Lesson 42 - Identify, Test, and Develop Your Champion

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A Champion is someone who has the authority and influence to sell on your behalf when you aren't in the room, and good Champions are critical to driving deals forward. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to identify, test, and strengthen your relationships with Champions. Your assignment will involve creating a plan to engage and empower a Champion within a target account.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to begin to identify, test and develop strong champions within your target accounts, a champion is one of the most important areas of med pick. A lot of people will say, No champion, no deal, you need a strong champion to guide you through an opportunity. So let's talk about what makes a champion. A champion is someone who can sell on your behalf when you're not in the room. They're the person that has a vested interest, normally, a personal interest, in seeing your solution implemented at their organization. They also typically have the power, the authority, the credibility, the trust of the economic buyer or executive sponsor in the organization. So ultimately, they're the ones that are able to get a job done. So thinking about the two sides of a strong champion they want to sell on your behalf when you're not there there, and they're educated enough to do so, and they have the power, influence and authority to make something happen. Now, before we go any further, it's important for you to understand the difference between a champion and a coach. You'll hear both of these terms thrown around a lot in discussions of med pick, a coach is someone that likes you and they like your solution, and maybe they're even rooting for you and your solution. And maybe they can even give you some information that is helpful, but ultimately, they don't have the power, the influence or the authority to actually get a deal done with your solution. So if I'm talking to someone, maybe it's an end user, and they're telling me how much they want to implement my solution at their organization, but I see that they don't have any authority. Does that mean that it's not valuable to talk to them? No, of course not. It can still be very valuable to talk to a coach. And when you're talking to a coach, you can ask them for information about the value they're getting from your solution. If they're an existing customer, you can ask them about some of the challenges their organization is facing, what they've personally seen. You can ask them to referrals to someone that you think might be a champion. A coach can be a valuable resource, but ultimately, you want to get to a champion. So how do we find them? The first thing you can do is whoever your contact is within the organization, you can ask who is typically the person that gets a deal like this done within the organization, who owns the budget for this can be another question to kind of work your way up the chain. Another thing you can do is start mapping out the org chart on LinkedIn Sales navigators. So if you can start to understand who is the executive sponsor, who's tied to the key initiative, who's most likely to own the budget. And then from there, you can move into, you know, who's likely to have the ear of that person who looks like they are tenured, who looks like they have influence. You could ask yourself, who's new at an organization? So who is someone that maybe just switched jobs over and they have a vested interest in, you know, proving themselves. You can look up current usage statistics for your solution, and look for power users or senior users. You can look on LinkedIn at that organization, for influencers or someone that's well connected they have a lot of other contacts within that organization, but ultimately, you want to start searching for any signs that this person is influential. From there, you can always reach out, ask for a referral to that person. You can reach out to them directly, but you want to start looking for different ways that you can potentially find a good champion. Now, once you think you have someone that can be a champion for you, you want to test that champion. And ultimately, you're testing for power and influence and credibility, and you're testing for their ability to sell on your behalf. So how can you do that? Well, a few ways to test for power, influence and credibility. Ask them for referrals. Ask them to set up meetings with other stakeholders, across departments, their peers. If they are able to get their peers into a meeting with you, they are probably fairly influential. Asking them for a referral to their boss, if they can get you into a meeting with their boss, that is a good sign. Ask them for a meeting in person, showing that they're able to arrange an in person, you know, book a conference room, get the whole thing. That can be a good sign. Ask. Ask them for internal information about what's going on at the organization. So hey, in the last meeting where you discussed our solution, what was said? What were the pros and cons, what were the internal objections being raised? Ask them for data that you aren't privy to or that isn't public facing. So you might say, you know, are you able to provide me with any usage statistics that show how our product is being used today, you might ask them for internal data on some of the challenges that they're facing, right? So asking them about things that might be a little bit more sensitive, what is the decision process? What is the paper process? Who's on the steering committee. What are their personal wins? So really, just asking for inside information can be a great way to test your champion. Some other ways you can do this are to ask them to help you develop your meeting materials. This is a great green flag. If I can ask my potential champion and say, Hey, I know we have a big demo coming up. Would you be willing to meet with me before that demo, to talk me through it, to make sure that I'm going to present the right things, to make sure that maybe you ask them to meet with you before you deliver a business case or an ROI statement, and say, Does this pass muster? Does this pass the sniff test? Right? And if they are helping you to create materials, to test materials before you even get to your meeting. That is an excellent green flag. Some other ways to test your champion. Let me think. Let me make sure I've covered everything I can think of here. Yeah, asking them to co create with you, asking them for meetings up and across the organization, asking