Champion development — MEDDPICC mastery: qualifying enterprise deals

Champion, coach and cheerleader

Three roles feel identical on a call recording and behave completely differently in your absence.

A cheerleader likes you and says encouraging things. No power, no risk taken. Most "champions" in most CRMs are cheerleaders.
A coach gives you information — the org chart, who really decides, what a competitor said. They may have power, but they inform rather than act.
A champion acts. They spend political capital on your behalf, in rooms you will never enter, because your success serves their interests. Every champion is a coach; not every coach is a champion; a cheerleader is neither.

The test is behavioural, never emotional. Ask what this person has done that carried a personal cost. If the answer is "been friendly and replied quickly", you have a cheerleader and your deal has no internal engine.

The three tests

Test one: power. Influence with the people who decide — not seniority, influence. Evidence: they have driven a purchase or a change here before; others defer to them; they can get an economic-buyer meeting at short notice.

Test two: personal win. What do they get, personally, if this works? Not organisational benefit — personal. A promotion case, a reputation repaired, a problem that has been embarrassing them for two years. If they cannot articulate it and you cannot infer it, they will not take risks for you when it becomes costly.

Test three: action. Will they do something that has a cost? The classic is the access request — ask them to arrange a meeting with the economic buyer. Others: send your business case internally under their own name, tell you who is against this and why, share their internal draft of the criteria.

Interpret the answer, not the enthusiasm. "Yes, I'll set that up" followed by a diarised meeting is a pass. "Let me handle the internal stuff, you focus on the demo" is a fail dressed as helpfulness — the most common way a fake champion protects their position as gatekeeper.

Voice from the field
"Champions have personal aspirations. To realize those aspirations, they need to differentiate themselves within the organization."
— John McMahon, The Qualified Sales Leader (2021)

Building a champion who can't yet buy

Most champions are made, not found. The person who eventually carries your deal often starts with genuine pain, moderate influence and no idea how to get anything funded.

Find their personal win and name it back. People commit to projects that serve them. Say it: "If this works, you're the person who fixed batch release before the audit — is that how you'd want it framed?"

Make them look good in a small, low-risk way. Send something they can forward: a peer benchmark, a regulatory update, an introduction at a comparable organisation. Being useful internally earns the right to ask for something costly later.

Teach them to sell internally, because nobody has ever taught them. Most clinical, scientific and operational leaders have no idea how to write a business case a finance function will pass. Coaching them through it — what the CFO cares about, which numbers survive scrutiny — is worth more than any demo you will ever deliver.

Escalate the asks. Introduction to a colleague → their internal criteria draft → presenting your case in a meeting you don't attend → economic-buyer access. A champion is built through a ladder of increasingly costly commitments.

Arming a champion

Assume your champion will present without you, badly, to someone sceptical, in eight minutes. Everything you give them must survive that; a rep who hands over a 40-slide deck has armed nobody.

The champion kit:

A one-page business case in their language, with their numbers and their logo, that they can put their name on without editing.
A short internal narrative — three or four sentences answering why anything, why now, why us, written the way they speak.
An objection sheet — the five things people will say, one line each, including the honest weaknesses.
Proof they can cite — a peer reference, published evaluation or validation summary; whatever their audience treats as credible.
A "what I need from you" line, so the meeting ends with a decision rather than interest.

Then rehearse it. Ask them to walk you through what they will say, and push back as the sceptic will. Awkward the first time, and the most valuable half-hour in the deal.

Champion succession

Assume your champion will leave. In life sciences and the NHS, reorganisations, secondments, parental leave and job moves are constant; a twelve-month cycle easily outlasts the person who started it.

The structural defence is never having exactly one. Aim for a primary champion plus a credible successor in a different function — one operational and one technical, say. This is not disloyalty; it is how you protect the project they care about.

Watch the leading indicators. "We" becoming "they". Meetings delegated. Vagueness about next year. A LinkedIn profile updated. New people copied on threads. Any of these earns a direct, friendly question: "Is anything changing your side I should know about?"

When it happens, run a handover, not a restart. Ask for a warm introduction and a written summary of where things stand — people are generous on the way out. Then treat the successor as a new relationship: re-run discovery, re-establish pain, find their personal win. Inheriting a project is not inheriting a commitment, and the fastest way to lose a deal here is assuming momentum transferred with the job title.

