In the past few years, companies large and small have called on Darius Lahoutifard to get help with their non-performing sales teams. The described symptoms are different from one company to another. Some suffer from shortages in revenue. Others complain about unreliable forecasts, with deals slipping constantly from one quarter to another before being lost or even abandoned a few quarters later. Some CEOs notice unproductive sales teams with an unusually high number of non-quota-carrying people needed in the sales force, hitting the bottom line hard.

Darius noticed that all these symptoms are related to the same illness: the inability to qualify. Since most sales teams put in place organizations, including SDR (Sales Development Representatives) or BDR (Business Development Representatives), who qualify leads for account managers, there is a wrong, unstated assumption, widely spread, that once a lead is qualified, the inside sales or field sales will have to work on them until they are won or lost.

Ongoing qualification is often the issue. Qualification is not a binary step of the sales process. Qualification is a mindset and a habit to apply all along the sales process, from the first call to closing.

This book covers both the why and the how of sales qualification. The author was an early sales leader at PTC, where the MEDDIC methodology took shape. He is also the founder of MEDDIC Academy, the first platform to bring the qualification methodology online. This book describes the MEDDIC (also known as MEDDPICC) sales methodology in-depth. This is not a book of theories, research, or academic concepts, but it is pure execution, techniques with practical recipes.

At a high level, MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) is a checklist that helps sales professionals to reveal the gaps in an opportunity and to execute properly to fill those gaps and close the deal or drop it early.