Comparing by fit
Two ways of thinking, side by side. There is no winner here — read across each row and choose the one that fits your situation.
Sales
A checklist for whether a complex deal is real, before you spend a quarter finding out.
By 6days
Sales
Four kinds of question that let a buyer talk themselves into the size of their problem.
By 6days
When to use — MEDDPICC Qualification
Use it on high-value B2B deals with several stakeholders and a long cycle, especially where forecast accuracy matters and pipeline reviews have become exercises in optimism. It is most useful as a shared vocabulary that lets a manager ask 'what don't we know?' without it reading as an attack on the rep.
When to use — SPIN Selling
Use it in considered, higher-value sales where the buyer has a real problem they have not fully priced, and where the purchase requires internal justification. It is especially strong when your advantage is genuine but not obvious in a feature comparison.
When not to use — MEDDPICC Qualification
Avoid it in transactional or self-serve sales, where the overhead exceeds the deal value and there is no committee to map. Applied mechanically it becomes a CRM compliance ritual that reps fill in after the fact, which produces the paperwork and none of the thinking. It also qualifies deals; it does not create them.
When not to use — SPIN Selling
Avoid it in low-value transactional selling, where the buyer knows what they want and the questioning reads as an obstacle between them and a purchase. It fails when the buyer has already diagnosed themselves and wants a price — implication questions asked of a decided buyer feel like manipulation, because at that point they are. It also requires real preparation; run cold it produces an interrogation.
Enterprise pipelines fill with deals that feel promising and never close. The meetings are pleasant, the champion is enthusiastic, the demo goes well — and then the deal stalls in procurement, or the budget turns out to belong to another department, or the enthusiastic champion had no authority to buy anything. The cost is not the lost deal; it is the quarter of attention that went into it and the forecast built on top of it.
A seller who explains why their product is excellent gets polite agreement and no purchase. Buyers do not act because a solution sounds good; they act when a problem feels expensive enough to be worth the disruption of fixing. Telling someone their problem is expensive rarely persuades them. They have to arrive there themselves, and most sales conversations never create the conditions for that.
MEDDPICC is a qualification checklist for complex, multi-stakeholder sales. Each letter names something you must know to claim a deal is real: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identified pain, champion, and competition. It is diagnostic rather than procedural — it does not tell you what to do, it tells you what you cannot yet answer. Gaps are the output. A deal where you cannot name the economic buyer is not a late-stage deal no matter how many meetings you have had, and the framework's real function is to make that unarguable in a pipeline review.
SPIN structures discovery around four question types asked in rough sequence: situation questions to establish facts, problem questions to surface difficulties, implication questions to expose what those difficulties cost, and need-payoff questions that invite the buyer to articulate the value of solving them. The engine is the implication stage — it converts a mild annoyance into a quantified business problem, and it does so in the buyer's own words, which is why it survives their internal review after you leave the room. The corresponding discipline is restraint: the seller's job is to ask, not to pitch.
Establish the measurable outcome the buyer expects, in their numbers. Not 'improved efficiency' but 'cut invoice processing from nine days to two.' Without a number there is no business case, and without a business case the deal dies the moment budgets tighten.
Find the person who can release the money — not the person who wants the product. These are different people in most enterprises. If you have not met them, you do not have a deal; you have a project someone is enthusiastic about.
Understand what they will judge on and how the judgement gets made: who is involved, in what order, against what standard. Criteria are often set before you arrive, sometimes by a competitor. Discovering them late means discovering you have been answering the wrong exam.
Trace what happens after 'yes' — legal, security review, procurement, signature authority. This is where forecast dates go to die, and it is almost always longer than the champion believes, because they have never watched it closely.
Not specified
An ordered process with 4 phases.
Establish the facts you genuinely need — sparingly.
Surface the difficulties, gaps, and dissatisfaction.
Develop what those problems actually cost.
Worked example — MEDDPICC Qualification
A rep reports a deal at 90% for quarter end. Walking the checklist: metrics are vague ('better visibility'), the economic buyer has never been met, and the paper process includes a security review the champion has not mentioned and cannot start until legal signs an NDA amendment. Three gaps, all fatal to the date. The deal is not dead — but it is a next-quarter deal, and the honest reforecast made in week two is worth far more than the pleasant surprise in week twelve.
Worked example — SPIN Selling
A field-service software rep meets an operations director. Situation: 40 engineers, paper job sheets, manual scheduling. Problem: sheets arrive late and some never arrive. Implication: how long until an unbilled job is noticed? Six weeks. What share never get billed? Perhaps 3%. On what revenue? £8m. Who chases them? Two admins, most of a week each month. The director has now said, unprompted, that paper is costing roughly £240k a year plus most of two salaries. Need-payoff: what would same-day billing be worth? The rep has still not mentioned the product, and the business case is already written — by the buyer.
The checklist grew out of enterprise software sales practice in the 1990s, commonly traced to methods developed at Parametric Technology Corporation and spread by practitioners who moved through that organisation. It began as MEDDIC and gained letters over time as practitioners added the paper process and competition. It circulates as accumulated craft with several competing commercial trainings attached; no single canonical text governs it.
The model was published by Neil Rackham in the late 1980s, drawing on a large observational study of sales calls conducted by his research organisation. It is unusual among sales methods in having been derived from recorded behaviour rather than from a successful practitioner's intuition. The named method and its book are the author's commercial work; this description is our own.
Verify the pain is severe enough to fund action, that your champion has genuine internal credit and will spend it, and that you know who else is being considered — including the option of doing nothing, which wins more enterprise deals than any vendor.
Establish the facts you genuinely need — scale, current tools, process, who is involved. Research everything you can beforehand. Situation questions bore buyers and buy you no credit, so the fewer you need, the better prepared you look.
Probe for what is not working: where things break, what is slow, what is manual, what people complain about. You are looking for dissatisfaction, not gaps in your feature coverage. Resist the reflex to solve the first problem you hear.
Take a surfaced problem and follow it outward. What does that delay do downstream? Who else is affected? What has it cost this year? This is the step sellers skip because it feels uncomfortable — and it is the step that does the actual work.
Invite the buyer to describe what solving it would be worth: what changes if this goes away? A benefit you assert is a claim to be checked. A benefit the buyer articulates is a position they will defend to their own colleagues.
Present your solution against the problem they have now sized, in their language and their numbers. Everything you say here lands against a need they built, which is why it is heard as relevant rather than as a pitch.
Let the buyer state the value of solving it.