Section 1
Key takeaways
• A coach reports the news; a champion makes the news. The cheapest, fastest reply in your inbox is usually coming from someone with no power to change the outcome. • Never grade a contact on what they say, grade them on what they do when you assign a costly action: getting you in front of the decision-maker, handing over the real criteria, or co-building the business case. • A champion costs you something to test and pays you back in access. A coach costs nothing to keep and changes nothing about the deal. • Single-threading through one friendly contact is structurally fragile: modern B2B purchases are decided by a buying group of roughly a dozen-plus people, most of whom you'll never meet. • A mole isn't always malicious. Sometimes it's a contact who genuinely likes you but is loyal to the incumbent, and every detail you share becomes ammunition for the other side.
Section 2
Why the friendliest contact is rarely the one who matters
Start with the uncomfortable mechanics of a complex sale. Most of the decision happens when you are not in the room. Prospeo, citing Forrester, puts it bluntly: a modern B2B purchase involves an average of 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external participants, and when generative-AI features enter the evaluation, that group doubles . You are selling to a committee you cannot see, in conversations you are not invited to. That single fact reorganizes everything. If most of the persuasion happens off your calls, then the only thing that matters about your primary contact is what they say and do in those rooms, not how warmly they treat you on Zoom. A contact who is delightful to you and silent internally is not an asset. They are a comfort blanket. This is where most founders running their own sales get fooled. The coach is genuinely helpful. They explain the org chart, forward you the RFP, tell you who the skeptics are, and confirm your pricing is "in range." All of that feels like momentum. None of it requires them to spend a single unit of their own political capital. Information is free to give. Advocacy is expensive. The whole diagnostic lives in that gap. Force Management framed the distinction in a line worth memorizing: "People with power and influence treat policies as if they are guidelines, because they are individuals who try to influence the future. A coach reports the news; a champion makes the news" . A coach tells you the committee meets Thursday. A champion gets you added to the agenda, or kills a competitor's slot. One recaps what already happened. The other shapes what happens next. If you want to see why this gap is fatal rather than merely inconvenient, look at where deals actually die. HubSpot's 2025 State of Sales data, cited on Salesmotion's MEDDPICC guide, found that 72% of deals fail because buyers do not see value . That number is the job description of a champion. "Seeing value" is not something that happens on your demo; it happens internally, in the language of the buyer's own priorities, argued by someone the room trusts. A coach can't close that gap because closing it requires standing up and spending credibility. A champion closes it as a matter of course, it's why they took you on.
Section 3
Coach, champion, mole: a working definition
Let's be precise, because the labels do real work. A coach likes you and shares information. They may be senior or junior. What defines them is that their help is costless, they advise from the sidelines. The MEDDPICC canon is direct about the ceiling here: a coach lacks the power or influence to drive the deal, and "No Champion, no deal" . Importantly, a coach is not useless. A well-placed coach with no vested interest can sometimes be developed into a champion if they secretly have the power and you give them a reason to care. The error is not having a coach. The error is mistaking one for a champion and stopping your search. A champion has four things stacked: power, influence, credibility, and a vested interest in your win. Power and influence let them move the room. Credibility means the room actually listens. Vested interest means they want to, your success makes them look good, solves a problem they own, or advances their career. Strip out the vested interest and you have an influential bystander. Strip out the power and you have a coach. You need all four. A mole is the one nobody warns you about. A mole behaves like a coach, curious, engaged, asking smart questions, but the questions trend toward your differentiation, your pricing floor, your weaknesses versus the incumbent. The information flows out of you and never produces internal movement. Sometimes the mole is loyal to the incumbent vendor. Sometimes they're sponsoring a competing internal option and using you as a stalking horse to sharpen their preferred choice. The tell is asymmetry: they take a great deal from you and you never get access, advancement, or advocacy in return. The relationship is all extraction, no reciprocity. The reason these three get confused is that on a transcript they can look identical. All three are pleasant. All three "engage." The only way to separate them is to stop reading the transcript and start running tests, which is the entire point of qualification. If you want the broader system for sorting who's actually worth your pipeline time, that's the work covered in how to qualify a buyer before you build a proposal; the champion question is one slice of it.
Section 4
How do you test for real influence before betting a deal on someone?
You don't ask. Asking "are you the decision-maker?" produces a yes from people who aren't, because the question is about status and people defend their status. Instead, you assign actions and watch. Gong's research gives you the behavioral signature to look for. In their analysis of B2B deals, winning deals included eight buyer-side contacts in email, a 243 percent difference from losing deals . Read that the right way: a real champion multi-threads you. They don't gatekeep you behind themselves; they pull you into the org because spreading you around is how they de-risk their own bet on you. A coach, by contrast, keeps you single-threaded, not maliciously, but because they have no standing to introduce you upward. A mole keeps you single-threaded deliberately, because your isolation is what makes you useful to them and harmless to their real preference. So the first test is simply: when you ask to meet other stakeholders, does the contact open doors or absorb the request? Gong's own framework lists the observable signals of influence, can this person schedule meetings with senior execs, do they control budget discussions, can they drive timelines, and do others defer to them . None of those are things a contact tells you. They're things you watch them either do or fail to do. The second test is the costly ask. Salesmotion's MEDDPICC guide calls this the Action Test: ask the contact to do something that requires them to spend internal capital, and a refusal or stall marks them as a coach . The asks that matter most are the ones a coach physically cannot grant: • Get you a working session with the economic buyer, the person who can actually release budget. • Hand over the real decision criteria, not the published RFP boilerplate. • Co-build the business case with you, in their words, for their leadership. A champion treats these as reasonable, because advancing you is in their interest. A coach goes quiet, deflects, or "checks and circles back" indefinitely. The stall is the answer. As Trumpet puts it, a coach can have valuable insight but be "without the juice" to sell internally, and the economic-buyer meeting is where the juice gets measured . There's a sharper reason to run this test early rather than late. Ebsta and Pavilion's 2025 B2B Sales Benchmarks found that early decision-maker involvement boosts win rates by 55%, while delayed engagement reduces win rates by 113% . The asymmetry is the whole story: getting the real decision-maker in early is not a nice-to-have, it's the single biggest lever on the deal, and the only person who can pull it is a genuine champion. If your contact can't or won't make that introduction in the first third of the cycle, you don't have an access problem you can fix later. You have a champion problem, and you have it right now. (The mechanics of running that first decision-maker conversation well sit inside the discovery call that earns a second meeting.)
