US & Canada: (866) 824-5452
Maintaining a consistent flow of high-quality opportunities has always been a challenge. It’s even harder when there are 10X more people involved in a single purchasing decision compared to 40 years ago. Sales reps are spending more time managing the moving parts of a deal instead of finding the one person who can cut through all the noise—a buyer champion
The quickest way to a win is to find a buyer champion. They’re the person in an account who sells your solution to their colleagues on your behalf. They can speed up deals, reduce your acquisition costs, and save 50% of the time sales reps waste on unproductive prospecting.
- How to find a buyer champion
- How to keep buyer champions
- Do less, sell more
- Selling on cruise control
How to find a buyer champion
Buyer champions can be in any role attached to a deal, making it tough to point them out. They can connect you with a decision maker, control the budget, or guide the sales process from the sidelines. What you’re looking for is the money-maker trifecta—power, influence, and authority.
Leveraging your existing customer data is the easiest way to spot these relationships. Using filters to segment data can identify multiple opportunities assigned to the same contact. These filters can include annual revenue, average deal size, conversion rates, referrals, and more. You can also use relationship maps and scoring to see who knows who and how well. These insights will tell you who is helping you close deals (your champions) and how well they know the people paying (decision makers).
How to keep buyer champions
The average person changes jobs 12X during their career. When it’s your champion that jumps ship, you could lose your relationship capital and your deals if you don’t have data on where they ran off to. These sales gaps put you right back at square one with a new contact. You will need to make about 18 cold calls that only have a 1% chance of converting.T
racking the movements of your champions will help keep your wins quick and your intros warm. You can turn your data into customer insights that will deliver instant notifications when relevant people in your pipeline change roles, leave the company or join a new one. Job title and company changes can also be sorted, isolated, and delivered directly to your inbox via pre-meeting, on-demand, and scheduled emails to help mitigate risk to accounts or deals in-flight.
Do less, sell more
Keeping tabs on resignations and role changes will reduce the runaround of prospecting by helping sales reps:
- Minimize customer churn
- Keep deals in progress
- Open doors at a new company
- Nurture relationships
Buyer champions don’t just help you close. They support every stage of the sales cycle to get your deals over the finish line.
Before the sale
Only 2% of voicemails from cold calls result in an appointment. To make any headway, you need a buyer champion to get you through the door and use their influence to get their colleagues to buy what you’re selling.
Warm introductions
Buyer champions bring the value of a referral that makes prospecting a little less painful. B2B buyers are 5X more likely to engage with a sales rep via a warm introduction versus cold outreach.
Define purchasing criteria
A buyer champion has a hand in formulating the decision criteria and process for purchasing. They can tweak the requirements to fit your solution’s points of differentiation.
Identify decision-makers
With multiple people involved in every buying decision, it can be challenging to connect with the right person. Buyer champions can introduce you to the decision maker and other key stakeholders that make final purchasing decisions.
During the sale
Buyer champions play every position in your winning lineup when a deal is in motion. They defend your product or service, their offense is strong when competitors try to intercept, and they quarterback the sales cycle all the way to the end zone.
Build a business case
Knowing their organization’s internal processes and KPIs, a buyer champion can share the necessary metrics to support your solution and help you prepare a business case to justify the purchase.
Influence purchasing
Champions know what decision-makers expect from you. This will help you adjust your offer to the prospect’s needs and improve your chances of convincing them to buy.
Block the competition
You probably won’t be the only vendor with a seat at the table. During a sales process, champions can handle sales objections and inform you what you should improve about your offering to combat the competition.
After the sale
Champions don’t disappear after you close the deal. They stick around because they know your product and want it to succeed.
Smooth implementation
Buyer champions don’t blindly support deals they don’t believe in. They’re now experts on your solution and can act alongside the account managers to keep their team on track in the early days of onboarding when pain points are running high.
Get referrals
84% of decision makers start the buying process with a referral. After a successful implementation, champions will sing your praises as they change roles and companies to give you a steady stream of new opportunities.
Track internal metrics
Buyer champions will keep track of your product performance metrics and use these numbers to support other sales in an existing or new account. This data can also give you a sightline into cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Selling on cruise control
Prospecting doesn’t have to be the bane of your existence. Finding (and keeping) your buyer champions will shave off some lead time and get your deals in play with the right people.
To really put your prospecting on autopilot, turn your CRM into a customer intelligence platform with champion tracking, relationship mapping, and whitespace analysis.
Book a consultation to see how this winning combo transforms customer data into insights that reveal every revenue opportunity and could benefit your business.
