00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Today we are talking about building champions across buying committees. 00:04 Andy Whyte: Yeah — we've seen data saying that in the last five years we've gone from an average of seven stakeholders to fourteen. And if you think about what departments are now involved: legal, procurement, finance, operations, C-suite, individual business units, security, data privacy. Levels and layers to this. And this works on a segment basis as well — because if anyone listening to this feels like "well, I'm not selling to enterprise or majors" — in mid-market, the data from the last couple of years tells us it's gone up to seven on average, sometimes more. Enterprise, double that. And all of this is relative anyway. If you are in the majors, you're probably going to have way more than fourteen. What's the most stakeholders you can remember having engaged, Lucy? 01:17 Lucy Williams-Jones: If you include a board, that could have an additional ten or twelve people on it who all need to say yes — you're probably looking at around twenty-two. 01:24 Andy Whyte: Yeah — that's a lot of stakeholders to keep front of mind. To keep on top of that buying committee, you're going to need champions. Plural. 01:38 Pim Roelofsen: Plural. Yeah. How do you do that? What's your advice to people going into those buying committees, Lucy? 01:43 Lucy Williams-Jones: I think first of all, you've got to appreciate you're probably not going to get to everyone. As I said — the board, you're not going to get time in the boardroom to go and meet ten people on the board. But what you need to do is map, first of all, the really important ones. They're all important because they're all stakeholders. But some are going to be easier for your champions to get to, and some are harder — though you need to make sure you're validating with all of them. And early as well. 02:09 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I think one of the things you said that is really apt — going back to relativity — you're not always going to have the ability to get to everyone, nor do you necessarily need to. There'll be situations where people are working on higher-velocity deals, smaller deals, where the economic buyer is not someone they'll actually be able to engage with directly. So what you need to do in those situations is treat your champion almost as a proxy to the economic buyer. They probably still have to speak to the economic buyer by nature of those personas being involved. So you have to set those champions up — not just with their own vested interests at heart, but you need to seed the vested interests of those other stakeholders you're not going to get to engage with directly. Which is where, again, what we talked about in another episode comes in: making sure you have urgency not just at the company level, but across each individual stakeholder and their vested interest. 03:13 Pim Roelofsen: 100%. And you're talking about vested interest there. But one of the things you always need to do with your champion is build their ability to sell on your behalf. Because a lot of those meetings will happen behind closed doors. So do you have someone behind those closed doors — and preferably multiple people — who can effectively do that? Because you will never always be there. You represent a different company to the one you're selling to. I always like to think about the mutual evaluation — the sales process — like a pie chart. A good portion of that pie chart is behind closed doors. The better job you do at building your champions' ability to sell on your behalf and carry out the message, the more you increase the likelihood of success. 04:06 Pim Roelofsen: And I think that's where the traits of a champion really come together — because finding the vested interest connected to the pain you're solving for together opens up the willingness for the champion to start selling on your behalf. You both win when that happens. However — one thing to really keep in mind — it doesn't magically happen. You have to put in the effort. Something we like to do is make sure that once we've found that willingness and we're on the same track, we start building champion decks in their branding, so they can sell more on our behalf. So — from your perspective, what are some things you see your teams doing really well to build champions? 04:52 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah, so we have champion decks as well. We're building those from discovery all the way through — actually even probably in the pipeline generation phase. The team puts together a value pyramid, and in that first meeting they can showcase how they believe the solution aligns to the pain the organization is having. As we go through discovery, we're pulling out metrics, pulling out pain. We get that documented and validated with the champion — and there's a little champion test. 05:22 Andy Whyte: Do something wrong? 05:23 Lucy Williams-Jones: See if they catch you. 05:25 Andy Whyte: I wouldn't do something really wrong — that makes you look like you don't understand. What's an example of something small? 