deal-champion-mapping

Champion Mapping

Turn what is already known about an account - contact list with titles, call notes, email and meeting activity, CRM contact roles - into a stakeholder map. The map:

• Names the likely champion, the economic buyer, and the blockers or detractors.
• Grades every assignment by the strength of its evidence.
• States what is still unproven.
• Attaches the next concrete action that proves or disproves it.

The role definitions come from MEDDICC (champion, economic buyer) and Challenger (Mobilizer, Blocker) as named sources; this skill identifies and tests the people - it never scores the deal against any acronym.

Confidence labels used throughout:

• verified - confirmed at a named source.
• second-hand - documented only via another publisher.
• vendor-data - a vendor's own correlational platform dataset, never independently replicated.
• inference - this skill's own reasoning rather than a cited claim.

No vendor correlation here is causal, ever.

Interview

Ask before mapping. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers when possible; skip anything the user's data already answers.

• B2B, or high-consideration B2C? (B2C here means considered household purchases - remodeling, solar, private school, financial products - not impulse retail.)
• Deal size and segment? (Transactional / mid-market / enterprise - this sets the coverage benchmark and how much committee to expect.)
• What contact data exists? (Contact list with titles, call notes or transcripts, email/meeting activity, CRM contact-role fields - paste or attach whatever is available.)
• What stage is the deal in? (Early discovery, evaluation, proposal, procurement/paper process - later stages demand more proven roles.)
• Does the team run a sales methodology (MEDDICC/MEDDPICC, Challenger, Miller Heiman, other)? The map will use its vocabulary where it matters.
• Industry or regulatory context? (Regulated buyers add compliance and legal seats to the committee by default.)
• Does the product touch customer data? (If yes, assume a security reviewer exists whether or not one has appeared - inference from practitioner consensus that security can veto after everyone else approves.)
• What is already known about the org - reporting lines, prior deals at this account, who bought last time?
• Who is the current primary contact, and why them? (The answer often reveals whether the deal is single-threaded.)
• By what date must the next assignment be proven - close date, board meeting, budget cycle? (A hard date promotes the near-zero, same-week asks and deletes anything whose latency exceeds it, starting with the co-built business case.)
• One-off win, or a compounding asset - is this account also a reference, an expansion base, a logo the team will resell against? (A compounding mandate promotes the slow, high-value plays: the co-built case, an executive sponsor, a cultivated second champion.)
• What is the effort ceiling - how much of the contact's political capital can this deal spend, how many rep hours, and can a refused ask be survived? (A low ceiling, or a contact who has already spent capital once, holds the ladder at its cheap rungs and deletes the proof-of-concept.)

Workflow

1. Run the Interview; collect the contact data before assigning any role.
2. Inventory the evidence. For each contact, separate three piles: observed behaviour (what they demonstrably did), stated claims (what they said about themselves or the process), and title/org inference. These piles are the evidence tiers below - never mix them.
3. Assign a candidate role to each contact from the taxonomy, grading each assignment with the evidence rubric. Contacts with contradictory or empty evidence get "unknown", not a guess.
4. Test the champion candidate: list which capital-costing asks have been made, what the follow-through was, and which rung of the ask ladder to run next - named as a rung, with the reason it was promoted or held.
5. Name the economic buyer, or explicitly flag "EB unknown" with the discovery action that would surface them. If the champion has deferred EB access, classify the deferral (four readings below) and run its countermove; where the evidence names no reading, run them in the section's order.
6. Hypothesize blockers by function from the taxonomy below, in its efficiency order - explicitly including at least one function not yet on any call, and deleting the functions this deal genuinely has no seat for.
7. Run the coverage check against segment benchmarks; flag single-threading as a coverage gap. (A full red-flag review of the deal notes belongs to the deal-red-flags skill, not here.)
8. Note champion risk: is there a second champion candidate, an executive sponsor, exposure to a job change or reorg?
9. Assemble the map per references/stakeholder-map-template.md; run the Quality gate; iterate until every item passes.
10. Deliver with refresh triggers: the map is a living artifact, re-walked at every stage change, new stakeholder appearance, or champion job-change signal - not a one-time deliverable (second-hand, Miller Heiman practitioner discipline via published syntheses).
11. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the map, the evidence behind each assignment, and the open next actions - the next run starts from proven ground instead of re-deriving it. Otherwise hand the user the map file to keep and re-supply.

Role taxonomy

One-line definition and the distinguishing test for each. Full framework disagreements (Miller Heiman's Coach vs MEDDICC's Champion, Challenger's title-rejection) in references/evidence-and-benchmarks.md.

