Champion

A Champion has three things. Power and influence in the organisation, which is rarely the same as seniority. A vested interest in your success, meaning a personal win riding on your deal: a promotion, a problem that has been embarrassing them for a year, a project they put their name to. And they actively sell for you. They fight for you in meetings you will never see, and they tell you what the Economic Buyer really said after the door closed.

The question a Champion answers is the one that decides most complex deals: who is selling this when we are not there?

The mistake is to confuse someone who likes you with someone who champions you. The friendly contact who takes every call, loves the product and gives you great information is often a Coach. Valuable, but a Coach has either no power to move the deal or no reason to spend their political capital on it. Sellers write “Champion” next to that name in the CRM because it feels better than writing “nice person, no power”. Then the deal dies in a meeting they were not invited to and nobody can explain why.

How I use it. I do not take the title on trust. I test it. I ask the Champion to do something that costs them: get me in front of the Economic Buyer, share the real Decision Process, tell me where we are losing to the competition. Champions do these things. Coaches apologise and explain why they cannot. The deals I regret are the ones where I knew which of the two I had and carried on anyway. Nobody regrets qualifying out of a deal with no Champion. Plenty regret the reverse.