The Origins of MEDDIC
As JFK stated in 1961, “...Victory Has 100 Fathers and Defeat Is an Orphan...”.
Recently, there has been quite a spike in interest around MEDDIC.
For many years I was in Sales Development at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) where the term MEDDIC was first coined. During my time at PTC, I conservatively estimate that approximately 3,000 customer-facing employees learned MEDDIC with me by way of company educational events.
Consequently, many people associate me with MEDDIC’s origin.
For the record, and many people have heard this before, I haven't had an original thought in my life.
Therefore in a few paragraphs I’ll offer up a bit of background on the origins of MEDDIC.
My 18.5 years at PTC came with many roles and rewards. Some financial, some career advancement, and some in quota carrying-roles. I earned my way to 8 Presidents Clubs which was the ultimate “badge of accomplishment” among my peers. However, the most gratifying “take away” for me was all the learning.
It's all the reading, observing of best practices of some of the greatest sales talent on the planet, and the coaching I've received. You’ll always learn more from me by what I did wrong than what I did right. I truly stand on the shoulders of “sales giants” when I engage in any of the sales education endeavors that I’m blessed to be involved with.
I believe John McMahon (and anyone else from PTC at the time) will agree with the following:
MEDDIC/MEDDICC/MEDDPICC is John McMahon’s sales brain codified;
Dick Dunkel was the first to write it down;
And then Dick and Jack told everybody at PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation) about it.
So that being said, the actual "biological" father of MEDDIC is Dick Dunkel.
I just witnessed the "birth" of MEDDIC when Dick wrote it on the white board for the first time. Hence some people refer to my role as "godfather" of the MEDDIC process.
MEDDIC originated under the PTC leadership team of Sam Geisberg (the genius who created Pro/Engineer which obviously contributed handsomely to making many of our selling efforts fruitful), Steve Walske (our CEO at the time), Dick Harrison (our illustrious CRO), and Mike McGuiness (VP of Sales)—all of whom had a relentless commitment to prioritize, budget, and fund sales education.
Among other things, this leadership team had tasked Dick Dunkel and I to do the following:
Create an onboarding program. That included New Hire Training, along with a couple of “boot camps” that “stress tested” the reps for the “white hot” selling efforts demanded by the CAD/CAM market we were selling into. This culminated in the reps who “made it” to attend Anne Gary's Advance Sales Training Program, as PTC wanted to ensure that the reps were “worthy” of the world class content Anne had developed. Editorial comment: There were two types of reps at PTC – 1) rich and 2) new.
Document our sales process. We credit John Helm, Grant Wilson, and a host of others with truly formulating the sales process. Again, it was Dick Dunkel and I being tasked with stopping and writing down the "ephemeral" undefined/undocumented “best practices” of the over quota performers and then telling the others. TRY THIS.
Author and execute a “Demo Tour”. Dick Dunkel, Pete Tyrell, Kelley Land, Matherki Onishi, Ed Reid, myself and every Sales Manager in the company at the time delivered “The Demo Tour” in 17 cities around the world. We invested many hours in making sure we were consistent in our discovery efforts, targeting our messaging to critical customer pain points, and demoing what was most important to the prospect.
These were a few of the undertakings that led us as a company, as the saying goes: “to execute our sales process like an 18th century hangman”.
This is just a brief excerpt on the origins of MEDDIC.