05:33 Lucy Williams-Jones: I would probably change a metric. So you've heard a metric — I'd probably make it a little bigger or a little smaller. And then when you ask the champion "does this look good?" — do they change it back? Nine times out of ten they do. And if they don't, I'd question either whether they're truly bought in, or whether they actually understand what the content is trying to show. But then we just evolve that deck — through the new business meeting, the POV, the BVA playback. It's the one deck that gets branded and then handed around. And I think the most underrated benefit of a champion deck is— 06:18 Andy Whyte: You're doing some work for them? 06:20 Lucy Williams-Jones: That's a very good part of it — but it's not the main one. It really forces you to inform yourself about what you're actually solving for. It puts you into a position where you have to operate within the context of the customer. 06:35 Andy Whyte: Yeah — the work that goes into building that deck means you have to put your mind into the mind of the customer. You have to see things through their eyes and be ready to talk about what the benefits are for them specifically. And that's such an underrated thing. It's almost like: if you told me every time "you can't give champion decks to customers anymore" — I'd still want my team to do them, even if they didn't spend time beautifying them. Just to put the work in and come out the other side. And it goes back to what we've talked about loosely around AI — taking shortcuts does so much damage to your point of view, because you don't spend the time to actually form that point of view and have confidence in what you're talking about. 07:29 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. The time spent creates the ability to connect the dots in the conversations you need to have as part of the process. I think both the champion deck and the value pyramid force people to immerse themselves in the world of the customer. And the play you were talking about, Lucy — to see if the champion would push back and say "actually, it's kind of right but it's actually this" — that happens naturally when you do these things. You put in the work, you create a champion deck, you do a value pyramid — which we have a full program on, by the way, as part of MEDDIC membership. And it's never going to be perfect, especially the first version. V1 requires feedback. If you do a V1 of a value pyramid and you don't get critical feedback — something is very, very wrong. Either that person is just running through the motions, or they don't know their business. Either way, it's really bad news for your deal. 08:36 Lucy Williams-Jones: I agree. And don't forget — the champion deck will evolve into the investment proposal. Because once you're at the point of actually pushing forward, you've been selected, and you're putting forward the investment proposal, you can move all that champion deck data into an appendix. And it just shows the whole evolution of the sales cycle. Some people on the board are going to want to read all the precursor — they want to get to the numbers. But at least if it's at the back, they've got it if they need it. So — typically when you're doing champion decks, do they look like your company's decks, or do you try and make them look like the customer's decks? 09:08 Andy Whyte: Even from the new business meeting, we put them in customer format. 09:13 Lucy Williams-Jones: Brilliant. And in the customer's branding as well? 09:16 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And again — it's a good champion test. Because we ask the champion for their template. Not everyone will give you their actual branding — it could be a legal thing, they're not allowed to. But I think it's a nice way to show that you're doing something together rather than just pushing something to them in your own format. A good tip: if they're a public company, you can normally go into their investor relations website and find a slide deck. You probably can't download it in PowerPoint, but you can get it in PDF and have someone on the team take the styling across. That's a shortcut there for sure. 09:59 Pim Roelofsen: I was wondering — we spoke at the beginning of this episode about the number of stakeholders. Let's say in your team there's someone early on in a deal with a proposed champion who's showing the right signs, but you don't have access to anyone else yet. What would you advise your team to do? 10:16 Lucy Williams-Jones: I think you need to multi-thread. You need to go and understand — because within any cycle or transaction, you're going to have competitors' champions in there as well. So you need to see whether you need to neutralize them or turn them. One thing I remember — Andrew, who was in my team, we were doing a presentation on champions and he tricked everyone. He said: "What's better than one champion?" And I said: "Nothing — a deal doesn't happen without a champion." And he said: "Multiple champions." So you need to go and get multiple champions across the buying committee, across the lines of business — especially as you move to larger transactions. And when you're in a room with your champions, you can kind of spot the competitors' champions. How do you then use your champion to dilute the competitors' champions? How would you spot that negativity? "Your solution doesn't do this, but this solution does." And that probably comes out in the new business meeting. 