By 6days · v1.0 · Updated 7/20/2026
A checklist for whether a complex deal is real, before you spend a quarter finding out.
Fill this in for your own situation — a private worksheet only you can see.
When to use
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 not to use
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.
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.
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.
Framework by 6days on 6days — https://6days.apexaion.ai/framework/meddpicc-qualification
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.
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.
Worked example
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.
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.
Related ways to think about this.
A jointly owned, dated plan from here to live — so the deal has no invisible middle.
Use when Use it on complex deals with long cycles, multiple approval gates, and implementation work after signature — especially where you have been burned by late-stage procedural slippage or where the buyer has a hard date they must hit.
Avoid when Avoid it on small or fast transactions, where it is bureaucratic overhead the buyer will resent. It is worthless if it becomes a seller-authored document emailed for agreement — that is a project plan with a friendly name, and it will not predict anything. And it cannot fix a deal with no genuine urgency; it will simply document the drift precisely.
Lead with a commercial insight that reframes the buyer's problem, rather than asking what keeps them up at night.
Use when Use it in complex B2B sales where you have genuine cross-customer data the buyer lacks, where the competition is undifferentiated on features, and where the real enemy is the buyer's inertia rather than another vendor.
Avoid when Avoid it when you have no real insight — performed without substance it is just contrarianism, and buyers detect it immediately. Avoid it with sophisticated buyers who know their domain far better than you, where a reframe reads as condescension. It also demands enablement most sales organisations do not have: the insight must be built centrally, because individual reps cannot see across the customer base.
Four kinds of question that let a buyer talk themselves into the size of their problem.
Use when 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.
Avoid when 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.