Champion Development

More deals are lost to Coach inflation — calling a friendly contact a Champion — than to any competitor. A true Champion has three properties: organizational influence, a personal win tied to your success, and willingness to sell internally when you are not in the room. Anything less is a Coach.

• Not the person who likes you most
• Not the person who takes every meeting
• Not the person with the senior title (titles are not influence)
• Not the person who says 'I'll try to set that up' (true Champions deliver, then update)
• Not someone whose career advances regardless of your outcome

Look for the contact who: actively asks for materials they can use to sell internally, volunteers information about politics and process, pushes back on your weaknesses (so they can defend them), introduces you to peers without being asked, and treats your problem as their problem.

1. Diagnose their personal win — promotion, mandate, problem they need solved, exposure to senior leadership
2. Equip them to sell internally — role-tailored one-pagers, ROI models, FAQs for skeptics, peer references they can cite
3. Make them look good — feed them insights, data, and language they can use as their own
4. Protect their air cover — never surprise them in front of their executive
5. Test, then trust, then test again

Run a Champion Test at least once per stage. Acceptable tests:

• Introduce the Economic Buyer with a warm endorsement
• Share the procurement timeline and approval thresholds
• Get budget confirmation in writing
• Defend the business case in a committee meeting
• Sign a Mutual Action Plan
• Bring you into a pre-meeting you would not otherwise attend

A contact who repeatedly declines or deflects these tests is a Coach, not a Champion. Treat the diagnosis as data, not a relationship judgment.

False Champions are dangerous precisely because they feel productive. They take meetings, share intel, even speak well of you internally — but they will not do the hard things. Deals built on False Champions fail late, after significant investment, and almost always with a 'they really seemed engaged' post-mortem. Hope is not a Champion test.

In MEDDPICC, the C for Champion is the keystone — without it, M, E, D, D, P, I, and the second C all degrade. A Champion delivers the Metrics in defensible form, opens the Economic Buyer, shapes the Decision Criteria, surfaces the Decision Process, navigates the Paper Process, validates the Pain at the EB level, and exposes the true Competition. Treat Champion development as the central discipline, not one item in a checklist.

A seller built a strong relationship with a Director of IT over six months. The Director loved the product, took every meeting, and consistently said 'we're going to make this happen.' When asked to introduce the CIO, the Director always had a reason to delay. When asked to share the procurement timeline, the response was 'I'll find out.' The deal slipped two quarters before the seller accepted the diagnosis: the Director was a Coach, not a Champion. Pivoting to multi-thread to the CIO's chief of staff revived the deal — but six months had been spent on a relationship that could never close it.