How should sellers reach and win over the economic buyer in enterprise deals?

Rich Liu · Jun 7, 2023

Deals still close in this market if you reach the economic buyer and can quantify how your product solves what they fear most.

He points to a large Am Law 100 expansion that closed because reps got to the CFO and managing partner and reframed the product from a discovery capability into a strategic lever (cost center to profit center, employee retention, differentiated pitching).

Scope: requires access to the true budget owner; value must be quantifiable

6:23 20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Rich Liu · Jun 7, 2023

The main reasons deals fail today are that there was never true buy-in — reps push contracts and sales stages without a real champion, economic buyer or business case — and that reps never actually sell to the economic buyer

Operationally prosecuting stages without getting over the hump with the champion and EB means you never had a deal, which bites hardest in a changing market

Scope: especially acute in the current changing market

39:11 20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

When a deal slips to next quarter for reasons attributable to the salesperson, the number one cause is lack of access to the economic buyer

The rep was working only with a champion who lacked the power to understand or drive the buying process; in MEDDIC terms that's the piece that makes deals fail

Scope: excludes genuine external shocks like a customer RIF; assumes a mutual evaluation plan was in place

29:55 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Matt Rosenberg · Oct 4, 2023

'The CFO is blocking budget' is a false excuse; CFOs are among the most rational actors in a business and will buy demonstrable value

If the CFO blocks, it means you haven't shown enough value, haven't made it an organizational priority, and haven't brought the CFO along in the process

30:18 20Sales: Why the Founder Should Not Be the One to Create the Sales Playbook, Why You Should Hire a Sales Leader Before Sales Reps & Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies with Matt Rosenberg, CRO @ Grammarly

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

The only way to confirm a deal champion is to test them by asking them to take you to the executive buyer

If they have the power and willingness to bring you to the CFO and sell internally on your behalf, they're a champion; a refusal means either they lack influence (so they're just a coach or stakeholder) or you haven't earned the right yet and have more selling to do

Scope: executive buyer today is typically the CFO

11:30 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

The test of whether a technical champion is real is whether they will bring you to the economic buyer — and senior executives are the lever reps use to get that access

A champion may refuse to introduce a rep to their boss's boss, but will make the introduction for a CRO or other senior executive

28:21 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

If a rep has been in an account six months, claims a champion, and forecasts a half-million-dollar deal but has never met the economic buyer, they do not have a champion and will not get the deal

A true champion in a six-month cycle on a deal that size would already have gotten you to the economic buyer

Scope: specific to large deals with long cycles

10:23 20Sales: John McMahon on How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Sales Reps | How Sales Changes in a World of AI | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

Sellers must get to the executive buyer, and the champion is only one of many routes — network, board members and your own executive team can be used to back-channel in.

Access to the economic buyer is non-negotiable, so you should not be dependent on a single path to reach them.

13:14 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

When your contact lacks sufficient pain, the answer is to go higher and wider in the organization to find someone with burning pain and build groundswell — multiple champions beat a single champion.

Multithreading builds the internal pressure that a single unmotivated contact can't.

19:20 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Harry Stebbings · Aug 2, 2023

Having a single champion is dangerous because they can leave, so you need to multithread

Champions can leave the company

31:48 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

You can test whether a contact is a real buyer by role-playing with your rep how that person would hold up under CFO or CEO pressure and whether they'd commit to consuming the technology.

In today's market there is rarely a single sole decision-maker; the contact must carry the deal to many other people, so their behaviour under internal pressure reveals their true buying position.

7:07 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

Good reps can predict the next moves in a deal and must pressure-test and prepare their champion rather than accept the champion's claim to be ready.

They do this for a living and can anticipate the competitor's questions; one probing question exposes whether the champion is actually prepared.

18:16 20Sales: John McMahon on How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Sales Reps | How Sales Changes in a World of AI | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency

Shyam Sankar · Jan 17, 2024

Government sales are complicated by a structural disconnect between the buyer and the user, so vendors should spend the bulk of their time with users and let users pressure buyers

Buyers will always push you back toward the conventional pay-by-the-hour model, whereas users can validate what to build and vouch that it is far better

13:30 20VC: Palantir CTO on The Broken Incentive Structure of How Governments Buy Defence, The Danger of Defence Spending at Historic Lows, How Elections and Wars Change Government Defence Buying & Why Budgets are Anti-Creative with Shyam Sankar

Dan Fougere · Nov 22, 2024

The standard playbook of 'come in high, get to power early' was wrong for Datadog; the right move was selling to the hands-on-keyboard practitioners implementing cloud and building a groundswell upward

CIOs and CTOs in early 2017 had just signed deals with AppDynamics, Splunk, Dynatrace and New Relic and believed cloud was handled, so even dinners with Amit Agarwal and Shardul Shah generated no interest; only implementers cared, and the product demonstrably worked for them

