How to identify internal champions to win more deals in B2B

B2B deals involve multiple stakeholders, complex org structures, and long decision cycles.

Your prospect's company structure can be hard to understand from the outside, and there are often many people you need to convince.

The solution: find someone inside the account who actively advocates for your product.

That person is your internal champion, and they're more common than you think.

What are internal champions?

An internal champion is someone inside your target company who believes in your product or service so much that they actively promote it to their colleagues. They've either seen firsthand how your solution solves their team's problems, or they've used it successfully at a previous company. Either way, your champion understands how things really work inside the company, has influence, and wants your solution to succeed. This is almost like having one of your own team members embedded within their organization.

With a champion on your side, the company's decision-making process becomes much clearer. If internal politics threaten to block the deal, your champion can help guide you. They can connect your sales team with key decision-makers or give you direct insight into what end-users truly need, better than anyone else could.

Here's how this works in practice:

The benefits of an internal champion are easiest to understand with a simple example. Say that you wish to sell a cloud-based project management software to a construction company. Your champion might be a project manager who loved using your tool at a previous job. They understand the company's workflow problems and can articulate exactly how your software solves them.

This champion could tell their colleagues and bosses how great your software is, adding credibility to your pitch. They could help you figure out the purchasing process and steer clear of office politics. And, importantly, they could introduce you to the key decision-makers you need to reach to close the deal.

Why are internal champions important in B2B sales?

You might wonder about the true value of internal champions. Their influence extends beyond signing authority to provide strategic advantages throughout the sales process.

Streamlined sales cycles

Every company has official processes and the actual way decisions get made. Your champion knows the difference. Having an insider can help you cut through red tape or avoid wasting time on people who don't influence the decision. Instead, your champion can guide you through the internal communication channels and help you align your pitch with the company's internal goals.

Access to hidden stakeholders

The most important people for your deal often aren't the ones with C-level titles. Getting buy-in from someone respected by the team, regardless of their spot on the org chart, often matters more than meeting a C-level executive. Your champion can point you to these hidden influencers whose opinions carry unexpected weight.

Better understand what the clients need

Having someone in your corner inside the company is fantastic for learning their real pain points and how they'd actually use your product. Executives focus on strategic outcomes. Your champion provides the operational details you need to tailor your pitch.

Faster, better adoption

Getting a whole company to use a new tool takes good training and support. An internal expert who knows both your solution and their colleagues' workflows can accelerate adoption faster than your support team alone. They can act as the local go-to person, helping train other employees and driving adoption for various use cases.

Preventing deals from falling off

Enterprise deals stall. Priorities shift. Budget freezes happen. It's frustrating when a deal loses steam simply because the company's priorities suddenly shifted. While a champion can't prevent shifts, they can often give you a heads-up, help you keep the conversation going (perhaps by linking your solution to new company initiatives), advise on the best time to re-engage, and maintain internal pressure to keep your solution top-of-mind.

Improved access to decision makers

Let's face it, busy decision-makers sometimes see sales reps as an interruption. Their time is limited. That first impression is critical. An introduction from someone they already know and trust can be the difference between getting five minutes of polite attention and having them genuinely engage with your pitch.

Handling internal risks and objections

Small obstacles can derail a deal. Sometimes, even if most people are cautiously positive, one strong "no" can carry a lot of weight, even from someone unexpected (like a key admin who must approve all new software). Your champion can be crucial here. They can address objections early, offer strong counterarguments, and alert you to potential roadblocks before they become major problems.

How to identify internal champions: 6 key steps

Finding an internal champion is essential. Here's how to do it: Champions don't appear automatically. You need a systematic approach to find them. You need a plan to actively find them.

Step 1: Find your ideal user

Your best champions are people who've seen measurable results from your product. Start by creating a detailed ideal customer profile (ICP) and develop buyer personas for the key people involved. Once you know who they are, identify what motivates them and which problems your product solves for their role.

Step 2: Map out the target company

You can often find basic information about a company's structure publicly. Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify key decision-makers and understand who reports to whom. This shows you whose opinions matter for the sale and identifies potential champion candidates.

Step 3: CRM data patterns

If you've worked with champions before, your CRM holds valuable clues. Look back at past deals where you had a champion. Scan the data for common threads – were they often in a specific role? Did they share certain traits? Finding these patterns helps you proactively spot similar potential champions in new prospects before you even reach out.

Step 4: Start connecting (peer-to-peer)

Once your ICP and CRM data give you ideas about who potential champions might be, find them on platforms like LinkedIn. Reach out and start building a connection naturally. Lead with empathy. Show that you understand their specific challenges. Make that the foundation of your conversation.

Step 5: Build a real relationship

Treat your contact as a partner. Treat them like a partner. Share insights relevant to their role and industry challenges. Nurture the relationship by providing value throughout the entire sales process – provide value throughout the sales process, not just when you need something.

Step 6: Asking for help

Eventually, you'll likely need to ask your contact for help – maybe navigating internal processes or getting an introduction to a key decision-maker. When you do, frame it collaboratively. Show them how helping you ultimately helps them get the solution they need to solve their problems.

The challenge of internal selling

Internal champions deliver significant value, but they have clear limitations.

They have different expertise: Your champion brings insider knowledge and influence, while you provide sales expertise and deep product knowledge.
They face challenges too: The same hurdles you face – company politics, satisfying different stakeholders, proving ROI – also apply to your champion when they advocate internally.
They open doors, you close deals: Champions create opportunities and provide key information while you handle the closing process. Their role is to open doors, provide key information, create opportunities, and help keep things moving. Closing the sale is still up to you.

