Qualification frameworks

Qualification means systematically testing whether an opportunity is real, winnable and worth the effort — turning "they seemed interested" into evidence. Interviewers ask about frameworks by name: learn the letters and what each is for.

BANT — the classic four

Coined at IBM decades ago; still the vocabulary many managers reach for.

• B — Budget: money allocated, or a realistic path to it?
• A — Authority: are you talking to someone who can decide, or who leads you to them?
• N — Need: a problem your product genuinely solves?
• T — Timeline: when do they intend to act?

Limits: BANT tests whether the prospect is ready-made, not whether you can win.

• Enterprise budget often doesn't exist until a champion builds the business case — so "no budget" at first contact means little.
• There's no letter for competition, champion or decision process.
• It invites crass box-ticking ("what's your budget?") too early.

Fine as a fast filter on transactional deals and inbound triage; too shallow for complex sales — say exactly that in interviews and you'll sound experienced.

MEDDIC and MEDDPICC — the enterprise standard

MEDDIC was developed at PTC in the 1990s; MEDDPICC adds two letters. It dominates enterprise software — including many life-science software companies — because it's a checklist of the things that kill complex deals: not a conversation script, but a lens for inspecting deal health. Every letter, with life-sciences illustrations:

• M — Metrics. The quantified outcomes the customer will get. Not "improves efficiency" but "sample processing from 4 days to 1, saving ~£250k/year". Metrics turn a preference into a business case the economic buyer can defend.
• E — Economic buyer. As in section 1: the person with the money and final authority. The letter forces the question: identified, and do we have access? A deal where you've never met the economic buyer is a deal you're guessing about.
• D — Decision criteria. The formal and informal standards vendors are judged against: "integrates with our LIMS API, ISO 27001, UKCA- or CE-marked and MHRA-registered as a medical device, clinicians rate usability ≥4/5 in pilot". Great sellers don't just discover the criteria — they influence them early to favour their strengths.
• D — Decision process. The steps, people and dates by which the decision gets made: pilot → evaluation report → clinical safety review (in the NHS, DCB0160 — the clinical-risk-management standard for health IT) → information governance and DPIA (data protection impact assessment) → procurement, possibly via a framework (a pre-tendered NHS purchasing route) → board sign-off. If you can't write this list with dates, you can't forecast the deal.
• P — Paper process (MEDDPICC). The contracting path after "yes": legal review, data-processing agreements, security questionnaires, purchase orders. In healthcare this routinely adds months; deals slip not on a "no" but on unmapped paperwork. Ask: "once we're selected, what has to happen before a signature?"
• I — Identify pain. The concrete, costly problem driving action, with a number attached. "Radiology backlog" is a topic; "1,800 unreported scans, breaching the 28-day cancer standard, locum reporting at £40k/month" is pain. No pain, no deal.
• C — Champion. As in section 1. The tests: real influence? Personal win if it succeeds? Have you armed them (business case, answers, deck) to fight for you in rooms you'll never enter?
• C — Competition (MEDDPICC). Everyone you're up against — rival vendors, "build in-house", and the most common enemy: do nothing (the status quo). If you don't know who else is in, you may be the column-filler in someone else's evaluation.

Why MEDDPICC dominates enterprise: every letter names a common way complex deals die — no business case, no access to power, criteria written by a competitor, unmapped process, paperwork stalls, weak pain, no champion, unseen competition — and it gives managers a shared inspection language ("where are we on the economic buyer?"), which is why job adverts name it explicitly.

If you learn one framework deeply, make it this one.

Voice from the field

"Found business pain creates opportunity. Quantified business pain drives higher price points. Implicated business pain drives urgency."
— John McMahon, The Qualified Sales Leader (2021)

SPICED — the recurring-revenue reframe

SPICED (from the consultancy Winning by Design) is popular in SaaS companies (SaaS — software sold on subscription), because subscription businesses only succeed if the customer keeps succeeding after the sale:

• S — Situation: the customer's current context and setup.
• P — Pain: the problems that context creates.
• I — Impact: what solving them is worth, quantified — the bridge from pain to business case.
• CE — Critical Event: the deadline that forces a decision by a date (one element, two letters — see section 6).
• D — Decision: how, and by whom, the decision will be made.

SPICED's distinctive contribution is Impact: it centres the customer's outcome, suiting land-and-expand SaaS and post-sales roles (account management, customer success) — worth knowing if those roles are on your target list.

CHAMP — needs-first BANT

• CH — Challenges: what problems are they facing? (Lead here, not with budget.)
• A — Authority: who's involved in deciding?
• M — Money: can funding be found if the challenge justifies it?
• P — Prioritisation: where does this rank against everything else they could do?

CHAMP suits earlier-stage, SDR-style qualification (an SDR — sales development representative — prospects and qualifies before handing to an AE; many entry-level BD roles in life sciences are this shape). Its insight — challenges before budget — repairs BANT's worst habit.

Voice from the field

"Making the field salespeople do cold calls means having your highest-cost (per hour) sales resource perform the lowest-value (per hour) activity."
— Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler, Predictable Revenue (2011)

When each fits

Worked MEDDPICC scorecard — fictional but realistic deal

Selling "Meridian CXR", an imaging-AI triage platform, to the fictional Thamesway NHS Foundation Trust. Each letter scored red/amber/green (RAG); the lesson: a deal can feel good and still be amber where it matters.

Reading it: pain and champion are green — the deal is real. But the metrics are our numbers not theirs, we've met the economic buyer once, and committee dates float — so it isn't yet forecastable.

Next actions fall straight out of the letters:

• get trust finance to validate the savings model (M)
• secure a second CDIO meeting (E)
• pin committee dates into a mutual plan (D-process)

That's how the framework is used: re-inspected at every stage, each gap generating the next action.

Field note

In practice, most companies that "run MEDDPICC" run it as eight mandatory CRM fields, filled in the night before the forecast call to keep the manager happy — which tells you nothing, because a rep can type "Dr Nair" into the Champion box without ever having tested her. The difference between MEDDPICC-as-religion and MEDDPICC-as-paperwork is whether the letters generate questions you ask the customer or text you type for your manager. Interviewers who came up in genuine MEDDPICC shops can hear the difference within a minute, so practise talking through a live deal, not reciting the acronym.