Scope: specific to Datadog and the early-2017 cloud monitoring market cycle

6:02 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

Embedded financing in invoicing products doesn't sell to the person paying the bill — the buyer of a payment-extension decision is the CFO or strategic finance person, not the clerk executing payment

Ramp assumed the bill payer had authority to take a loan, but that person is typically an operator/clerk rather than a financial decision maker, so uptake required approval higher up

38:01 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Dan Fougere · Nov 22, 2024

The real economic buyer is usually one or two levels above whoever the rep thinks it is

Reps mistake the technical user for their champion and that user's boss for the economic buyer; it's hard to accept the signer sits multiple levels above where you've engaged

4:41 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

Losses to competition typically come from price (when value hasn't been sold) or from being outflanked by a competitor with a more senior champion, which is why you must map the organization

A price-sensitive buyer with no articulated value can be undercut or given a free product; a more senior champion has more influence in the org

Scope: based on his own experience

41:54 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

The most common missed risk causing deals to slip is failing to map the buyer's full procurement process and budget holders end to end

There is always a surprise budget committee member; selling a large deal to a manager whose budget holder doesn't know the conversation exists is a red flag because people are inherently bad at selling the business case internally

Scope: some deal loss is genuinely outside the rep's control

39:41 20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

You can only lock down a deal's decision criteria through a champion who buys into your differentiators and has influence to fix the criteria internally.

The champion's own pain is solved by your differentiators, so he takes control of the criteria inside the organization on your behalf.

12:43 Champion is the only route to locking decision criteria

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

Multiple champions make your position stronger, and reps should explicitly assess whether their champion outweighs the competition's champion and recruit more if not.

There will be meetings you aren't present for, so the relative strength of champions decides the outcome in the room.

17:16 Champion strength relative to competitors champion

Lauren Schwartz · Oct 19, 2022

In enterprise sales, multithreading is critical — you must map champion, competitor's champion, and champion for doing nothing before even reaching the economic buyer

You can't construct a credible current-state/future-state and business-outcome picture from a single person; you gather it from several stakeholders and iterate on their feedback

12:42 Map champion competing champion and do nothing champion before reaching economic buyer

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

The right way to multithread is to first get the champion's buy-in by explaining why and showing how sharing the story internally amplifies their own goals and career, then ask them for referrals — rather than going around them via LinkedIn

Explaining the why and earning buy-in is essential in every sales engagement, and a great champion has upside in being the one who spreads the story

32:03 Multithread through the champion not around them

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

Buying patterns are predictable enough by company size and persona that reps can be coached in advance on where the real buyer sits and when they will surface

You can study the patterns of what happens with similar organizations and interpret the data so the salesperson doesn't get tricked

14:45 Buying patterns predictable by size and persona

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Nine times out of ten the prospect who claims to be the decision maker cannot actually sign the order form, so the useful question is 'who should I engage early?' rather than 'are you the decision maker?'

People like to feel important and will claim authority; CFO, procurement and IT inevitably get involved at the end, so pulling them in early serves both sides' time

40:08 Ask who should i engage early rather than are you the decision maker

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Framing the ask as a hypothesis based on what happens at comparable companies lets you bypass the stated decision maker without damaging their ego

Citing patterns from thousands of similar customers gives the seller credibility, so it reads as helping rather than doubting the buyer

40:52 Framing asks as hypotheses from comparable customers bypasses decision makers ego

Frank Fillmann · Mar 22, 2023

Running a deal single-threaded into one person or buying unit is dangerous; multithreading should come out of genuine customer obsession rather than being bolted on at deal time

If the sponsor leaves the organization the deal is exposed, whereas an obsessed seller who threads from IT to data to the line of business has every angle covered and can simply remediate the one relationship that falls astray

39:18 Multithreading must emerge from genuine customer obsession not be bolted on

Stevie Case · Jan 25, 2023

In a capital-constrained environment where CFOs are more prominent, sellers must go multithreaded and pull the CFO and other potential objectors into deals much earlier rather than avoiding them

Junior sellers try to avoid the CFO or CISO and stay with their champion, which is exactly how deals fall apart at the last minute; bringing objectors in early surfaces requirements and objections in time to work through them and sets the champion up to look competent

40:32 Multithread to cfo and objectors early rather than staying with the champion

Jordan Van Horn · Aug 17, 2022

In enterprise deals you must multithread across a champion, a practitioner who will deploy, and an economic buyer, with access to all three aligned — and securing that access is becoming the core role of the enterprise sales rep

Even if you win the deal, a departed champion leaves you with churn risk on day one because someone still has to roll out and adopt the product; multiple champions or a whole department as champion is a real backup plan

15:47 Multithread across champion practitioner and economic buyer is the core rep skill

