How to identify champions for your most important accounts in 2025

The most expensive mistake in enterprise sales isn’t losing to a competitor — it’s investing months in a contact who lacks the influence to drive deals forward. Using technology to identify true sales champions can transform this critical process from guesswork into your strategic advantage. Your team will be able to focus on stakeholders who can actually secure budget approval and executive buy-in.

Think of champions as the internal force multipliers who sell on your behalf when you’re not in the room. While many prospects show surface-level enthusiasm, only true champions combine genuine commitment with the organizational authority to navigate complex buying committees and push deals across the finish line.

A sales champion is an internal advocate within your prospect’s organization who actively promotes your solution and has the influence to drive purchasing decisions. Not every friendly contact becomes a champion — the difference lies in their ability to navigate internal politics and mobilize stakeholders.

Winning deals have at least three stakeholders in calls on average, but simply having multiple contacts isn’t enough. You need someone who combines genuine enthusiasm with organizational authority to push deals through complex approval processes.

Champions serve three critical functions in enterprise sales:

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Mistaking a friendly contact for a true champion can quietly sabotage deals that should have closed. When you invest months nurturing someone who lacks budget authority or can’t influence decision-makers, you’re not just wasting time — you’re missing opportunities to build relationships with the people who actually control purchasing decisions.

Why champion misidentification sabotages deals

Surface enthusiasm often masks a lack of real influence. A contact might love your product and attend every meeting, but if they can’t secure budget approval or get executive buy-in, their enthusiasm won’t translate into a closed deal.

True champions demonstrate specific behaviors that go beyond polite interest or regular meeting attendance. They actively work to advance your deal internally, even when it requires political capital or extra effort on their part.

The most reliable indicator? Champions bring other stakeholders into the conversation without being asked. Winning deals include eight buyer-side contacts in email, a 243 percent difference from losing deals. Your champion facilitates these broader conversations by introducing you to decision-makers and making sure the right people participate in key meetings.

Internal influence reveals itself through observable behaviors and organizational dynamics. Look for contacts who can schedule meetings with senior executives, control budget discussions, and drive timeline decisions.

You can assess influence by asking direct questions about their role in vendor selection. True champions will clearly explain their involvement in budget allocation, implementation planning, and how vendor evaluation fits into broader strategic initiatives. They’ll also demonstrate familiarity with your competitors and articulate specific reasons why your solution aligns with organizational goals.

You can analyze communication patterns to identify influence signals that might not be obvious during individual conversations. By tracking who initiates meetings, who speaks most during calls, and who drives follow-up actions, you gain objective data about a contact’s organizational standing.

Commitment requires more than expressing interest — it demands active investment of time and political capital. Committed champions defend your solution against internal skeptics, share confidential documents that provide organizational context, and invest personal time learning your platform’s capabilities.

Watch for these commitment indicators:

The strongest commitment signal? When a contact starts selling internally on your behalf. This shift from evaluation to advocacy indicates they’ve decided your solution is worth fighting for, which is essential for navigating complex B2B sales cycles.

Traditional champion identification relies on gut instinct and subjective impressions, creating blind spots that cost deals. Sales reps naturally gravitate toward friendly, responsive contacts — but these traits don’t correlate with organizational influence or deal-closing ability.

Confirmation bias compounds the problem. When a contact attends meetings regularly and responds to emails promptly, reps interpret these behaviors as positive signals. But without analyzing actual participation levels and influence within those meetings, you can’t determine whether they’re truly championing your cause or simply being polite.

Manual tracking methods miss critical engagement patterns. Spreadsheets and CRM notes capture obvious interactions but fail to analyze:

The complexity of modern buying committees makes manual champion identification nearly impossible. With extended evaluation periods, multiple approval layers, and shifting stakeholder involvement, sales teams struggle to maintain visibility into who’s actually driving decisions.

The hidden cost of manual champion tracking

RevOps professionals report spending hours each week trying to piece together stakeholder relationships from incomplete CRM data and rep notes. Even then, they’re often surprised when deals stall because the supposed champion couldn’t mobilize internal support.

