The MEDDPICC Pipeline Audit Checklist

Run this audit against any deal that feels "stalled" or is worth more than 20% of your quarterly target. If you cannot answer a question with documented evidence, that letter is a GAP.

One rule before you start: "documented evidence" means an email, a recording, a requirements document, a confirmed date, not "he seemed enthusiastic on the call." The whole value of this audit is that it refuses adjectives. For the psychology behind each letter, why champions are not fans, why the status quo beats competitors, read the companion piece, The Invisible Hand: the subtle power of MEDDPICC. This page is the operational version: the one you open in front of your pipeline.

When, With Whom, and How Often Should You Run This Audit?

When. Three triggers, and any one of them is enough:

• Stage change: before you move a deal into "commit" or "best case", never after.
• Stall: no client-owned action has been completed in the last 14 days.
• Size: the deal exceeds 20% of your quarterly target, or its scope suddenly doubled (scope changes reset qualification more often than teams admit).

With whom. Run it twice, with different people:

• First pass, alone, CRM open. Be brutally honest: you're auditing evidence, not defending a forecast. Score each letter 0 or 1; no half points, half points are how hope gets back in.
• Second pass, out loud, in deal review, with your manager, a peer, or a coach. Their only job is to ask "how do you know?" after every answer. In our coaching sessions, roughly half of the letters that were "green" in the CRM turn amber the moment someone asks that question.
• For every gap found, name an owner and a date. A gap without an owner is just a documented worry.

Cadence. What works for the teams we coach:

• Weekly (10 minutes): committed deals only, did any letter change since last week?
• Monthly (30–45 minutes): full audit of every deal above the 20% threshold.
• Start of quarter: audit the entire forecast. Deals scoring 0–3 get recycled to nurture or disqualified, before they consume a quarter of selling time.

The Checklist, Letter by Letter

M: Metrics (The Logic)

• Do we have a baseline of their current performance (e.g., current churn rate)?
• Has the client agreed, in writing, to the potential savings or gains our solution provides?
• Can I explain the ROI to a CFO in under 60 seconds?

E: Economic Buyer (The Power)

• Have I had a live conversation (or video call) with the person who owns the budget?
• Do I know their personal "Win"? (e.g., Is their bonus tied to this project's success?)
• If my Champion left the company tomorrow, would the Economic Buyer still take my call?

D: Decision Criteria (The Rules)

• Do I have a copy of their technical "Wish List" or requirements?
• Have I successfully "poisoned the well" by adding a criterion that only we can meet?
• Are the commercial criteria (payment terms, liability caps) clearly defined?

D: Decision Process (The Roadmap)

• Do I know every person who needs to provide a signature (Legal, IT, HR, Security)?
• Has the client confirmed the date of the next Board or Steering Committee meeting?
• Do we have a "Mutual Action Plan" with dates owned by the client?

P: Paperwork (The Gauntlet)

• Has our Master Service Agreement (MSA) been sent to their legal department yet?
• Do we know their specific security/compliance requirements (e.g., SOC2, GDPR)?
• Is there a "Procurement Black Hole" we need to navigate?

I: Identified Pain (The Driver)

• Is the pain "Critical" (Business-ending) or just "Latent" (Annoying)?
• What is the daily/monthly cost of the client doing nothing?
• Has the client explicitly stated, "We cannot continue like this"?

C: Champion (The Weapon)

• Has this person given me internal "protected" information (e.g., a competitor's quote)?
• Have I "tested" them by asking for a difficult introduction?
• Does this person have the political capital to push this deal through a budget freeze?

C: Competition (The Rival)

• Am I aware of all other vendors in the "Shortlist"?
• Is the client considering an "In-House" build?
• The Big One: Have I successfully defeated the Status Quo by showing the risk of inaction?

