Champion building

Champion Building

Purpose

Determine whether you have a real champion (not just a friendly contact), arm them to sell internally on your behalf, and test their actual power before you stake the deal on them.

Inputs

• The deal and its key contacts (names, titles, who you actually talk to)
• What each contact has done for you so far — intros, meetings booked, info shared
• The buying process: who signs, who else has to say yes
• What you've given them and what they've given back

Method

1. The champion vs coach test

Two separate questions — a contact must pass both to be a champion:

• Do they have power? Can they influence budget, get you to the economic buyer, or move the process? A friendly junior with no authority is not a champion.
• Are they selling for you when you're not in the room? A champion advocates internally, defends your price, forwards your business case, and pushes the deal forward without you prompting.

Classify each contact:

• Champion = power + selling for you. Rare. Protect and invest.
• Coach = no power, but feeds you intel and tells you the truth. Valuable, but cannot close the deal for you. Use them to find and build a champion.
• Supporter = likes you, no power, not actively selling. A lead, not a champion.
• Blocker / no-decision = neutral or against. Manage around, don't invest in.

A coach who gains power, or a supporter you enable to advocate, becomes a champion.

2. Arm them — enablement assets

A champion can only sell as well as the ammunition you give them. Build assets for their internal audience, not for you:

• Business case / one-pager — the problem, the cost of inaction, your solution, expected outcome. In their CFO/exec's language, not feature-speak.
• Internal deck — 5-7 slides they can present or forward without you. Self-explanatory.
• ROI / value model — quantified: hours saved, revenue impact, payback period. Use their numbers so they can defend it under scrutiny.
• Mutual action plan — the steps to close with owners and dates, so they look organized internally. Rule: every asset must survive being forwarded with no context. If it only makes sense when you present it, it doesn't arm a champion.

3. The give-to-get exchange

Advocacy is reciprocal. Every time you give the champion value, ask for a small advance in return:

• Give: a tailored ROI model → Get: a meeting with their boss.
• Give: an internal deck → Get: introduction to the economic buyer.
• Give: early access / a competitive teardown → Get: the real decision criteria and timeline. Make the ask explicit and proportional. If they consistently take and never give, that's a signal (see false champion).

4. Test their real power

Don't assume power — verify it with low-cost asks that escalate:

• Ask them to get you a meeting with the economic buyer or a missing stakeholder.
• Ask them to take an internal action: forward your business case to their boss, put the next step on a calendar, or get a question answered by procurement.
• Watch whether the action actually happens and how fast. A real champion can move others; a supporter will stall, deflect, or go quiet. The result of the test tells you more than anything they say about themselves.

5. Signs of a false champion

• Only meets you 1:1, never connects you to anyone with authority.
• Always positive, never shares bad news, risks, or internal politics.
• Can't or won't name the economic buyer or the real decision process.
• Takes your assets but you never see evidence they were used internally.
• Fails the power test — asks for a meeting/action and nothing moves.
• "We love it, just need approval" with no path to whoever approves. Treat a false champion as a coach at best: keep extracting intel, but find or build the contact with real power in parallel.

Tool binding

This skill works from your own knowledge of the contacts. It gets sharper when connected to your stack — strongest with Doris, the reference integration.

With Doris (recommended)

If the Doris MCP (mcp.meetdoris.com) is connected, pull the real stakeholder and interaction picture instead of relying on memory:

• ontology_resolve("deal", id, expand=["stakeholders","emails","activity"]) — use stakeholders to see roles, influence, and who's actually engaged; emails and activity to verify who is doing things (responding, forwarding, booking) versus who is just on the thread. This grounds the champion vs coach test and the power test in evidence, not impressions.
• search_transcripts(...) to find moments a contact advocated, pushed back on price, or named the decision process — proof of selling-for-you behavior. Prefer the stakeholder and activity data Doris already extracts over re-deriving who matters from raw recollection.

With a CRM / CI / email MCP

• CRM MCP (Salesforce/HubSpot) → pull the contact record and full interaction history (meetings attended, emails, last touch) to assess engagement and role.
• Conversation-intelligence MCP (Gong/Chorus/Fireflies) → find call moments where the contact advocated or revealed the decision process.

With nothing connected

Ask the user to name the contact(s) and walk through, per contact:

1. Their title and what power they actually hold.
2. Concrete things they've done for the deal (intros, meetings, info).
3. Whether they pass the champion vs coach test. Then output a champion-development plan: which contact to invest in, the enablement assets to build for them, the give-to-get exchanges to run, and one power test to set this week with the expected signal.

Works without Doris

Fully functional from your own knowledge of the contacts — Doris only replaces guesswork with evidence of who actually has power and who is actually advocating.

Common mistakes

• Calling a friendly contact a champion when they have no power (they're a coach).
• Arming a champion with seller-speak assets that can't survive a forward.
• Giving value endlessly without ever asking for a return advance.
• Never testing real power, then discovering at close there was none.
• Ignoring the false-champion signals because the contact is pleasant to talk to.