Not an MEDDPICC letter · What It Must Do
Required Capabilities
Required capabilities are the things the solution has to actually do, stated as jobs rather than as features. This is not a MEDDPICC letter; SalesWolf works it because without the list the demo is a guess and every differentiator the rep leads with is a coin flip. A capability that is merely named tells you what to show, not why it matters or whether you have proved it.
Required Capabilities is not one of MEDDPICC’s eight letters. SalesWolf works it anyway, and says so here rather than quietly presenting it as part of somebody else’s methodology.
How it actually gets missed
The capability list arrives as a feature checklist and gets answered as one. Nobody asks which items are actually load-bearing, so the demo spends its best fifteen minutes on the capability that was easiest to demo rather than the one the decision turns on.
Without the capability list the demo is a guess — and so is every differentiator you lead with.
How deep, not how many
Required Capabilities 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.
- named
- You know what the solution has to do. A list of features, at this point, and nothing more.
- tied to value
- You know why each one matters — the job it does and what breaks without it. This is what turns a demo into an argument.
- evidenced
- They have seen it work on their own terms: their data, their workflow, their edge case. Not a recorded demo.
Done when · You can name what they need the product to do, what each one is worth to them, and our edge on it.
What to ask
“Of everything on that list, which one, if we got it wrong, would make the whole thing not worth doing?”
Sorts a flat feature list into the one capability the decision actually turns on.
“What breaks today because you do not have that?”
Ties a capability to a real consequence, which is what makes it worth leading a demo with.
“What would you want to try yourself before you believed it?”
Names the evidence they would accept, so the proof step is designed rather than guessed.