The Top 5 Mistakes Salespeople Make With Decision Criteria (and How to Never Be “Column Fodder” Again)

Let’s cut to the chase: Decision Criteria is the most abused, misunderstood, and lazily handled piece of the MEDDIC framework. Everyone nods their head when you ask, “What are the customer’s decision criteria?” But then you read their notes and see generic nonsense like:

• “Needs easy-to-use solution.”

• “Wants best value.”

• “Looking for scalability.”

That’s not Decision Criteria. That’s word salad dressed up as discovery. And it’s the reason so many deals stall out, go to “no decision,” or worse, end up won by your competitor who actually did the work.

Decision Criteria is the rubric your buyer uses to decide. It’s the grading scale that turns a RFP or short list into a winner’s podium. If you don’t know it, and if you don’t shape it, you’re nothing more than Column B, the vendor who filled out the form but never shaped the outcome.

So let’s call out the five biggest mistakes salespeople make when uncovering or building Decision Criteria. If you see yourself in these, good, it means you’re about to level up.

Mistake #1: Treating “Requirements” as Decision Criteria

Most reps confuse requirements with decision criteria. Requirements are the features they need. Decision criteria is how they rank, weigh, and evaluate those requirements.

Example:

• Requirement: Must integrate with Salesforce.

• Decision Criteria: The depth of Salesforce integration is weighted at 30% of total score, with specific emphasis on two-way sync and reporting visibility.

See the difference? The first is a checkbox. The second tells you how the customer is going to score the test.

If you only capture requirements, you’re flying blind. You’ll think you’re checking boxes while your competitor is quietly influencing the weighting behind the curtain. Suddenly, your perfectly fine Salesforce integration loses to theirs because the CIO gave “native sync” double the weighting.

Fix: Always push beyond “what do you need?” Ask, “How will you judge if that integration is strong enough? How much does it matter compared to X or Y?” Dig until you can sketch the weighting system in their head.

Mistake #2: Letting the Customer Write the Criteria Without You

Here’s the dirty secret: Decision Criteria are rarely written in stone before vendors show up. They’re fluid and influenceable. The customer will happily let you help them define what “good” looks like.

But too many reps act like passive order-takers. They accept the customer’s initial criteria like it’s the Ten Commandments, carved in stone. Meanwhile, the competitor who has a better relationship is whispering in their ear, shaping the grading rubric to favor their strengths.

Result? By the time the RFP hits your desk, it’s already biased. You’re dancing to someone else’s tune.

Fix: Insert yourself early. When a customer says, “We’re evaluating vendors and putting together our criteria,” your ears should perk up like a bloodhound. That’s your opening. Ask, “Can I share with you what best-in-class organizations typically look for when making this decision?” You’re not gaming the system—you’re educating them. And in doing so, you plant the seeds that tilt the field your way.

Mistake #3: Confusing “Decision Criteria” With “Personal Preference”

Reps love to latch onto the first nugget they hear: “The VP really cares about ease of use.”

Great, but is that a decision criterion or just a personal preference?

Decision Criteria are institutional. They’re documented, scored, and agreed upon by the buying committee. Preferences are individual biases. Both matter—but only one will show up on the final scorecard.

Here’s where lazy reps blow it: they hear a preference and think they’ve uncovered the criterion. Then they spend cycles over-optimizing on that one angle while ignoring the weighted factors that actually move the needle.

Fix: Separate bias from rubric. Ask:

• “Is that a must-have across the whole team, or is that more of your personal lens?”

• “When the final committee meets, how will this factor be weighted?”

If you can’t map it to a committee-wide scoring system, it’s not a Decision Criterion—it’s a nice-to-have.

Mistake #4: Never Quantifying the Criteria

Unquantified criteria are meaningless. “Scalability” could mean 100 users to one person or 100,000 to another. “Best value” could mean the cheapest upfront or the best total cost of ownership.

If you don’t put numbers around it, you’re leaving it to interpretation. And interpretations tend to favor the vendor who was bold enough to anchor the number.

Fix: Whenever a customer throws out a criterion, anchor it with numbers.

• “When you say scalability, are you planning for 2x growth? 10x?”

• “When you say uptime, what’s acceptable—99%, 99.9%, or 99.99%?”

• “When you say ‘ease of use,’ how are you going to measure that? Number of clicks? Training time?”

Salespeople who quantify win because quantified criteria set the bar, and you can align your strengths against it.

Mistake #5: Ignoring the Emotional Layer

This one’s sneaky. We all love to think that decision criteria are cold, logical, and objective. But humans build them, and humans are deeply emotional animals.

Procurement may dress it up in weighted spreadsheets, but behind the curtain, there’s always fear, ambition, and ego. There's fear of getting fired for choosing wrong, ambition to be the executive who drives transformation, and ego about having “the best” or “the most innovative.”

Lazy reps ignore this. They only hunt for the spreadsheet criteria. Elite reps dig for the shadow layer: the emotional decision drivers that influence how criteria are written and scored.

Fix: Add the human lens. When you’re mapping criteria, ask yourself:

• “What are they afraid of?”

• “Who wins politically if this succeeds?”

• “Who loses?”

• “How are they defining ‘success’ in their career, not just in this purchase?”

That’s where you’ll find the levers to tilt the criteria in your favor.

So, How Do You Win?

Stop being the vendor who fills out forms and hopes for the best. Be the vendor who co-authors the rubric. The vendor who quantifies, anchors, and emotionally resonates.

Decision Criteria isn’t paperwork—it’s the battleground where deals are won or lost long before the final demo.

And by the way, winning doesn’t just mean logging a deal as Closed Won because they picked you. Winning can also mean walking away before you waste 2–3 months chasing a rigged game. In every deal, there are always two winners: the rep smart enough to disqualify when it’s unwinnable, and the one who takes it across the finish line.

If you take nothing else from this article, take this: The biggest mistake is assuming Decision Criteria already exist. They don’t. They’re written in pencil, not stone. And the bold salesperson who grabs the pencil often ends up writing themselves into the winning column.

Callout: Quick Gut-Check for Your Pipeline

Here’s a five-minute exercise for every deal in your pipeline. For each opportunity, ask yourself:

1. Can I name the top 3 criteria they will use to decide?

2. Do I know how those criteria are weighted?

3. Did I personally influence the definition of those criteria?

4. Do I know the quantified thresholds (not just buzzwords)?

5. Have I mapped the emotional undercurrent behind the official rubric?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all five, your deal is at risk, no matter how “strong” you think it looks in the CRM.

Final Thought

Decision Criteria is where MEDDIC goes from academic to lethal. If you do this well, you’re not just qualifying deals, you’re shaping outcomes. If you do it poorly, you’re just filling in forms for someone else’s win story.

Stop being Column B. Grab the pencil. Write the script. And win the deal.