Winning a company as a customer isn't enough anymore. Champion lifetime value matters more than you think.

B2B success now depends on building relationships with individual buyers and their companies. When your champions move to new roles, they bring repeat business beyond renewals and upsells. Taking advantage of past relationships and buyer job changes is a great way to reel in new customers.

Companies purchase once. Champions become repeat buyers, referrers, and advisers who influence multiple deals across their careers. And now, individual champions within companies have more influence on purchasing decisions than ever. Acquiring one customer is a step toward acquiring many more.

The Great Resignation highlights a recent trend: The average job change rate is on the rise. People are changing jobs more often, and B2B purchasing habits are evolving to include more decision-makers on buying committees. Is your revenue team keeping up with this new reality?

What is Champion Lifetime Value?

Many B2B companies religiously track customer lifetime value (LTV) to measure:

• Product stickiness

• Product profitability

• And the effectiveness of their retention and acquisition strategies.

However,customer LTV represents only a fraction of a customer's true worth. Your customer LTV is only a fraction of the worth of a customer (i.e., a company) because it doesn’t capture the value of those who moved on to a new business.

These individuals — who have bought, used, championed, or simply evaluated your product — have a high likelihood of doing so again.

Champion Lifetime Value (LTV) captures this: the estimated dollar value of individuals (primary contacts, decision-makers, admin users, and end users) in your CRM who have moved on to new jobs in businesses that fit your ideal customer profile. Combined with customer lifetime value, these two metrics can significantly boost your business profitability.

Champion lifetime value is very similar to customer lifetime value. But it focuses on the revenue your company generates from an individual instead of an organization as a whole.The idea is a person joins a company, becomes your customer, and loves your product.Then they move to a new organization and become your customer again.

Why you should track champion lifetime value

Tracking champion lifetime value doesn’t just allow you to capture the value of individuals within your target accounts. It also helps you to:

• Automate repeat business by turning individual users into new customers when they move to a new role.

• Reduce churn risk by leveraging the strong customer relationships you’ve developed to boost customer retention.

By focusing on the lifetime value of a person instead of an organization, you bring the strong relationship you’ve built into play.

Because this is a person — not a company — making the purchasing decisions informs your sales and marketing strategies, helping you take a more personalized approach.

And the more relationships you build and nurture with your existing customers, the easier it is to drive efficient growth for your business.

B2B is human to human

B2B sales happens between people, not companies. The relationships you build with individual buyers matter more than the logo on their business card.

Individuals at a company can bring in revenue far beyond their initial participation in the purchasing decision. When they take on a new role at a new organization, the buying process repeats. They can influence and/or refer others even if they're not the decision-maker.

It looks like this: A customer evaluated our product but left his company mid-deal for a new opportunity. When he started his new role as chief digital and demand generation officer at a new company, he and his team evaluated and bought our product. Later, when he moved to another new company, this time as a CMO, he purchased from us again.

The right lead source can grow your business exponentially

When you nurture relationships with individual champions, you turn your CRM into a source of repeat revenue. Previous customers are your most likely buyers because they've already used your product and seen the results.

Consider this: At my own company, we can pinpoint individuals who have championed and purchased our product in their roles at three different companies with a six-figure average contract value (ACV). We were able to keep in touch with these champions across their job movements and win their business again.

Revenue teams should consider tracking their champion movements to multiply growth. As job change rates increase, so does the outcome of this revenue play.

Champions can accelerate deals

Previous customers can be your deal accelerators. Champions in non-decision-making roles can still help influence purchasing decisions. They are uniquely positioned to help revenue teams multithread within the organization to connect with the right people.

You have already established a relationship with these individuals, and they can provide firsthand information about the value of your product. This feedback gives your sales team a strong entry point. Decision-makers get firsthand proof from someone who's used your product. Your champion gets to help solve a problem they understand.

How to implement champion lifetime value

Follow these four steps to implement champion LTV in your pipeline generation playbooks:

1. Identify your most valuable contacts. Champion LTV highlights the value of individual users in your contact list. Your champions may include your products' primary contacts, decision-makers, power users, and end users. These people are familiar with the value you bring to the table and are primed to influence purchase decisions within their companies.

2. Develop a tracking process to track these individuals as they switch jobs (and companies). Track champion job changes manually or with automation. When they start a new role, you want to be top-of-mind.

3. Set up a process for contacting your champions once they’ve settled in at their new jobs. While it’s possible that a champion will feel strongly enough about your product to buy right away, they might need a little push via marketing and sales outreach. Even if your champion is not in a position to make a purchase decision, they can be critical for helping your revenue team push past gatekeepers to reach the right decision-makers.

4. Keep track of the dollar value these individual users contribute to your revenue numbers. When they switch jobs, are they influencing purchase decisions that bring your business new customers? When they are promoted within their current company, are they influencing upsells and cross-sells? How often has a champion influenced your product purchase at a new company? As you track champion movements from job to job, you will better understand your overall Champion LTV.

Every other lead source gets harder as you grow. But champion tracking grows naturally with your business.

So, if you’re looking for a repeatable way to increase revenue, think about how:

• Your company can increase the number of product users

• To turn your product users into product champions

• To systemize a method for tracking champions across job movements.