meddpicc-scorecard

MEDDPICC Scorecard

Score one described deal against the eight MEDDPICC elements and say plainly what is missing, what is assumed rather than validated, and what the rep should go validate next.

The largest field study available (Ebsta x Pavilion 2023 benchmark, 3.2M opportunities across 364 companies) found:

• 61% of methodology-adopting companies chose MEDDPICC.
• Only 15% of opportunities were fully qualified.
• Only 5% of companies scored confidence per criterion.

The acronym is everywhere; the discipline is rare - that gap is "MEDDPICC theatre", and this scorecard is built to prevent it.

The whole scorecard runs on one axis: evidence, not presence. A letter is never scored on whether the rep can name something; it is scored on whether the buyer has done something observable to prove it.

The skill scores one deal at a time, gathers no new information itself, and grades only what the user reports, then tells them what to go validate next.

Two confidence distinctions run throughout and belong in the output:

• Whether a rule is published by the methodology or set by this skill.
• Whether a figure is an independent measurement or a vendor claim, a vendor's own correlational number never independently replicated.

Interview

Ask questions under these constraints:

• One question per message.
• Multiple-choice answers wherever possible.
• Skip anything the deal description already answers.

Two rounds:

Deal frame (right-sizing inputs, always first):

1. B2B, or considered high-ticket B2C (real estate, automotive, solar, remodel, private education, financial advisory - not impulse retail)?
2. Rough deal size (contract value or ACV), and how many people on the buying side are involved?
3. What stage is the deal at, how long has it been open, and who set the expected close date - the buyer or the rep?
4. Does the buyer's side involve formal procurement, security review, or legal redlines?
5. Does your team mandate its own MEDDPICC definitions or scale (second C, Implicate vs. Identify, weighting)? If yes, use theirs and note the mapping in the output.
6. By what date must this scorecard change something - this week's forecast call, the next deal review, or nothing dated?
7. Do you want a one-off read on this deal, or a re-scored record that compounds across reviews?
8. What is your effort ceiling before that date: how many buyer asks you can make, and how much of your champion's internal credit you can spend?

Questions 6-8 re-rank the next actions, not the scoring; which answer moves which action is in Closing the biggest gap.

Evidence collection (only for elements that survive right-sizing), one element per message:

9. For this element: what do you know, and what buyer-side artefact or event backs it - an email, a recorded call, a document you have seen, an intro that was made, a date or number the buyer supplied? "The buyer seems positive" is an answer; it scores accordingly.

Workflow

1. Run the deal-frame interview questions before any element questions.
2. Right-size (next section). Confirm the element list with the user before scoring anything.
3. Collect, per scored element, the rep's claim and the buyer-side evidence behind it.
4. Score each element on the 0-3 evidence ladder (Scoring section).
5. Challenge every 2 and 3: which artefact or event justifies it? No artefact named → drop the score to 1 and record why. Apply this anti-inflation rule without exception - self-scoring optimism is the documented failure the rule corrects - score levels need objective definitions, or an optimist and a pessimist grade the same deal differently.
6. Apply the two gates, compute the total, band the deal.
7. Name the single biggest gap: a failed gate first; otherwise the gap that buys the most verdict change per unit of effort (Closing the biggest gap).
8. Attach a next action to every element below 3, ordered by that same ratio. Single out the top one, phrased as a buyer-visible test - an ask the buyer either performs or refuses, so the answer is evidence either way.
9. Run the Quality gate; iterate until it passes.
10. Deliver the scorecard using references/scorecard-template.md.
11. If your harness has persistent memory, store the scorecard, its date, and each score's justifying artefact so the next run can re-score and show deltas - deals decay, so re-score at every deal review. Otherwise, end with a short recap the user can paste into their own deal record.

If you can browse the web, you may verify public facts a score depends on (the named Economic Buyer still holds the role; the competitor cited still sells the product); otherwise rely on the user's report and mark those facts "user-reported".

