Ensure Success by Staying Aligned with Your Champions

You’ve found a champion, now ensure you are leveraging their power, influence and vested interest in your success. Are you guiding your champion through their buying process, or are you dragging them along through your sales process? Continuously help your champion drive the success of the deal by staying aligned with their internal challenges and coaching them on how to execute effectively inside the account. Here are key ways to stay aligned with your champion to ensure a positive outcome:

Improve your ability to coach your champions by checking in

Once you’ve identified your champion, how you develop them and nurture that relationship can make a big difference in your deal and your ability to further penetrate that account.

Improve your ability to coach and support your champion by staying aligned with their day-to-day challenges and business environment. Don’t just focus on your next steps or priorities. Stay curious about what they’re sharing with you. Listen for any frustrations, upcoming meetings or internal tasks they’re working through to ensure you’re not missing opportunities to support them and help them sell on your behalf.

Staying aligned with your champion will help you ensure you’re not missing a key moment where they can influence internal decisions with your solution’s competitive differentiation. Remember, your champions spend 99% of their time inside the account without you. Continuously checking in can help you ensure you’re leveraging your champion’s internal influence on the business to effectively progress your deal and beat out competition.

Here are a few ways to stay checked in and aligned with your champion:

Actively listen to ensure you stay attuned to their current frustrations and internal challenges
Take notes so you know when they have critical meetings that they may need your help with or that you could provide additional support for
Help them prepare for internal meetings by asking what they need to carry out these conversations successfully
Offer outside support, content and materials and provide it to them promptly
Share relevant articles on topics you’ve heard they have interest in, rather they’re related to your deal or are just a value add you can provide
Find ways to be more personable in the remote environment. Now more than ever, you want to make sure you’re bringing your “A” game and account for the challenges remote selling brings

We covered this topic in a recent episode of The Audible-Ready Podcast.

Frank Azzolino, Force Management Senior Partner, talks about staying aligned with your champions in a way that builds great trust in you and your solutions.

Build champions for life by nurturing your relationships with your them

The way you build your relationship with your champion can be a critical component to you staying tethered to the account. How you build, nurture and support your champion during your deal will impact your ability to cross-sell, up-sell, drive repeat business and leverage your champion for referrals. We’ve put together some of our most popular resources on building up, leveraging, and testing champions. You may find additional value from reviewing these resources. Use them to make an impact in your current accounts and opportunities:

Tips You Can Use to Make an Immediate Impact on Your Current Pipeline

Gaining champion trust and support is just one topic Frank covers in this podcast on “Lessons From a Sales Veteran”. He also covers tips you can use to make an immediate impact on your current critical deals, in all stages of the sales process. It’s a must listen episode for any Account Rep, SDR/BDR and manager out there looking to drive consistent improvements to their numbers.