As an executive coach with a background in International Business Development, I coach a number of leaders in sales. MEDDIC is a well know framework that helps people learn to excel in sales qualification. Oddly enough it has quite a number of similarities to what we do in the coaching process when we help executives think through issues strategically and communicate effectively.
Imagine a client who needs to make an important decision. Here are some of the questions that could be raised during the coaching session. Notice how each one corresponds to a part of the qualification framework:
👉(M) What is the potential benefit to you? Your team? Your org? What will you get out of it? Can you quantify or measurable the potential gain?
👉(E) Who is ultimately responsible for making the decision? Who will be held accountable? What influence and/or control can you have over the decision? If money is involved, do you control the funds or do you need to enter into agreement with someone else who does in order to move forward?
👉(D) Is there a pre-established process you must go through in order to reach your goal? What does that look like? How can you best manage the process in terms of time and efficiency to reach your goal?
👉(D) What is the evaluation criteria? What can you do to be clear on that in order to start creating a plan to meet or maybe even exceed the criteria that you will be evaluated on? How can you use this criteria to manage expectations?
👉(I) Is there a real problem here that needs to be solved? Is this just a nice to have or is this something that will have a greater impact? If so on whom, in what way and how big? What problem are you solving by taking decision x and what are the possible outcomes and adjacent effects.
👉(C) Do you have the needed support and if so is it from the right people?
Just like MEDDIC helps sales professionals assess the level of qualification and the degree of confidence in their sales forecast, the framework applied to coaching will lead a person to assess where they are in a decision or in a process and will allow them to identify gaps and gain more control over the outcome.
Darius Lahoutifard is author of the book “ always be qualifying” and the MEDDIC framework he shaped while at the software company PTC.
#coaching#leadership#sales#framework
originally published on linkedIn
