How to win complex B2B deals: Support your project champion

Every complex B2B deal has one person inside the account who gets it. They understand what your product does, they want it to happen, and they'll go to bat for it in rooms you'll never see.

That's your project champion. They usually don't sign the contract. Their job is to get it signed.

I've seen sales teams treat that person as a nice-to-have. This is about why they're the whole deal, and what to hand them so they can win it for you.

What your champion is actually doing all day

Forrester's 2026 buyer research puts the typical business purchase at 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers. Procurement is a decision-maker in 53% of those cycles. Your champion is the one talking to IT, fielding questions from security, walking finance through the ROI, and trying to get the executive team to stop saying "maybe."

Those groups don't agree with each other. Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers and found 74% of buying teams show "unhealthy conflict" during the decision: conflicting objectives, disagreement on the solution, or someone senior overruling the group late. The same study found teams that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.

Consensus doesn't build itself. Somebody has to do it, and that somebody is your champion. If it goes wrong, they take the heat, and you'll never hear about most of it.

Why "let's just pitch the execs" backfires

When a deal stalls, the instinct on the GTM side is to go over everyone's head. "Let's get 20 minutes with the CFO."

It feels bold. It's usually a mistake.

Going around your champion tells them their buy-in doesn't matter. That's the fastest way to lose the one person in the account who had any reason to fight for you. And the execs aren't evaluating vendors. They're responding to momentum inside their own company. If your champion isn't creating that momentum, the exec meeting is a courtesy call.

There's a number that explains why the champion is so hard to replace. CEB, now part of Gartner, found that 51% of people who would be willing to buy from a supplier are not willing to advocate for that supplier internally. Half of the people who like you won't stick their neck out for you. A champion is someone who already has, and you don't get to swap them for a more senior model.

Champions don't talk like a board deck

The C-suite cares about growth. Your champion cares about the operational mess they're stuck with today.

Selling a Security Director on revenue impact wastes everyone's time. Their world is compliance, risk, and how many people they'd need to run this thing. And they're the majority. Gartner found 67% of the people involved in a technology purchase sit outside IT, each with their own version of "why should I care."

If your story only works in the boardroom, it won't survive the actual buying process, because the actual buying process happens in a dozen smaller rooms with people who have never read your homepage.

Why execs say no

When an executive shuts a deal down, the post-mortem usually lands on "we didn't talk ROI early enough."

Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna's research for The JOLT Effect says otherwise. They found 40 to 60% of deals end in no decision, and most of those are lost to the buyer's fear of getting it wrong, not to loyalty to the status quo. When sellers responded by pushing harder on the cost of inaction, it backfired 84% of the time.

Fear doesn't respond to a bigger spreadsheet. It responds to someone inside the building saying "I've looked at this, I trust these people, and I'll own it." If your champion can't say that with confidence, the exec didn't believe your ROI because they had no reason to believe you.

So the job is to make your champion credible. Gartner's 2026 buyer survey found that buyers who are confident about how a solution improves their specific outcomes are twice as likely to report a high-quality deal. Confidence is what you're selling your champion. The product comes after.

You earn the C-suite meeting through your champion

Access to the executive team doesn't come from clever outbound or a pretty deck. It comes from someone with influence and proximity to the problem saying, "This is the one we need." That's when leadership pays attention, and that's when they take you seriously once you're in the room.

What to hand your champion

You've run this play before. Your champion hasn't. HBR said as much back in 2015 in "Making the Consensus Sale": find internal champions, turn them into active advocates, and "arm them with the skills and materials needed to win over fellow decision makers." A decade on, most sales teams still send a generic deck and hope.

Here's what arming them looks like.

Pre-empt the objections. You already know where the pushback comes from. Security wants to know you're compliant. Finance wants payback inside a year. IT wants to know it won't become their problem. Get ahead of all three with ROI calculators, an implementation plan, case studies, and technical docs your champion can forward without editing. The goal is that every hard question gets answered before it's asked in a meeting you're not in.

Give them an internal pitch they didn't have to build. Your champion has to sell your product without you present. Hand them:

• A short deck on why you're different and why that matters here
• Proof: logos, case studies, before-and-after numbers
• A one-pager that's easy to forward
• Plain answers to the objections you know are coming

"Better" won't carry a room. Your champion needs to say why you're the right fit for this company, in this situation, against the two other options on the shortlist. That's the whole job of positioning, and it's what keeps a deal from dying in committee.

‍Coach them through the politics. Objections aren't always rational. IT doesn't want more to maintain. Ops wants to protect its turf. Someone doesn't want to admit the last system they picked was a mistake. You've watched this happen at other accounts, so tell your champion what you've seen: how other champions handled IT, the point in the deal where procurement shows up, the blocker who always appears late. You've seen this movie. They haven't.

What this costs if you skip it

Your champion may not be the decision-maker, but they shape the decision. They live the pain, they were handed the job of fixing it, and they're close enough to know whether your product works. They also build the internal case, line up allies, and manage the politics you'll never be invited to.

Positioning wins in-market. Champions win in-account.

Skip the support and you get the outcome in Gartner's regret data: buyers with high regret took 7 to 10 months longer to close, and the ones that stalled mostly stalled because of "dysfunctional behaviors within the buying team," in Gartner's words. That's a champion without a playbook.

Give them the tools. Anticipate the objections. Coach them through the org chart. They're the difference between "interesting idea" and a signed contract, and your pipeline already knows it.