This chapter is built on the champion-building philosophy of Nate Nasralla, founder of Fluint, author of Selling With and Brief & Brilliant, who has spent his career enabling enterprise buyers sell internally, and has trained thousands of sellers to work with them.
How to win
Gartner puts six to ten decision makers on a typical enterprise purchase but only about 10 to 15 percent of a buyer's time in the process is spent with sellers. The other 85 to 90 percent is internal: hallway conversations, one-on-ones, Slack threads, budget meetings, and forwarded documents you may never see.
With this many decision makers and so little time spent with sellers, most buying decisions get made in meetings the seller never attends.
That's why Nate Nasralla says: “Sales reps do not close enterprise deals, buyers do.”
What the buyer is experiencing when purchasing
Enterprise employees spend a career accumulating internal capital, and they are extremely choosy about spending it. That in mind, every employee has a finite number of asks.
So before a buyer advocates for anything, they are running two private calculations:
Is this worth spending my chips for? The executive they would advocate to has a dozen competing priorities. Bringing a small ask earns a reputation of "that sounds like a you problem." The ask has to be big enough and specific enough to be worth the spend.
Can I execute? They need confidence that if they stick their neck out, the project lands well and they can come back and say it went great. That is what buys them the credibility for the next ask.
Both calculations get harder as contract value rises. Larger deals require larger changes to how a company operates, and in organizations where people are already swimming in change, perceived personal risk multiplies.
That said, in order to make a change worth pursuing, the buyer needs three things:
A reason to see their job differently. In early conversations, the buyer should walk away thinking you know something they need to know. Even if they never buy from you, the buyer should now know something that makes them approach their role differently.
A version of the work they helped make. Confidence comes from ownership, and ownership comes from contribution. In this chapter, we will outline how to get ownership out of your champion.
Language that survives internal pushback. Whatever you said in the meeting has to be repeatable by someone else. The seller must give the buyer "soundbites that travel," which allows them to carry your message ito rooms you are not in.
As Nate puts it: you do not find a steel-welded champion, you produce one. Now, let's get into how to produce one.
Building a champion runs in four stages: qualify, build, equip, and test. Next, we go step by step in how to build a champion.
Stage 1: Qualify who can actually become a champion
The characteristics of a champion
A champion must have all three of these characteristics to qualify:
Incentive: Something is personally in it for them if this goes well, tied to a company level win.
Influence: They have the ability and reach to reshape the internal conversation.
Intel: They work hard to find deal intelligence you would never get on your own.
All three are required, however, someone can possess all three and still be only an advocate. The distinction to make between a champion and advocate is the ability to create productive forward motion. This is critical. Without forward motion, you do not have a champion.
Contrary to popular belief, influence inside organizations has almost no relationship to the org chart. Enterprises behave like social networks, and the power line falls differently in every account. A manager can be the person who moves the company and a C-level exec can be a bystander. It’s the job of the seller to understand where that power line falls and who have influence to create necessary forward motion.
Diagnose why this person is in front of you
In the case of inbound demo requests, the person we are talking with is of unknown standing. In these scenarios, it’s helpful to ask directly:
“Typically we get involved in significant projects that require hard work. Are you looking at taking this on yourself, and what made you interested? Or is this something you were looped into by someone else?”
The question separates the person whose idea this was from the person sent to gather information and report back. Self-initiated buyers are more likely to become champions, though they may still need someone with more standing alongside them.
Past projects can reveal the power line within an organization. There are a few simple questions to ask the prospect to understand where it lays:
“Was there a tipping point when that project went from an idea to actually moving?”
“Who did people turn to and trust to spearhead that?”
“When something has been really important to [executive], have they ever recruited someone they already had a track record with?”
Expect more than one role
Complex deals need a project sponsor and a project manager. The sponsor may never be in the details, and without their backing the project goes nowhere. The rule to hold tight: no deal gets done without a champion, and a champion alone will not get a deal done.
Stage 2: Build the champion by co-creating the business case
A champion is built through ownership, and the mechanism that produces ownership is what Nate calls the “IKEA Effect.” The act of creating the champion enablement document is simultaneously the act of creating a champion.
This means how you handle the production of the document matters as much as what goes in it. A few habits help you craft the champion.
Start early and rough
Business cases are not late stage documents. it’s best to treat them as LEGOs, small blocks that accumulate. A few problem statements laid out on a document after the first discovery call is a good start.
Introduce it as a working artifact
Open a conversation with a simple slide: “Here’s what I understood from our last conversation, and here are the questions I had on what I may have missed.” Similar to Jen Allen Knuth’s philosophy of “be specific enough to be wrong,” asking the buyer for correction is a form of building the document with them.
Design in the incompleteness
If ownership comes from contribution, a finished document has nothing to contribute to. Throughout the deal, insert placeholder data, say plainly that you are probably off base, and ask who should correct it.
Ask for contribution in a way that is easy to say yes to
As sellers, you have to make it easy for the buyer to contribute to the process. It’s not our job to make more work for them. Rather, it’s our job to make buying as easy as possible. Here are three asks that bring the buyer into the document:
“If I share a recap of what I’ve captured so far, would you be open to weighing in with a comment or two?”
“What here resonates, that you think we should highlight? And what do you think we’ve missed?”
“Here’s what I’m understanding from my last calls with [contacts]. What should we change, or add in here, from your perspective?”
