The business problem driving a deal, and the work of making its cost real enough to act on; the I in MEDDPICC, sometimes written Implicate Pain.
Also known as:
Implicate Pain, Identified Pain, Pain, IP
Identify Pain is the business problem driving the deal, and the work of making its cost real enough to act on. It is the I in MEDDPICC, sometimes written Implicate Pain. People buy to fix problems, so a deal without a clearly identified, quantified pain is a deal without urgency. The job has two parts: identify the problem, and implicate it, surfacing who else in the organisation feels it and how.
A strong pain is shared, quantified and time-bound. It is tied to real numbers (cost, time, risk, revenue), agreed by more than one stakeholder, and linked to a date or a compelling event. The test is the difference between a vitamin and a painkiller: a vague "would be nice to improve" rarely gets funded, while a problem costing a named executive real money this quarter does. Quantify the cost of doing nothing, not just the upside.
In the deals we inspect, weak pain is the most common reason a deal drifts to no decision. We coach reps to identify the problem, quantify it against time, cost and risk, and implicate it across the buying group, because a second stakeholder often feels the same problem more acutely. A pain that is named, quantified and owned by the economic buyer is one of the strongest early signals a deal is real.
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