Champion Building that creates life long relationships

Give (and get) Advice
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This is the checklist my sales team and I use whenever we are establishing a relationship with a potential champion and testing our potential champions. Hopefully you all find this helpful!

CHAMPION BUILDING CHECKLIST

  • Does this person have influence?

  • Does this person have access to other stakeholders?

  • Will they take us to those other stakeholders?

  • Have they done this before at this company?

  • Have we uncovered their personal win / metrics?

  • Are they selling our product when we’re not there?

  • Have they given us information they would not give the competition?

  • Do they have access to the Economic Buyer?

  • Will they take us to the Economic Buyer?

  • Can they articulate how a deal gets done?

  • Can they define the approval process?

  • Do they understand the funding process?

  • Have we identified pain & urgency?

  • Do we understand the “Why (insert your product)?” for this person?

  • Have we mitigated their “FOMU” (Fear of Messing Up)?

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Curious to hear if others use a similar checklist like this, or have other go-to resources for champion building? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Thanks so much for sharing this Customer Champion Checklist, @david.graswick!

And - for those of you who missed the roundtable - we have got the full recording up here on our YouTube channel.

(and if you’re looking for some TL;DR highlights, you’ll find those here in the Events channel)

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@david.graswick.

Thanks for a great roundtable session.

Your list is solid and I have a similar list, but categorize it in the following ways…

  1. Qualify/define a Champion

  2. Test your Champion

  3. MEDDPPICC for Opportunity Qualification/Validation

First, Qualify a CHAMPION. There are really 4 questions that need to had an answer of “YES” in order to say you have a definitive CHAMPION. These questions are:

  1. Do they have access to power/EB?

  2. Are they selling on your behalf (when are or are not present)?

  3. Do they have a personal win?

  4. Do they have political clout/influence?

It is up to the RVP to hold the AE accountable to ensure they are actually dealing with a CHAMPION. A few of your questions are great for qualification like…

  1. Will they take us to the EB and other stakeholders?

  2. What are their personal wins/metrics?

I often see Sales Reps give the “CHAMPION FLAG/LABEL” away like a free frisbee. THEY MUST EARN IT! Giving it away for free is a HUGE mistake and will set you up for failure. If there is not a YES for each of the 4 questions above…at best you have is a COACH…which isn’t bad…you need coaches too. But a coach will not move the needle when the needle needs to be moved.

Jus to note, some of your questions above can be answered by a COACH. For example:

  1. Identified Pain and Urgency

  2. Can they articulate how to get a deal done?

  3. Can they defined the procurement process?

Questions like the above are part of MEDDPPICC which helps qualify and validate an oppty.

One other topic you raised are the “WHYs”, in this order and in the CUSTOMERS words:

  1. Why Change?

  2. Why Now?

  3. Why your product/company?

Extremely successful AEs build out their relationship maps/org charts and classify everyone involved and anyone who could be involved in the following way:

  1. your Champion (Green)

  2. Potential/Identified Champion (Yellow)

  3. your Coach (Blue)

  4. Potential Coach (Orange)

  5. Competitors Champion (Red)

  6. Competitors Coach (Red)

  7. Unknown/have not met (Grey)

Ideally you want more Greens and Blues than Reds. The number will vary based on the product you are selling and the organization you are selling to.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

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