for inside information. Those are really the big three, if I think of any. As I continue to talk through some of these, I'll let you know. Now, if you are testing your champion and they don't happen to pass every single test, that's okay. It doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a champion. It just means that you need to further develop your champion. Oh, that's another way to test your champion. I just remembered ask them why your product is the best product for their organization. Have them sell you your own solution. What are they saying about why they need to act, why they need to act now, and why they need to act with your solution. If they can't articulate those three whys, then they're probably not acting as a strong champion. When you're not in the room, ask them who you're competing against. Can be another one. I'm probably going to think of a bunch of these as we talk, just because they don't pass the test doesn't mean you can't develop them into a strong champion. So what are some ways that you can develop them? One, set up a call with them to to go over the value of your solution and make sure they are aligned, and have them repeat it back to you, send them follow up material on why your solution is the best for them. Bring a strong value proposition, make sure that they can articulate the ROI that you're bringing to their organization. One way to do this is just ask them if they're willing to be a strong champion for you. Say, Look, you know, we're not going to be able to get this deal done without someone in on the inside fighting for us. Are you willing to be that person? Right? And if they say no, great, that's an awesome sign that they are not your champion. And if they say yes, great, now you can be far more upfront about what you're asking of them. Okay, if you're going to fight on our behalf, we want to make sure that you can articulate the Three Wise. We need to know who we're competing against. We need your help. CO creating the business case right? Some other ways you can develop your champion. Make them look good. Make them look good in front of their boss, in front of their peers, defer to them. Talk about how great of a partner they've been to you. Talk about the wonderful things that they've been doing as a as a partner with, with your team after the sale is made, one great thing you can do is write a champion letter, which is a letter that you write to their boss, letting them know all of the great work that you're planning to do together, all of the diligence that they did in in in reviewing your solution. So writing a champion letter can be a great way to do that. Now, let me make sure I haven't missed anything here. Perfect giving them personal wins. Find out what success looks like for them personally. One way to develop your champion is to develop a trusting relationship with them. Show them that you are a person of your word, that you're going to do the things you say you're going to do. Show them that if they are relying on you for something, that you're going to show up for them. So if they if they go through the trouble of booking a demo, booking a meeting. Their boss that you're showing up on time, prepared, ready to discuss the things that that you addressed with them. Fight for their needs. Make sure that once you understand their personal win that you're fighting for it, and that you show them you're fighting for it. Say, I know that what you want to get out of this is less time preparing for your you know, product planning meetings, or whatever it may be, I want what you to get out of this is less time having to manage multiple social media accounts, less time creating different dashboards and reports. And I want to make sure that that is top priority as we start to implement this solution. So they need to know that that you are going after their wins, so giving them personal wins, fighting for their needs, making them look good, being a trustworthy partner, working with them on a mutual action plan for success. What does success look like for you? What does it look like for your organization? What are the different steps we're going to take to get this deal done together and then make sure that you don't disappear right after the sale is made, I've seen so many people put in great work to develop a strong champion, and then the second they make the sale, they disappear, and they lose all of the trust that they built. The champion now only sees them as someone that's out for a sale. So you need to follow up after the sale is complete, ask them, Hey, how are things going? How did onboarding go? How is adoption going with your solution? Are there any other ways I can still help you out and letting them know that that you're not disappearing? There two final tips on building champions. One, don't rely on just one champion. It's so easy to develop somebody and then, and then they leave the organization, and now you're stuck at ground zero, right? You have to kind of start from scratch, um, and then two, um, you should constant. This is a constant, ongoing process. You're never done developing a champion. You should always be looking out for them, continuing to build and develop trust, continuing to look out for their needs, and continuing to test them to make sure they still have that influence, power, credibility, and that they're still able to sell on your behalf. Because eventually someone's going to turn to them and say, Is this product still valuable? Does it still make sense? And you want them to continue to be able to sell when you're not in the room? Okay? I think that's what I wanted to cover at a high level. There's a lot that we could cover on developing, testing champions. I would encourage you to look up some of the literature on this, but for now, it is your turn for today's assignment, review your top accounts, until you find an account for what you do not already have a strong champion. Then write down a list of contacts at that account that could potentially serve as champions. Next, write down two ways that you can get to these contacts, that you can develop these contacts and that you can test these contacts to determine if they are a champion or a coach. Finally, you should list a personal win that you can deliver to help build trust and help develop them further as a champion. Share your plan with your manager, mentor or new hire buddy for feedback, your study guide is going to give you all of the different steps to make this happen. Thank you for listening. That's it for today's lesson on the daily quota, and we'll see you next time bye. You.