The Vital Role of Champions in Enterprise Sales
When selling complex solutions into large enterprises, having an internal champion is critical for success. Enterprise sales cycles are notoriously long and labyrinthine, involving numerous decision makers across various roles, teams, and hierarchy levels. Without a strong internal advocate actively pushing things forward and knocking down obstacles, even the most promising opportunities can stall out indefinitely and eventually die on the vine.
What is a Champion?
A champion is an individual within the prospective customer organization who emerges organically as a fervent internal supporter of your proposed solution. This person innately understands the value you provide, sees clearly how it can benefit their company, and takes an active, vigorous role in driving the decision-making process towards a purchase.
They use their deep organizational knowledge, cross-functional relationships, sphere of influence, and persuasive abilities to clear roadblocks, gather needed information, debunk objections, sway other key stakeholders, and keep everything advancing. A great champion relentlessly champions your cause behind closed doors.
Why are Champions Absolutely Crucial?
In large, complex organizations with ingrained processes, you rarely encounter a single decision maker empowered to independently sign off on an enterprise-wide purchase. You need to meticulously cultivate buy-in and signoff from numerous players across the organization — C-suite executives, department leaders, end users, legal, IT/security, finance, procurement, and more. Each has their own horse in the race and boxes to check.
An internal champion helps you deftly navigate this multi-fronted gauntlet. As an insider, they know precisely who needs to have a seat at the table, what objections will inevitably be raised by each party, what specific questions and criteria will need to be addressed, and frankly whose support is make-or-break. Without this guided navigation from someone on the inside who deeply gets the org’s dynamics, you’ll flail trying to steer your sale effectively through the shifting sands of the organization’s complexities.
A great champion will:
• Thoroughly map out all decision makers, influencers, detractors early
• Provide candid guidance to help you deeply understand the org’s needs, priorities, and buying process
• Advise on customizing your pitch, demos, and materials to resonate
• Proactively rally support from other departments, executives
• Continuously push for prioritization against the inevitably long list of competing initiatives
• Unblock stalls and org inertia by cutting through red tape
• Directly defend against politics, turf wars, competitors’ objections
Having this kind of tenacious internal partner is invaluable for bridging information gaps, averting pitfalls, keeping things progressing, and maintaining mindshare amidst all the noise. Without their insider’s view and full-throated advocacy at each turn, even the best solution will struggle to survive the matrix.
Finding and Empowering Champions
Your highest-potential champions are usually mid-level managers or team leads who would directly use, benefit from, and become internal power users of your solution. They have a clear and vested interest in making the purchase happen to solve their headaches.
However, potential champions can emerge from different roles and motivations too — IT leaders seeking to modernize, business analysts looking for better data insights, compliance officers needing more robust controls, procurement professionals aiming to reduce costs long-term, etc. Listen closely for the true pain points they voice.
Actively work to identify and engage with potential champions during the sales cycle. Pay attention to those who demonstrate a clear and nuanced understanding of your value proposition beyond surface-level features. Take note of those who seem authentically enthusiastic and frustrated with the current state of things. Invest time educating and empowering them with tools like:
• Customized ROI/value calculation analysis
• Tailored use cases and process maps for their org
• Slide decks and presentation templates making your case
• Negotiation advice based on similar enterprise wins
Nurture these potential champions, make them feel bought into your long-term vision, and give them everything they need to wage an effective internal campaign.
At a certain point, you may want to directly ask your strongest champions to formally take on an explicit internal advocacy role for your initiative. Have an open discussion setting expectations around the specific activities and workstreams you need them to own — building a supportive internal coalition, securing executive endorsement, coordinating requirements gathering and evaluations, prepping other teams, and more.
Importantly, establish a cadence for regular structured updates with your champion, positioning them as the hub incorporating inputs from all spokes. This creates accountability and allows you to continuously realign based on their unvarnished view from the trenches.
The Path of Least Resistance
At the end of the day, large organizations with deeply entrenched processes tend to choose the path of least resistance, even if it means passing over major innovation and optimization opportunities. When you have an impassioned, well-prepared champion clearing the way for you, knocking down silos, and escorting you through all the checkpoints, you become that smoother path of least resistance.
Conversely, without an effective champion on the inside doing the heavy lifting, even the most game-changing and seemingly perfect-fit solution will falter under the inertia, bureaucracy, politics, and compounding barriers present in today’s big companies. While not a guarantee of success, prioritizing efforts to find, enable, and lean on powerful internal champions is absolutely essential to maximize your chances of winning those make-or-break, whale-sized enterprise deals.
