How do I know if a deal is real or if I am being strung along?
Write down what you know against a qualification frame and the gaps become obvious. MEDDPICC is the common one: metrics they care about, the economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, the pain you are implicating, your champion and the competition. If you cannot name the economic buyer or describe the paper process, you do not have a deal, you have an interested person. The single best test of a champion is whether they will do something for you, like get you a meeting with their boss or send you the security questionnaire. Be willing to disqualify early and loudly, because a clean no in week two is worth more than a maybe that dies in your forecast in month four.
Go deeper
4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
The reference explanation of all eight letters from the people who own the methodology, free to read. Use it as a deal checklist: the letters you cannot fill in are exactly where your deal will die.
Built from a masterclass with Mohit Garg, former CRO at MindTickle, and written for cross-border companies selling from India, including how to structure SDR and AE teams for cost efficiency. Covers qualification, MEDDIC scoring, pipeline reviews and loss reviews in one place.
Gives you numbers to aim at on your next call instead of vague advice: roughly 11 to 14 questions, spread through the call rather than front-loaded, covering three or four business problems. Drawn from 519,000 recorded B2B calls.
Jen Allen-Knuth spent 18 years selling into large enterprises and her test for whether a deal is real is the cost of inaction: if the buyer cannot say what standing still costs them, nobody is signing. She also shows how to get to the executive who decides, which is the fastest way to find out whether your champion can actually move.
