Definition
The one-line version
A Champion is the person inside your prospect's organisation who wants you to win and has the influence to make it happen.
In Practice
What this actually looks like
A real Champion is proactive, not passive or reactive. Look for:
- Actively collaborating on your business case, not just reviewing it
- Pushing back on your approach to make it sharper, not to slow things down
- A personal stake — they are not doing this out of professional generosity
The most common mistake
Confusing access with advocacy
Taking your calls and responding to emails is not championship. Watch out for:
- Enthusiastic in meetings but goes quiet when asked to act internally
- Cannot articulate why this matters to the business in their own words
- Has never done anything on your behalf that cost them political capital
You can test this — there are specific questions to ask. The full post goes through them in detail.
In my experience, the most common reason AEs lose deals they thought they had is this: they had a contact, not a Champion.
Go deeper
Do you really have a Champion?
A full post on how to identify, test, and develop a Champion in an enterprise deal — with a real example from the field.
Read the full post →New entries added weekly. One post per week — just raw learnings from enterprise B2B sales.
