Most buyers struggle to tell vendors apart. Your competitive edge won’t come from better qualification. It will come from how brilliantly you shape opportunities.
But here’s a troubling trend: Sales teams are wielding MEDDICC—a fantastic qualification framework—like a discovery tool. It’s a bit like using a microscope to find your car keys. And it’s burning revenue.
We’ve studied hundreds of B2B deals, and the data is stark: This approach is toxic to value creation. When sellers jump straight to qualification, they misalign with buyers 54.5 percent of the time. In lost deals, this misalignment is even worse, plummeting to 77 percent. It’s like starting a first date with, “So, what’s your credit score?”
Every deal presents two distinct challenges: creating magic and measuring merit. Blur these lines, and you’ll muddy both waters.
Discovery is outward-facing—it’s about understanding and shaping how buyers see their challenges. Through strategic questioning and insight-led dialogue, you help buyers recognize the full scope of their problem and envision a compelling future state.
Qualification, by contrast, is inward-facing. It’s about evaluating whether an opportunity is worth pursuing based on your ability to win and deliver value. Good qualification helps you focus resources on the right deals and avoid costly pursuits that are likely to end in “no decision.”
This is where MEDDICC shines—but only after you’ve done the heavy lifting of discovery. Using MEDDICC too early is like sizing the wedding ring before the first coffee date.
Picture true discovery for a moment. While MEDDICC helps you size up known opportunities, discovery is where you craft value from thin air. It happens through three critical moves:
Research shows these discovery activities dramatically improve win rates because they help you:
MEDDICC can’t pull off any of these magic tricks because it assumes the opportunity is already sitting there, gift-wrapped. It’s built to evaluate deals, not conjure them from scratch.
Skip discovery for quick qualification, and you’ll pay a steep price.
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Instead of a value-creating conversation about their business challenges, they get interrogated with qualification questions:
Lead with this interrogation, and you’re setting yourself up for three spectacular failures:
Lead with MEDDICC, and you’re essentially telling buyers, “Your budget matters more to me than your business challenges.”
But lead with discovery, and you show buyers you’re invested in solving their real problems—long before you even think about their purchasing process.
Here’s the truth: When sellers nail problem statement alignment with their buyers, our research shows that win rates increase by 68 percent. Yet deals are three times more likely to die on the vine when sellers fail to create this clarity—and MEDDICC alone can’t build that bridge.
Your path to victory? Keep discovery and qualification in their own lanes. Your skill at shaping opportunities through strategic discovery isn’t just another sales trick—it’s the difference between being a vendor and being invaluable.
Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions, is the sought after expert on evidence-based revenue growth using counterintuitive approaches. Known for his candid thought leadership and engaging keynotes, he’s spent decades testing and refining go-to-market strategies that put buyers squarely at the center. Tim is the author of four insightful books, including Customer Message Management, Conversations that Win the Complex Sale, The Three Value Conversations, and The Expansion Sale.