Scoring Your Deal

• 0-3 Checks: This is a "Lead," not a "Deal." You are in high-risk territory.
• 4-6 Checks: You are in the "Technical Evaluation" phase. You have a fan, but you don't yet have a buyer.
• 7-8 Checks: This is a qualified "Forecastable" deal. Focus now on Paperwork and Momentum.

What Does a 5/8 Deal Actually Look Like?

Let's make the scoring concrete with a composite example drawn from deals we've coached: call it "Nordhaven": a mid-six-figure logistics platform opportunity, sitting in the CRM at 80% probability for this quarter.

What's solid (5 letters):

• M ✓: Baseline documented: the client's own churn figure, and an email where their VP Ops confirms the savings model "looks right."
• I ✓: Pain is critical, in their words: the COO said on a recorded call, "we cannot staff our way out of this."
• D (Criteria) ✓: Requirements document in hand, and one criterion (a native integration only we offer) was shaped by us.
• C (Champion) ✓: Tested: she shared a competitor's pricing and set up a meeting with the CFO's office.
• C (Competition) ✓: Shortlist known (one rival plus an in-house option), cost of inaction quantified and presented.

The gaps (3 letters):

• E ✗: The CFO meeting was scheduled twice and cancelled twice. The champion says "don't worry, I've got it covered." That is reassurance, not evidence.
• D (Process) ✗: No mutual action plan. Nobody on the deal team can say when the steering committee actually meets.
• P ✗: The MSA hasn't been sent, and the security questionnaire hasn't even been requested.

Now read the pattern. In the CRM, Nordhaven looks like a deal you'd bet the quarter on: real pain, agreed value, a genuine champion. The audit says something more precise: this deal has a fan base but no buying machine. And the three missing letters are exactly the ones that kill deals in the final two weeks: no Economic Buyer engagement, no client-owned timeline, and paperwork that hasn't started. A 5/8 is not bad news. It's a to-do list with names on it: get EB access (ask the champion, "who will be held accountable for this ROI after go-live?"), build a mutual action plan with dates the client owns, and start legal and security in parallel, not after the verbal yes. That is also why "no decision" is the biggest rival in complex sales: The JOLT Effect research (Dixon & McKenna, 2022, based on 2.5 million recorded sales calls) found 40–60% of qualified opportunities are lost to customer indecision, and indecision feeds precisely on unmanaged process and paperwork.

How Do You Use This Checklist in Pipeline Review With an AI Coach?

The hardest part of this audit isn't the questions: it's getting them asked consistently, without ego and without mercy, every single week. Managers run out of time; peers run out of patience. This is exactly the discipline gap an AI coach fills, and it's why we believe the next edge for sales teams is not more data but more reflection, industrialized.

A simple routine that works, ten minutes before each pipeline review:

1. Bring the facts. Summarize one deal for your coach: what you know, letter by letter, and what evidence you hold. (Respect your company's confidentiality rules: the coach needs the structure of the deal, not the client's name.)
2. Ask for the audit. "Score this deal against MEDDPICC. For each letter, ask me one question I cannot answer with evidence." The gaps surface fast, and without the defensiveness a human review can trigger.
3. Play the skeptic. "Now role-play my Economic Buyer and challenge the ROI in 60 seconds." If your metric survives that, it will survive the CFO.
4. Leave with owners and dates. Close every session by converting each gap into one action, one owner, one date, then bring the same deal back next week.

This is coaching-based selling in miniature: the coach doesn't inspect your pipeline, it interrogates your thinking. And the evidence says the format holds up: workplace coaching meta-analyses show strong effects on individual performance (Jones, Woods & Guillaume, 2016), and randomized trials by Terblanche and colleagues (2022) found AI coaches matched human coaches on goal attainment. The value isn't the coach's opinion of your deal; it's the ritual of answering hard questions with evidence, every week.

Your pipeline already knows the truth. The audit just makes it visible. Pick your one deal that "feels stalled," walk it through the eight letters, and run the audit live with Lumia, your AI coach: ten minutes, one deal, zero adjectives.