MEDDPICC · P · position 5 of eight
Paper Process
The paper process is everything between yes and signature: legal review, security review, procurement, vendor onboarding. It is the least glamorous dimension and the one that most often moves a deal into the next quarter, because it runs on a duration nobody thinks to ask about until the last week. A verbal yes with an unmapped paper process is not a forecast.
How it actually gets missed
Nobody asks how long procurement takes, because it feels like a question for later. It is a question for now: if the answer is eight weeks, the last safe day to start is a date that passes silently in the middle of the quarter, and it is not in anybody’s calendar.
Legal, security, and procurement stall deals at signature when they're left to the last week.
How deep, not how many
Paper 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 which reviews this purchase has to pass — legal, security, procurement, whatever else this company runs.
- owned
- Each one has a named person on the customer’s side. Procurement in particular is a team, not a step, and it has a queue.
- dated
- You know roughly how long each takes. This is the rung that produces a last-safe-day-to-start, which is the only date that actually protects a close.
Done when · You can name who on the customer side owns legal, security, and procurement.
What to ask
“Once the decision is made — how long did the paperwork take the last time you bought something this size?”
Gets a real duration from a real precedent, rather than an optimistic guess about this one.
“Who runs security review here, and what do they need from us to start?”
Turns the review most likely to stall the deal into a task with an owner and a start date.
“Is there anything that has to happen before procurement will even open a file?”
Finds the prerequisite step — a vendor form, a supplier registration — that quietly adds two weeks.