5. Multi-threading in practice

How big is a buying group, really

Gartner's widely quoted figure is that a typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to ten decision-makers. More recent Gartner work puts the spread wider: a 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers described groups ranging from five to sixteen people across as many as four functions, found 74% of buyer teams demonstrating unhealthy conflict during the decision process, and found consensus groups 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.

Two practical implications. Your deal has more voices in it than you have met. And much of your job is helping the group agree with itself, because internal disagreement, not competitor preference, is the most common reason nothing happens.

Voice from the field
"Buying groups are more diverse than ever, ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions. Each member may have differing priorities and opinions."
— Delainey Kirkwood, Principal, Research, Gartner Sales Practice (May 2025)

Map by function, not by title

Titles vary between organisations; functions do not. For a health-tech or life-sciences deal, map these seven and name a person against each:

Economic — who releases the money.
Operational owner — whose service or department changes.
Technical — integration, architecture, infrastructure.
Security and data protection — information governance, DPIA, security assurance.
Clinical, scientific or quality — clinical safety, GxP, validation, QA.
Procurement and legal — route to market, contracting, terms.
End users — who will use it daily and can kill a pilot.

A blank here is not a gap in a document — it is an unmanaged risk. The name you cannot fill in is often the one that stops the deal in month seven.

Sequencing: who you meet, in what order

There is a real trade-off between going early to power and going too early. Gong's analysis of more than a million executive sales cycles, run with 30 Minutes to President's Club, found win rates dropped by roughly 6% when an evaluation started with an executive but rose by about 5% when executives were involved around the third touchpoint — and that a won deal in the $50,000–$250,000 range typically involved at least ten stakeholders.

The practical read: earn the executive conversation, then have it early. A sensible order:

Operational owner first — they have the pain and can describe the process.
Users and technical contacts next — they generate the detail that makes you credible and the objections you must handle.
The economic buyer around the third substantive engagement — once you have enough of their organisation's language and numbers to be worth their time.
Security, quality and procurement in parallel, early — not at the end. These functions cannot be accelerated, so start their clocks while everything else runs.

The executive-access ask

Ask for access as a value exchange with a bounded time cost, and give the champion a reason that helps them. Three usable phrasings:

The validation ask: "Before we invest in a pilot, I'd like twenty minutes with whoever owns the budget — not to pitch, but to check what we're building matches how they'll judge it."
The joint ask: "Shall we prepare the executive summary together and present it jointly? You lead, I answer the technical questions."

When you get the meeting, do not demo. Bring their numbers, the risk of inaction, the decision you need and the date. Ask what would make them confident, leave with a specific commitment, and make your champion look good in front of their boss — that is what pays for the next request. If access is refused twice with no explanation, treat it as data about the deal, not the relationship: either your contact lacks influence or the project lacks priority, and both are qualification findings.

When you're single-threaded and stuck

Single-threading is the default state of a deal nobody is working. Five moves, in rough order of cost to you:

Route an artefact. Send something needing another function's input — a security questionnaire, integration specification, validation checklist — and ask who should receive it. You are requesting a routing decision, not a meeting, which is far easier to grant.
Thread laterally first. Peers are easier to reach than a boss and generate no threat. Two lateral relationships often produce the vertical one.
Use your own executives. An executive-to-executive introduction from your VP or CEO bypasses the gatekeeper problem and flatters the recipient.
Trade an event for access. A workshop, peer roundtable or benchmark review — something of value that structurally requires several people to attend.
Name the constraint. "I've only ever spoken to you, and deals that stay that way tend not to get funded. What's the best way to change that?" Honest, non-accusatory, often effective — and if it isn't, you have your answer.

Field note
There is a version of multi-threading that damages deals, and new reps stumble into it constantly: going around a contact without telling them. Emailing their boss after being asked not to, or cornering an executive at a conference, buys one meeting and costs you the only person inside the account who was helping. The rule that keeps you safe is transparency without permission-seeking — say what you are doing and why, frame it as protecting the project, give them the chance to own it. "I'm going to send this to the CFO's office next week; would you rather send it yourself?" preserves the relationship and still moves the deal.