A champion will tell you the deal is going well. An economic buyer decides whether it closes. They are rarely the same person, and the pitch that gets one of them nodding does nothing for the other. The short version: talk to your champion about the workflow and give them ammunition to use in the room you are not in. Talk to the economic buyer about money, risk, and what happens if nothing changes.
Most reps learn this the hard way. A deal looks healthy because the champion keeps replying fast and forwarding the deck, and then it stalls for weeks with no clear reason. The reason is usually that nobody ever sent the economic buyer a message built for an economic buyer. They got the champion's enthusiasm, forwarded secondhand, which is not the same thing as a case for spending money.
What a Champion Actually Is
A real champion needs three things at once, not just enthusiasm. MEDDIC's definition of the role is specific about this: a champion is "someone working at the company who clearly understands the value you offer and can help convince their colleagues to buy," and critically, they "could also be lower in the hierarchy, but the problems you're solving for directly impact them."
That last point is the one reps miss. A champion does not need a senior title. They need to feel the pain daily, understand why your product fixes it, and have enough standing with the right people to get a hearing. What they do not have, by definition, is the authority to spend the money. If they had that authority, they would be the economic buyer, and you would be having a completely different conversation.
A champion's job, in plain terms, is to be your voice inside a room you were never invited to. Everything you say to them should make that job easier.
None of this makes a champion less valuable. It makes them a different kind of valuable. A champion who disappears halfway through a deal is a bad sign about your product or your relationship. A champion who was never going to approve the spend in the first place is simply doing the job the role was always meant to do, and treating that as a failure on their part is a reader error on yours.
What the Economic Buyer Actually Controls
The economic buyer is, simply, "the person with the power to allocate budget to your deal." On most accounts there is exactly one, and that person carries the consequence if the purchase does not pay off. The role is less about job title than it looks. A VP running a single P&L line often holds more real authority over a deal this size than a CEO two levels up who will never see the invoice.
What they weigh before saying yes rarely has anything to do with your product's feature list. Buyer research groups it into four areas: financial return, risk to the business, strategic fit with where the company is headed, and total cost of ownership once the contract is signed. The same research is blunt about the stakes: "no deal is final without their sign-off."
This is also the role most CRM records leave blank, because it is the one rep has the least natural access to. The economic buyer does not read a cold email, rarely attends a demo, and often has a title that gives no hint of budget control. The full buying committee map covers why that blank field is the single most common reason a confident forecast resets to zero.
How to Tell Which One You Are Talking To
Title will mislead you here more often than it helps. The cleaner test is to ask who carries the consequence, and watch what happens when you ask for an introduction.
These tests work because the two roles answer differently almost every time, even when both contacts seem equally positive on a call. For a closer look at the economic buyer, champion, and the blocker role that tends to surprise reps late, see how to confirm each buying committee role on a live deal.
When One Person Holds Both Roles
On a small or founder-led company, the split above can collapse into a single person. A ten person startup might have a founder who is simultaneously the champion, the economic buyer, and the only contact you will ever speak to. That is not an exception to the framework, it is the framework with the org chart compressed down to one name.
The risk shows up at the opposite end of company size. In a two thousand person enterprise, reps sometimes assume a senior, enthusiastic contact must be the economic buyer simply because they outrank everyone else on the call. Seniority is not the same signal as budget authority. A VP of Marketing can be deeply enthusiastic, genuinely influential, and still have zero say over a line item that sits in a different department's budget. Ask who carries the consequence before assuming the most senior voice in the room is the one who signs.
What to Say to Your Champion
Your champion's job is to carry your case into a meeting you cannot attend. Give them language they can actually repeat, not a deck they have to translate on the fly. That means a short, specific narrative: what changes for their team, by when, and in whose words it sounds credible coming from an internal voice instead of a vendor.
A champion sells for you when you are not in the room. Everything you hand them should be built to survive that room without you in it.
Concretely, that is a one page summary of the problem, the fix, and the expected outcome, written the way their manager talks, not the way your pitch deck talks. Ask them directly what objection they expect to hear internally, and build the answer into that page before they need it. A champion who has to improvise an answer in the room usually loses that exchange.
What to Say to the Economic Buyer
Drop the feature list entirely. An economic buyer thinks in numbers: hours saved, dollars recovered, and what the cost of doing nothing looks like three quarters from now. Lead with the business problem your discovery actually uncovered, not a generic pain point, and back it with a proof point and a timeline rather than an adjective.
If you have real numbers of your own, use them plainly and say where they come from. Across LeadLx's customer base, sales teams report saving 8 or more hours a week per rep that used to go into manually checking and updating records, which is the kind of concrete, sourced number an economic buyer can actually weigh against a budget line. Translate your product's benefit into a number like that before the conversation, not during it.
Notice the shape of that sentence. It does not say the product is efficient, it says what the efficiency is worth and where the number came from. An economic buyer hears a dozen vague efficiency claims a quarter and discounts all of them automatically. A specific number, attached to a specific source, is the one claim that survives that filter.
This is also where LeadLx's automatic role classification earns its place before the call even happens. It marks a contact as a likely economic buyer or champion directly on their LinkedIn profile with a confidence score, so you are confirming a labeled guess instead of starting the identification work from nothing.
Where to Start This Week
Pick your three largest open opportunities. For each one, write down a name next to champion and a separate name next to economic buyer. If the same name appears twice, or one line is blank, that is the deal most likely to stall without warning.
Then rewrite the next message you send to each of those two people using the split above, not the same deck copied twice. The habit compounds the same way multithreading does across an entire account, covered in more depth in multithreading in B2B sales: why one contact fails.
