Principle
An enthusiastic internal champion is not the same thing as a buyer, and conflating the two is one of the most reliable ways a genuinely promising deal quietly dies without anyone in the sales organisation understanding why. Enthusiasm is easy to generate. Budget authority is not, and only one of the two actually closes a deal.
Behaviour
A rep identifies an engaged contact early in the sales process: someone who responds quickly, asks good questions, attends every call, and speaks internally about the product with genuine conviction. The rep, reasonably, reads this engagement as strong deal momentum and begins forecasting the opportunity with increasing confidence as the relationship deepens over subsequent weeks.
What frequently goes unexamined is whether this champion has any actual budget authority, or any meaningful influence over the person who does. In many organisations, the most enthusiastic internal advocate for a new tool is a mid-level individual contributor or manager who wants the tool for entirely genuine reasons, but who has no formal role in the purchasing decision and, critically, whose own internal credibility with the actual economic buyer may be limited. The deal advances through the CRM pipeline on the strength of this person's energy while the real decision-maker remains, at best, a name in a field the rep has never actually spoken with directly.
The deal advances on the strength of this person's energy while the real decision-maker remains, at best, a name in a field the rep has never actually spoken with.
Evidence
For every deal currently in a Commit or Best Case forecast category, check for direct, verifiable evidence of contact with the economic buyer specifically, not the champion, and not the champion's manager by proxy. Direct contact means a call, an email exchange, or a meeting where the buyer personally engaged with the substance of the deal, not a forwarded message or a secondhand summary relayed by the champion.
Where this direct contact is absent, ask the rep a specific, pointed question: what is your champion's internal reputation with the actual budget holder, and how do you know. A rep with a genuinely well-qualified champion can answer this with real specificity, often citing a direct conversation. A rep relying on an enthusiastic but unconnected champion typically cannot answer beyond a vague assurance that "they'll get buy-in."
A useful secondary check is organisational: ask the champion themselves, directly and specifically, how the budget decision will actually be made and who signs off. A genuinely influential champion describes the process fluently and often volunteers to make an introduction unprompted. A champion without real standing tends to be vaguer about the mechanics, because they have never actually been part of a purchasing decision at this level themselves.
Psychology
Reps gravitate toward champions because champions are, by definition, pleasant and rewarding to talk to. They return calls promptly, they validate the rep's pitch, and every interaction feels like forward progress. Economic buyers, by contrast, are frequently harder to reach, more skeptical by role and disposition, and considerably less immediately gratifying to engage with. The path of least resistance for a rep under quota pressure is to invest disproportionate energy in the relationship that feels productive, even when that relationship has limited actual bearing on whether the deal closes.
This dynamic is reinforced by the champion's own incentives. A champion advocating for a tool genuinely wants it to succeed and will often, in good faith, overstate their own internal influence to keep the rep engaged and motivated, not out of any dishonesty but out of simple optimism about their own ability to bring the deal home. The rep, wanting to believe the deal is on track, has little incentive to press hard enough to test that optimism until it is too late in the process to recover cleanly.
Commercial Risk
Deals anchored to an unqualified champion carry a specific and underappreciated forecast risk: they tend to progress smoothly through the middle stages of the pipeline, generating consistent positive activity and rep confidence, and then stall abruptly and unexpectedly at the point where the champion's actual influence runs out and the real decision-maker is finally forced to engage directly.
At the portfolio level, this produces a late-stage loss pattern that is difficult to explain from the CRM data alone, because every earlier signal looked positive. The fix is not more activity from the rep. It is an earlier, more rigorous test of whether the champion can actually deliver the buyer, run systematically rather than left to individual rep judgement.
Investment Committee Note