Harry Stebbings · Aug 17, 2022

Contrary to the common notion that a deal no longer matters once it is signed, losing your champion puts you in serious trouble

16:49 Losing your champion post signing still creates real churn risk

Ben Fiechtner · Aug 2, 2024

The best way to get introductions to additional stakeholders is to break the fourth wall and openly admit you're a salesperson who needs to triangulate, rather than inventing a pretext

Buyers see through manufactured reasons; authenticity is the only thing that matters, and framing it as not wasting either team's time worked nine times out of ten

12:11 Authentic direct request beats pretext for stakeholder introductions

Shaunt Voskanian · Mar 21, 2026

You build enterprise champions by bringing them insights that teach them something they don't know, not by them loving the product

Delivering value that makes them and their teams more effective at their jobs is what makes a champion go all in

21:34 Champions are created by teaching them something new

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Great enterprise selling is built on story creation around customer understanding, listening, meeting customers where they are, and board-level executive relationships

At ServiceNow's scale, transformational deals require $10–50M a year funding decisions, which are board-level lifts that only senior relationships can unlock — Bill McDermott's decade at SAP gave him that network

60:22 Board level executive relationships decide large transformational enterprise deals

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

Creativity in winning deals should be strategic stakeholder alignment — pairing every important buyer with a counterpart at your company, running workshops, and creating teachable moments — not gimmicks like novelty gifts

Surrounding the right people with your solution and giving each stakeholder value from a peer relationship (CFO to CFO, PM to PM) is what moves deals; gimmicks sometimes work but aren't how she sells

60:08 Peer to peer stakeholder pairing and workshops beat gimmicks for deal creativity

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

The most common cause of lost deals is being single-threaded with stakeholders who lack the influence to get the deal done

Champions will claim they can get it done and tell you not to involve anyone else; without multi-threading across lines of business and actual budget holders you can't change how a company operates

61:42 Single threading with low influence champions is the top cause of lost deals

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

When a champion blocks multi-threading, use colleagues rather than yourself to make contact — ghostwrite outreach from your manager or someone with a connection — as a low-risk test of whether the deal is real

Messages from others in your company let you check whether the executive sponsor even knows about the evaluation, revealing whether your champion is actually selling internally

63:08 Ghostwritten colleague outreach tests whether the champion is real

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

To ask for executive access without seeming slimy, set the expectation in the very first meeting that open executive-to-executive dialogue is part of your sales process

Framing the relationship as a partnership rather than a typical vendor-customer relationship makes the ask a pre-agreed part of the process

12:26 Pre frame exec dialogue in first meeting

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

You should never equip a champion to sell on your behalf in your absence — you must be in the room with the executive buyer.

If the CFO asks a question about numbers, implementation or other stakeholders that the champion can't answer, the deal is exposed; accepting wholesale a champion's claim that 'my CFO doesn't meet anybody' is living dangerously.

13:54 Seller must be in the room not the champion

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

A real champion has exactly three characteristics — they sell for you when you're not in the room, they have access and influence over the economic buyer, and they have a personal win — and the personal win is the one to focus on

A personal win (building a brand as the AI person, becoming 'the data guy') is what makes someone go to war for you

41:23 Three part champion test anchored on personal win

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

Champion status is binary — there is no such thing as a 'bad champion' — and reps should be pressed on what they have literally seen with their own eyes that proves the three attributes

Reps routinely mistake a coach or someone merely dabbling in the product for a champion; forcing them to cite observed evidence makes them qualify properly

43:08 Champion status is binary require eyewitness evidence

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

The economic buyer and the change agent are often different people — the economic buyer may be the CFO while the change agent is a director-level person driving the deal to earn their next promotion.

A senior director of revenue operations who wants to be a VP will push the change through the organization because they believe in it and it advances their career.

10:47 Change agent distinct from economic buyer

Matt Rosenberg · Oct 4, 2023

Sellers should take the 'power position' and refuse to progress a deal until the CFO is engaged, framing it up front as part of the process

Deals fall apart when the CFO isn't involved; if you know they're out there and avoid them you're wasting everyone's time and not serving your investors, founder or business

31:23 Refuse to progress without economic buyer engagement

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026 · hedged

Whether PE firms or law firms hold the power varies case by case, and law firm buying processes are unusually intricate — innovation teams, knowledge management, partners, AI committees — with a single client sometimes holding an outsized voice for or against a vendor

Stakeholder maps differ from firm to firm, so every deal is different

26:45 Stakeholder maps vary per account no predictable pattern

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

Selling AI to law firms and corporates gives unusually easy access to executive buyers, unlike traditional SaaS where reaching a CMO was very hard

Law firm partners are being asked by clients how they use AI, and corporate legal teams face board and CEO pressure to figure it out, so senior stakeholders want to lean in and learn

29:35 Ai urgency opens executive doors that saas never could