"Sunny, I tried. I couldn't do it": how to help your champion sell internally

Sunny Ray · Jul 27, 2026 · 5 min read

When your champion fails to sell you internally, it's your pitch that failed, not them.

On July 27 I told Charles about a founder in financial services who'd bought into our system completely. He'd been through the conversations, he got it, he wanted it. Then he tried to explain it to his own team. He came back and said, as I relayed it on the call: "Sunny, I tried. And he's like, I'll be honest, I couldn't do it at all." His team's reaction was that they didn't get it.

He wasn't a bad salesman. He's a founder. He sells for a living. What he didn't have was our pitch. He had his memory of our pitch, which is a different and much weaker thing.

The handoff is where deals die

Every B2B deal with more than one decision-maker has a handoff. You convince one person. That person has to convince the others, usually without you in the room. Your champion becomes your salesperson, unpaid and untrained, pitching your product from memory to people who are skeptical by default.

Two weeks earlier, on July 13, a founder selling a workplace wellness app described the same failure from the other side. His deals had come through strong relationships with HR people. HR got convinced. Then HR pitched upward to the decision-makers and lost. His own read: "It's not that the use case was best for those companies." The champion was enthusiastic. Enthusiasm doesn't survive a budget meeting.

Why champions can't pitch you

I saved a post earlier this year that put it well: early deals die because the champion is scared for their job. Pushing a new vendor through is a career risk. If it goes wrong, it's their name on it. So they pitch tentatively, hedge every claim, and fold at the first hard question.

Add to that the memory problem. Your champion heard your pitch once, maybe twice. They remember the feeling and a few phrases. They don't remember the numbers, the objection handling, the story that made it click. When their boss asks "how is this different from what we tried last year?" they don't have an answer, because you had it and you weren't there.

Hand them the deck, not your explanation

Here's what fixed the financial founder's problem. That weekend I walked him through our deck, slide by slide. He got it immediately, and then he had the thing he'd been missing: an artifact he could put in front of his team that made the argument without him having to reconstruct it.

That's the lesson. Your champion needs something they can forward, present or leave on the table. A deck built for them, not for you:

• The problem in their company's words, not your category's.
• What changes, in plain numbers they can defend.
• What it costs and what it replaces.
• The two or three objections their boss will raise, with the answers already on the slide.

If your champion has to translate your pitch, they'll lose something in translation every time. Give them the original. It costs you an hour to build and it's the difference between a champion who carries your argument and one who carries a vague good feeling.

Sell the felt state, then the logic

On another call on July 27, a two-part frame came up that I've been using since. Every sale has a logical side, the evidence, and an emotional side, the felt state. Get prospects to experience the product fast, then back it with proof.

Champions usually carry only the logic upward, and badly. The felt state stays with them, because they're the one who experienced it. So the decision-maker hears a secondhand list of features without the feeling that made the champion want it.

The fix is to give the decision-maker their own experience. For us, that's easy: invite them onto the show. A 30-minute conversation about their own story is the felt state, delivered directly. Then the champion's deck lands on someone who already feels it.

Pick champions at companies that are growing

The wellness-app founder had one more insight worth stealing. When we talked about which companies to target, he said: "I would rather say one indicator for a good ICP is if the company is doing well."

That's a champion insight in disguise. At a profitable, growing company, a champion pushing a new vendor is seen as ambitious. At a struggling one, the same push is a risk to the budget and to their job. The same person, with the same deck, wins at one and loses at the other. Choose champions where saying yes is easy.

It also matters for timing. A champion at a company that's hiring and growing has a reason to move this quarter. At a company in cost-cutting mode, the same champion is told to come back next year, and next year never comes.

A champion kit

1. A short deck built for their boss, with the objections answered on the slides.
2. A one-paragraph summary they can paste into an email or a chat thread.
3. Three numbers they can say from memory.
4. A way for the decision-maker to experience it directly, not secondhand.
5. An offer to walk the deck with them before they present it. That weekend walkthrough is what turned "I couldn't do it" into a team that got it.

The best way I know to skip the handoff entirely is to get the decision-maker in the conversation from the start. That's how we approach bigger accounts, laid out on landing enterprise clients with a show.

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