Champion

UNCOVERING POWER AND INFLUENCE

Ask yourself how much the person is affected by the driving factor for your engagement or the business-oriented problems you are trying to solve. If it impacts them in a big way, then this is favorable to them being Champion material.

Ask your Contact about the last time they bought a solution like yours. Have they seen a project through to its fruition? What was their role, and who owned the outcomes? This is one of our favorite discovery questions to ask a Champion to uncover the Decision Process.

Do you get the impression your Contact is the go-to for the executives at the top of the company’s hierarchy? This reflects on their power and influence, and if they have connections to senior executives, it will help obtain access to them.

How do they talk about rules within their organization? Champions tend to be ‘doers’ and see rules as guidelines and something they can work around when they need to.

How do they share information with you? Do they see information as something that is better shared with you? Or do they keep their cards close to their chest? Champions generally share information freely and tend to hold more helpful information than a Coach will.

Reflect on the information your Contact has given you. Is it instrumental? Was it something you’d never have known without them? Or is it readily available information that your competition is likely to have too?

Building on this...

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, it isn’t usually possible for a salesperson to build a Coach into having power and influence.

A method to counteract this challenge is to underpin your Coach with rock-solid and bulletproof Metrics that can help them ‘influence’ other stakeholders into supporting your solution.

UNCOVERING THE INTERNAL SELLER

When it comes to your Contact selling on your behalf, can they distinguish the strengths of your solution? More importantly, are they willing to when it is most important, when you are not there.

Are they able to minimize the competition because your competition is their competition?

Do they guide you through the decision-making process regarding how best to approach a client and then eventually close the deal?

Are they helping you identify pain and working with you towards indicating and implicating it?

Are they bought into working through the Decision Process with you? Are they actively working out timeframes, dependencies, and actions? Are they happy to work with you on a Go Live Plan?

Building on this...

The basis of building your Coach into having a vested interest in your success lies in the salesperson performing effective discovery to uncover the Contact’s goals and challenges and aligning your solution to be able to help.

Usually, a vested interest means that the Contact stands to get recognition, a promotion, a bonus, or a new skill from your success. Therefore, if you can tap into your Contact’s ambition and focus on it, you can gain their trust.

UNCOVERING THE VESTED INTEREST

Do they recognize and act like any win for you is a win for them? Do they appear to share good news for you as if it is their own too? I.e., Champion: “I heard from the Economic Buyer today, and he approved our deal; things are looking really good!”.

Do they have the same urgency that you do? A Champion with a vested interest in your success knows that deals don’t just get themselves done, and urgency is vital. Whereas a Coach often tends to have a more laid-back ‘it’ll be OK' rhetoric.

Building on this...

To get a Coach to sell internally for you effectively, they usually need to have a vested interest in your success. Therefore, this process relies on the salesperson communicating two things to the Coach:

1. What is in it for them if they sell internally for them? Not just ‘winning the deal,’ but also the salesperson needs to explain to the Coach how important it is to sell internally.
2. The salesperson needs to ensure the Coach is well versed in the Metrics and strengths of their solution