You're not making one sale. You're making two.
The first sale is rep to champion. Your demos, decks, and discovery calls are built for this. It's the sale you're trained for, the one your enablement team obsesses over.
The second sale is champion to decision-makers. It happens in rooms you'll never enter, conversations you'll never hear, with stakeholders you may never meet. Nobody trains for this sale. Most sellers don't even know it exists.
That's why they lose deals they thought they'd won.
The Invisible Sale
Your champion walks out of your demo excited. They believe in what you showed them. They want to move forward. And then they have to convince everyone else.
They walk into meetings where nobody experienced your presentation. Nobody felt your energy or heard your carefully crafted positioning. Nobody built rapport with you. Your champion stands alone, translating what they learned into arguments that work for completely different audiences.
The CFO conversation. Financial leaders don't want to hear about capabilities. They want defensible numbers. Clear cost justification. Budget predictability. If your champion walks in with "this will transform how we work," the CFO tunes out. If they walk in with "this reduces operational cost by X and pays back in Y months with these specific assumptions," the CFO engages.
The IT conversation. Technical teams don't trust enthusiasm. They've been burned before by vendors who promised and underdelivered. They want implementation reality: integration requirements, security considerations, support models, what could go wrong and how you handle it. Excitement makes them suspicious.
The executive conversation. Senior leaders want narrative, not detail. How does this connect to priorities they've already announced? How does it position the organization competitively? Details bore them. Strategic alignment energizes them.
Why Champions Go Silent
Your champion was enthusiastic. They returned calls quickly. They scheduled internal meetings. They advocated for you.
Then they went quiet.
What happened wasn't that they lost interest. What happened was they walked into one of those rooms unarmed and got beaten up. Maybe the CFO asked questions they couldn't answer. Maybe IT raised concerns they hadn't considered. Maybe a peer questioned their judgment for backing an unproven vendor.
Champions who feel exposed stop advocating. They don't tell you this directly. That admission would be embarrassing. So you get proxies: timing isn't great, need to loop in more stakeholders, priorities shifted.
The retreat pattern. Watch for these signals: response times lengthen, meetings get rescheduled, new stakeholders get introduced without clear purpose. These aren't random delays. They're a champion stepping back because moving forward feels harder than letting the deal drift.
The solution isn't pushing harder. It's recognizing that you sent them into battle without weapons and providing what they need to re-engage with confidence.
Arming Your Champion
Translation is your job. Not theirs.
Your champion understands your product through the lens of their role and concerns. They don't automatically know how to translate that into language that resonates with finance, IT, or the executive team. If you haven't given them those translations, you've set them up to fail.
Create stakeholder-specific materials. Not one generic deck. Multiple versions crafted for different audiences. The CFO version emphasizes financial impact with specific numbers they can defend. The IT version addresses technical concerns honestly with implementation detail. The executive version connects to strategic priorities with minimal tactical detail.
Anticipate objections. What will skeptics say? What concerns will each stakeholder raise? Arm your champion with responses before they need them. "When your CFO asks about implementation costs, here's how to frame the conversation..." This preparation transforms your champion from someone defending a choice to someone executing a plan.
Provide proof points. Give them case studies and references that match each stakeholder's concerns. The CFO wants financial outcomes from similar companies. IT wants implementation experiences from similar technical environments. Executives want strategic impact stories from organizations they respect.
The Translation Framework
Everything you know about your product exists in three layers. Most sellers only work in one.
Features describe what your product does. This is where most product training lives. Feature knowledge is necessary but insufficient.
Outcomes describe what happens when someone uses those features. A feature automates reporting. The outcome is that teams get accurate data without manual compilation. Outcomes matter more than features because buyers purchase outcomes, not capabilities.
Impacts describe what those outcomes mean for specific stakeholders. The same outcome means different things to different people. Accurate data without manual compilation means time savings to an operations manager, audit confidence to a CFO, and reduced error rates to a quality director.
Your champion needs impact-level translations for every stakeholder who will influence the decision. When you arm them with "here's what this means for [specific person]," you're giving them the language to win conversations you can't attend.
Identifying the Real Decision-Makers
The org chart lies. Titles don't tell you who actually decides.
Some stakeholders have formal authority but defer to others. Some have no formal authority but shape every decision through trusted relationships. Some appear peripheral but can veto anything they don't like.
Ask your champion directly. "Who else will have opinions on this?" "Who might have concerns we should address early?" "Who tends to influence decisions like this even if they're not formally involved?" These questions surface the hidden landscape your champion navigates daily.
Map influence, not authority. For each stakeholder, understand: What do they care about? What would make them support this? What would make them object? Who do they influence and who influences them? This map guides which translations matter most and where to focus your champion's energy.
Find the hidden skeptics. The person who will kill your deal often isn't in any meeting you attend. They're the technical evaluator whose opinion leadership trusts, the peer with a competing initiative, the executive assistant who shapes priorities. Your champion knows who they are. Ask.
Coaching the Second Sale
You can't attend the meetings that decide your deal. But you can prepare your champion to win them.
Pre-meeting preparation. Before key internal discussions, talk through what your champion expects to happen. Who will be there? What questions will arise? What objections might surface? Walk through their talking points and refine them together. This isn't manipulation. It's partnership.
Post-meeting debrief. After internal discussions, understand what actually happened. What went well? What concerns emerged? What questions couldn't be answered? Each conversation generates intelligence that shapes your next move. Debriefs also signal to your champion that you're invested in their success, not just your sale.
Momentum maintenance. The second sale dies when momentum stops. Every interaction should produce a next action within 48 hours. Not vague follow-up but specific action with an owner and a date. Committees that lose cadence rarely recover it. Your job is keeping the process moving by giving your champion clear next steps they can execute.
The first sale gets you into the building. The second sale gets you the signature. Most sellers invest everything in getting through the door and almost nothing in what happens after. That's backwards. The second sale is where deals are won and lost.