How to identify and grow your champions in a client’s organization

One of the key success factors for customer retention is having a strong champion on the client’s side. Champions are responsible for driving the adoption of your product, getting buy-in from the team, helping employees to get on board with it, and more.

The ideal champion is an individual who meets the following three criteria:

They have decision-making authority.
They have a great understanding of the company’s business processes and challenges.
They’re willing to dedicate time to product rollout and adoption.

Realistically, not every champion will meet these criteria, and it is in the Customer Success Manager’s (CSM) best interest to proactively work on growing champions in the clients’ organization. So, how do CSMs identify the best person to be a champion, and what actions should they take to have a strong advocate for their product on the customers’ side?

Why do you need more customer advocates?

While having a single champion might be okay when we’re talking about smaller customers, putting all your eggs in one basket when it comes to medium and large clients presents multiple risks.

The most obvious one is that the champion might leave the organization and unless their replacement clearly perceives the value your product is providing, you will need to resell the value (and there’s no guarantee that you will be successful in it).

It could also be the case that after the departure of the champion, no one will want to take ownership of your product in the organization. As a result, without a catalyst, the usage of the product may naturally decrease and eventually the decision not to renew the contract will be made.

Having multiple champions in your client’s organization can also noticeably reduce the risk of churn. If your product is being used by several teams or even departments, having a champion in each of them is just not a nice thing to have – it’s mandatory if you would like this account to grow its usage.

Another advantage of having multiple champions is that if a decision is made on the company level to reduce the spending on SaaS solutions, some of those champions may have very strong arguments to keep the product at least for their teams. That means that when other subscriptions might be canceled completely, you’ll only get hit by a downgrade churn (which is still unfortunate, of course) and retain the opportunity to grow the account back later.

How to identify your champions

Now, who could be a good candidate to become the champion of your product in the client’s organization? We’ve already discussed the three criteria that make a great champion, but where exactly should you look for a champion?

One of the obvious choices is to look for someone in a leadership role. However, you may face a problem that the leader won’t have much time available to drive the adoption and usage of your product.

Based on our experience here at Wrike, the champion doesn’t necessarily have to be a formal manager, but it’s imperative that they have the manager’s ear when it comes to the decision-making process. Their opinion has to matter.

I can recall several cases when we were working with marketing teams and heads of marketing were too busy to drive the usage of Wrike. As a result, we worked with art directors, senior project managers, and other individuals who knew all the business processes in detail (since they were basically living them) and could easily justify to a senior marketing executive why there was a clear need to continue paying for Wrike.

If a busy leader ends up being a champion, consider helping them by growing several power users who can share the responsibility of onboarding new team members with the product, sharing best practices, and answering questions.

Almost any enthusiastic and tech-savvy person could be a good candidate to become a power user. They often grow naturally – you can analyze the usage of the account by team members, identify who’s using it the most, and reach out to these folks individually offering additional support from your side.

Another important aspect when identifying the champion is to confirm whether they are the budget holder and/or have an influence on the budget holder. Even solutions that are the best fit for an organization could be put on a shelf if there’s no budget allocated for them.

Ask questions such as, “Who would be involved in the decision-making process on the purchasing of the product” or “Is there anyone else who needs to be present on the call in order to make a commitment to get our solution this quarter?” As long as your contact in the company can refer you to the budget holder and is willing to advocate for the decision to get your product, the champion doesn’t necessarily need to be the budget holder herself.

How to get buy-in from your client’s leadership

It’s important to get buy-in on the role of a champion from the leadership team of the client’s organization. The best approach in my experience is to appeal to the value the existence of a champion brings from an ROI perspective.

Use arguments such as, “Your company has made a decision to purchase our product and you already paid for it. My goal here is to make sure that you get a good return on investment from it. In our experience when a dedicated person exists on your side to drive the usage of the product, the results you expect from it are consistent and are achieved faster”.

If your product has been used by the client’s organization for a while and has already brought results, make sure you refer to them: “We’ve partnered with [champion’s name] for a while and the result of our collaboration was that XYZ has already been achieved. I’ll be happy to work with you and make sure that your department starts getting value from the product ASAP. Who, in your opinion, would be the best person to drive the adoption and usage in your structure?”

How to grow your champions

Once you’ve identified the right candidates to become champions, it’s time to proactively work on growing them. As we discussed above, one of the defining characteristics of the champion is a deep understanding of the company’s business processes. In order to apply that knowledge to the effective usage of your product, the champion needs to know it better than others (and ideally be an expert in it).

A good starting point is to conduct a series of training sessions for the champion. Given the fact that you don’t want to overload the person with information, it might be a good idea to break the educational process into logical buckets and give the champion room to practice between the sessions.

Once you can confirm that the champion has a good grasp of the core areas of your product, the next step is to work together on a plan to address any challenges the company has with your solution.

Here, you’ll build a strong connection between what the problem is, how it can be tackled with the product, and what exactly they need to do. Have the champion reiterate to you how they understand the process to double-check that you’re fully aligned on this.

How to get buy-in from the wider team

Our next step is to get buy-in from the team. The leadership's reasons for choosing your product won’t necessarily resonate with all team members. Let’s face it – “making the life of the management easier” is not a very compelling argument for every employee.

That said, I recommend proactively working with the champion on the ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) statement for the team members. You need to collaboratively come up with a good answer to the question “How can the usage of this solution be beneficial for me personally?”

For example, here at Wrike we often advise champions to communicate to the team members that if they make all the necessary updates in Wrike, they will need fewer status update meetings. We all know those never-ending meetings where you give a quick update on your area of work and then sit for the next 45 minutes listening to what others say (which often has nothing to do with your work).

Who likes those meetings? Probably not too many people. So the WIIFM statement for the team could be that if they keep the work items up to date in Wrike, they can skip those meetings and focus on what they enjoy doing at work. One of the clients I worked with went as far as giving the employees with great Wrike hygiene, i.e. using our product properly, one hour off on Friday. Pretty great, right?

Keep in mind that for different teams – and sometimes even for different employees in the same team – the WIIFM statement might be different. So when discussing it with the champion, consider coming up with multiple statements.

Play the long game

Once all three checkboxes – motivation to be a champion, product expertise, and change management best practices – have been tackled, work with the champion to achieve the first results. The earlier they emerge, the more confidence the champion will have that your product is worth all the effort – both already invested and future. Now would be the right time to document your success.

Here at Wrike, CSMs work with the champions to develop a success statement. It’s a short document that describes exactly how our product has already helped the organization, what the initial state of things was, and what has changed after the product’s successful implementation. It may also include any sort of commitment to the further rollout of the product to the whole organization.

Ask the champion to sign off on the document. Given the fact that you already helped the champion address their business challenges with your product, it’s unlikely that there’s going to be any pushback here.

This document then becomes your seller’s proof. If the champion leaves the organization or changes role, or if you need arguments to support the rollout of your solution to other departments, and in many other cases, the success statement will serve as a confirmation of the value your solution delivered to the business.

Identifying and growing champions is a long play that doesn’t bring results immediately, but customer-facing teams that are consistent in this will show better retention rates with their clients and have strong and long-lasting relationships with them.