Chris Arsenault

Category: The Musings

Long-form writing on technology, leadership, AI strategy, and execution inside complex organizations.

  • The Champion Map: Who Actually Moves a Deal

    Most enterprise reps think of “the champion” as a single person — usually the one who said “I love this” on the first call. That’s a dangerous simplification. Your champion isn’t one person. It’s a map of archetypes, and winning the deal depends on managing all of them.

    Here’s the map I use on every complex deal:

    The Champion. The person who wants the deal to happen and will spend political capital to make it so. Already sold, by definition. The deal is not won through this person — it’s won through the three below.

    The Mobilizer. The person who coordinates stakeholders across the buying committee. They may not own the outcome but they own the process. Matt Dixon’s research made this archetype famous for a reason: in complex B2B, the Mobilizer is often who actually gets the deal moving internally.

    The Skeptic. The person who needs to be converted before sign-off. Not hostile — analytical. They have legitimate concerns about risk, cost, or integration. They will ask the hard questions your champion won’t, and your job is to have answers before the question is asked.

    The Blocker. The person who will kill the deal if not managed. Sometimes their job is to say no (procurement, legal). Sometimes they have a competing priority or a preferred alternative. Always: they exist, and they’re dangerous when invisible.

    In medtech, I’ve watched this play out on nearly every deal: the clinical champion is already sold, the department head is the skeptic (worried about workflow disruption), supply chain is the blocker (concerned about vendor consolidation), and the COO is the mobilizer coordinating across all of them. Miss any one and you lose the deal.

    In telecom, the pattern looks different in titles but identical in structure: the CTO is the champion, the network ops lead is the skeptic, finance is the blocker, and the procurement lead is the mobilizer.

    In construction, the GC is the champion, the owner’s rep is the skeptic, the bonding company is the blocker, and the project manager is the mobilizer.

    In consulting, the sponsoring partner is the champion, the COO is the skeptic, procurement is the blocker, and the engagement manager is the mobilizer.

    The titles change. The roles don’t.

    The failure mode is almost always the same: the rep builds a strong relationship with the champion, ignores or underinvests in the other three, and gets surprised when the deal stalls at decision. The deal didn’t stall — the rep just wasn’t talking to the people who actually moved it.

    Three moves that separate operators who can map champions from those who can’t:

    1. Name every stakeholder, not just titles. “VP of Operations” is not a name. If you can’t name the person, you don’t know the deal. Titles suggest you’ve done research. Names prove you’ve had conversations.

    2. Classify each stakeholder into the map. Champion, Mobilizer, Skeptic, or Blocker. If everyone is a champion, you haven’t done the work — real buying committees always have skeptics and blockers. The fact that you haven’t identified any means you haven’t gone deep enough.

    3. Build an engagement plan per archetype. The champion needs ammunition (data, case studies, answers to hard questions). The mobilizer needs process clarity (timelines, decision paths, next steps). The skeptic needs evidence (references, proof points, risk mitigation). The blocker needs to either be converted or isolated — but they cannot be ignored.

    The good sellers I’ve worked alongside always knew exactly where every stakeholder sat on the map. The mediocre ones had a single champion and hoped for the best.

    Pull your top five deals right now. For each, sketch the map. Name names under each archetype. You’ll find something uncomfortable — usually two or more blockers you haven’t engaged, or a skeptic you’ve been avoiding because the conversation would be hard.

    That’s the work. That’s the difference between a pipeline and a forecast.

  • The Compound Interest of Trust

    In every industry I’ve sold into — medical devices, management consulting, commercial construction, telecom infrastructure — the deals I won fastest were almost never the deals with the newest relationships.

    That’s not sentiment. That’s math.

    Trust is the only revenue asset that compounds. Ads decay. Brand awareness fades without reinvestment. Pipeline evaporates if you stop feeding it. But a relationship you built three years ago, invested in quarterly, and never asked anything from? That relationship is earning interest whether you notice or not.

    Here’s the compounding mechanism, in four parts:

    Access premium. Trusted people get the meeting. That’s the zero-to-one. A cold email converts somewhere between 1 and 3%. A warm introduction from someone who vouches for you converts at 60 to 80%. That delta — that’s the access premium, and it only exists if you’ve been depositing.

    Speed premium. Trusted vendors skip steps. In medtech, I’ve watched trusted reps bypass three rounds of clinical evaluation because the department head had already vouched. Not because the product was better — the product was equivalent. Because the trust was collateral.

    Risk discount. A buyer choosing between two roughly equivalent options will choose the one where they trust the human. Not because they’re irrational. Because they are correctly pricing implementation risk. Your relationship is their insurance policy.

    Referral multiplier. One trusted relationship becomes three. Three becomes nine. This isn’t LinkedIn-post nonsense — it’s what actually happens when someone stakes their reputation on you in a room you’re not in.

    Now here’s the hard part: you can’t manufacture this in Q4.

    Trust doesn’t respond to urgency. It responds to consistency over time, with no extraction. The quarterly check-in that doesn’t ask for anything. The intro you made because you thought two people should know each other, not because you needed something. The follow-up six months after a deal closed — not a renewal pitch, a genuine “how’s it going.”

    Most operators treat relationship-building like an expense they’d rather not carry. They show up when they need something. They disappear when they don’t. Then they’re confused why the pipeline is thin when the market turns.

    The operators who build durable revenue treat relationships like a balance sheet. They know who they owe a call to. They know who owes them one. They know which five people, if they picked up the phone on Monday morning, would take the call — not because those people need something, but because the trust has been deposited.

    So here’s the diagnostic I use. Write the list:

    • Who owes you a call? (You did them a favor; they haven’t reciprocated yet.)
    • Who do you owe a call to? (They did you a favor; you haven’t returned it.)
    • Who would take a cold call from you on a Monday morning? (Not your family. Your professional network.)

    If the list is shorter than 20 names, you don’t have a pipeline problem. You have a deposit problem.

    Start this week. Don’t pitch. Just show up.