MEDDPICC Qualification Checklist + CRM Field Kit

Who this is for

MEDDPICC earns its overhead on complex B2B deals: contract value above roughly $15k, more than one stakeholder, cycles of two months or longer, and a procurement or legal step before signature. It is for sellers and founders who keep getting surprised at the end of the quarter, sales leaders who want "commit" to mean something, and anyone building an AI pipeline agent that needs a machine-checkable definition of "qualified" - eight named fields are exactly that.

Use it at two moments: as a stage gate and as the backbone of a weekly pipeline review. It is not a discovery script - it is a scorecard for what discovery actually produced.

Credit: MEDDIC originated at PTC in the 1990s, credited to Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli; MEDDPICC adds Paper process and Competition, popularized by Andy Whyte and the MEDDICC community.

The eight elements

Element	The question	Evidence that counts
M - Metrics	What quantified outcome does the buyer expect?	A number with a baseline and a timeframe, stated by the buyer
E - Economic buyer	Who can spend discretionary budget on this?	Name, title, and a direct conversation with them
D - Decision criteria	What will vendors be judged on?	A written list - technical, commercial, legal - ideally shaped by you
D - Decision process	What steps and people stand between evaluation and yes?	Named steps with owners and dates
P - Paper process	What happens between yes and signature?	Security review, MSA redlines, procurement portal, vendor onboarding - mapped
I - Identify pain	What does doing nothing cost them?	Pain admitted by the buyer, in their words, with a cost attached
C - Champion	Who sells for you when you are not in the room?	Someone with power who has taken a visible risk for the deal
C - Competition	Who else is in the deal, including status quo?	Named alternatives and where you stand against each

Four of these kill more deals than the other four combined:

Metrics. "Improve efficiency" is not a metric. The test: could your champion repeat the number to their CFO and survive the follow-up question? If the metric came from your deck rather than their mouth, score it as a hypothesis.

Economic buyer. The most common self-deception in pipeline reviews is promoting the most senior person on your calls to economic buyer. The EB is whoever can say yes after everyone else has said no. If you have never spoken to them, you do not have this letter.

Paper process. One of the two letters MEDDPICC adds over classic MEDDIC (the other is Competition), and where "done deals" slip a quarter. Map it before the verbal yes: who owns the security questionnaire, how long legal takes on redlines, whether procurement batches vendor setup monthly. Ask the champion to walk you through the last purchase like this one - the answer is the map.

Champion. A champion is not someone who likes you; that is a coach. The test is risk: have they introduced you to the economic buyer, shared internal numbers, or defended the project in a meeting you were not in? No risk taken, no champion.

Scoring: 0-24

Score every element 0-3. Resist finer scales - the point is to make "we do not actually know this" visible, not to produce false precision.

Score	Meaning	Test
0	Unknown	Nothing in the CRM field
1	Hypothesis	Your read, never validated with the buyer
2	Validated	Buyer confirmed it verbally on a call
3	Evidenced	Written or behavioral proof: an email, a document, an intro that happened

Thresholds that hold up in practice: below 8, it is not a deal yet - keep it out of the forecast. 8-15 is a real opportunity with homework attached; the missing letters are your next-call agenda. 16-19 is forecastable. 20+ is commit-grade. Two operating rules do most of the work: no deal advances past proposal below 12, and any deal whose score has not moved in two weeks gets discussed by name. Score velocity beats score level - a 10 that was a 6 last week is healthier than a 16 that has sat still for a month.

When MEDDPICC is overkill

A framework nobody fills in is worse than no framework. Skip MEDDPICC when deals close under ~$10k, cycles run under 30 days, or one person decides alone - there is no committee to map and no paper process to survive, so eight fields of ceremony just rot. Use BANT for fast disqualification or a simple 0-100 lead score for volume triage; if your motion is recurring-revenue driven, SPICED is often the better fit. MEDDPICC pays for itself exactly where deals are expensive to lose late: multi-stakeholder, multi-month, procurement-gated.

The CRM field kit

Eight deal-level custom fields, one per letter, prefixed meddpicc_ so agents find them by convention. They are text fields on purpose: qualification data is evidence, not enums. Store the score inside the value with a "score: evidence" convention - for example "3: CFO email 6/12 confirming $400k/yr toil cost" - so the rubric and the proof sit in one glance.

