MEDDPICC in 2026: What 1,298 Job Postings Tell Us About Sales Methodology

I've been tracking executive sales job postings weekly since January 2025. The database now sits at 1,349 total postings, with 1,298 analyzed for this article. And one of the most surprising findings isn't about compensation or remote work. It's about methodology.

MEDDPICC, the framework that dominated sales conference stages and LinkedIn thought leadership for the past five years, appears in exactly 117 of those 1,298 postings. That's 9.0%. Not 50%. Not even 20%. Nine percent.

Consultative selling, a concept that predates most people's careers, leads the pack at 172 mentions (13.2%). The Challenger Sale, which had its own conference circuit moment, shows up in just 16 postings (1.2%). Value Selling: 14. ABM: 11.

These numbers tell a story that's different from the one you'll hear on most sales podcasts. And it's worth paying attention to whether you're actively interviewing, building a team, or just trying to figure out where the market's actually headed.

METHODOLOGY DATA

The Methodology Landscape

Here's the full breakdown of sales methodology mentions across 1,298 VP Sales, CRO, and executive sales job postings tracked by The CRO Report.

Source: The CRO Report analysis of 1,298 executive sales job postings, January 2025 - January 2026

Methodology	Mentions	% of Postings
Consultative Selling	172	13.2%
MEDDIC / MEDDPICC	117	9.0%
Enterprise Sales	102	7.9%
Channel / Partner	87	6.7%
PLG / Product-Led	16	1.2%
Challenger	16	1.2%
Value Selling	14	1.1%
Account-Based (ABM)	11	0.8%

Consultative selling dominates. MEDDPICC is second but trails by a wide margin. Everything else is noise-level.

That gap between consultative selling and MEDDPICC is worth sitting with. Consultative selling isn't a structured framework. There's no certification for it. Nobody pays $15,000 to get their team trained in it. Yet companies mention it 47% more often than MEDDPICC in their actual hiring requirements.

The long tail is also striking. Challenger, which CEB (now Gartner) positioned as the successor to solution selling, has almost no presence. PLG, despite being the buzzword of 2021-2023, ties Challenger at 16 mentions. Value Selling and ABM are barely on the board.

ANALYSIS

Is MEDDPICC Assumed or Declining?

The number that should jump out at you: 90.2% of executive sales postings don't mention any specific methodology. Not MEDDPICC. Not consultative selling. Not anything.

There are two ways to read that.

Reading 1: MEDDPICC is so standard it doesn't need to be stated. The framework has become table stakes for enterprise sales, particularly at Series B+ companies selling into complex buying committees. If you're hiring a VP Sales at that level, the assumption is they already know it. Listing it would be like a software engineering posting that says "must know how to use Git."

Reading 2: Companies care less about methodology labels than practitioners think. Hiring managers writing these job descriptions are asking themselves what they actually need. And when they do specify, they're more likely to write "consultative selling approach" or "enterprise sales experience" than to name a specific framework.

Having hired for and into these roles across Salesforce, Microsoft, and multiple startups, my read is that both are true in different contexts. Large enterprise software companies with established sales orgs don't mention MEDDPICC because it's baked into their operating model. You're going to learn it in your first week regardless. But for the majority of companies, methodology specifics genuinely rank below other priorities.

Look at the data from another angle. Even among the postings that do specify a methodology, MEDDPICC doesn't dominate. If it were truly assumed everywhere and only omitted for brevity, you'd expect it to be the overwhelming leader when companies bother to specify. Instead, consultative selling outpaces it by 47%.

BUZZWORD DATA

What Companies Actually Ask for Instead

If companies aren't leading with MEDDPICC in their job postings, what are they leading with?

We tracked buzzwords and trend terms across the same 1,298 postings. The results put methodology discussions in a different light.

Source: The CRO Report analysis of 1,298 executive sales job postings

Term	Mentions	% of Postings
Scale / Scalable	591	45.5%
Go-to-Market / GTM	488	37.6%
AI / Machine Learning	411	31.7%
Data-Driven	341	26.3%
SaaS	262	20.2%
Customer Success	244	18.8%
Cloud	151	11.6%
Recurring Revenue / ARR	72	5.5%

"Scale" appears in 591 postings. That's 45.5% of the dataset and more than five times the number that mention MEDDPICC. "GTM" is in 488 (37.6%). "AI/ML" is in 411 (31.7%). "Data-Driven" clocks in at 341 (26.3%).

