It's fine not to know who the economic buyer is

A business I worked in invested heavily in MEDDPICC. Training, certification, CRM fields for every letter. Within a year, every enterprise opportunity had every field filled in.

The deals didn't close any faster.

It took a while to see why. The reps had learned what a good answer looked like, and they wrote it. Economic buyer: the CFO. Decision criteria: functionality, price, support. Champion: the project lead. All plausible, most of them guesses, and none of them tested. The framework had become a form you completed to move the deal to the next stage.

The problem with a gate

If the rule is "you can't move this deal forward until the fields are filled in", the rep's job becomes filling in the fields. They're not lying, exactly. They're giving the system what it asks for.

So the manager sees a complete record and assumes the deal is qualified. The forecast includes it. And three weeks before quarter end, it turns out nobody has spoken to the person who signs.

What changed

I ran the group deal desk for enterprise deals for several years, five to eight deals a week, each worth £100k to £500k ARR. The one rule that made it work was this: it's fine not to have the answer.

A rep who says "I don't know who the economic buyer is" is more useful than one who writes "CFO" because it sounds right. The first one has told you where the risk sits. The second one has hidden it.

Once that was safe to say, the deal desk stopped being an inspection and became a working session. The question changed from "have you filled this in?" to "what don't we know, and how do we find out by Friday?"

How a deal review runs

Thirty minutes per deal, sometimes less. The rep and their manager attend. Anyone else who can help, such as a product specialist or a senior sponsor, joins for the part they're needed.

Start with the gaps. The rep says what they don't know. Not what they do.

Rank them by risk. Which unknown, if it goes the wrong way, kills the deal? That's the one you work on.

Agree the action. Who's going to find out, how, and by when. Usually a specific meeting with a specific person, or a specific question asked in a specific way.

Check the close date against reality. If the gaps can't be closed before the forecast date, the date moves. Better now than in the last week of the quarter.

Come back next week. The same deal returns until it closes or dies. The rep reports what they found out, and the list of unknowns gets shorter.

What it does to the forecast

Something useful happens after a couple of months. The forecast gets more accurate, not because anyone's being more cautious but because deals with big unknowns stop sitting in commit. Reps start bringing their gaps without being asked. Managers start running their own versions with their teams.

At one point the CRO stopped running his own deal reviews because he was comfortable the desk had it covered. That's the best signal I know that it's working.

If you're setting one up

Keep the framework. MEDDPICC, Sandler, SPIN, whatever your team was trained in. The language is useful and everyone shares it.

Just stop using it as a gate. Use it as a checklist of what to find out, and make the deal desk the place where finding out gets planned. And make sure the most senior person in the room says, early and often, that not knowing is fine. Not finding out is the problem.

A weekly deal desk is part of how Veridian works with leadership teams, as board adviser or fractional CRO, and within outsourced revenue operations.