You can reduce the guesswork by analyzing comprehensive interaction data across all customer touchpoints. Instead of relying on subjective impressions, you gain objective analysis based on actual communication patterns and engagement behaviors.

You can capture every customer interaction — calls, emails, video conferences, and document sharing — to build complete behavioral profiles for each stakeholder. This comprehensive view reveals subtle patterns that individual reps might miss, such as declining engagement frequency or shifts in communication tone.

You can track engagement signals across every customer touchpoint to identify who demonstrates genuine investment in your solution. This approach goes beyond surface-level metrics to analyze behavioral nuances that indicate champion potential.

Email analysis examines:

Meeting analysis reveals:

Document engagement tracking shows when contacts spend significant time reviewing proposals, share materials with colleagues, and return to specific sections multiple times — all indicators of serious evaluation and internal selling efforts.

You can use relationship mapping to reveal the true power dynamics within prospect organizations. By analyzing who communicates with whom, who defers to whose opinions, and who drives decision-making processes, you can identify stakeholders with genuine organizational authority.

You can track:

When your primary contact consistently brings senior stakeholders into conversations or when multiple people defer to their opinions during group calls, you can flag these as strong influence indicators. Conversely, if your contact rarely interacts with decision-makers or struggles to get executives to join meetings, you’ll know to expand your stakeholder relationships.

Once you’ve identified potential champions, success depends on strategic nurturing that transforms interest into active advocacy. The most effective approach combines personalized enablement with systematic relationship expansion.

Your champion needs different support at each stage:

Effective champion enablement requires providing customized resources for different stakeholder groups. Your champion can’t influence technical evaluators with the same materials they’d use for financial decision-makers.

Create stakeholder-specific resources:

Revenue AI helps you anticipate what materials champions need by analyzing which topics generate the most engagement during similar deals. If security concerns frequently arise in your industry, make sure your champion has comprehensive security documentation before those objections surface.

Timing matters as much as content. Provide materials just before internal meetings rather than overwhelming champions with everything at once. AI-powered insights can predict when champions will need specific resources based on deal progression patterns.

Champion relationships require ongoing maintenance throughout extended B2B sales cycles. You can monitor engagement patterns to identify when champion relationships are weakening, alerting you to take corrective action before deals stall.

Watch for these warning signs:

When you detect declining engagement, you can implement specific interventions based on successful patterns from similar situations. You might schedule a one-on-one meeting to address concerns, provide additional resources to overcome internal obstacles, or connect them with customer references who faced similar challenges.

You can also identify potential new champions by spotting stakeholders with increasing engagement and influence patterns. This capability helps you expand your champion network before existing relationships weaken, maintaining deal momentum even if individual advocates become less available.

The difference between winning and losing enterprise deals often comes down to champion identification and development. Revenue AI transforms this critical process from guesswork into data-driven strategy, helping your team focus on the stakeholders who actually drive purchasing decisions.

By analyzing interaction data across your entire sales organization, revenue AI reveals which behaviors correlate with closed deals versus which simply seem positive. This insight helps every rep — not just your top performers — identify and nurture high-potential advocates with precision.

The competitive advantage extends beyond better identification. AI-powered champion management provides early warning when relationships change, surfaces coachable moments for your reps, and flags when deals lack the executive backing needed to close. Instead of discovering champion problems during pipeline reviews, you can address issues while there’s still time to course-correct.

Organizations using AI-powered champion identification see measurable improvements across key metrics. Win rates increase when you align with true decision-makers rather than friendly faces. Sales cycles shorten when real champions navigate internal processes on your behalf. Forecast accuracy improves when champion health provides reliable indicators of deal progression.

The Gong Revenue AI Platform delivers comprehensive champion intelligence that modern revenue teams need to excel in complex sales environments. By capturing and analyzing customer conversations across all channels, Gong helps you identify true champions, monitor relationship health, and develop the internal advocates who drive deals forward. You can work continuously to surface champion insights and recommend actions that strengthen your most important relationships. With Gong, your team gains the clarity to distinguish between surface enthusiasm and real influence — the difference between deals that stall and deals that close.