🤝 A new addition to your sales team

A client told me about a project that went well on paper, but badly in the room.

My client is a specialist consultancy. The owner of an online store found them and hired them to fix the store’s main growth channel. The marketer who ran that channel day to day was defensive the whole time. They took every finding as an accusation, and the team had to tread carefully around every single recommendation.

Look at it from that marketer’s side. They lived with the channel every day and were probably the first to notice the numbers slipping. In a better version of that story, they’d be the one who finds the consultancy and walks the idea into the owner’s office.

That’s the champion, a role anyone who has sat through a conversation about buying committees will recognize. What isn’t always top of mind is how we can arm these people with better content.

After all, we build sales enablement for our own sales team: the decks, the one-pagers, the answers to the objections they hear every week. The champion is doing a salesperson’s job for you inside their company, usually with none of that. So I’ve started telling clients to take their enablement material past their own sales team and into the buyer’s company.

We could call it buyer enablement? Champion enablement? Whatever the term, it’s important.

Some teams already do this well. But since a version of this topic came up with three clients I worked with in September, I thought I’d share some more on making it work.

The office politics nobody puts in the brief

The champion feels the problem first. They go looking for fixes, shortlist a few, and then have to get one approved by whoever controls the budget. Their own reputation is on the line as much as the company’s cost.

For an in-house champion, the stakes sit with how they look to their boss. They want to be seen as the one who keeps the channel under control, and the worst seat in the room belongs to whoever is explaining why revenue fell.

The champion wants to look proactive (which I believe was the main issue in the example in my intro), but they’re also aware that whatever recommendation they make, it will come back to them, for better or worse. If the tool isn’t adopted, if the subcontractor doesn’t do a good job, it reflects on them.

Back in April, I wrote about naming the buyer’s emotions in your messaging. This is the same instinct, pointed at the person who has to sell you internally.

To lower the risk here, they need to show the objective selection process they went through and demonstrate they didn’t just present the first thing they found on Google or a company they have a personal preference for.

What to arm champions with

For the consultancy I’m advising now, we’re adding material to their content plan that a champion can put in front of the decision maker, written for that decision maker. The goal is to make it easy for them to make the case, communicate potential value clearly, and look like a proactive professional in control of their work.

What goes in depends on which champion you’re dealing with.

When the champion is part of the internal team:

• The case in the decision maker’s language. Bring it back to the business problem and its impact, and answer the questions the boss will ask beyond the features the champion came for. This includes delivery timeframes, pricing models, payment terms.
• How working with you goes. Full onboarding or integration details with clear steps, what you’ll need from their team, the deliverables they’ll get and when.
• The brief for their technical people. Most fixes need someone to implement them, and when that’s an in-house dev team, marketing requests tend to sink to the bottom of the queue because they often lack technical specificity. A brief that’s ready to forward spares your champion the chase.
• The evaluation material. A software client of mine is planning a buyer’s guide for choosing a tool like theirs. It’s meant for the person running the selection, and it has two jobs: teaching them how to make the decision, with clear criteria to compare the options against, and giving them the language to present that choice inside their company.

When the champion is an agency:

• Clear roles. Spell out who does what and who owns which outcome, so both the agency and the client can see where their responsibility ends and yours begins.
• Reasons to trust you. Case studies, references, a track record they can point to when their client asks why you.
• Something they can present. Copy and explainers that make the agency look well-informed in front of their client.

Beyond the one-pager

Some of this sits outside content, in how your team runs a sale.

• Ask who else has to say yes. In the first conversation, find out who decides and what they’ll ask. Then send the piece that answers those questions.
• Offer to be in the room when the decision gets made. A short call with the decision maker settles the questions your champion would otherwise have to relay back and forth.
• Offer to be the translator with their technical team. Talk to their developers or their contractor directly, so the champion doesn’t have to carry technical questions they can’t answer.

Sales and marketing build this together. Sales knows what goes in, because they hear the questions every week. Marketing knows how to build it: the structure, the order of information, the production flow.

***

Even when you offer to be in the room, the conversation that decides a deal often happens in a meeting you’re not invited to.

If you want somewhere to start, think of one deal from the past few months, won or stalled. Who carried it inside the company, what did they have to explain, and to whom? Then look at what they had from you when they did it.

Champions matter,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

The future of content isn’t writing. It’s thinking. | A good point about how much ideas matter in today’s writing environment. Andrew Holland argues that as AI makes the words cheaper, the value moves to the research, judgment, and experience behind them.

How to Build a Profitable BFCM Strategy in 2026 | A good primer for any promo campaign, Black Friday or not. The piece starts with the business decisions behind the offer (margins, return rates, customer acquisition costs), makes the case for planning early, and sets the ad spend caps and decision rules before the sale goes live.

How Clarify Turned LinkedIn Into Their #1 Lead Machine | A great example of how much goes into a LinkedIn strategy that works, once you go beyond posting on the company page. It shows how Clarify feeds its posts with weekly 30-minute interviews with its executives, and brings in creators and employees.

👀 Two for fun

This gallery for movie lovers | A curated collection of movie posters and memorabilia. I’d love to get my hands on that La La Land anniversary poster!

This kerning spotter’s worst nightmare | It mashes fonts into weird hybrids that grate on the eye, and every one of them downloads as a fully usable font.

🐈 Weekly cat

Coming from a long line of beasts, choosing the other side.