With internal champions now driving 83 percent of the buying conversation without the seller present, this playbook shows how to equip them to retell your value story clearly and confidently, closing the internal Value Communication Gap and winning complex deals¹.
Have you ever watched one of your top sellers deliver a pitch that felt nearly perfect, with clear outcomes, measurable ROI, and visibly engaged stakeholders, yet still seen the deal quietly stall weeks later? In my early days as a sales manager, this scenario frustrated me endlessly. How could such an effective sales conversation fail to move the needle?
Eventually, I recognized the critical missing piece. After your seller leaves the room, another conversation takes place: the internal meeting, conducted by your champion, without your presence.
Here’s the blind spot many sellers overlook: In this internal meeting, your champion effectively becomes your seller. They must retell your carefully crafted value story to their peers, stakeholders, and budget owners. If they hesitate, fumble, or struggle to communicate your value internally, the Value Communication Gap (VCG) reopens, and the deal stalls despite earlier success.
In previous articles, we’ve thoroughly explored the external Value Communication Gap buyers face throughout their journey:
- Part 1: Defined the silent deal-killer (VCG) and why unclear outcomes stall deals.
- Part 2: Highlighted the challenge overloaded buyers face and the need for clear, tailored messages.
- Part 3: Explained how traditional feature-heavy pitches widen the VCG, and how outcome-first conversations close it.
- Part 4: Provided practical frameworks to craft customer-centric value stories.
- Part 5: Offered actionable ways to create defensible business cases trusted by skeptical executives.
In Part 6, we shift inside the customer’s walls, showing how top sellers identify, equip, and empower champions to effectively retell your value internally, ensuring the internal Value Communication Gap stays firmly closed.
Understanding Your Champion’s Internal Value Communication Gap
Your champion is rarely a trained seller. Typically, they have other primary responsibilities, busy schedules, and competing internal priorities. Suddenly, they’re tasked with something unfamiliar: clearly selling your solution internally. They encounter their own internal Value Communication Gap:
- Can they clearly communicate your solution’s measurable outcomes?
- Can they convincingly defend your business case against internal skepticism?
- Can they simplify your external pitch into an easily digestible internal message their CFO or VP instantly understands?
If your champion struggles to answer these internal questions confidently, your meticulously crafted external pitch risks evaporating into internal confusion and indecision.
Five Practical Steps to Close Your Champion’s Internal Value Communication Gap
Here’s how top-performing sellers proactively address this internal challenge:
1. Identify Your Champion (It’s Not Always the Most Vocal Person)
The ideal champion is not simply your most enthusiastic contact. Instead, look for the person who clearly grasps how your solution positively impacts their internal KPIs and who possesses genuine internal influence and respect.
Example: At Parsable, we initially thought our champion was the person most excited about new technology. Our real champion emerged quietly. He was a plant operations director evaluated strictly on downtime reduction metrics. When enabled properly, he skillfully translated excitement into actionable internal buy-in.
2. Provide Your Champion with a Simple Internal Narrative
Your external presentation may contain multiple slides, technical details, and detailed metrics. However, your internal champion needs something simpler: concise, shareable, and precisely aligned with internal priorities.
Rather than large decks, give your champion a clear one-page internal pitch summary that outlines:
- The measurable internal problem (“We currently lose 500 production hours per year”).
- The specific measurable outcome your solution delivers (“Recovering 300 of these hours, approximately $1.2M annually”).
- The urgency to act promptly (“Waiting increases losses and delays our yearly goal attainment”).
When we shared our simplified internal story with our champion at Parsable, his internal conversations shifted significantly from discussions about technology specifics to clear decisions focused on measurable business value.
3. Role-Play the Internal Conversations
Champions seldom admit openly they feel uncertain about selling internally. Take initiative by offering to practice potential conversations they’ll likely have with their internal stakeholders:
- “What is the exact investment required?”
- “What measurable returns can we expect?”
- “What’s the downside or risk of waiting?”
- “Why specifically this solution and this vendor?”
Practicing these conversations builds your champion’s internal confidence. I’ve seen numerous deals move swiftly from stalled to accelerated simply because we spent a few minutes proactively role-playing internal objections.
4. Anticipate and Neutralize Internal Objections in Advance
Your champion’s internal colleagues typically raise predictable objections about security risks, integration concerns, or budget issues. Explicitly ask your champion about potential internal objections, then proactively equip them with straightforward resources or third-party validations to neutralize these concerns.
In my previous role, we successfully transformed hesitant IT stakeholders into supportive internal allies simply by equipping our champion with credible third-party validations addressing security and integration issues. When objections arose internally, our champion immediately had clear, credible responses available. This effectively closed their internal VCG.
5. Develop Multiple Champions Within the Account
NEVER rely solely on a single internal advocate. Proactively identify and cultivate multiple champions² within the account:
- A strategic-level champion who ensures executive alignment.
- An operational-level champion who can confirm practical daily value.
- A technical champion who addresses IT and security validation.
Cultivating multiple internal champions ensures that your value narrative remains strong, even in the face of internal changes, significantly reducing deal risks and accelerating internal consensus.
Internal Champion Preparation Checklist
Before handing off the internal selling to your champion, verify you’ve:
- Clearly identified and validated your champion’s internal influence.
- Provided them a concise, shareable internal pitch summary.
- Practiced critical internal stakeholder questions and answers.
- Equipped them to proactively address likely internal objections.
- Actively identified and begun developing additional internal advocates.
If you overlook any of these steps, your carefully closed external VCG may reopen internally, causing delays or loss of momentum.
Real-World Lesson Learned: The Cost of Ignoring the Champion’s Internal Gap
I clearly recall a deal that stalled simply because we initially overlooked our champion’s internal communication challenges. Our primary advocate was highly enthusiastic. He was deeply involved in the project, knew exactly how the platform worked, appreciated how simple it was to configure, and recognized significant potential from integrations with other systems.
But he was also extremely technical. Very quickly he became captivated by the product’s detailed features, unintentionally losing sight of the bigger picture and the specific business problems our solution would solve. Because of this, he struggled when presenting internally. When it came time to explain the solution’s measurable outcomes clearly to his financial controller, he defaulted to technical explanations and detailed feature descriptions. The internal Value Communication Gap reopened, causing the deal to stall and delaying the decision by nearly two quarters.
Only after we explicitly addressed our champion’s internal challenges by providing him with a concise, credible internal pitch summary and rehearsing the key conversations he needed to have with his controller did the deal regain momentum and swiftly move forward.
Your Turn: Share Your Champion Insights
Reflect on your recent deals:
- Did your champion confidently communicate your value internally?
- Which simple tool or preparation step made their internal advocacy most successful?
Please share your experiences in the comments. Your insights help all of us close internal Value Communication Gaps more effectively.
Sources
- Gartner – B2B Buying Journey Insights (Buyers spend only about 17 % of their total buying time with vendors and the average B2B sale now involves 11 or more stakeholders)
- LinkedIn Sales Solutions – Deep Sales Playbook 2024 (Top performers build multiple champions and consistently outperform quota)
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