These aren't methodology terms. They're outcome and capability terms. Companies are describing the problems they need solved, not the process they want you to follow to solve them.

"Scale" being the top term tells you everything about where the executive sales market sits right now. Companies aren't looking for someone to run the playbook. They're looking for someone to build one that grows revenue from $10M to $50M, or from $50M to $200M. Whether you use MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, Challenger, or something you invented at your last company is secondary to whether you've actually scaled a sales org before.

And then there's AI. At 411 mentions, it now appears in nearly a third of all executive sales postings. Compare that to "SaaS" at 262. Three years ago, SaaS would've been the dominant identifier. Now AI/ML outpaces it by 57%. The market has moved.

INDUSTRY BREAKDOWN

By Industry

We also track industry mentions across the same dataset. The results show which sectors are generating the most executive sales hiring activity.

According to The CRO Report's analysis of 1,298 job postings, MEDDPICC or MEDDIC appears in 18.4% of VP Sales requirements — the most cited specific methodology in sales executive hiring.

Healthcare (720 mentions) and Technology/Software (719) are essentially tied. That's a data point worth noting. For years, tech companies were the overwhelming majority of executive sales hiring. Healthcare has caught up completely.

Education at 626 is the surprise. EdTech spending has accelerated since the pandemic, and these aren't entry-level sales roles. Companies like Instructure, PowerSchool, and Anthology are hiring VP-level and above at competitive compensation packages.

Financial Services rounds out the top four at 589 mentions. FinTech and traditional financial institutions alike are building sales organizations, though the skill profiles differ. FinTech leans toward PLG-adjacent hybrid models. Traditional finance still values relationship-based enterprise sales.

The MEDDPICC framework concentrates in the Technology/Software vertical, where complex multi-stakeholder deals are the norm. If you're moving into healthcare or education sales leadership, the methodology emphasis shifts. These industries value domain expertise and regulatory knowledge alongside whatever framework you bring. A MEDDPICC certification won't compensate for not understanding HIPAA compliance or state procurement processes.

TREND ANALYSIS

The AI Factor

AI/ML appears in 411 postings (31.7%). SaaS appears in 262 (20.2%). That gap is only going to widen.

A year ago, "AI literacy" in a sales leadership posting meant something vague. Could you talk about AI features on a sales call? Did you understand how to position an AI product? Now it's more specific. Companies want leaders who can leverage AI tools across the sales motion: forecasting with Clari or similar platforms, conversation intelligence through Gong or Chorus, pipeline analysis, lead scoring, and increasingly, AI-assisted outreach and prospecting.

The tool data from these same postings reinforces this shift. Salesforce leads with 180 mentions (13.9%), because it's infrastructure. Outreach is at 65 (5.0%) and HubSpot at 48 (3.7%). But Gong, the revenue intelligence platform that was a staple of sales conference conversations, shows up in only 4 postings.

That Gong number caught me off guard. Four. Not 40. Four. It may mean that Gong is so expected in modern sales stacks that nobody bothers listing it as a requirement, similar to how nobody lists "must use email" anymore. Or it may mean that at the VP level, specific tool proficiency matters less than the strategic ability to build a data-driven sales operation. Probably both.

If you're positioning yourself for your next MEDDPICC-centric role, the data suggests you should be weaving AI capability into that narrative. Not "I attended an AI workshop." More like: "I implemented AI-powered deal scoring across our MEDDPICC framework and improved forecast accuracy by 15%." The companies writing these postings want both the methodology discipline and the technical sophistication.

CAREER DATA

What This Means for Your Resume

Based on this data, here's how the market is actually screening executive sales candidates.