Section 5
A worked example: the agency that "had it in the bag"
Make this concrete. A 12-person brand agency is selling a $90k annual retainer to a mid-market consumer company. Their contact is the head of brand, sharp, responsive, clearly a fan. She forwards the internal brief, tells them the CMO "loves the direction," explains exactly which competitor they're up against, and even coaches them on which slides to cut. The founder forecasts it at 90%. It feels closed. Then it isn't. The deal goes dark for three weeks and comes back as "we've decided to keep this in-house for now." Run the post-mortem through these tests and the failure was visible from week one. The head of brand gave information generously and advocacy never. Every time the agency asked to present directly to the CMO, the answer was a warm deflection: "Let me bring it to her, she's slammed." That stall was the signal. She was a coach, possibly an unwitting mole, since the competitor she so helpfully described turned out to be the internal team she ultimately sided with. The agency was being used to pressure-test an in-house option, and every detail of their pricing and approach made that option stronger. Now replay it with the test applied early. In week two, the agency makes the costly ask: "We do our best work when we can pressure-test the strategy live with the budget owner, can you get the three of us in a room for 30 minutes?" If she makes it happen, she's a champion and the 90% forecast is earned. If she stalls, and she did, the deal gets re-rated to "single-threaded, no champion, develop or disqualify," and the founder spends the next three weeks finding a second thread instead of polishing slides for a room he was never going to enter. Same information, radically different forecast, because the grade came from an action and not a vibe. This is why indecision, not competition, is what actually kills pipeline. Matt Dixon's research for The JOLT Effect, cited on the Salesmotion guide, found that 40–60% of the average sales pipeline stalls out due to buyer indecision . A coach cannot drive a decision, driving decisions is precisely the thing a coach lacks the standing to do. So betting a deal on a coach isn't just betting on the wrong horse; it's betting on a horse that structurally cannot finish the race. The agency above didn't lose to a competitor. It lost to a non-decision that no one on the inside had the power to convert into a yes.
Section 6
The BGA framework: The Make-the-News Test
Here's how to operationalize all of this into something you run on every live deal, every week. It's built on Force Management's distinction and MEDDPICC's Action Test , compressed into four steps. 1. Classify with one question: are they making the news or reporting it? For your primary contact, ask: in the last two weeks, did they predict and shape an outcome (got you added to an agenda, killed a competing option, moved a date) or did they recap one (told you what the committee decided)? Makers are champion candidates. Reporters are coaches. Extractors, people taking your information while producing no movement and asking pointed questions about your weaknesses, are moles. Rule of thumb: if everything they give you is information and nothing they give you is access, you have a coach at best. 2. Assign one costly action and watch. Pick the highest-value ask the contact could plausibly grant: a working session with the economic buyer, the real (unwritten) decision criteria, or a co-built business case. Assign it explicitly with a date. The grade is binary, they either move it forward inside one cycle or they don't. Say it out loud: you are not grading what they say, you are grading what they do. A stall is a fail. 3. Measure multi-threading, not warmth. Count your buyer-side contacts who are actively engaged, not just cc'd. Gong's winning deals carried roughly eight ; you don't need eight, but you need more than one, and the number should be growing because your contact is introducing you. If you're still single-threaded after a costly ask, you've confirmed a coach or a mole. Track this number on the deal record the way you'd track a dollar figure. 4. Run the bad-news test. Champions tell you bad news early because they're protecting a shared bet, a slipped budget, a new competitor, a skeptical VP. Coaches deliver bad news late or never, because they're not invested enough to flag risk on your behalf, and they learn about it late themselves. A contact who only ever brings good news is not reassuring; they're under-informed or managing you. Ask directly, every cycle: "What's the biggest reason this doesn't happen?" The quality and timeliness of that answer is a live influence reading. The economics tie it together. A champion costs you something to test, you have to make an ask that could fail, that could even cost you the relationship, and pays you back in access, advocacy, and early bad news. A coach costs you nothing to keep and changes nothing about whether you win. If a contact has never cost you anything to maintain, you almost certainly have a coach. Once you've identified a real champion, the next job is arming them with what they need to win the room without you, which is the through-line of how to win the deal when you're not in the room. For the full version of this with the scripts and a champion scorecard, the LeadOS playbook carries it, and you can pressure-test your own pipeline against it with the free growth diagnostic.
Section 7
You're running the Make-the-News Test right when…
You're running it right when your forecast confidence is a function of actions taken, not emails returned. When you can name, for every deal over a threshold, the specific costly thing your champion did this cycle, and you've re-rated to "no champion" any deal where the answer is a list of helpful information and zero access. When your strongest-looking contacts are the ones you've tested hardest, not the ones you've leaned on most comfortably. When a contact who only ever reports good news raises your suspicion instead of your confidence. And when you've walked away from at least one warm, friendly, responsive relationship because you finally noticed it was costing you nothing and moving you nowhere. The day a deal can no longer surprise you at close, because you stopped grading words and started grading what people do when you ask them to spend their credibility, is the day you've actually got a champion instead of a coach you've been hoping was one.