A $480K HubSpot deal in my pipeline last quarter looked clean. Champion was engaged. Three discovery calls done. Demo scored 9 out of 10 in the recap. The forecast called it for Q2 close.
It died in legal review on day 62. The economic buyer had never seen the contract. Procurement had a 90-day SLA we never asked about. The "champion" did not have the political capital to push past their own CFO.
This is the deal MEDDPICC was built for, and the one most B2B teams still lose, even when they think they run MEDDPICC.
The framework has 12,100 monthly searches and a long shelf of consulting collateral behind it. The original MEDDIC came out of PTC in the 1990s. Andy Whyte added the second P and the second C in 2020 with his MEDDICC book, and most enterprise SaaS teams have been on some version of it ever since. About 73% of SaaS companies selling above $100K ARR use it in some form, per recent benchmarks from Salesmotion and Sales Assembly.
The methodology works. The implementation, almost always, does not.
I have run RevOps inside Series A and B companies for over a decade. I have rolled out MEDDPICC in HubSpot three times and in Salesforce twice. Here is the part nobody writes about: the framework is the easy part. The eight fields are obvious. The hard part is what the team does with them every Monday morning, and what your CRM forces them to do.
This post breaks down the eight steps, the specific places teams skip work, and how to wire it into a CRM so the data is actually trustworthy.
What MEDDPICC stands for, in plain English
Most articles spell out the acronym and stop there. Here is the short version, with the question each letter is trying to answer.
- M, Metrics. What financial number changes if they buy?
- E, Economic Buyer. Who can sign without asking permission?
- D, Decision Criteria. What boxes does the solution have to tick?
- D, Decision Process. What are the literal steps from "we like this" to signed contract?
- P, Paper Process. How long does legal, security, and procurement actually take?
- I, Identify Pain. What is broken today and what does that cost per month?
- C, Champion. Who inside the account is selling for you when you are not in the room?
- C, Competition. Who else is in the deal, including "do nothing"?
MEDDIC had six letters. MEDDPICC adds Paper Process and Competition. Both got added because the late-stage death of enterprise deals stopped being about discovery and started being about procurement and incumbent vendors. If you sell into companies with formal procurement, security reviews, or InfoSec questionnaires, the two extra letters are not optional.
MEDDPICC is not a discovery checklist. It is a deal inspection system.
If reps fill it in once after the second call and never touch it again, you have a vanity field on the deal record. The whole point is the weekly delta between what you knew last week and what you know now.
Why teams still skip half the framework
I have audited 14 sales orgs running "MEDDPICC" in the last 18 months. In every single one, two or three letters were dead. Here is the pattern.
Metrics is almost always made up. The rep writes "save 20% on operational cost" because that is what the website says. Nobody asked the buyer for their actual operational cost baseline. When the CFO joins the call in week 6, the rep cannot defend the number, and the deal goes back to procurement evaluation.
Economic Buyer is the wrong person 60% of the time. Reps mark the VP they have been talking to. The real signer is the CFO or the CIO, two levels up. The VP is the recommender. The closest thing I have seen to a reliable test: ask the contact, "If I sent you a contract for $300K today, could you sign it?" If the answer is anything other than yes with a date, they are not the economic buyer.
Paper Process is the most-skipped field. Reps avoid it because the answer is uncomfortable. Asking "what does your security review look like" in week two feels presumptuous. So they wait until week 10, find out the SOC 2 questionnaire is a 14-week process, and the deal slips two quarters.
Champion is confused with cheerleader. A champion has three properties: they want the deal, they have political capital, and they are willing to spend it. Most "champions" have only the first. The test is simple. Ask: "Can you set up a 30-minute call with your CFO next week and pitch this with me?" If they say no, you have a coach, not a champion. Move on.
These four are where pipelines actually die. Decision Criteria and Competition are usually OK because reps want to talk about them. The hard fields are the ones nobody enjoys filling in.
(Stats from Salesmotion and Forecastio benchmarks across 2024 to 2026 B2B SaaS data.)
