Run a Champion-Building Conversation

Every AE has had a deal where an internal contact seemed genuinely on your side — responsive, warm, forthcoming with information — and the deal still stalled or died in a room you weren't in. That's usually not because the contact was lying about liking the solution. It's because being friendly and being a champion are different things, and most reps never have the conversation that turns one into the other.

Friendly is not the same as invested

A friendly contact will take your calls, answer your questions, and tell you what you want to hear about internal politics. None of that requires them to spend their own political capital on your behalf. A real champion does something riskier: they bring the deal up when you're not there, they push back when a colleague raises a doubt, and they put their own name behind the recommendation. That's a meaningfully bigger ask than being pleasant on a call, and it's not something that happens by default just because someone likes you or your product.

Ask what's at stake for them, specifically

The conversation that builds a real champion starts with a direct, personal question most AEs are uncomfortable asking: “If this project goes well, what does that actually mean for you? And if it stalls, what happens?” A contact with real personal stake — a metric they own, a problem their boss has asked them to fix, credit they'd get for driving the change — has a reason to advocate that has nothing to do with liking you. A contact who can't answer that question clearly probably doesn't have enough skin in the game to fight for the deal when it gets hard.

Equip them, don't just inform them

Sending a champion a deck and asking them to “share it internally” usually fails, because a deck built for a sales conversation doesn't translate into something a non-salesperson can repeat confidently in their own meeting. What works instead is building the business case together, in language that sounds like the champion, not like your pitch — a short, specific version of “here's the problem, here's the cost of not fixing it, here's why this approach solves it” that they could say from memory. That's a meaningfully different ask than “can you forward this,” and it's the difference between a champion who repeats your case accurately and one who quietly avoids bringing it up because they're not sure they'd explain it right.

Testing commitment honestly

The only reliable way to know whether someone is a real champion is to ask for something that costs them a little — and see what happens. “Would you be comfortable introducing me to [economic buyer] so I can walk them through this directly?” or “Could you run the business case by your VP the way we just talked through it, and tell me how it lands?” are real tests. A genuine champion makes the introduction or takes the ask seriously, even if it takes a little coordinating. A contact who deflects, delays indefinitely, or quietly hands the task back to you is telling you, politely, that they're not willing to spend the capital — and that's important information before you build a forecast around them.

Where this fits with MEDDIC

MEDDIC names Champion as one of its six qualification criteria for exactly this reason — a deal without a real champion is a deal that depends entirely on the rep being in every room, which doesn't scale past a certain deal size. This guide is the practical version of building that specific element: the conversation, not just the checklist item.

Why practicing this beats reading about it

Asking someone what's personally at stake for them, or testing their commitment with a real ask, is an uncomfortable conversation the first few times — it's more direct and more personal than most AEs are used to being with an internal contact. That discomfort is exactly why the conversation gets skipped in real deals, and exactly why The Practice Gap matters here: rehearsing the phrasing and the follow-up questions ahead of time is what makes it possible to actually have the conversation instead of avoiding it.

Practicing this with Frontline Coach

Frontline Coach lets AEs rehearse champion-building conversations against AI personas that respond like a real internal contact would — warmly at Friendly difficulty, more guarded and noncommittal at Balanced and Challenging, so you can practice reading the difference between genuine enthusiasm and polite deflection. Pair this with Running a Multi-Stakeholder Demo Without Losing the Room for the meeting your champion should help you get into, or Handling ‘We Need to Think About It’ for what happens when a champion goes quiet. Frontline Coach starts at $9.99/mo, self-serve, no sales call required.