You can spend all day building relationships and listening to your prospect’s pain points - but if you’re talking to the wrong person, you’re wasting their time and yours. Finding the right connection at your target account is vital. While it’s tempting to zero in on the highest-placed C-suite individuals you can, there’s another category of decision-maker who could potentially provide you with better results - the buyer champion.
These ‘movers and shakers’ might not be running the show (yet), but they’re driving change for their organizations. They’ve got influence—and they’re not afraid to use it. When it comes to trying to close a deal, they could be your secret weapon.
Key takeaways
- Buyer champions are people in their organization who want your solution (and only your solution).
- The champion is not the same as a coach, but both roles can be extremely helpful to you as a seller.
- Finding and building a relationship with a buyer champion takes time and effort, but this will pay off.
- Relationships with buyer champions are based on emotional connection and honesty.
What is a buyer champion?
According to legendary sales leader John McMahon in his 2021 instant classic, ‘The Qualified Sales Leader,’ the primary characteristic of a buyer champion is someone who’s ‘both willing and able to bring you to the economic buyer.’
This deceptively simple descriptor disguises the unique position that a buyer champion must occupy in their organization to enjoy the access to power needed to take you to their leader. It also merely hints at the amount of work necessary to recruit one of these rare individuals.
To produce the results McMahon and others espouse, you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort into your potential champion. The key is to locate a primary pain point—one that’s strong enough to spark an emotional reaction and genuine interest in your solution.
Benefits of having a buyer champion during the sales process
A buyer champion is more than just an enthusiastic customer. A buyer champion has aligned their success with yours and is willing to act as your internal advocate at your target account.
1. They can provide insights into the buying process
If they want you to succeed, they’ll be ready to guide you through, helping you identify potential hurdles or bottlenecks specific to their company’s buying process. They can also let you know if you’ve got any direct competition for the account and even what approaches or strategies your competitors are deploying.
2. They can influence their colleagues
By definition, buyer champions are individuals who can influence the opinion of their company. If they’ve got a reputation for effective leadership, their seal of approval will often create a strong pull in favor of your offer.
3. They can boost the effectiveness of your sales methodology
Learning how to identify and nurture buyer champions is a sales strategy that's perfectly aligned with consultative selling methodologies, where building customer relationships is the priority.
Some of these methodologies, such as CHAMP, Miller Heiman, MEDDIC, or MEDDPICC, explicitly state the need for a buyer champion, categorizing them as a key component of the methodology.
How to know if you’ve found the right buyer champion (or just a coach)
In addition to your buyer champion (whom we’ve already defined) and the economic buyer (whose approval we’re seeking with the assistance of the buyer champion), there’s one other complex sales archetype we need to be aware of.
The role of the coach can appear similar to the Buyer Champion at first—someone at your target account who believes that your solution will help them solve problems within their organization.
They are also willing to advocate for you and influence their colleagues on your behalf. Unfortunately, they can’t - because they don’t have the power or access.
Building a relationship with a coach is useful, up to a point (particularly for information gathering during the discovery stages). However, to move the deal forward, you must avoid investing too much time with your coach. In some circumstances, coaches can even hinder the deal by attempting to leverage the situation to increase their influence.
If you're reading this thinking about some of your own pending deals and trying to determine if you have a buyer champion or a coach here are a few ways to know you've found your champion:
They can explain the Economic Buyer’s perspective
The buyer champion knows the economic buyer’s priorities well enough to predict your offer's most important aspects. Once you’ve established trust, they may speak openly about which areas to focus on.
Remember that in healthy organizations, it’s a two-way street - the economic buyer also places a high premium on their relationship with the buyer champion. As John McMahon says: “As salespeople, we need a Champion to get us to the Economic Buyer. But if you’re the Economic Buyer, you need a Champion for the implementation - and the success of that implementation.”
By contrast, a coach will be looking to use this process to build a champion-style relationship with the economic buyer. Even though they may discuss the buyer’s preferences, you should be ready to ask questions to determine whether their information is based on personal experience - or if they rely on circumstantial evidence or guesswork.
Their actions and influence are evident
It’s often easy to assess the buyer champion’s influence by looking at an organization chart—their job title may well begin with ‘chief,’ ‘senior,’ or ‘lead.’ However, a little research on LinkedIn may be required in flatter hierarchies where titles are less indicative. If they’re regularly getting personally tagged in company news or by C-suite, and their posts and comments attract a lot of engagement from their colleagues, that’s a strong signal they’re a champion.
Do they seem interested - but busy?
You might not be able to get hold of your potential champion all the time - and that’s ok. Even if they ask you to talk to someone else in their place, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Champions are often masters of delegation. They also have strict boundaries. Their relationship with the economic buyer is valuable, and they need to make sure they don’t get too close with you until they’re sure.
A coach will probably be much more available and won’t necessarily want you talking to other people in their absence - especially the economic buyer, because they’re worried about getting left out.
They’re actively giving you opportunities to build trust
Even if they’re impressed with your offer, the buyer champion needs to have complete faith in your solution.
Buyer champions will be looking to establish they can trust:
- The business value of your solution
- The performance of your company
- Your experience as a salesperson.
Most of their questions will be linked to establishing viability against these three criteria.
Ways to help your buyer champion facilitate the deal
There are specific sales enablement strategies you should deploy to turn potential champions into your staunchest allies, and give them everything they need to close the deal.
