MEDDPICC vs MEDDIC: What the Two Extra Letters Add

Compare the two side by side:

• MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion.
• MEDDPICC: the same six, plus Paper process and Competition.

Paper process is everything that happens after the buyer says yes: legal review, procurement onboarding, security questionnaires, vendor forms, signature routing and payment set-up. It's separate from Decision process, which is how the buyer decides. Paper process is how the buyer's company turns a decision into a signed contract.

Competition covers other vendors, but also the option of doing nothing or building in-house. Some teams also read the "I" as Implicate the pain rather than Identify it, and the "M" as Metrics or Measurable results, so agree on your definitions internally.

Add Paper process and Competition when at least one of these describes your deals:

1. Late-stage deals stall after a verbal yes. If contracts sit in legal for weeks, you're missing paper process detail.
2. The buyer runs security or vendor reviews. These take time and involve people you haven't met.
3. You lose to a small set of named competitors. Tracking them lets you plan positioning early.
4. Deals include procurement teams. Procurement rules can add steps and reduce your negotiating room.
5. Contract values are high enough to need board or finance sign-off. Then the signature path becomes a project of its own.

If your typical deal is a founder buying on a credit card after one demo, the base version will do.

Fields multiply quickly, so add only what changes behavior:

• Paper process: one text field for the steps and owners, and one date for expected signature. Ask the champion for the buyer's typical steps as early as the evaluation stage.
• Competition: one picklist of the alternatives seen (named vendors, status quo, internal build) and one line on why the buyer might prefer each.
• Set the paper process question as an exit criterion for your proposal stage, so no deal reaches negotiation without it.
• Keep the six original fields exactly as they are, so your history stays comparable.

For example, say a deal is verbally agreed but the legal contact says review takes four to six weeks. Knowing that at proposal stage lets you start the security questionnaire in parallel and forecast the close date honestly.

Track two things for a quarter before deciding to keep them. First, compare the gap between "verbal yes" and signature before and after you started asking about paper process. If late-stage slippage shrinks, the field is doing its job. Second, look at loss reasons. If more of your losses now name a specific competitor, you have data to plan positioning.

Keep the outside numbers in context. The average B2B new-logo win rate is 19 percent¹, so most new-logo opportunities won't close whichever framework you use. What a framework can do is show you sooner which ones won't. Your forecasting tool, such as Clari, can then use those fields for deal inspection, and Gong can help verify what the buyer said about competitors and process.

Say a mid-market buyer has agreed verbally to a $40,000 annual contract. Your paper process notes might read: security questionnaire required from the buyer's IT team; legal will redline the master agreement; procurement needs a completed vendor form and a tax document; the CFO signs; payment terms are net 45.

Beside each step, write an owner, a start date and an expected duration, and ask the champion how long each step took the last time the company bought software. Then work backward from the date the buyer wants to go live. If the steps add up to more time than remains, tell the buyer now, not in the last week of the quarter. Starting the questionnaire while legal reviews the agreement can save the most time.

Three common errors:

• Making everything required at once. Reps learn to fill fields with placeholders. Phase the new fields in by stage.
• Recording competitors as opinions. Note where the information came from, such as the buyer's own words or a call recording.
• Skipping the training. A short session with two real deals teaches more than a slide deck.

If you're still choosing between frameworks, MEDDIC vs Challenger vs SPIN compares selling approaches, and the MEDDIC qualification template gives the base fields. For the longer treatment of the extended version, see the MEDDPICC framework guide.