Metrics in MEDDPICC: What They Are, Examples, and Why a Number in the CRM Isn't Enough

I once wrote this about a common MEDDPICC habit, and I stand by it:

Writing a number in the Metrics box doesn’t mean you know Metrics.

Most CRMs will turn that field green the second anything is typed into it. A guess. A benchmark from a case study. A number your contact threw out on a first call.

In most systems, those numbers come up green. In how I teach Deal Management, you’re red. Yellow at best.

Here’s why, and what green actually takes.

What Metrics Really Means

Metrics are the things you use to build the business case.

That’s the whole job of the letter. The point of M is to understand the levers you’ll pull to build a financial case for change. The best way to find them is to understand the outcomes your solution drives, and by how much.

So Metrics isn’t a field. It’s the raw material for the one document that decides whether your deal gets funded.

And the raw material has to come from the buyer. Sellers love talking about ROI, but ROI only works when you have a baseline. Without one:

• Your desired future state becomes vague.
• Your business case becomes fiction.
• You can’t defend the cost of waiting.

Metrics Start With a Baseline

There’s an order to this. Skip steps and you’ll pitch too early.

1. Identify the problem. What’s happening, and where exactly does it show up?
2. Implicate the pain. What breaks downstream? What goals become unattainable?
3. Quantify it. How big is the cost? Dollars, hours, conversion rates, cycle time, churn, risk exposure, missed revenue, headcount, opportunity cost.

That third step is the bridge from a complaint to a business case.

If you don’t implicate the problem, you won’t create urgency. If you don’t quantify it, you won’t earn priority.

The baseline usually lives in the second and third level questions, not the first. When you hear a problem, don’t jump to “I can solve that.” Stay in it until a number shows up. And if they don’t know, ask: “Who would know?”

Weak vs Strong Metrics: Examples

Here’s the difference between a number and a metric you can build on.

Weak metric	Strong metric
“We need $2M more pipeline.”	“We have a 20 percent pipeline shortfall, which means we’re missing our bottom-line number by $2M a month, which means we’ll miss our annual plan, won’t secure our next round of funding, and may need layoffs.”
“We’ll save your team hours every week.”	“We save time, which eliminates two planned hires, saving $420K fully loaded.”
“Customers are complaining and we can’t service cars fast enough.”	“Each open technician role costs about $100K a month, and there are over a hundred open. This is a $120 million annual problem.”

The weak versions aren’t wrong. They’re just unusable.

“We need $2M more pipeline.” You and me both. But why does that matter? The strong version shows you’re not fixing a pipeline problem. You’re fixing a business modeling problem. That’s the kind executives fund.

The last row is from an RPO deal where I kept asking “why does that matter?” until the CFO stopped me, and then found the number together with him. The full story is in How to Build a Business Case.

Soft Costs Start the Conversation. Hard Costs Close It.

This is where a lot of Metrics work quietly fails.

Soft costs feel real but don’t show up cleanly on a P&L. They’re directional, probabilistic, and often based on assumptions. Time savings is the classic example. I learned that one the hard way, from a CFO who told me flat out he didn’t care about time savings. It killed my deal, because I never translated the time into a hard business outcome.

Soft costs can start the conversation. They rarely close it.

Don’t sell the input. Sell the output. Time is an input. Money is an output. Pull every soft claim up the “so what” ladder:

1. What improves? Time saved, fewer errors, faster cycle.
2. So what changes? More capacity, faster output, fewer hires, fewer delays.
3. So what is that worth? Budget, headcount, revenue, cash, spend, loss avoided.

Hard costs are already on the P&L or directly change a line item: headcount, vendor and overtime spend, tooling, revenue, churn, cost of delivery, penalties.

Soft costs are where most people sell. Hard costs are where decisions get made.

What “Done” Looks Like

Done for Metrics is not “we have a number.”

Done is when the business case for change has been agreed to by the Executive Sponsor and Economic Buyer.

That’s a high bar on purpose. In practice, it means:

• The baseline is theirs. Their numbers, in their language, not a benchmark from your marketing deck.
• It’s triangulated. No one person speaks for a business. CFOs see CFO problems. A metric only one stakeholder believes is yellow.
• It’s tied to a priority. Pain can be real and still not get funded if it isn’t attached to a strategic objective.
• It’s agreed at the top. The people who control priority and funding have seen it, challenged it and signed on.

The goal isn’t perfection. I’ve built thousands of business cases and none were perfect. The goal is agreement. A savvy executive will de-risk the case anyway. Why sign up for a 10x improvement when a 3x will get the change approved?

On timing: you shouldn’t leave Discovery without a solid current-state baseline. The business case built on it gets hardened and agreed later, in Business Alignment and Go / No Go.

Common Metrics Mistakes

Treating a CRM field as proof. A typed number is data entry, not evidence.

Using generic benchmarks. Build the business case using the client’s exact metrics. No guessing. No generic industry benchmarks. Generic business cases are where projects go to die.

Stopping at soft benefits. “We save time” is a hypothesis. “We eliminate two planned hires” is an outcome.

Building a spreadsheet instead of a story. Numbers without narrative don’t travel. Executives don’t forward a table. They forward a conclusion.

Not writing it down. If the agreed metrics aren’t documented and shared, the buyer won’t feel the problem the same way a few days later.

Plays to Move Metrics From Red to Green

Peel the Onion. When they name a problem, don’t move on. What happens next? Why does that matter? What happens if you don’t fix it? You’ve peeled far enough when a number appears.

Back of the Napkin. When they struggle to quantify it, offer an anchor:

“From what I’m hearing, it sounds like the problem may be costing the business X. For many companies like yours, it’s around X. Does that sound unreasonable?”

Get agreement or pushback (“No, it’s more like Y”), document it, and ask them to validate it with others before the next meeting. This often gets more senior people invited to the next call.

Good Questions, Wrong People. When you hit the ceiling of your contact’s knowledge, ask the strategic questions anyway, then ask who would know.

Cost of Delay. Ask: “If we do nothing for 90 days, what gets worse?” Quantify it in their language and tie it to a real event.

Business Case One-Pager. Package the baseline, outcomes, cost of inaction and the decision required into one page. Share it and ask them to edit it. That’s how the case becomes theirs.

How Metrics Connects to Deal Management

In Deal Management, Metrics maps to two of the six criteria: Current State (the baseline) and Change Justification (the business case built on it).

That split matters. MEDDICC is great at helping you capture pain and metrics. But it doesn’t force you to package them into an executive-ready narrative. When that step is missed, MEDDICC becomes data collection instead of leverage.

Metrics is only green when the numbers have become a decision.

Where to Go Deeper

• Build the case step by step: How to Build a Business Case, then use the free Business Case template.
• Make the future concrete for executives with the PRFAQ template.
• Metrics works hand in hand with Identify Pain, and gets approved by the Economic Buyer.
• See how all eight letters fit together on the MEDDPICC methodology page.