If you’ve been around people who use MEDDIC successfully, you will know that the very best salespeople are the ones who have mastered the art of building champions in their accounts.
So, what is a champion? And why are they so important to winning new business?
Gartner gives us a clue to the problem that building champions solves. According to their research, there is now an average of 5.8 people involved in every B2B buying decision.
A recent report published by EBSTA, which analysed over 3.2 million sales opportunities, found that an average of ten stakeholders were involved in deals that were successfully closed.
This means that there will be six to ten people involved in the decision to buy your solution. That’s a lot of people you have to influence – especially when post covid, it’s increasingly difficult to get meetings with multiple people from the same company.
The solution is to find someone (from the company you are trying to sell to) who is in a position to influence their colleagues for you. In MEDDIC, we call that person a champion (the ‘C’ in MEDDIC).
So, what is a champion? A champion is someone who sells for you when you are not there. And today, we are ‘not there’ a lot of the time. So many meetings are held online, so you don’t get the chance to meet people, walk the corridors of their offices and influence them in person, like you used to be able to do.
You do, however, have lots of opportunities to identify a potential champion and meet them online, so you can encourage them to tell their colleagues why they think your solution is best for them.
A champion is the cornerstone to successful selling in the digital age.
The EBSTA report also showed that only 15% of lower-performing salespeople focused on building champions, while 56% of top performers were really good at building champions, especially in the executive suite – where all the decisions are made. And 85% of top-performing salespeople either built champions or used their champions to influence executives at the economic buyer level (the ‘E’ in MEDDIC).
So why are champions important?
Because, as the Champion Building tagline says, you can’t win without one.
It’s that simple.
If you want to transform your sales results, focus on identifying, then building, champions who are motivated to sell with you. This means shifting your focus from selling to a client, to selling with a client.
If you master champion building, you will change your sales destiny.
