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.