11:25 Lucy Williams-Jones: Actually, I've changed my view on new business meetings. I used to think discovery should be more of a 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 with the customer organization. For new business meetings, I'd rather have more stakeholders — so I can get the political layer to land right within that meeting. So ahead of a new business meeting, I'd encourage my team to look at LinkedIn: have they got connections with someone who speaks at one of our competitors' events or conferences? Because you know the questions you're going to pose in that new business meeting — you want to pose questions that make them think and give you more differentiation points. The new business meeting is so important. It's not just a handover to the SE for the demo. This is actually a great opportunity for a salesperson to uncover more levels of pain, understand the competitive landscape, identify target champions for the transaction, and start building that champion plan. 12:23 Andy Whyte: You've talked so much about champions in plural throughout this episode. Would you say — it's almost like we used to say "no champion, no deal." Is that now plural? 12:33 Lucy Williams-Jones: I know it depends on the size of the opportunity. But where you're working in the enterprise or majors space — yes, I think so. You need multiple champions because people leave, restructures happen. But also your champions will have different potential roles depending on whether they're coming from legal, a different business unit, or procurement. Actually, I think probably the biggest champion you need is a procurement champion. To get something over the line. And we spoke about it earlier — people often forget the people who click the link on the AWS Marketplace. People think that's just an admin role. But actually they're the ones who decide whether that gets accepted into the marketplace or not. If they've got a list at the end of the month of twenty different marketplace transactions they need to accept — and you've never met them and just thought "that's not my role" — big mistake. 13:22 Andy Whyte: You're selling yourself short 100%. And you're leaving leverage on the table by not engaging with that person. Because — as we've talked about before — if an organization is buying from a hyperscaler and they're savvy to cloud marketplaces, there's always going to be someone in that business who is the champion for cloud marketplaces. And if you can find that person — sure, they may have nothing to do with the business unit you're selling to. But they can be a champion in the sense that they can find funds that maybe the business unit didn't know about. It's unreasonable to expect business units to understand cloud commitments and cloud marketplaces. So if you explain that to a champion in a business unit and they say "sounds too good to be true" — if you go and find the cloud marketplace champion and they explain it from the inside, of course they're happy because it's burning down their committed spend. It's a win-win for everyone. 14:21 Andy Whyte: That cloud champion might not only help you sell internally — they may give you insights you didn't have. They might say: "Actually, some of this cloud spend has been committed for another vendor or project that your business unit doesn't even know about." So it just goes to show that multi-threading — getting high, broad and wide — is invaluable. And it's not just the seller individually operating all these threads into the customer organization. You want to match the multi-threading on both sides. It takes a village — and that applies to both companies doing the mutual evaluation. 14:59 Pim Roelofsen: Going back to your question — "no champion, no deal," should it be plural? I think it should be. But not because it's impossible to win a deal without multiple champions. It's that in the current climate, where things are changing so fast, you're building in a lot of risk if you don't. How fast do we win it? How much value do we win it for? Are we winning it at all? Because if the champion's gone — is the deal gone? 15:33 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah. 15:34 Andy Whyte: Well — our view has always been that if you haven't got a champion, no champion, no deal. Not just because of how important champions are to getting deals over the line. But because everything we talk about in good selling — anything we've discussed recording this season — all of it requires a champion. A champion is a force multiplier. If you haven't got one, all of those tactics, all of those best practices are basically ineffective. Because you've got no one — except someone who absorbs it all and does nothing with it. But the more champions you have, the more your good work as a salesperson — the craft you bring, the value-oriented stakeholder building, the process acceleration — goes beyond that one person. Because those champions have the vested interest to sell internally for you and spread your good word. 16:33 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. And I think that's the nucleus of this episode. Cheers to that! 16:36 Lucy Williams-Jones: Cheers! 16:37 Andy Whyte: Cheers!
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