A lot of SE training focuses on the deal in front of you - the demo, the POV, the technical objection in the room. Less gets said about the thing that determines whether any of that survives after you leave the room: whether there’s someone on the customer’s side who’ll keep advocating for you when you’re not there.
That’s a technical champion. And building one isn’t a side effect of doing good technical work — it’s a distinct skill, and arguably one of the highest-leverage things an SE does across a deal’s lifecycle.
Why this is an SE responsibility, not just an AE one
Champions get talked about constantly in sales methodology — MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, every framework has a “C” for champion. But champion-building often gets treated as the AE’s job, with the SE showing up to support the technical conversation. That’s backwards, or at least incomplete.
The AE builds the business relationship. The SE builds technical credibility — and technical credibility is exactly what a technical champion needs from you in order to have credibility internally, themselves. If the champion doesn’t trust your technical judgment, they can’t stake their own reputation on recommending you. That trust gets built in the technical conversations — which is your seat, not the AE’s.
Identifying the right person, early
This is the part that’s easiest to get wrong: mistaking engagement for championship potential. Someone who asks a lot of questions in a demo might just be curious, or skeptical, or doing due diligence for someone else entirely. A real champion candidate usually shows a different signal: they start talking about how they’d use this, not just whether it works. They ask about rollout, about their team’s workflow, about what internal conversations they’d need to have to get this approved. That’s someone already doing the internal selling in their head.
The mistake is waiting until late in a deal to figure out who your champion is. By then, you’ve usually already spent your best technical credibility-building moments on the wrong audience. Identifying champion-potential early means you can deliberately invest technical time with that person specifically — not just present to whoever’s in the room.
The part that’s genuinely underrated: don’t rely on just one
Here’s the pattern that shows up across a lot of stalled or dead deals, and it’s rarely about the product: the deal had exactly one champion, and something happened to that person. They changed roles. They left the company. They got pulled onto a different priority. And the deal, which looked healthy a month earlier, quietly stalled — because all of the internal advocacy was sitting with one individual who was no longer positioned (or present) to provide it.
Multi-threading a champion relationship isn’t just a nice-to-have risk mitigation — it’s closer to a hard requirement for a deal that’s supposed to survive contact with reality. That means deliberately building technical credibility with more than one person on the customer’s technical side, even when one person is clearly your strongest advocate. It’s slower. It takes more of your time to build two or three real relationships instead of one. But a single point of failure in your champion strategy is exactly that — a single point of failure — and it’s one of the more preventable ways a good deal quietly falls apart.
Why this is worth treating as a discipline
None of this is exotic. It’s closer to just taking seriously something that’s easy to let happen passively instead of deliberately. Champions who happen organically are a nice outcome. Champions who are deliberately identified early and multi-threaded are a strategy — and the difference between the two tends to show up exactly when you’re not in the room to see it.