MEDDPICC · D · position 4 of eight
Decision Process
The decision process is the chain of internal approvals between the customer wanting this and the customer approving it. Every step carries a person who runs it and a duration you can estimate, and a step you do not know about is what stalls the deal in the last week. Mapping it is not project management — it is how you find out who else has to be sold.
How it actually gets missed
Reps map the process once, early, from one person’s description, and never re-check it. Then the budget line moves, or a committee is added, and the deal is still being forecast against a sequence that stopped being true in month two.
No mapped sequence means surprises at close — a step you didn't know about stalls the deal.
How deep, not how many
Decision Process has three rungs, and where a deal sits on them is the difference between a dimension you have answered and one you have qualified. These are the rungs SalesWolf actually scores — the same ladder the product reads, not a scale invented for this page.
- listed
- You know the steps exist and roughly what order they run in. Usually this came from one person’s memory of the last purchase.
- owned
- Each step has a named person on the customer’s side who carries it. A step with no owner is a step nobody is doing.
- dated
- You know roughly when each step happens. Dates are what turn a process map into a forecast you can defend.
Done when · You can walk the deal from here to signature — every step, who runs it, and when.
What to ask
“Walk me through what happens after you decide you want this — who sees it, and in what order?”
Gets the sequence in their words, including the steps that never appear in an RFP.
“Which of those steps has surprised you before?”
Finds the step that stalls deals here, which is rarely the one that looks hardest.
“Has anything about that path changed this year?”
Catches a reorg or a moved budget line before it invalidates your close date.