To maximize your champion relationship, provide full support. Make sure they have the right information, tools, and arguments to make the case for your solution confidently and efficiently inside their company. Always be ready to back them up.

Tips for working effectively with internal champions

Once you've built a solid relationship with your champion, understand their limits, and are giving them good support, how do you best use this advantage? Here's how to work effectively with champions:

Stay in control of the deal: Your champion is helpful, and you run the show. Keep driving the process forward, maintain communication with all the decision-makers, and check in regularly. Only you can close the deal.
Remember you're the product expert: While coaching your champion on how to talk about your product is useful, don't forget you know it best. You have more detailed information, understand various use cases deeply, know the product roadmap, and have a deeper understanding of the business value it brings.
Navigate gatekeepers strategically: Decision-makers are busy and often have "gatekeepers" to manage their time. Instead of pushing past gatekeepers, reposition yourself. Position yourself as a helpful product expert. Offer to join calls simply to provide quick, accurate answers to technical questions, saving everyone time and making yourself valuable.
Tailor your pitch to each stakeholder: Different people care about different things. Decision-makers, end-users, IT, finance – they all have unique needs and interests. Create a specific value proposition for each key person you talk to, showing them exactly why your product is the right choice for them and their priorities. Multi-stakeholder buy-in accelerates deal velocity.

Tips for empowering your internal champions

A champion can only be effective if they have the right support from you. Tailor your support to each champion's needs. Common approaches include:

Customizable sales resources: Provide flexible materials your champions can customize. Give your champions flexible materials – like interactive slides or customizable documents – that they can adapt to make specific points or address particular concerns within their company.
An easy-to-access knowledge hub: Make sure your champion can find answers quickly. Provide a searchable knowledge base or even an expert chatbot where they can get instant answers to FAQs, helping keep the deal moving without waiting for you.
Targeted training sessions: Offer focused training so your champion truly understands the product details. This helps them confidently explain how it solves unique problems or even give quick, informal product demos to colleagues.
Shareable multimedia content: People engage well with visuals. Supply your champion with easy-to-share videos, short webinar clips, case study highlights, or infographics that clearly show the benefits of your solution. This makes it easier for them to get their colleagues' attention.
Consistent communication and support: Check in regularly with your champion. Offer support, answer their questions promptly, and keep them updated on product news or relevant initiatives. Make sure they feel included and valued. Always follow up after important meetings they've helped facilitate.

💡PLAYBOOK → Accelerate Deals with Past Champions

Supercharging champions with Gem-E

Finding and enabling champions takes time. Gem-E automates the heavy lifting. Identifying the right contacts, building relationships, and enabling champions requires significant time investment.

That's where Gem-E comes in.

Gem-E is an AI agent that identifies in-market buyers and generates personalized outreach at scale. Gem-E augments your sales team, increasing outbound efficiency up to 10x and boosting conversion rates up to 3x.

Traditional outbound tactics deliver declining results. Volume-based outreach gets ignored or flagged as spam. Gem-E uses proprietary buying signals to identify in-market prospects and generate contextually relevant outreach. It uses unique data to spot buying signals, allowing it to send personalized, natural-sounding messages to the right people exactly when they're likely to be interested.

How it works:

Finding the right people with buying signals

Gem-E taps into exclusive data from UserGems and uses smart algorithms to identify strong buying signals.

Gem-E identifies in-market buyers before your competitors reach them.

This focuses your team on prospects showing active buying signals.

Gem-E identifies prospects already researching solutions like yours—potential champions showing clear buying intent.

Smart, relevant AI messaging

AI can write natural-sounding messages. But relevance requires high-quality data about the buyer and their context.

Gem-E analyzes your CRM data along with its buying signal information to create personalized emails, call talking points, and LinkedIn messages.

Each message references specific buyer signals and context, making outreach relevant to the recipient's current situation.

This signal-based outreach generates higher response rates from potential champions.

From there, your sales rep can easily step in for a more personalized discussion, focusing on the benefits and solutions most important to that specific person.

Smarter account and contact prioritization

Sales teams need clear prioritization to focus on high-intent accounts.

Gem-E uses its signal intelligence to highlight the companies that are your best prospects and identifies the key people within those companies who are best positioned to help move a deal forward.

This prioritization delivers conversion rates up to 3x higher than traditional outbound.

Smooth CRM integration

Most sales tools require manual data transfer between systems.

Gem-E integrates natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and SalesLoft—no manual data entry required.

This keeps your workflow simple and efficient, with no need for clunky workarounds.

Boosting outbound efficiency

Gem-E is designed to help your current team make a much bigger impact – potentially increasing your outbound efficiency up to 10x.

Instead of reps spending time on leads unlikely to convert, Gem-E finds the most promising opportunities so your team can focus their efforts where it counts most.

Reliable data you can trust

AI output quality depends entirely on data quality.

Most AI tools use low-quality third-party data, producing inaccurate results and hallucinations.

Gem-E prioritizes data quality. It uses reliable, proprietary UserGems data and integrates cleanly with your CRM data.

This focus on quality makes Gem-E's output more dependable and much more effective at guiding your sales team toward the right companies and contacts.

See Gem-E in action. Book a personalized demo today.

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