 2 or higher.

Review it at every pipeline stage gate, not just at forecast time – Dunkel’s point about marrying MEDDPICC to the sales process means each stage should have a specific MEDDPICC outcome attached to it, not just activities completed.

FAQs

What does MEDDPICC stand for?
Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, and Competition.

Is MEDDPICC the same as MEDDIC?
Functionally, yes. MEDDIC is the original 1996 framework, created by Dick Dunkel; MEDDPICC adds Paper Process and Competition as explicit letters, though both were always implicit in the original version. Dunkel himself describes them as “exactly the same,” just with different emphasis.

How long does MEDDPICC certification take?
This varies by provider and format – self-paced courses can take a few hours to complete, while cohort-based or in-depth programmes run over several weeks. Check the specific certification provider for exact timing.

Want to see MEDDPICC in action with a real sales team? Watch Dick Dunkel’s full conversation with Lead Forensics in MEDDPICC in Practice.