Pre-Sales: Zero to Hero — Qualification Frameworks

MOD 06

Qualification Frameworks

BANT tells you if a deal is worth a conversation. MEDDPICC and SPICED tell you if it's actually going to close.

BANT — the entry‑level filter

Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Fast and useful for triage, but shallow for complex enterprise deals: it says nothing about competition, internal politics, or how the decision actually gets made — which is exactly where most enterprise deals stall or die.

MEDDPICC — the enterprise standard

Letter	Stands for	The question it forces you to answer
M	Metrics	What quantified business outcome does this solution need to deliver, in the customer's own numbers?
E	Economic Buyer	Who actually has the authority to release the budget — and have you spoken to them directly, or only their delegate?
D	Decision Criteria	What formal and informal criteria will this be judged against, and did you help shape them or just receive them?
D	Decision Process	What are the actual steps, in order, from here to signature — including procurement, security review, legal?
P	Paper Process	What happens after the decision is made but before ink is dry — redlines, security questionnaires, procurement portals?
I	Implicate the Pain	Have you connected your specific solution to their specific, quantified pain — not pain in general?
C	Champion	Who has the power, credibility and personal motivation to sell this internally when you're not in the room?
C	Competition	What else are they considering — including "do nothing" — and why would they choose it over you?

MEDDIC is the original six‑letter version (no Competition); MEDDICC added Competition; MEDDPICC — now the most widely used form — adds Paper Process, because so many technically‑won deals stall for months in legal and security review. Use the full scorecard in Template 2 to score every open deal weekly; gaps in the scorecard are where the deal will stall, not the parts already filled in.

Where it came fromMEDDIC wasn't built by a consultant — it was built inside PTC in 1996 by Dick Dunkel, working with Jack Napoli under sales SVP John McMahon, specifically to fix a qualification problem that was costing PTC deals. It worked: PTC's sales grew from roughly $300M to $1B in the four years that followed. Paper Process and Competition were added later, by the wider field, for exactly the reason given above — the original six letters didn't cover why a technically‑won deal still stalls for months in legal.

SPICED — a lighter, momentum‑based alternative

Popularised by Winning by Design, SPICED asks the same underlying questions with a bias toward urgency and momentum, which suits shorter or mid‑market cycles better than MEDDPICC's heavier enterprise weight:

Situation — current state, tools, team structure
Pain — the specific problems in that current state
Impact — the measurable and human cost of leaving the pain unresolved
Critical Event — the deadline or trigger forcing a decision by a specific date
Decision — the people, process and criteria used to evaluate and approve

Which to useUse BANT to triage inbound volume fast. Use MEDDPICC on any deal above your team's "complex deal" threshold — multiple stakeholders, competitive, six figures plus. Use SPICED where your organisation already runs on it, or where cycles are short enough that MEDDPICC's overhead outweighs its value. They're not mutually exclusive: MEDDPICC's "Implicate the Pain" and SPICED's "Pain/Impact" are the same discipline wearing different letters.