Annotate the sections you want input on
“Any thoughts?” does not point the buyer to anything specific enough to correct or contribute to. A comment on a specific line, with a specific question, helps guide to buyer to an answer you need.
Close the loop with a commitment to use it
At the end of the meeting, make sure you’re getting your champion to commit to contribution:
“If I fold in the goals we discussed and what would be required for a pilot into a simple one-pager, would you be down to attach that to your next one-on-one agenda?”
The underlying ask is always the same: if I do the work of building this for you, will you use it, and will you be in it?
Keep the document
Fold every round of feedback into the next version, until you have a complete document. Come back after each internal meeting with “how did it go, what did you learn, what should we update.” The document becomes a living record of the deal instead of an attachment.
Stage 3: Equip the champion to sell without you
As we mentioned earlier, most of the deal is going to happen in room you’re not in.You must equip your champion to carry your message into the meetings they have to defend your solution.
The unit of enablement is one document written for an internal audience, carrying the byline Developed by: [Champion Name], [Key Deal Players]. Your logo and your name are absent by design. It should read like something produced inside the company.
Five sections to include:
Section
What to include
Priority-driven headline
Anchor to a strategic priority that is already funded, stated in your buyer’s language. Use the trigger phrase or codename people actually say, the way SendGrid used “make the mail move.”
Problem statement with consequences
Quantify the cost, then answer the question “and if it isn’t solved?” The honest answer is usually that it gets worse.
Recommended approach, before product
Win agreement on the right approach vendor-agnostically first. Differentiate after the approach is settled.
Target outcomes
Flip the same metrics you used to size the problem. Ranges and scenarios hold up better internally than a single confident figure.
Required investment
Cost and contract terms, plus the time, people, energy, and commitments the buyer’s own side has to make.
Compress the argument into a soundbite that travels
A champion will have far more moments with the economic buyer than you ever will, and most of them will be brief. In Nate’s words, “big deals are won by short soundbites that travel,” which means the message has to be small enough to remember and repeat.
The Strategic Soundbite has three parts:
A shift has occurred that makes this something other than a choice
You will take a differentiated approach to it
The right response unlocks specific outcomes while inaction lets the problem worsen.
On a one-page business case, the headline is that soundbite.
To test if your soundbite is specific enough, write two or three soundbites for two or three different accounts and hold them side by side. If they read the same, you are selling to the persona instead of to that company.
Stage 4: Route to the economic buyer through the champion
It's critical to establish presence with the economic buyer early, with low-cost and constant updates. To do this, identify the economic buyer well before you need them, then start a single email thread and keep returning to it:
“Hey, I’ve been working with the team, it’s been awesome. Here’s an example of what [champion] built on [X] deal.”
Then later, on the same thread:
“Learned from [contact] that the team was able to do X differently. I had a couple of ideas from other teams that may relate to [priority the EB owns]. I’ve got [next step] planned with the team, I’ll update you then.”
Executives read things that relate to their job even when they never reply. When a real risk surfaces, the context is already there, and “I see two risks to this rollout and I need your input, can we catch up Friday?” lands in a warm thread.
If a direct path to the economic buyer is not available, write through the champion to get your message through. We call this a "forwardable email." It's an email written to the champion but aimed at the executive. It should sound like the champion, open on the executive’s own initiative, use language familiar inside the company, and introduce a tension real enough to justify attention.
Stage 5: Test continuously
Testing your champion is not a separate stage that happens at the end. Every ask is simultaneously a build step and a diagnostic, which makes it a self-reinforcing loop. The one requirement is that each test adds value for the buyer so it doesn't feel like we simply asking for favors.
There are three tests worth running in every deal:
Assign an action item tied to a real gap in the case. You're looking for follow through as a signal that your champion can create forward motion.
Ask them to lay out the internal buying process. A champion can draw you the treasure map. A coach can only describe it vaguely. This is a great test to determine if your point of contact has influence and reach within the organization.
Flip the roles. “Pitch me how you would sell this internally, so I can capture what matters most.” This helps you learn exactly how strong the argument is once it leaves your mouth and enters theirs.
The default follow-up is an email with links to product pages, a case study, and an ROI calculator. That email hands the work of assembling an argument back to the buyer, along with control of the message. The champion now has to hunt, read, translate, and rebuild your case in their own language before they can use any of it, and most of them will not.
The fix is one narrative the champion can forward without translating.
2 Going over the champion's head
Internal timelines can look like inaction from the outside. Reps often read silence as a stall and reach around the champion to the executive. The cost is the relationship with the only person who can actually move the deal.
When you need the executive, build the path through the champion by naming a shared obstacle and teeing up a specific, easy action.
3 Mistaking advocates for champions
Sellers routinely fool themselves with someone that is enthusiastic, responsive, and helpful. Run each potential champion against the Three I's before you label someone your champion.
The second half of the mistake is treating "champion" as a singular role. In transformational deals spanning multiple business units and P&Ls, a single champion is a single point of failure. One reorg, one internal move, one shift in priorities, and the deal has no one carrying it.
The act of building a champion takes time and is mostly done through human-to-human interaction. That said, there are places where AI can help a seller deliver a better experience to their champion.
The most obvious place for AI in the act of building a champion is translating buyer's language into the champion enablement document that we have in this section. The champion enablement document should be written using the language of the buyer and AI can help translate call transcripts into a document that reflects the words that were said.
While the template of the document is standard, the content of the document should be unique to each deal. Avoid standardizing your champion enablement document so it doesn't become too generic.