Role	Definition	Distinguishing test
Champion	"A person who has power, influence, and, subsequently, credibility within the customer's organization and who is willing and able to assist you" (verified, MEDDICC)	Spends internal political capital: passes a capital-costing ask with follow-through
Coach / informant	Helpful, shares process and politics, but lacks power or won't spend capital	Gives information; hedges or defers when asked for an EB introduction
Cheerleader	Enthusiastic, takes every meeting, no organisational pull	Cannot move budget or override anyone's preference; enthusiasm is the only evidence
Sponsor	Senior, lends name and authority to the deal	Endorses but does not do the internal selling work or build the case
Mobilizer (Challenger)	Defined by consensus-building disposition, not title (verified as Challenger's taxonomy)	Responds to insight with hard questions and drives internal change
Economic buyer	"The power to say yes when others say no, and say no when others say yes" (verified, MEDDICC)	Can release discretionary or unbudgeted funds for this purchase
Budget holder	Owns a budget line	May not have authority to redirect it to this purchase
Signatory	Signs the contract	May be a delegate executing the EB's decision - never conflate the two (second-hand, MEDDICC guidance)
Approver	Required sign-off in the process (procurement, legal, security)	Gate-keeps the paper process; not the value-based decision-maker
Blocker	Objects on risk, competing priorities, or politics	Surfaces objections openly; can be addressed or co-opted
Detractor / anti-champion	Actively works to defeat the deal, often silently	Rarely on any call; visible only through second-order effects (stalls, resurfaced objections)

Evidence tiers and confidence

Grade every role assignment by the strongest evidence supporting it:

• Behaviour under cost beats behaviour.
• Behaviour beats claims.
• Claims beat titles.

Tier	Evidence	Example
1 - Behaviour under cost	The contact did something that cost effort or political capital	Arranged the EB meeting; forwarded the business case; defended the deal in a meeting the rep didn't attend
2 - Low-cost behaviour	Observable but cheap actions	Fast replies, meeting attendance, sharing non-sensitive information
3 - Stated claim	What they said, uncorroborated	"I'm the decision maker"; "I'll champion this internally"
4 - Title inference	Role guessed from title, department, seniority	"VP of the function that owns this category, so probably the EB"

Confidence rules (inference, this skill's rubric):

• High: at least one Tier-1 item, consistent with the rest of the evidence.
• Medium: Tier-2 or Tier-3 evidence corroborated by a second independent item.
• Low: a single uncorroborated item, or anything Tier-4.
• Title alone is the weakest tier and never yields more than Low - a title can suggest a hypothesis, never confirm a role.
• Missing or contradictory inputs widen uncertainty: cap confidence at Low and mark the role "unknown" rather than defaulting to the typical org chart.
• Company size bends title inference: at small companies function leaders buy directly; at 1,000+ employees the same title often sits two levels from the budget (second-hand, published qualification-prompt heuristic).

The champion test

A champion is proven by an ask that costs them internal capital, and by follow-through - not by warmth. "No Champion, no deal" (verified, MEDDICC). The four canonical asks below are a ladder, not a list, ranked on two axes:

• Effort - the contact's own political capital, plus calendar latency and reversibility. A refused ask spends standing they may not get back.

• Value - evidence strength about whether this person is genuinely a champion.

• effort: co-built case > EB introduction > criteria share > forwardable email

• value: co-built case > EB introduction > criteria share > forwardable email

• efficiency: criteria share > forwardable email > EB introduction > co-built case

• compliance cost: criteria share (under a formal RFP or public procurement, asking for competing bids can disqualify the bid) > forwardable email == EB introduction == co-built case (genuinely equal at zero: none touches a policy, a contract clause, or a sign-off)

Effort and value rank identically, which is why row order can be neither: the strongest proof is also the ask most likely to be refused. Run the ladder in efficiency order.

Rung	Ask	Contact's effort	Evidence bought
1	Share internal evaluation criteria, competing vendors, or budget	An hour, plus a norm quietly broken	Tier 1: they took a real risk for you, and the competitive picture arrives in the same move
2	Forward a rep-written summary internally, or call a customer reference	Near-zero, same day	Weak Tier 1: their name is now attached to you internally - proves willingness, not standing
3	Arrange a meeting with the economic buyer or an executive sponsor	A week of calendar latency; visible standing spent	Tier 1, plus the deal's single most diagnostic answer - and the EB meeting itself
4	Co-build - not just receive - the internal business case, and present it at a meeting the rep does not attend	An exec-review cycle; publicly staked, hard to walk back	The strongest evidence available: they defended the deal in a room you could not enter

Progress the ladder one rung at a time:

• Default to rung 1 with an untested contact.
• Climb exactly one rung each time the previous one passes with follow-through inside its stated timeframe.
• Never repeat a passed rung

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