August 31, 2026
Hi Everyone,
Most sales teams need to get three things right:
Is this deal real? Why should the buyer change? And how do we run the conversation well?
Three well-known sales methodologies are especially good at answering those questions: MEDDPICC, Challenger, and Sandler.
You don’t need to adopt any of them in full. But there’s one habit from each that I think almost every sales team should use.
Habit 1: The up-front contract (Sandler)
Sandler's method dates back to 1967, and parts of it show their age. One piece has held up, and that's the up-front contract.
In the first two minutes of every sales meeting, agree with the buyer on how long you have, what you'll cover, and what gets decided at the end.
Yours could sound like this:
"We have 30 minutes. I'd like to understand how you handle invoicing today, and you can ask us anything. At the end, tell us honestly whether this deserves another conversation. No is a fine answer."
Most buyers won't reject you to your face, so they exit politely with 'send us more information.' Once you've told them a “no” is acceptable, they don't need the polite exit, and you hear where you stand.
Habit 2: One teaching point per deal (Challenger)
When Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna analyzed 2.5 million sales conversations, they found that 40% to 60% of qualified deals end with no sale, to you or to any competitor.
Challenger exists to prevent exactly this. It trains reps to teach the buyer something they don't know about their own business.
The research behind the original book, The Challenger Sale, covered over 6,000 reps, and in complex sales, 54% of top performers sold this way. Reps who led with relationship building made up 7%.
Before each meeting, write down one thing this buyer doesn't know about their situation:
- A cost they haven't counted
- A risk they haven't priced
- A number from their industry they haven't seen
Habit 3: Three deal checks (MEDDPICC)
In 1996, Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli studied hundreds of won and lost deals at the software company PTC.
The same things kept showing up in the wins and missing from the losses, so they turned them into a checklist called MEDDIC. PTC grew from $300 million to $1 billion in revenue over the following four years.
The full checklist is longer, but three questions catch most weak deals:
- Economic Buyer: Who signs? Name the person who approves the money. A title is enough to start, but "someone in finance" means you don't know.
- Metrics: What improves in their numbers? Look for something measurable, like 'cut invoice processing from four days to one.'
- Paper Process: What happens between yes and signature? Legal review, security questionnaire, procurement. Deals lose entire quarters in these steps.
How the three work together
Inside a meeting, the habits run in order.
Open with the up-front contract, spend the discovery questions listening, and bring the teaching point once you know enough to connect it to what the buyer said. Sandler says listen and Challenger says push, and the order is what lets a rep do both.
The three habits need different amounts of preparation:
- The up-front contract is a sentence, and a rep can start using it this week.
- The three MEDDPICC questions take no preparation, only an honest look at what you don't know.
- The teaching point is the hard one — it takes real preparation, and the bigger the deal, the more it deserves.
Go deeper
👉 HBR: Stop Losing Sales to Customer Indecision — read this if your forecast keeps losing deals to "we'll think about it"; Dixon and McKenna explain why pushing harder backfires and what works instead.
👉 MEDDICC: Who Created MEDDIC? — the PTC origin story in five minutes, worth reading before you decide which of the eight letters your team needs.
👉 Inc.: The Challenger Sale: Not Very Challenging — the honest counterargument; read it so you know the case against Challenger before you borrow from it.
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow, we’ll show you how to figure out which internal documents are actually worth writing before you waste time on the rest.
P.S. Our one-page business case pairs well with this — once you can answer the three questions, that page nearly writes itself.