MEDDIC, MEDDICC, and MEDDPICC are three versions of the same sales qualification framework. They give you a checklist for judging whether a deal is real, winnable, and worth your team's time, so you can spot the gaps before you commit hours to an opportunity that was never going to close.
They differ only in how many checks they include. MEDDIC is the original six-part version. MEDDICC adds a seventh check, Competition. MEDDPICC adds an eighth, the Paper process. You'll also see MEDDPICC misspelled as medpicc or medpick. They're the same framework, and Google treats them as the same search.
Why it matters: research by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, drawn from 2.5 million sales calls, found that between 40 percent and 60 percent of deals end in no decision rather than a loss to a competitor. Most deals don't die because a rival wins. They stall because the buyer is unsure. A qualification framework exists to catch those stalls early, while you can still do something about them.
This guide covers all three. We start with the six MEDDIC components, then show what MEDDICC and MEDDPICC add, and how agencies use the framework to qualify and win new business.
A short history
MEDDIC was created in the 1990s by Jack Napoli and Dick Dunkel at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), where it helped drive a long run of rapid sales growth. It became one of the most widely adopted qualification frameworks in enterprise sales, and it's still maintained today by training companies like MEDDICC. MEDDICC and MEDDPICC came later as extensions, adding checks for the parts of a complex deal that the original six didn't cover.
MEDDIC: the six core components
Metrics
The numbers the client wants to move. Revenue, cost, pipeline, retention, brand awareness. If you can't name the metric your work will improve, you can't prove your value later.
Economic buyer
The person with final authority over the budget. In an agency pitch this is often not the person in the room. Your day-to-day contact may love you, but if the CMO or a procurement lead signs the contract, you need access to them.
Decision criteria
The factors the client uses to choose between options. Creative quality, price, sector experience, chemistry, speed. Knowing the criteria lets you shape your pitch around what actually wins the account, and it helps you judge whether the prospect even fits your ideal client profile before you invest in pitching.
Decision process
The steps and timeline the client follows to reach a decision. Who's on the panel, how many rounds, when they want to start. This tells you whether a deal will close this quarter or slip.
Identify pain
The real reason the client is looking. A campaign that underdelivered, an incumbent agency that went quiet, a launch with no plan. Pain drives urgency, and urgency is what gets deals signed. The trick is to listen for what the client actually means, not just what they say, because miscommunication with clients is where pitches quietly go wrong.
Champion
Your internal advocate. The person who wants you to win and will sell for you when you're not in the room. A champion has influence and a personal stake in the outcome. A friendly contact with neither isn't a champion.
MEDDICC: add Competition
MEDDICC keeps all six MEDDIC components and adds one more.
Competition
Everyone else in the running: other agencies on the shortlist, the incumbent, and the option of keeping the work in-house. Understanding the alternatives lets you position against them honestly, and it's where a sharp, well-prepared sales pitch earns its keep, rather than finding out at the final round that you were never the front-runner.
MEDDPICC: add the Paper process
MEDDPICC is the most complete version. It keeps the seven MEDDICC components and adds an eighth.
Paper process
The admin required to sign: master service agreement, procurement, legal, security review, onboarding. Surfacing this early stops a won pitch from stalling for six weeks in a contracts queue.
So the full eight letters of MEDDPICC are: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Paper process, Identify pain, Champion, and Competition.
Which version should you use?
MEDDIC (6 checks): straightforward deals where you mainly need to qualify the opportunity and find your champion
MEDDICC (7 checks): competitive situations where you're up against other vendors or agencies
MEDDPICC (8 checks): complex deals with formal procurement, legal review, or several competitors, which is most agency pitches
For agency new business, MEDDPICC is usually the right fit. Procurement and contracting (the Paper process) and the agencies you're up against (Competition) are too important to leave out.
MEDDPICC vs BANT and other frameworks
MEDDPICC isn't the only way to qualify a deal. The best known alternative is BANT, which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Popularised by IBM, it's the lightweight, four-question version: does the prospect have the money, the authority to spend it, a real need, and a timeline to act.
The difference is depth. BANT is quick, which makes it useful for an early, high-volume check on inbound leads. MEDDPICC is slower and far more thorough, which makes it the better fit once a deal is real and competitive. BANT can wave through an opportunity that MEDDPICC would flag. A prospect can have budget and a deadline but still have no internal champion, no clear decision process, and three rival agencies you haven't accounted for.
You'll also come across frameworks like CHAMP and SPICED, which reorder similar ideas. For agency new business, a sensible approach is to use BANT as a fast first-call filter, then switch to MEDDPICC once a prospect becomes a serious pitch.
How to score a deal
Most teams turn the letters into a simple scorecard and rate each one:
Green: you know it and have it confirmed
Yellow: you have a partial answer or an assumption
Red: you don't know
Any red or yellow is an open risk. The point isn't a perfect score. It's an honest picture of where the deal is weak, so you know what to chase before the next conversation. Run the scorecard in pipeline reviews and you'll spend less time on deals that were never going to land.
How agencies use it to win new business
A pitch is a complex sale: several stakeholders, a formal process, real money, and competitors. That's the exact situation this framework was built for.
Most of the answers come straight out of your discovery and pitch calls. Run your client meetings well and the information surfaces naturally: the client tells you their pain, names the panel, hints at the budget holder, and lists who else they're talking to. The hard part is capturing all of it accurately while you're also running the conversation, then making sure your whole team can see it. And once you win, a strong kickoff meeting carries that same context into delivery.
Where Supernormal fits
Sales reps spend just 28 percent of their time actually selling, according to Salesforce's State of Sales report. The rest goes on admin, data entry, and writing things up. That's the gap Supernormal closes.
Supernormal captures your discovery and pitch calls without a bot joining the meeting, so the conversation stays professional and you stay present in it. After the call, its AI agents turn the discussion into your notes, follow-ups, and next steps, surfacing the qualification detail that came up: the metrics the client cares about, who signs off, the pain behind the search, and the competitors in the mix.
That means your scorecard fills itself from real conversations instead of half-remembered notes, and everyone working the account sees the same picture. You stop doing the write-up and start reviewing what matters. From the same call, Supernormal can also draft the follow-up email after a discovery call or the proposal, ready for you to polish and send. It's the kind of context-aware help AI agents built for agencies are made for.
