What it is
MEDDIC is a B2B sales qualification framework built from six criteria: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain and Champion. It originated inside PTC's enterprise software sales organisation in the 1990s and spread through the wider SaaS and enterprise sales world as a way to separate real opportunities from ones that only look real. Applied to recruitment business development, it becomes a checklist for whether a target account deserves the effort of a full cadence, a proposal or a pitch, before you commit the hours.
Each letter answers one question. Metrics: what number does filling this role move for the client. Economic buyer: who can actually release budget for your fee. Decision criteria: what the client is judging suppliers on, price, speed, exclusivity. Decision process: the steps and approvals between a brief and signed terms of business. Identify pain: what the vacancy is costing the client while it stays open. Champion: the internal contact who wants you to win and can sell you internally. Extended variants such as MEDDPICC add paper process and competition, but the original six cover most of what a recruitment desk needs to qualify a mandate.
If you cannot name the economic buyer, you do not have a deal. You have a conversation.
Why it matters
Not every open role deserves the same BD effort. A consultant who runs a full cadence against every inbound enquiry burns hours on mandates that were never going to close, often because nobody with budget authority was ever in the conversation, or because the approval ran through layers the consultant never mapped. MEDDIC forces those questions early, before the shortlist goes out, not after the deal has already stalled.
The framework also explains why warm relationships fail to convert. A champion who loves your shortlist but sits nowhere near the economic buyer cannot get a retained fee approved. A mandate with no clear decision process drifts for months with no result. Qualifying against MEDDIC's six criteria is what separates a mandate worth chasing from one worth politely letting go.
How boilr handles it
boilr's account intelligence pre-fills several MEDDIC fields before a consultant even opens the account. When it enriches a target company, it maps the leadership structure to flag the likely economic buyer alongside the hiring manager or champion, and buying signals such as a funding round or a new leadership hire double as the "why now" that answers identify pain. The Company Brain keeps a record of how similar deals closed at similar accounts, so the decision process for a new mandate is an informed guess rather than a blank page.
What boilr cannot do, and does not try to, is judge the metrics or read the internal politics of a specific deal. That judgement stays with the consultant. What it removes is the manual research each MEDDIC field used to demand, so a consultant can qualify a mandate in minutes and spend the BD effort only on the accounts that pass.