Help them prepare for the challenges they’ll face, fighting for your solution
In Richard Rivera’s ‘The Champion Sell,’ he explains that when champions advocate for something to their peers or authorities, they’re putting something very personal on the line—their reputation and credibility. It’s your job to ensure they don’t get caught out, so give them as much information as you can on known product limitations, competitive traps, or implementation impediments (once you’re sure trust is sufficiently established).
They’ll need to prepare for:
- The economic buyer meeting - making the first overtures to the buyer before they grant you access.
- Battles with your competitor’s champions. You and your champion may not be the only game in town, and there might be significant challenges to overcome from other influential team members with alternative solutions. If this is likely the case, you may want to consider strengthening your relationships with your coaches (or even approaching multiple champions).
- Building the cost justification. If you’re following the MEDDIC methodology, then your ‘M’ - metrics - should hopefully have provided much of the groundwork for the cost justification your champion will need here.
- Change management. Any support or guidance you can provide for product implementation or training needs will help your champion strengthen their business case ahead of approaching the economic buyer.
Ask the right questions
While working to establish a buyer champion relationship, your questioning will likely fall into two distinct phases. The first phase is for qualification purposes - using MEDDIC questions will help you establish whether you’ve found your champion and whether the account is a good fit generally.
The second phase of questioning is intended to test your champion. This can be delicate and shouldn’t be attempted too early, or you may injure your attempts to build trust. These questions can help you both establish where the pitfalls of the buyer journey might be - such questions would include:
- “What part of the decision process will be the most challenging?”
- “Where could this decision go wrong?”
- “Which stakeholders might reject the purchase (and why)?”
Other, harder questions can be used if the process is beginning to stall. These can include direct questions such as:
- “What do you need to trust me?”
- “How much time do you want to spend at this stage before we involve [Economic Buyer]?”
Maintain emotional connection
If you’ve demonstrated to your champion that you and your offer are worthy of their trust and that you can solve their problems and meet their needs, you’ve likely created an emotional connection in the process. This emotional connection is vital to the sales process, and in long, complex sales cycles, it needs to be rebuilt constantly.
Your champion is also relying on you to replicate that same connection when you communicate with their colleagues (and eventually, the economic buyer). It’s crucial in order to justify their faith in you.
How to build and honor the relationship with your buying champion
It’s important to do what you can to facilitate and make your champion’s life easier. In the interests of your (hopefully) long-term professional relationship, you also have to establish common ground and mutual respect. Your integrity needs to be clearly visible to the buyer - you’re a professional, too, and your time is also important.
Assemble a structure for your sales conversations with your champion based on the following components.
Certainty strategies and proof events
In ‘The Champion Sell’, Richard Rivera uses the terms ‘certainty strategies’ and ‘proof events’ to describe a range of ways to ‘prove’ to your champion that your product or service will provide the benefits promised.
This incorporates the well-known concept of ‘social proof’—through customer references or customer-and-partner events—alongside product walkthroughs and demonstrations, where the champion gets to see the solution in action
If successfully implemented, these strategies give both parties a shared point of reference for the solution’s effectiveness.
‘Who’-based impact framing
This logical chain of thought allows you to raise the idea of bringing the economic buyer into the conversation with your champion. Once you’ve located the main pain point, you’ll need to discuss ‘who’ in your organization is impacted by this pain point?’
As a key stakeholder, the economic buyer is going to be impacted by this pain point.
The follow-up question then asks, ‘Because of this impact, don’t you think it would be only fair to include them in our next call?’
Setting a social contract
In consultative selling strategies such as this, the salesperson's role is that of a trusted advisor. Within this framing, it’s perfectly acceptable to set your boundaries. This way, you can resolve ongoing deliberations and avoid wasting further time with no results.
Set a proof event for your next step - ideally a demo or walkthrough - but explain that your aim for this next step's conclusion is to meet with the economic buyer. Let them know that if you can’t get this result, it’s probably time for both parties to move on.
This places your potential champion in the position of giving a definite answer after the proof event, and lets you gauge both their seriousness and also the success of your efforts so far.
Final thoughts
There’s no doubt that buyer champions are a prized asset when looking to close a complex sales deal.
However, a typical buyer champion is nobody’s fool. If you’ve identified a potential champion, you’d better have done your homework before you even think about approaching them. It’s essential to have a solid grasp of the target account’s use case, the pain points associated with that specific use case, and a ready supply of relevant customer success stories.
Effective and customizable sales collateral can be invaluable when preparing to approach a champion, so that you and your team can instantly personalize and share relevant information to reduce friction and communicate your main selling points.
If your collateral, proposals, or general presentation is underwhelming, you can avoid losing the deal (and a potential champion) by using Qwilr. With over 200 sleek, professional templates available and advanced tracking and analytics capabilities to help measure engagement, you’ll be able to put your resources front and center. Try a 14-day free trial today.
About the author
Dan Lever|Brand Consultant and Copywriter
Dan Lever is an experienced brand consultant and copywriter. He brings over 7 years experience in marketing and sales development, across a range of industries including B2B SaaS, third sector and higher education.
Frequently asked questions
Economic buyers are usually senior in position to their buyer champions, and are insulated from the work of buying teams. Economic buyers make decisions based on the case presented by buyer champions, and aren’t responsible for implementing the solutions offered.
In complex sales, these terms are used interchangeably. Both refer to an influential employee at a target account who will champion your product or service and introduce you to the economic buyer—the person who decides whether to buy your offer.
As well as champions, there are several other buyer team archetypes to be aware of, including end users (who will spend the most time using your product), blockers (those who are ambivalent or opposed to the purchase) and evaluators (those who view your product in terms of its technical features, rather than trying to gauge overall benefits).
