# Sales champion: how to spot a real one and record it in a Pipedrive deal

https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-champion-pipedrive-deals/
Published: 2026-10-05 · Updated: 2026-10-26

A champion is someone inside the customer’s company who wants your deal to happen and acts on it when you are not in the room: they tell you how the decision really gets made, they bring in the people who decide, they argue for you in meetings you will never attend. A friendly contact who answers your emails quickly is not one. In Pipedrive, record the champion in a Person custom field on the deal and look at that field at every deal review, because a deal where the field is empty after the second meeting is carrying a risk nobody has named yet.

Most writing on champions assumes an enterprise team with a tracking tool and a six-person buying committee. A five-rep team on Pipedrive has the same problem in a smaller room: a contact who likes you, a deal that feels warm, and nothing in the CRM that says whether anyone inside is working for you.

## Three questions, and none of them is “do they like us”

Ask them about the contact, not to the contact. If you cannot answer all three with a specific event, you do not have a champion yet.

1. What has this person done for the deal that we did not ask for? Forwarded the proposal to their boss before you suggested it. Booked a room for the demo with two colleagues. Warned you that the CFO hates annual prepayment. One unprompted act is worth more than ten warm replies.
2. Have they told us how the decision gets made, including the uncomfortable parts? A champion will say “procurement will sit on this for three weeks, and the COO used a competitor at his last company.” A friendly contact says “I’ll push it internally.”
3. When we asked for access, did we get it? The intro to the person who signs, the name of the IT reviewer, the date of the budget meeting. A champion opens doors. A fan tells you the doors exist.

Notice what is not on the list: seniority, enthusiasm on calls, how fast they reply. Those are pleasant. They are not evidence.

And listen for the pronoun: a champion says “we need this live before the audit,” a contact says “I think it’s a good fit.”

## Friendly is not the same as on your side

Every deal past the first call has someone who was pleasant on the phone. That person usually plays one of four roles, and the role decides what you can expect from them.

The friendly responder took the meeting, replies within the day and will take another meeting. They have no particular stake in whether you win; the status quo costs them nothing. This is the most common contact in a small-team pipeline and the one most often mistaken for a champion, because speed and warmth are exactly the signals they produce.

The coach wants to help you maybe because they dislike the incumbent vendor, and will tell you who really decides and when the budget resets. But they do not act. Ask a coach to set up a meeting with their director and the energy drains out of the conversation. Take the information as a gift and don’t count the deal because of it. The Blue Sheet gives the coach a box of its own; here is [how to keep a trimmed Blue Sheet in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/miller-heiman-blue-sheet-pipedrive/).

The sponsor without reach truly wants the deal and simply can’t move it: two levels below the signer, never in the room where money gets allocated. We think this is the role reps misread longest, because the goodwill is real ( [why that leaves a deal fragile](https://salesbond.app/blog/single-threaded-deals/)).

The champion wants it and can move it. Picture a support team lead at a forty-person logistics company that is replacing spreadsheets. She has no budget authority, but she has the ops director’s ear and a bruise from last quarter’s reporting mess. Without being asked, she books thirty minutes on his calendar and sends you his three objections the night before. That’s what a champion looks like: the deal moves even on days you do nothing.

![Four contact roles in a row, from friendly responder to coach and sponsor without reach, ending with the champion highlighted in orange](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/sales-champion-pipedrive-deals-2.png)

## Ask for something that costs them something

The three questions look backward. If you want to know today whether a contact is a champion, give them a chance to be one, and make it a request with a price.

The obvious first ask is the introduction to the person who signs, the same test we use for the C in [MEDDIC on a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/meddic-small-sales-teams-pipedrive/).

The second is access to the buying process itself. Who reviews security, what the legal template looks like, whether there is a vendor onboarding form you can start now. A champion treats these as shared work, the instinct behind a [mutual action plan](https://salesbond.app/blog/mutual-action-plan-small-teams/), where the customer side owns steps too. If your contact will not own a single step on a shared plan, the plan is yours alone and so is the deal.

One warning: the ask has to fit the stage. Asking for the CFO after one discovery call fails with a real champion too. Ask for the next door, not the last one.

What you are doing here is replacing a feeling with an event. And an event is something you can write down.

