Why Champions Are Tested, Not Declared

Open any pipeline review and listen for the word. "We have a strong champion." "The champion loves us." "Our champion says we're the front-runner." Now ask the question that collapses most of those sentences: what has this person spent internal capital on for us, and when?

Silence, usually. Or a recitation of warmth: they respond fast, they take our calls, they said great things about the demo. None of that is championship. That is friendliness — and friendliness, in an enterprise deal, is nearly free. The failure smell in deal reviews is the word "champion" applied to anyone who returns emails.

Here is the definition that actually predicts outcomes. A champion has power — real influence and access to the Economic Buyer — and will — a personal stake in your success. A friendly contact who lacks either is a coach: genuinely valuable, worth cultivating, and not sufficient to carry a deal. Deals with coaches feel good. Deals with champions close.

The only way to know which one you have is to test.

The test: ask for something with internal cost

A test is simple: request something that costs the person political capital inside their own company. Not a meeting with you — a meeting for you. The reliable tests, roughly in ascending order of cost:

Share internal intelligence you could not get otherwise. Org dynamics, the real decision process, a competitor's inside track, the post-mortem of the last failed project.
Secure an introduction to the Economic Buyer. The single most reliable test in existence. A champion controls or can create that access; a coach explains why now isn't a good time.
Rehearse the business case with you — and then present it, or parts of it, without you in the room.
Defend you under pressure. When a competitor or an internal skeptic pushes back, does this person argue your case, or go quiet and report the weather?

Champions deliver. Coaches deflect. The deflection is rarely dramatic — it sounds like "let me think about the best way to approach him" for three consecutive weeks. That is not a delay. That is a diagnosis. Either the person lacks the access (no power) or the appetite (no will), and either way you do not have a champion; you have a pleasant single thread that will snap the first time the deal needs weight moved.

In the bank deal that runs through my book, the champion — an SVP who owned the pain, the 340 analysts, and the regulator relationship — was tested three times before the deal ever entered the forecast as more than upside: she secured the meeting with the COO who owned the budget, she shared the incumbent vendor's failed-project post-mortem, and she rehearsed the executive deck twice. Three tests, three deliveries, all logged in the deal file with dates. When the deal-health score gave her the full ten points for champion strength, those points were evidence, not adjective. That is the standard: in my scoring system, an untested champion is worth six points out of ten; a coach only, three. The gap between "declared" and "tested" is measured, because it is exactly where forecasts go to die.

Why the distinction is worth real money

Because the deal is decided in rooms you will never enter. The definition of a champion in qualification terms is someone with the power and will to fight for you when you're not there — in the budget conversation, the steering committee, the hallway exchange after the competitor's lunch.

And competitors know it. In that same bank deal, mid-proof, scores trending green, the incumbent vendor's president had a private lunch with the Economic Buyer, arranged through a shared board relationship. The vendor found out eight days later, secondhand. In the interim, the EB had quietly asked his risk team to take another hard look at the internal-build option, and the deal's temperature dropped for two weeks while nobody on the selling side knew why. The post-mortem was uncomfortable: two threads above director level, no relationship with the EB's chief of staff, no one in finance. A single-threaded deal at altitude — and nobody had noticed, because everything below was going so well.

An untested champion gives you exactly this failure mode, everywhere, all the time. You believe you have coverage; you have a rumor of coverage. The test is how you find out while it is still cheap to fix.

Developing a champion is a ladder, not a label

Testing is one rung of a five-step development ladder. Run it deliberately:

Identify. Who is most damaged by the pain and most rewarded by solving it? Championship follows self-interest; pick the person whose year gets materially better if you win.
Educate. Arm them with the 3 Whys — why buy anything, why buy us, why now — the value model, and the objection answers. You are teaching them to be a better businessperson inside their own company; that is the trade that makes the relationship worth their capital.
Test. Ask for something with internal cost. Log what happens, with dates.
Arm. Co-author the Economic Buyer deck with them. Run a dry run. Agree who says what. The strongest version of this: the champion presents your conservative business case without you in the room. In the bank deal, the champion presented the value model to the risk committee with no vendor employee present — and introduced the number with "we stress-tested their model and cut it nearly in half; this is the floor." A champion defending your floor is worth more than a seller pitching your ceiling.
Protect. Never let a champion be surprised — no new pricing, no new terms, no claims they have not seen first. They sold your number internally. A surprise discount or a late claim spends their credibility, and champions whose credibility you burn do not champion twice.

Notice the reciprocity in the ladder: you are not extracting favors. You are making a capable person more effective at winning an argument they already wanted to win. That is why real champions accept the tests — each one advances their project, not just yours.

The health check, and what to do when it fails

Four questions, asked of every material deal, every review:

Have they gotten you a meeting with the Economic Buyer? (Held, not hoped.)
Do they share internal information you couldn't get otherwise?
Can they articulate your differentiation in their own words — not your slideware's?
Have they defended you when a competitor or skeptic pushed back?

Score honestly. Zero or one out of four: you have a coach — keep them, value them, and go find a champion, usually by asking the coach who is most damaged by the pain. Two or three: you have an untested or partially tested champion — design the next test this week and put it in the deal plan as a dated action. Four: log the evidence and protect them like the asset they are.

And never let the champion be the whole deal. The rule of thumb is five or more meaningful relationships in any enterprise opportunity — Economic Buyer, technical evaluators, end users, procurement, security, and the blockers you engage instead of avoid. A mutual action plan where every customer-side owner is the champion's name is one resignation letter away from a lost quarter. Put the influence map on screen in every review: deals narrate beautifully; maps do not lie. Three green dots and eight grey ones is a single-threaded deal wearing makeup.

The discipline compresses to one sentence for your next pipeline review. When a seller says "we have a champion," ask: what was the most recent test — what did we ask for that cost them something, when, and what did they do? If the answer has a date and a delivery, forecast accordingly. If it has an adjective, you have a coach, a hope, and work to do this week.

Champions are not declared in your CRM. They are proven in their hallways.

Go deeper. The champion development ladder, the Economic Buyer playbook, and the multithreading system are in Chapter 7 of The Value Engine: How Elite Enterprise Sales Teams Turn Buyer Pain into Forecastable Revenue by Rudy M. Celekli. Get the book, and download the free Field Toolkit — the Deal Review One-Pager asks for the champion's most recent test, by name and by date, on every deal.