Each object in the array below is a valid POST /v1/fields body in Relm's API - register them once and every deal accepts the keys under custom_fields:

[
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_metrics","label":"Metrics (quantified impact)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_economic_buyer","label":"Economic buyer (name, title, met?)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_decision_criteria","label":"Decision criteria","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_decision_process","label":"Decision process (steps, owners, dates)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_paper_process","label":"Paper process (legal + procurement path)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_pain","label":"Identified pain (cost of doing nothing)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_champion","label":"Champion (name + proof of advocacy)","data_type":"text"},
  {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_competition","label":"Competition (incl. status quo)","data_type":"text"}
]

Want a roll-up number for dashboards? Add a ninth field: {"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_score","label":"MEDDPICC score (0-24)","data_type":"number"}. The same eight keys map one-to-one to custom properties in HubSpot or Salesforce - the kit is portable, this JSON just makes Relm the fastest place to install it.

Apply it with your agent

Point any MCP client (Claude, or anything speaking MCP) at https://api.relmcrm.com/mcp with your relm_live_ key and paste this prompt. It installs the kit if needed, audits every open deal, and turns gaps into next actions:

You are my pipeline qualification auditor. My CRM is Relm
(MCP: https://api.relmcrm.com/mcp - use the relm_* tools).

1. Read the schema and confirm these eight deal custom fields exist:
   meddpicc_metrics, meddpicc_economic_buyer, meddpicc_decision_criteria,
   meddpicc_decision_process, meddpicc_paper_process, meddpicc_pain,
   meddpicc_champion, meddpicc_competition. Register any missing ones
   (object "deal", data_type "text").
2. List every pipeline and its stages. Treat won/lost-type terminal
   stages as closed; every other stage is open.
3. Page through all open deals. For each deal, read custom_fields and
   count how many of the eight meddpicc_ keys are filled (non-empty).
4. Report one table sorted by value_cents descending: deal title, stage,
   value, filled count (n/8), and the missing letters spelled out.
5. Flag every deal past the proposal stage with fewer than 6/8 filled
   as "at risk - do not forecast".
6. Ask me before writing anything. On my approval, log one activity per
   flagged deal (type "note", deal_id set) listing the missing elements
   and, for each, the single question to ask the buyer next.

Prefer REST? One field is a single call, and test mode (relm_test_ keys) lets you rehearse the audit against an isolated dataset for free:

curl https://api.relmcrm.com/v1/fields \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer relm_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"object":"deal","key":"meddpicc_champion","label":"Champion (name + proof of advocacy)","data_type":"text"}'

From there, make it a cadence: run it before your weekly review alongside the daily pipeline review agent prompt, and hand qualified deals to your follow-up sequences.

FAQ

What is the difference between MEDDIC and MEDDPICC?

MEDDIC covers Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain and Champion. MEDDPICC adds Paper process (the legal and procurement path to signature) and Competition. For enterprise deals the two additions matter: paper process is where committed deals slip quarters, and competition includes the status quo, which is usually the real rival.

How do I score a deal with MEDDPICC?

Score each of the eight elements 0-3: 0 means unknown, 1 means your own hypothesis, 2 means the buyer confirmed it verbally, 3 means you have written or behavioral evidence. The total runs 0-24. Deals under 8 stay out of the forecast, 16 or higher is forecastable, and 20 or higher is commit-grade. Trend matters more than the absolute number - a deal whose score has not moved in two weeks is stalled.

When is MEDDPICC overkill?

Skip it for transactional sales - deals under roughly $10k, cycles under 30 days, or a single decision-maker. The overhead of maintaining eight fields exceeds the value when there is no committee, no procurement and no paper process. Use BANT or a simple lead score there instead.

Do I need Relm to use this checklist?

No. The framework and the scoring rubric work on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in any CRM that supports custom fields. The field kit on this page is formatted for Relm's API because that makes it a two-minute setup for an AI agent, but the eight field names map one-to-one to properties in HubSpot or Salesforce.

Should the rep or the AI agent fill in MEDDPICC fields?

The rep supplies the facts; the agent does the bookkeeping. A good pattern is to paste call notes to an agent that extracts MEDDPICC evidence, updates the deal's custom fields, and logs the gaps as an activity - the audit prompt on this page does exactly that.