Right-size before scoring

Full MEDDPICC on every deal is over-engineering; scoring the wrong list is the first inflation. Which letters survive is itself a ranked menu - what scoring the letter costs against the verdict information it returns:

• value on a small deal (verdict change per letter scored): Champion > Implicate the Pain == Metrics > Decision Process > Competition > Decision Criteria > Paper Process
• effort (rep time plus the buyer questions the letter costs, most expensive first): Paper Process > Decision Process > Decision Criteria > Competition > Metrics == Implicate the Pain == Champion

Drop from the low-value, expensive end inward: Paper Process leaves first (the first element dropped in lightweight practice), then Decision Criteria, then Competition.

• Pain == Metrics: they are one answer from two directions: the costed consequence and the number the buyer owns arrive in the same sentence.
• Metrics, Pain and Champion tie at the cheap end and never drop: on a small deal each is a single question, and any two of them are unreadable without the third.
• Economic Buyer sits on neither line: it is a gate, and on small deals it merges into Champion instead of being dropped.

Fit bands:

• Roughly $100K+ contract value, 5+ stakeholders, formal procurement/security/legal path: score all 8.
• ~$25K-$100K, 2-5 stakeholders: drop Paper Process, unless procurement is known to be involved.
• Below ~$25K, 1-2 deciders, no procurement: Metrics + Implicate the Pain + Champion, adding Decision Process if any multi-step approval exists. Here the Economic Buyer and Champion usually collapse into one person - score them as one letter and say so.
• High-ticket B2C: see the B2B and B2C section; right-size aggressively.

Never score an element that was right-sized out; the denominator shrinks with the element list, and a dropped element earns no next action either.

The eight elements and their evidence bar

Element	What it means (this skill's chosen definition)	Validated (3) looks like	Assumed (1) looks like
Metrics	The quantified outcome the buyer expects, as a number they own	A figure the buyer supplied in their own words	"They want efficiency"; a rep-built ROI never confirmed
Economic Buyer	The one person with discretionary spend authority and veto	A held meeting with the named EB confirming the case	"My contact says the CFO is on board"
Decision Criteria	The technical, economic, and relationship standards used to compare options	Criteria the buyer wrote down or confirmed, proof mapped	A feature list or RFP sheet treated as neutral criteria
Decision Process	Who decides what, in what order, by when (technical validation + business approval)	A mutual action plan the buyer co-edited	A close date the rep invented; "they said Q3"
Paper Process	Everything between verbal yes and signature: legal, procurement, security	A mapped path with named owners and timelines	"Procurement is just a formality"
Implicate the Pain	The problem made costed and owned; the cost of inaction	Buyer states the specific costed consequence of not solving	A surface pain with no cost attached
Champion	Power + personal stake + sells internally when you're absent	The contact has acted: EB intro, shared criteria, presented internally	A friendly contact who hasn't and maybe can't act
Competition	Every alternative: rivals, internal build, other initiatives, inertia	Buyer articulates the alternatives; a win plan positions against each	"We're the only one they're looking at"

Contested definitions - this skill's positions, to be overridden by the user's team standard when one exists:

• The second C is Competition, including inertia/do-nothing (the methodology publisher's official position); some teams use Compelling Event or Closing instead.
• A compelling event is a thread running through every element, not its own letter; its honest absence is deal intelligence, never something to manufacture.
• Pain means Implicate the Pain: identify the problem, indicate its broader impact, implicate the buyer in the costed consequence.
• The optional "P for Partner" variant is not scored here.

Per-letter evidence exemplars, red flags, and the questions that move a letter up the ladder are in references/element-evidence-bar.md - read it before scoring.

