Last week I laid out four moves that create momentum in the middle of the funnel. This week I want to spend the whole post on the third one, because it’s the one I see teams skip most often and the one that costs the most when they do.
Here it is: at some point in every deal that matters, someone who does not work for you stands up in a meeting you were not invited to and makes your case for you.
That person is your champion. They are also, functionally, your worst-prepared seller. They don’t know your competitive positioning. They’ve never heard your objection handling. They’ve had about 5 minutes of airtime with a CFO who is already skeptical, and whatever they say in those few minutes determines where the deal moves.
And what did we send them? A case study.
Most content can’t survive being forwarded
Try pulling the last five assets your team produced and ask one question about each of them. Could a champion forward this to their CFO, with no explanation, and have it land?
For almost everything in almost every content library, the answer is no. Not because the content is bad, but because it was built for a different job.
Acquisition content is written to persuade a stranger to raise their hand. It generally leads with the problem, establishes credibility, and asks for a conversation. That’s the right structure for someone who doesn’t know you yet, but it’s the wrong structure entirely for someone who already believes you and now has to convince three colleagues who don’t.
The champion doesn’t need to be sold. They need ammunition. And those are different documents.
What ammunition actually looks like
The good news is that this doesn’t require a content team you don’t have. It requires being specific about what the champion is up against.
Three things show over and over in deals that clear the internal hurdle.
The argument in someone else’s language. Your champion is probably in one function, while the person who has to approve the spend is probably in a different one. Somebody has to translate the value into finance terms or IT terms or operations terms, and right now that somebody is improvising. Do that translation work for them and hand it over.
The objection getting answered before it’s asked. Every deal has a predictable killer. Budget timing, an incumbent contract, a bad experience with a similar vendor two years ago. Your champion knows exactly what it is. Sales usually knows too. Almost nobody writes it down and gives the champion a response they can actually say out loud without sounding like a brochure.
Something short enough to be read. A 30-page report doesn’t get forwarded. A one-page summary with a number on it does. If your champion has to spend twenty minutes summarizing your content before they can use it, you’ve added work to the deal instead of removing it.
The part that stings a little
Here’s what I keep coming back to. We spend an enormous amount of energy getting a person to believe us, and then we abandon them at the exact moment their belief has to become someone else’s decision.
We do it because the metrics don’t reward the other thing. Nobody gets credit for the one-pager that helped a champion survive a procurement review. It doesn’t show up in a campaign report. It just shows up as a deal that closed, which sales will reasonably claim, and fair enough.
But if you want a straightforward way to make the middle of your funnel less messy without new budget or new headcount, this is it. Ask your top three sellers what their champions keep getting stuck on. Write three assets against thoes answers, and see what happens over a quarter.
Where this goes next
Arming the champion assumes you know who the champion is and that they’re the only person you need to reach. Neither of those is safe anymore, and next week I want to get into what happens when the one person you’ve been talking to turns into a room of seven.
For now, one question worth asking in your next pipeline review. When your champion walks into that meeting, what exactly are they holding?
If the honest answer is a link to your website, that’s the problem.