How to score MEDDPICC without the LinkedIn slop
Most scorecards I have seen score each letter from 0 to 4 and average them into a "MEDDPICC handicap" percentage. Kalungi has a public HubSpot setup that does this with a calculated field. The math is fine, but the calibration is where it breaks.
Here is the scoring I now use, after several painful resets:
- 0. You have nothing. The rep does not know the answer.
- 1. You have a guess. Nobody at the account confirmed it.
- 2. Someone at the account told you, but not the person who would actually decide.
- 3. The right person confirmed it, in writing, with a date attached.
- 4. It is signed, dated, in the CRM, and you can show it to your manager.
A deal at "stage 3" should have most fields at 2 or 3. A deal heading to close should be at 3 or 4 on every letter. Anything still at 1 or below by stage 5 is the reason your forecast is going to miss.
The percentage matters less than the field-level audit. I would rather have a deal at 60% with no zeros than a deal at 75% with two zeros in Economic Buyer and Paper Process. Average scoring hides the deal-killer.
Wiring MEDDPICC into HubSpot
HubSpot does not ship with MEDDPICC fields. You build them yourself. Here is the setup I run for clients, end to end.
Eight custom deal properties. One per letter. Type: dropdown with the 0 to 4 scale above. Group them under a "MEDDPICC" property group on the deal record.
Eight notes properties. One per letter, type: multi-line text. The number alone is useless. The notes are where the rep documents how they got there. I require at least one sentence per letter to advance past stage 3.
A calculated MEDDPICC score. Sum of the eight values divided by 32, expressed as a percentage. This is your handicap. Use it as a forecast input, not as a stage gate.
A workflow that flags zeros. If any letter is zero past stage 3 in a deal above $50K ACV, fire an internal Slack alert to the rep and their manager. I have seen this single workflow lift forecast accuracy by 12 points within a quarter, because zero scores are where reps used to hide.
A weekly deal review board. Filter pipeline by stage 4 and 5, sort by MEDDPICC score ascending. Bottom five deals are the agenda for Monday's pipeline meeting. This is the one habit that actually makes the framework work. Without it, you have data nobody looks at.
Salesforce is the same setup with custom fields and a Process Builder or Flow for the calculation. Both CRMs have community add-ons (the MEDDICC Score app for HubSpot is decent) but I prefer building it native so you control the scoring logic.
The deal review that makes MEDDPICC actually work
Here is the part nobody writes about. The framework lives or dies in the Monday meeting. Most teams run pipeline reviews by deal stage and pipeline value. That is the wrong axis.
I run them by lowest-scoring letter. The agenda looks like this:
- Five deals with the lowest Economic Buyer score. For each: who is the actual signer, what is the rep doing this week to get to them?
- Five deals with the lowest Paper Process score. For each: when did procurement, legal, and security last touch this deal, what is the realistic close date given their SLA?
- Five deals with the lowest Champion score. For each: what has the champion done for the rep in the last 14 days?
This format does two things. It forces the rep to defend specific gaps, not generic "deal is healthy" talk. And it surfaces the deal-killer signal early, before the deal slips out of the quarter and the rep is explaining it on a board call.
If you cannot answer "what specifically is the rep doing this week to move letter X from a 1 to a 2," the deal review is theater. Salesforce's own State of Sales report found that 30% of seller time goes to non-selling activity, mostly admin. A deal review that does not generate a concrete next action is part of that 30%.
What MEDDPICC misses, and what to bolt on
Two gaps in the framework, both worth knowing.
Champion change. Champions leave. The framework treats Champion as a static field. In reality, your champion at month 2 may have a different job at month 8. I now track "champion verified within 14 days" as a separate field, and if it goes red, the deal is automatically flagged for re-qualification.
Buying group, not buying person. Gartner's research on B2B buying groups (the 6 to 10 stakeholder average) does not fit cleanly into MEDDPICC's single-person fields. I add an extra related-record table for stakeholders: name, role, sentiment (champion, neutral, blocker), and last contact date. The score lives at the deal level, the people live in a child object. This is where Gong-style relationship intelligence tools earn their seat.