Scoring

The evidence ladder, per element:

Score	RAG	Label	Bar
0	Red	Unknown	No information at all
1	Red	Assumed	The rep believes it; no buyer-side evidence
2	Amber	Stated	The buyer said it - in a meeting, call, or email
3	Green	Validated	The buyer demonstrated it: an intro made, a document seen, a date committed, a number they supplied

Where the scale comes from: the red/amber/green convention comes from Andy Whyte's book, confirmed as the book's own core scoring mechanism rather than one option among several. The 0-3 evidence ladder is a documented practitioner variant rather than official methodology doctrine, and this skill adopts it and defines each rung precisely above. Per-letter weighting is configurable and practice-dependent, never canonical - this skill weights all elements equally and says so in the output; if the user's team weights differently, use theirs.

Aggregate: total = sum of element scores; percentage = total / (3 × elements scored). Bands:

• ≥80% and both gates passed - Forecast-ready. Evidence supports committing the deal (anchor: a documented practitioner threshold of 20+/24). Still re-score at every review.
• 55-79% - Real but gapped. The deal is live but not commit-grade; work the listed gaps before forecasting it.
• 30-54% - Under-qualified. Not forecastable. Late-stage deals in this band are a coaching trigger (a documented sub-16/24 late-stage trigger).
• <30% - Not qualified. Re-qualify from discovery or disqualify. Disqualification is a valid outcome of this skill, not a failure.

Gates - two letters cap the verdict regardless of total. The emphasis on both letters is the methodology's; the cap mechanic is this skill's, not published doctrine:

• Champion ≤1 → verdict capped at Under-qualified. "No Champion, no deal".
• Economic Buyer = 0 → verdict capped at Under-qualified. A champion unwilling or unable to introduce the EB is a major red flag that also questions whether the champion is real.

Place borderline scores with the sourced maturity ladders:

• Metrics: M1 (outcomes delivered for other customers) → M2 (personalized to this prospect) → M3 (validated post-go-live). A buyer-confirmed M2 scores a 3. A recited M1 scores a 1.
• Champion: Contact → Coach → Champion.
• Economic Buyer: unknown → Access (intro committed, not held) → Sponsorship (met, case confirmed). Access scores a 2. Sponsorship scores a 3.

Never present vendor outcome claims ("18% higher win rates / 24% larger deals / 26% shorter cycles", "forecast accuracy to 95%") as expected results - unreplicated vendor claims; the quarantine list is in references/vendor-claim-quarantine.md.

Closing the biggest gap

Every element below 3 generates a next action, and they all compete for one scarce thing: the asks this rep can make of this buyer before the next checkpoint. Rank them by verdict change bought per unit of effort.

Effort here is never money. It is:

• Rep hours.
• Calendar latency.
• How much of the champion's internal credit the ask spends.
• Whether a refused ask can be re-asked.

The eight candidate asks:

• Champion test
• EB meeting
• Pain cost
• Buyer's metric
• Decision-process plan
• Criteria write-down
• Paper-process map
• Do-nothing probe

The ordering below is this skill's, not published doctrine; effort is stated as orders of magnitude rather than figures.

• value (how much closing it moves the band): champion test > EB meeting > pain cost == buyer's metric > decision-process plan > paper-process map > do-nothing probe > criteria write-down
• effort (most expensive first): EB meeting > paper-process map > decision-process plan > criteria write-down > champion test == pain cost == buyer's metric == do-nothing probe
• efficiency (the default order to work): champion test > pain cost == buyer's metric > do-nothing probe > decision-process plan > criteria write-down > EB meeting > paper-process map

Magnitudes, never figures:

• Near-zero: champion test, pain cost, buyer's metric, do-nothing probe - one question on a call already in the diary.
• An hour to draft plus a week waiting for the buyer to return it: decision-process plan, criteria write-down.
• A week and a second introduction: paper-process map.
• A week or more of calendar, plus the champion's credit to arrange it, and it cannot be un-asked: EB meeting.

The champion test leads on value because it is the ask that produces the others: a champion who acts books the EB meeting, and one who refuses is a coach, which caps the deal anyway. The four near-zero asks tie on eff

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