MEDDIC

Each letter in MEDDIC checks a different fact a rep needs before trusting their own read on a deal. Metrics: a quantified cost of the problem, in dollars or hours, not a vague sense that it matters. Economic buyer: the specific person who controls budget, confirmed, not assumed. Decision criteria: what the buyer is actually grading vendors on. Decision process: the dated, named-owner path from here to signature. Identify pain: the business reason this gets fixed now rather than next year. Champion: someone inside the account who's put something real on the line to push the deal forward, not just someone who likes the product.

MEDDPICC adds two more checks

The extended version, MEDDPICC, tacks on Paper process (what legal and procurement actually require to get a signature, and how long each step has historically taken) and Competition (not just who else is in the deal, but specific evidence of whether you're winning or losing against them, including against doing nothing at all). Teams pick the six-letter or eight-letter version based on how much of the deal's risk lives in procurement and competitive dynamics versus in the core business case.

What makes MEDDIC useful isn't the acronym. It's that each letter forces a rep to produce evidence instead of an impression. "They have pain" isn't a MEDDIC answer. A dollar figure and the person who gave it to you is. That's the same discipline a real deal review runs against every open opportunity: score each criterion as verified, claimed, or unknown, and treat "unknown" as unknown instead of rounding it up to "probably fine."