Deal Qualification Scorer

What qualification is actually for

Qualification is the discipline of deciding, early and on evidence, whether a deal can close and whether it is worth your time. It is not a form to fill in for the CRM. It is the set of questions whose answers predict the forecast, and the honest reason most forecasts miss is that those questions were never asked, or were asked once in month one and never revisited.

The word that matters is disqualify. A rep who qualifies well closes more by chasing less. Every hour spent on a deal with no budget, no compelling event and no access to the person who signs is an hour not spent on the one that could close this quarter. The scorer above is built to find the gap, because the gap is the thing that is going to stall the deal, and you would rather know now.

BANT and MEDDIC are the two frameworks almost every B2B team uses. They answer different questions. BANT asks whether this buyer can buy. MEDDIC asks how the buying will actually happen.

BANT: the four questions and how to ask them

BANT comes from IBM and has survived because it is simple. Four letters, four questions, and a rep can run it in the first call.

• Budget. Not "do you have budget" but "how have you funded projects like this before?" and "if this is as useful as you hope, where would the money come from?". A buyer with no answer is not lying; they genuinely have not thought about it, which tells you the deal is early.
• Authority. "Who else would need to be involved in a decision like this?" and, more usefully, "who could stop it?". The person you are talking to will usually say they decide. They usually do not.
• Need. Have they described a specific problem, in their own words, that your product solves? If you suggested the problem and they agreed, that is not need; that is politeness.
• Timing. "What happens if this is not solved by the end of the year?" If the answer is "nothing really", there is no timing, however keen they sound.

MEDDIC: six questions for complex deals

MEDDIC was developed at PTC in the 1990s for enterprise software sales with long cycles and many stakeholders. It is heavier than BANT and deliberately so.

• Metrics. The economic impact in the customer's numbers: "we lose about 40 hours a week to manual dispatch", not "it would save time". Without metrics you cannot justify a price, and procurement will treat you like any other vendor.
• Economic buyer. The person who controls the money and can override everyone else. You have to meet them. A champion telling you "I'll handle Pat" is the deal's most common point of failure.
• Decision criteria. The list the customer will judge vendors against. If you do not know it, a competitor probably wrote it.
• Decision process. The literal steps: security review, legal, procurement, board approval, and who owns each. "We should have it signed next week" means nothing without this.
• Identify pain. The problem, its cost and its urgency. MEDDIC pushes you past "they have a problem" to "doing nothing is no longer acceptable to them".
• Champion. Someone with influence who wants you to win and will sell for you in meetings you are not in. A friendly contact is not a champion; a champion has something to gain and takes risks for you.

BANT vs MEDDIC: which one to use

Many teams run both: BANT to decide whether a lead becomes an opportunity, MEDDIC to run the opportunity. That is a sensible default if your deal sizes vary.

Worked example: scoring a real deal

Here is a deal as a rep might describe it in a pipeline review, and what running it through MEDDIC does to it.

Qualification mistakes that show up in the forecast

• Ticking boxes on assumption. "They must have budget, they are a big company." The scorer only works if you tick what you have heard the customer say.
• Qualifying once. A deal that was fully qualified in March has had a reorg, a budget freeze and a new CFO since. Re-run it at every stage change.
• Confusing enthusiasm with a champion. Liking you is not the same as having something at stake.
• Letting the champion gatekeep the economic buyer. "I'll take it to Pat" is where deals go to wait.
• Accepting a problem without a cost. Unquantified pain loses to "let's revisit next quarter" every time.
• Never asking who could say no. Legal, security and procurement are not stages; they are people with a veto.
• Treating disqualification as failure. The rep with the cleanest pipeline usually has the best quarter.

Asking the questions is the hard part

Every rep knows what the E in MEDDIC stands for. Far fewer will say, to a friendly champion who has just praised the demo, "who actually controls the budget for this, and when can I meet them?". The gap in most deals is not knowledge of the framework. It is the moment on the call where the direct question feels rude and the rep softens it into nothing.

That is a skill, and like any skill it is built by doing it under mild pressure until it stops being uncomfortable. Pavone lets you run a qualification call against an AI buyer who deflects the budget question, claims to be the decision-maker, and gets vague about timing, then shows you which MEDDIC elements you actually established and which you let slide. Run it before the real call, not after.