What Do You Do When Your Champion Leaves?

I see you on your couch, crying as you scroll through Instagram (HubSpot), reading romance novels (Gartner.com), and dreading ever going on another date (pitch meeting). Ending a relationship is hard. But in sales, as in life, it does occur. “This isn’t some edge case that happens to rookie reps,” SalesMethods reminds us. “This is a normal Tuesday in the B2B sales world we live in. People leave jobs, they get promoted, or poached. They get laid off. And when they go, all their enthusiasm and internal political capital go with them.”

And it hurts. It’s disorienting. “In Customer Success,” says Lincoln Murphy, who also operates the Sixteen Ventures site, “we talk a lot about our ‘sponsors’ or ‘champions’ that work for our customer as if there is this person walking around wearing our logo t-shirt, telling everyone how awesome we are, stopping anyone who says anything bad about our product, and just otherwise being our biggest cheerleader internally with our customer. And of course, when they leave, it’s a huge deal since we no longer have that walking, talking banner ad championing our product with the executives and users within our customer [organization].”

Chin up, though. We have some tips—which is not to say Maestro doesn’t support feeling your feelings. Cry it out. Listen to “Purple Rain” (Planet Money on NPR). Read Jane Eyre (Fuentes Fridays). Then join us for some solutions.

NOT ALL DEPARTURES ARE THE SAME

Sometimes, before a champion leaves, you have a heads up, for a variety of reasons, the most straightforward of them being: they tell you they’re leaving. “Obviously,” says Maestro’s Will Fuentes, “if it’s expected, you want to have them introduce you to their replacement, as soon as possible…”

Will has encountered this scenario more than once, both as a salesperson and a coach. Is it scary? It can be. “Sometimes the new person coming in has different initiatives and priorities, but that’s okay. At least you have a connection point, and they’re not going to ghost you if their colleague is advising them to meet with you.”  

This is a gift. Don’t squander it. When you ask your champion to introduce you to their proxy, “ask for them to be on the introduction meeting, so there’s a smooth transition…” This is also the time to double down on your foundational sales work, says Will, to accelerate the deal. If you’re lucky, you might even close before your champion leaves, “but that’s a rarity.”

Even after your champion steps away from the process, they can still be helpful to you. “Leverage the departed champion’s credibility,” says Matt Green, CRO of Sales Assembly. A sample line he provides is, “Sarah specifically mentioned this would solve your Q4 capacity issues.” Or here’s one he offers to take advantage of internal references: “Sarah connected me with your VP of Operations because she knew he’d appreciate the automation benefits.”

Along related lines, Asad Ali, Maestro’s SVP of sales and consulting, takes “a two-pronged approach. With the champion, I stay in touch, congratulate them on the new role, and explore whether there’s an opportunity at their new company. I also ask if they’re open to making a quick intro back at their old firm or at least pointing me to the right contact. With the original firm, I reach out directly to acknowledge the transition, reaffirm the value of our solution, and identify who is now leading the initiative. That way, I’m keeping momentum alive in both directions, strengthening the relationship with the champion while positioning myself as steady and consistent with the organization.”

WOMP WOMP

But sometimes, you don’t get the heads up. You get to dinner at your favorite restaurant (your inbox (okay, not your inbox, that’s a terrible analogy)) and your person’s not there. SalesMethods paints the picture this way: “Your champion is gone, and your commission may have gone with them. What about your Q3 target? Maybe they left for a competitor, a startup, or maybe they just burned out and decided to become a yoga instructor. Who knows? Doesn’t matter why. What matters is that the person who walked you through the buying process, who scheduled those internal meetings, who kept saying ‘this looks great, let’s move forward,’ that person is gone…The emails you send now get forwarded to someone who’s never heard of you. The meetings you had scheduled get canceled ‘while we transition responsibilities.’ The whole buying process you spent months working through just reset to zero.  That pain is real. Will openly shares the experience of losing a deal (an eight-figure one at that) after a champion left unexpectedly. “That was a shock. I immediately tried to connect with the organization and…I got a lot of, ‘Yep, yep, we’ll get back in touch with you when we find a replacement.’ What ended up happening was, when that replacement came in, they decided that, for them particularly, we didn’t have a relationship, and that they were going to start the process over again because it was a large initiative. Ultimately, they decided to build it as opposed to buying it.” Their building meant the collapse of Will’s deal.

MULTI-THREADING

“Having a structured method of handling champion changes and sponsor losses is a critical piece of your Customer Success strategy,” says Lincoln Murphy in “The Real Risk When your Customer Champion Leaves.” It needs to be part of your planning, which will help you avoid being the recipient of this tough-love-style assessment Sales Method doles out: “Most sales advice treats this like a recovery situation. ‘How to salvage a deal when your champion leaves.’ Like it’s a natural disaster you just have to weather. But nobody wants to admit that if losing one person kills your deal, you didn’t really have a deal. You had a dependency, and that isn’t a strategy.”

Fair enough, Sales Method. Hard to hear, but fair enough. So, how do we prevent this? For one, do some good old-fashioned multi-threading. “Hopefully,” says Will, “you mapped the organization [before you lost your champion], and you have multiple people in the organization who you can connect to at the same level.” Take care not to cultivate what he calls a “single point of failure.” Rather, do what everyone who has ever taken a Maestro training recognizes as one of the pillars of sales: mitigate risk. In this context, according to Will, that means “starting early…getting other people involved, understanding who else is going to be involved, getting in front of them.”

Questions? Super important. One that Matt Green recommends is, “If you weren’t here tomorrow, who would drive this decision forward?” He’s also a fan of mapping “the full buying committee and [building] relationships across functions. Document their specific language and priorities so you can replicate their influence.” Questions can go a long way in softening the blow of a champion leaving down the road. Ultimately, says Matt, “Forecast what could go wrong – and how to fix it before it breaks.”

DO SOMETHING

Seriously. Will says he sees too much inaction out there, people, “just stopping, being like, ‘Oh no, our champion left, what do we do?’” What do you do? “Call them, call another person in the company, figure out what’s going on. Call the person underneath them who they might have mentioned. Look in your CRM…There are all of these things that you can do.”

One approach, says Mike Valade, Maestro’s CCO, is to use former leaders in the company with whom you have a relationship as luminaries. “These are often C-suite people who left or retired. Just because they left doesn’t mean they can’t still help you close the deal. With their deep relationships, they often have access to information that you as a salesperson just won’t get on your own.” The method often involves partnerships or referrals. Just make sure that this structure is appropriate and above board for the situation in which you’re operating.

And, perhaps most importantly, remember the basics: sales, says Will, is physics. Urgency and momentum are paramount. And so is Prince.

Maestro Momentum: The Ultimate Revenue Summit is October 20–22 in Washington, DC! Click here to learn more and register.