Qualification Frameworks: How This Skill Interprets Them

The gate system (1-5 evidence scores, per-stage minimums, qualify-or-kill) is framework-agnostic. The framework supplies the dimensions; the gates supply the enforcement. This file explains the frameworks the skill references and how it maps between them.

SPICED (default lens)

SPICED stands for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision. This skill scores it across six dimensions by splitting Decision into its two working parts, giving a 30-point model:

Dimension	The question the evidence must answer
Situation	What is factually true about their world (stack, team, scale, motion)?
Pain	What hurts, in their words, logged?
Impact	What is the pain worth, in their numbers?
Critical Event	What deadline or trigger makes "do nothing" break something, with a date?
Decision criteria	What they will judge options on, ranked, from them.
Decision process	Who decides, in what order, through which steps (security, legal, procurement)?

SPICED is used because its Critical Event dimension carries the forcing question this skill leans on hardest. The evidence-gate layer on top of SPICED (quality scores per letter, stage minimums, qualify-or-kill) follows the qualifying-system approach developed by Douwe Wester; the same attribution appears in icp-builder, which carries the account-level summary of these gates.

MEDDICC mapping

Keep the 1-5 scale and the gate logic; swap dimensions. MEDDICC has seven letters, so the totals scale to 35 and the stage gates become 8 / 16 / 22 / 27 (same ratios as 7/14/19/23 out of 30, rounded):

MEDDICC	Nearest SPICED equivalent
Metrics	Impact
Economic buyer	Decision process (who signs)
Decision criteria	Decision criteria
Decision process	Decision process
Identify pain	Pain
Champion	(no SPICED equivalent; score the relationship's evidence: has the champion done something only a champion does?)
Competition	Situation (partial)

MEDDICC's Champion dimension has no SPICED twin and is worth keeping even for SPICED shops as a seventh optional letter on enterprise deals: score it by observable champion behavior (forwarded the business case, secured the meeting, previewed objections), never by friendliness.

BANT mapping

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) is a four-dimension model, total 20, gates 5 / 9 / 13 / 16. It is the weakest of the three for complex sales because it measures the buyer's readiness to purchase without measuring the problem's weight (no Impact dimension), which is why deals that are "BANT-qualified" still stall. If a team insists on BANT, add Impact as a fifth dimension (total 25, gates 6 / 12 / 16 / 19).

Benchmark provenance

• B2B average win rate 19% for 2025, 29% for 2024: Ebsta x Pavilion GTM Benchmarks (2025 edition; 655K opportunities, $48B pipeline). Checked August 2026: no newer full-dataset edition has been published; 2026-dated industry pages still cite this dataset. Re-check when the 2026 edition lands.
• Deals closing within ~50 days win at ~47% vs ~20% beyond; early economic-buyer involvement lifts win rates ~55%: same Ebsta x Pavilion 2025 dataset.
• Closed-won deals show ~2x engaged buyer contacts vs closed-lost; 11-14 discovery questions correlate with peak win rates: Gong Labs published research (2017-2021 datasets, 1.8M+ opportunities analyzed).
• Post-proposal win rates 31-50%: Norwest Venture Partners benchmark data (2024).

Vintages are stated because win rates moved sharply between 2024 and 2025; recalibrate gate expectations against current-year data where you have it.