# Paper Process: everything between yes and signature Legal, security, and procurement stall deals at signature when they're left to the last week. Updated 10 Oct 2026 ## What is the paper process in MEDDPICC? 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 asked about last, which is how a verbal yes becomes next quarter: it runs on a duration nobody thought to ask about until the final week. A verbal yes with an unmapped paper process is not a forecast. ## What do I ask about legal, security and procurement, and when? Ask in discovery, not in the last week: which reviews there are, who runs each one, and how long the last one took. The answer is either specific — names, steps, weeks — or it isn’t, and if it isn’t you have learned the most useful thing in the call. SalesWolf doesn’t know how long their legal takes either, and it keeps no table of typical durations. Its close plan lists each review with only the owner and timeline you’ve recorded. ## 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. How deep, not how many ## Paper Process questions, from listed to dated 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 marks on the deal, by the same names and in the same order. What is written under each is the standard to hold a deal to. The product can only mark what is on record, so check its rung against this bar before you rely on it. 1. ### listed You know which reviews this purchase has to pass — legal, security, procurement, whatever else this company runs. 1. “Which reviews does a purchase like this go through here — legal, security, procurement, anything else?” Gets the full list in one question, before any of it is urgent. 2. “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. 2. ### owned Each review has an owner on the customer’s side recorded against it. Get a person, not a team: procurement is a team with a queue, and a team’s name tells you nothing about where you stand in it. 1. “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. 2. “Who in procurement will pick this up, and how full is their queue right now?” Procurement is a team with a queue, and the queue is part of the duration. 3. ### 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. 1. “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. 2. “Does legal start from our contract or yours, and how long did the last redline take?” Whose paper it is decides most of legal’s duration, and a precedent gets you a number rather than a hope. Done when · You can name who on the customer side owns legal, security, and procurement. [The questions for every letter, on one page.](https://www.saleswolf.com/meddpicc/questions) This page in plain text, with nothing to sign in to. Open it on a phone on the way into the call. [www.saleswolf.com/meddpicc/paper-process.md](https://www.saleswolf.com/meddpicc/paper-process.md) Sample deal · Halden Freight · Paper Process ## On a deal, it has a position. On this one, it has none yet. ## Qualification Nothing yet: Paper Process Gaps aren't failures. They're the next things worth learning. The chip from the deal cockpit in SalesWolf, once three calls and an email thread are in. [Work a deal](https://app.saleswolf.com/login) [See it on a sample deal](https://www.saleswolf.com/sample-deal) 14 days free, no card, no call.