## Recording a sales champion in Pipedrive

Pipedrive gives a deal exactly one linked contact person. Everyone else connected to the deal goes in as a participant, added from the Participants section in the deal’s detail view ( [Pipedrive: Can multiple people be linked to a deal?](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/can-multiple-people-be-linked-to-a-deal)). A participant list of five names tells the manager nothing about who among them is for you.

So add a dedicated field. Pipedrive’s Person custom field type lets you “tag a person from your Pipedrive database,” and the help center’s own example of what it is for is a “related or secondary person contact” ( [Pipedrive: What types of custom fields are there?](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/what-types-of-custom-fields-are-there)). A champion is exactly that: a second person who matters, attached to the deal rather than lost among the participants.

The setup, once, by whoever administers the account:

1. Add a custom field for deals. Pipedrive custom fields can be created for leads, deals, contacts, projects and products; this one belongs on deals, because a champion is a role in one deal, not a property of the person. The same woman can be your champion on one deal and a bystander on the next.
2. Name it Champion. Type: Person.
3. Agree, as a team, what earns an entry. Our rule: the field is filled only after the contact has done one of the things from the first section without being asked, or has delivered on an ask from the third. “Seems keen” does not qualify. Write the rule down wherever your team keeps its CRM conventions, because the field is only as honest as the bar for filling it.

If you already track the C as a Named / Suspected / None field from our MEDDIC setup, the Person field can sit next to it or replace it: the status says how sure you are, the Person field says who.

One habit that helps: when a rep fills the field, they add a one-line note on the deal saying what the person did. “Forwarded proposal to ops director unprompted, Sept 30.” Fifteen seconds, and a name becomes evidence the manager can read in the review.

## Finding the deals where nobody is for you

The point of the field is the deals where it’s empty.

Build a filter for the review. Open the filter dropdown in the top right of the deals list or pipeline view, choose “+ Add new filter,” and set the conditions to ALL: the stage after discovery, plus a condition on the Champion field. Save it as shared so the whole team looks at the same list ( [Pipedrive: Filtering](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/filtering)). Keeping early-stage deals out matters, because an empty field there is normal.

That list is a review agenda, not a verdict. Some deals are fine: the rep has a champion and hasn’t recorded it, a one-minute fix. Others are the dangerous kind, resting on one pleasant contact who has never lifted a finger.

The question that sorts them comes after the usual [questions about what the buyer did](https://salesbond.app/blog/deal-review-questions-buyer-action/):

“Who is for us inside this company, and what did they do for the deal this week?”

“Maria likes us” is a feeling. “Maria got the security questionnaire pre-approved on Tuesday” is a fact, and only the fact counts.

## When the champion goes quiet or leaves

Two things happen to champions. They stop acting, or they go.

Silence first. A champion who has gone two weeks without doing anything may just be busy. Or something changed that you did not hear about, like a reorg or a call with the incumbent. Do not guess. Make a small ask, the kind they would normally say yes to in an hour, and read the response. If the reply is polite and empty, clear the Champion field. An empty field on a late-stage deal will feel bad to the rep. It is supposed to. It puts the deal back on the Monday list where it belongs. A champion who goes quiet right after the company is sold is a special case; what to re-qualify when your [prospect gets acquired](https://salesbond.app/blog/prospect-acquired-mid-deal-pipedrive/) is in a separate article.

Departure is cleaner and worse. Clear the field the day you hear, lower the close probability then, not at quarter end, and treat the next two weeks as new discovery: who inherits the problem, and do they feel it the same way? If the departing champion was also the linked contact, see [the champion’s last day](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-switch-deal-contact-participants/).

Before they go, ask for one last introduction. Then add a note on thier person record, because a champion who moved companies is a warm lead.

## Where SalesBond fits

We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. The Champion field stays a human judgment the manager reads at the review. Deal Health works alongside it. It checks every deal against more than 20 rules in categories such as Activity, Progression, Data, Ownership and Forecast, gives the deal a health score, explains what lowered it and recommends a corrective action, with a per-rep view for the manager. If you want to see that on your own pipeline, [check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

Start this week with one deal past discovery: name the person who is for you, and write down the last thing they did. If you can’t, that is the deal to bring to the the next review.