Champion

The champion concept is a core element of MEDDIC and MEDDPICC. In those frameworks, having a champion is treated as a qualification requirement because without one, critical parts of the deal are invisible to the rep. The champion is the rep’s intelligence source, access point, and internal sales force simultaneously.

A champion has three defining characteristics:

• Personal stake:They feel the pain your product solves. Not just professionally aware of it, but personally affected by it. Their credibility, their team’s performance, or their own goals are connected to the outcome.
• Organizational influence:They have enough standing to advocate effectively. A champion who wants to help but can’t get a meeting with the economic buyer is limited in what they can do.
• Active advocacy:They actively sell on your behalf when you’re not present. Not just answering questions when asked, but proactively making the case to colleagues and decision-makers.

Most reps have more friendly contacts than champions. The difference matters enormously for forecast accuracy and deal outcomes.

A friendly contact is happy to take meetings, responds quickly to emails, and says positive things about the product. They’re a pleasure to work with. But when the deal gets to a decision point, they disappear. They can’t get the rep access to the economic buyer. They don’t know how decisions actually get made. And when things go quiet, they don’t surface what’s happening internally.

A champion does all of those things. The test is not whether they like the product. It’s whether they will do something uncomfortable to help it move forward: get the rep in front of the economic buyer, share the formal evaluation criteria, or advocate for a timeline when the organization wants to slow down.

Champions are identified through discovery, not through title or enthusiasm. The questions that surface a potential champion are the ones that reveal personal stake:

• “Who in the organization feels this problem most acutely?”
• “How does this problem affect your team specifically and what does that cost you personally?”
• “If this gets solved, who does that reflect well on inside the organization?”
• “Who has been pushing internally to address this and for how long?”

The person who has been pushing internally for the longest time, whose team directly feels the pain, and who has something to gain from the solution being successful, is the champion candidate. The rep’s job is to give them the tools and language to advocate effectively.

Identifying a champion candidate is the beginning. Developing them into an effective advocate requires equipping them with what they need to make the case internally.

Most champions are willing to advocate but don’t know how to quantify the business case. The rep’s job is to provide the numbers, the framing, and the objection responses the champion will need when they get to the economic buyer without the rep present.

Practical development steps:

• Build the business case together with the champion so they own it, not just received it
• Prepare them for the objections the economic buyer is likely to raise
• Get their read on internal dynamics before every major milestone so you can anticipate what’s coming
• Give them credit for the solution publicly when possible, so their organizational stake in the outcome grows

The most reliable way to test a champion is to ask them to do something concrete. Not something easy, but something that requires them to spend a small amount of political capital:

• Get the rep a meeting with the economic buyer
• Share the formal evaluation criteria before they’ve been finalized
• Advocate for a specific timeline against internal inertia
• Introduce the rep to a stakeholder who hasn’t been in the conversation yet

What they do tells you more than what they say. A champion who completes the ask is real. One who deflects, delays, or offers a softer alternative is a friendly contact being confused for a champion.

This matters for forecast accuracy. A deal that is “progressing well” based entirely on a friendly contact’s enthusiasm is not a qualified deal. The presence of a tested champion is one of the most reliable signals that a deal is real.

Mistaking enthusiasm for influence

The most engaged person in the evaluation is often not the most influential one. They may love the product and have no organizational standing to move it forward. Verify influence through what they can do, not through how much they like the demo.

Building only one champion

Champions leave. They get promoted, reassigned, or exit the company. A deal with a single champion is one personnel change away from starting over. In complex deals, build champion relationships across two or three stakeholders if possible.

Not equipping the champion

A motivated champion with no business case, no competitive positioning, and no objection responses is doing their best work with bad tools. The rep’s job is to make the champion as effective as possible in the conversations they’re having without the rep present.

Treating champion development as a one-time event

Champions need ongoing support throughout the deal. Re-engage them before every major milestone. Update their messaging as new stakeholders enter. Keep them current on the competitive situation. A champion who was well-equipped three months ago may be operating on stale information today.

Developing a champion requires asking the right questions in discovery to surface personal stake, then equipping that person with the language and business case to advocate internally. Commit surfaces champion-qualifying questions in real-time during the call based on what’s being said, so reps identify and develop champion candidates in the conversation itself rather than realizing late in the cycle that they’ve been selling without internal support.

That’s real-time sales enablement applied to deal qualification: the right question at the right moment, so the most important relationship in the deal gets identified and built before it’s needed.