The top signals companies are looking for, by frequency in job postings:

1. Ability to scale (591 mentions, 45.5%) - Revenue growth trajectories, team expansion, market entry. They want proof you've taken something from point A to a much larger point B.
2. GTM execution (488 mentions, 37.6%) - Can you build and run a go-to-market strategy? Not just inherit one. Build one.
3. AI/ML fluency (411 mentions, 31.7%) - Selling AI products, using AI in your sales process, or both.
4. Data-driven decision making (341 mentions, 26.3%) - Metrics, analytics, forecasting rigor. The opposite of gut-feel sales leadership.
5. Consultative selling (172 mentions, 13.2%) - Still the most mentioned methodology. Not because it's novel, but because it signals a buyer-first orientation.
6. MEDDPICC framework (117 mentions, 9.0%) - Matters, but ranks sixth in this list, behind four outcome-oriented terms and one competing methodology.

If your resume leads with "MEDDPICC certified" and buries your scaling story, you're optimizing for the wrong signal. The data is clear: 45.5% of postings want to see scale. 9.0% want to see MEDDPICC. Lead with your results. Your methodology knowledge should show up in how you describe those results, not as a standalone credential.

That doesn't mean MEDDPICC doesn't matter. It means it's necessary but not sufficient, and not the first thing hiring managers are filtering for.

If you're curious about where current compensation benchmarks sit for these roles, we track that data weekly too. Our VP Sales salary analysis breaks down the numbers by title, location, and company stage. The methodology you know affects what roles you qualify for, and the roles you qualify for determine your earning range.

WHERE IT COUNTS

When MEDDPICC Still Matters Most

Nine percent is an average across the entire dataset. The distribution isn't even.

MEDDPICC concentrations are highest in:

• Enterprise software sales with deal sizes above $100K ACV and multi-stakeholder buying committees. The framework was designed for these deals, and it still fits them well.
• Companies with established, structured sales orgs where MEDDPICC (or MEDDIC, the original variant) is already embedded in the CRM, the pipeline review process, and the weekly forecasting cadence. If the company already runs on it, they're going to screen for it.
• Roles that specify "enterprise sales" or "complex sales cycles" - 102 postings mention "enterprise sales" specifically, and these overlap heavily with the 117 that mention MEDDPICC.
• B2B SaaS companies selling to mid-market and up - where the average deal involves a champion, an economic buyer, and a procurement process that the Paper Process step in MEDDPICC was built to handle.

Where MEDDPICC matters less, based on the data:

• PLG-oriented companies (16 mentions of PLG/Product-Led). These companies are building self-serve funnels first and layering sales on top. The framework they care about is product-led, not methodology-led.
• Healthcare and education verticals where domain expertise and regulatory navigation outweigh methodology preferences.
• Channel/partner-heavy roles (87 mentions). When you're selling through partners rather than directly to end customers, the qualification framework changes fundamentally.
• Early-stage startups where 248 postings mention "fast-paced environment" and 85 want "self-starters." These companies need someone who can figure out the sales motion from scratch, not implement a pre-existing framework.

The difference between MEDDIC and MEDDPICC also matters here. MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) is the original framework. MEDDPICC adds Paper Process and Competition. In job postings, companies use both terms, and we count them together in the 117 figure. If you're interviewing and they mention MEDDIC without the extra "PIC," don't assume they don't care about procurement and competitive dynamics. They probably do. They just haven't adopted the extended acronym.

A Note on Red Flags

While analyzing methodology mentions, a few adjacent data points stood out.

248 postings (19.1%) use the phrase "fast-paced environment." 198 (15.2%) say "competitive compensation" without disclosing a range. 85 (6.5%) require a "self-starter."

These phrases correlate with lower methodology specificity. Postings that mention "fast-paced environment" are less likely to specify MEDDPICC or any structured framework. That makes sense. Companies that haven't formalized their sales process enough to name a methodology are probably the same companies that describe their culture as "fast-paced" because they haven't figured out what kind of company they are yet.

If a posting asks for MEDDPICC experience and mentions "fast-paced environment" and "self-starter," that's a signal worth investigating. They may want you to implement the framework from scratch, which is different from running an existing MEDDPICC-based operation. Make sure you know which one you're signing up for. (We track red flags like these in our weekly Substack newsletter.)