If you bolt these two on, MEDDPICC handles modern B2B buying cycles. Without them, you are running a framework built for the buying patterns of 1996.
Where it fits and where it does not
MEDDPICC is built for complex enterprise deals. Salesmotion and Sales Assembly both put the cutoff around $50K ACV, five or more stakeholders, sales cycles over six months. Below that, the eight-field setup is more friction than value.
For SMB deals under $25K closing in under 30 days, BANT or a simpler four-field framework works better. Forcing MEDDPICC on a 14-day sales cycle is how you get reps who hate the CRM and forecast that lies to you.
If your average deal sits between $25K and $50K, run a stripped MEDDPICC. Four letters: Economic Buyer, Pain, Champion, Decision Process. The rest is overkill at that size.
I tell every CEO who asks me to roll this out the same thing. The framework will not save bad deals. It will tell you which bad deals to kill earlier, so your reps stop wasting their quarters on pipeline that was never going to close. That is most of the value.
MEDDPICC field-filling but no forecast lift?
Book a 30-minute audit and we will show you the three changes that move the needle, usually the deal review format and a workflow that catches the zeros.
Book an audit →Where MEDDPICC sits in your wider stack
If you are setting this up from scratch, the order matters. Get the CRM data model right first, then the qualification framework on top. We cover the build sequence in our work on CRM and RevOps and the field-level setup in CRM design and customization. If you are migrating off another CRM and want to bring MEDDPICC over cleanly, the CRM migration playbook covers the data side. For wiring the score into your forecast cadence, the sales QBR cadence post and the sales forecasting accuracy breakdown both fit on top.
For the broader qualification debate (MEDDIC vs MEDDPICC vs SPICED), our MEDDIC piece goes deeper on the original six-letter version.
FAQ
What is the difference between MEDDIC, MEDDICC, and MEDDPICC?
MEDDIC has six letters and was developed at PTC in the 1990s. MEDDICC added Competition (one extra C) in the early 2000s. MEDDPICC, popularised by Andy Whyte's 2020 book, adds Paper Process, giving you eight letters. The newer two letters exist because procurement and competitive displacement now kill more deals than weak discovery.
How long does it take to roll out MEDDPICC in HubSpot?
The field setup is a one-day job. Real behavioural adoption (reps using it without being told) takes two to three quarters, per Sales Assembly's data. The biggest variable is whether your sales managers run weekly MEDDPICC-based pipeline reviews. Without that, the fields just collect dust.
Should we use MEDDPICC for every deal?
No. For deals under $25K with one or two stakeholders and short cycles, the framework adds more friction than value. Use it for deals above $50K ACV with five or more stakeholders. Below that, a stripped four-field version (Economic Buyer, Pain, Champion, Decision Process) is enough.
How do you measure if MEDDPICC is working?
Three numbers. Forecast accuracy at stage 5 (target above 85%). Stage 4 to closed-won conversion (target above 40%). Average MEDDPICC score on closed-won deals versus closed-lost (gap should be at least 20 points). If you cannot move these in two quarters, the rollout is not working.
Is AI going to make MEDDPICC obsolete?
The framework, no. The manual data entry, yes. Tools like Gong, Clari, and Sybill now auto-populate fields from call transcripts and email threads. The fields and the scoring still matter. The grunt work of filling them in is getting automated. I expect 60% to 70% of the field population to be AI-assisted by end of 2027.
Closing
The framework is not the moat. Plenty of teams use MEDDPICC and still miss forecast by 30%. The moat is the operating cadence around it: the weekly review, the workflow that catches zeros, the manager 1:1 that opens with the lowest letter and a specific next action.
That is the part you actually have to build. The eight fields are an afternoon. The discipline is two quarters of management work, and it is the part that decides whether MEDDPICC becomes a forecast input you trust or another set of fields nobody updates.
If you want help wiring it into your CRM and your pipeline review cadence, book a 30-minute audit. We will look at your current deal record, your pipeline review format, and tell you which of the three fixes above will move forecast accuracy the most in your next quarter.