Let's talk about champions.
Unfortunate timing, considering my favorite football team was publicly executed on the biggest stage in American sports a couple weeks ago.
Effective sales champions catalyze your sales process.
Ineffective ones pull the sales equivalent of putting up 13 meaningless points and making Bad Bunny's performance the only fond memory I'll ever have of that game.
Anyway, here's insight from our survey of 300 sales leaders to help you source and develop productive champions.
An inordinate amount of sales orgs rely on reps trusting their gut when assessing champions..
Our survey found 20% of sales leaders use informal evaluation to assess champion quality, and 16% skip assessment entirely — so 36% lack a structured way to separate real champions from casual supporters.
Champions should fight for you in meetings and work for you when you're not in the room.
They exhaust political capital, navigate objections, and push timelines — and their word carries real weight.
You shouldn't eyeball a stakeholder and say, "Wow, they're everything we want. They're everything we need. They're everything inside of us that we wish we could be. They got this."
Still, our data suggests over a third of sales leaders do exactly that. They don't systematically answer, "Is this person actually a viable champion?"
That approach (or lack thereof) makes every downstream investment in enablement, coaching, and readiness more of a gamble.
Leaders understand that tiering prospects for outreach is crucial, but they might not be training reps on how to do it.
Only 7% of sales leaders say empowerment and enablement is the most important champion development skill. Yet 26% cite equipping champions with tailored business cases, evidence, and talking points as their primary readiness tactic — the plurality response.
This trend indicates orgs deprioritize a key skill while doubling down on its output.
They bet materials can substitute for competence, essentially sending a champion a deck and saying "You're strong, beautiful, capable, and we believe in you. Go get'em, tiger."
Enablement materials can't adapt mid-conversation, but a properly prepared champion can.
Leaders should train reps to read champions' internal circumstances and offer those stakeholders tailored insight on how to navigate them.
Organizations investing in champion collateral without reps understanding how to coach it are funding a capability they've hollowed out from the inside.
What can you do with this next-level, revelatory insight?
For reps: Your champion doesn't need a prettier deck. They need your value proposition translated into their organization's language — their CFO's priorities, their VP's metrics, their procurement team's concerns. A champion who sounds like a vendor sacrifices credibility.
For managers: If a rep says,"They're definitely a champion," ask what that person has done — not said. An introduction, unsolicited internal intel, or unprompted pushback against a competitor constitute evidence. Verbal enthusiasm doesn't. Coach that distinction.
For leadership: 36% of teams qualify champions without structure. Every investment in enablement, coaching, and readiness downstream assumes the right person was identified in the first place. If that assumption is wrong, nothing built on top of it holds. Framework first.
"I've been described as the funky, badass problem child of the sales newsletter community (by me — just now). Consider this installment the evidence."
Jay Fuchs. Managing Editor, The Science of Scaling Newsletter
The data in question
As the banner says, we sourced the data we used here through Panoplai: The panoramic research platform I would kill and die for. I can't say that for anything else in my life. Then again, nothing else in my life brings together survey collection, data ingestion, synthetic enrichment, digital twin creation, and interactive reporting quite like Panoplai does.
How does your team assess whether a potential champion has the ability AND willingness to advocate for you?
- Structured qualification process — specific questions and tests to verify both ability and willingness - 14%
- Ability-focused assessment — verify their influence and access but assume willingness - 23%
- Willingness-focused assessment — gauge their enthusiasm but don't validate their organizational influence - 17%
- Informal evaluation — reps use intuition and experience to judge champion strength - 20%
- No formal assessment — we take advocates at face value without testing - 16%
- None of the above - 11%
What skill matters most for your reps to excel at champion development over the next 12-18 months?
- Advanced prompt engineering — knowing how to extract quality output from AI tools - 15%
- Research and context gathering — finding the insights that make emails resonate - 21%
- Critical evaluation — assessing and refining AI output to match quality standards - 21%
- Strategic thinking — knowing when deep personalization matters vs. scaled approaches - 17%
- Technical fluency — understanding AI capabilities and limitations across tools - 16%
- None of the above - 11%
How does your organization ensure champions are ready to influence key stakeholders and navigate competitive evaluations?
- Comprehensive preparation — coaching sessions, ROI validation, competitive battle cards, and objection handling practice - 17%
- Strategic arming — equipping them with tailored business case, evidence, and talking points for their specific situation - 26%
- Material-focused enablement — providing case studies, comparisons, and documents they can reference and share - 20%
- Just-in-time support — helping champions prepare as critical moments approach rather than proactively - 9%
- Limited readiness investment — champions mostly self-advocate using their own judgment and experience - 16%
- None of the above - 12%
Frameworks + Strategy
