Every enterprise deal has someone who will fight for you when you're not in the room. Or someone who won't. The presence or absence of a real technical champion is one of the strongest predictors of deal outcome, and it's one of the few variables an SE can directly influence.
The catch: most of what gets called "champion building" is actually relationship maintenance. There's a real difference between a person who likes you, a person who likes your product, and a person who will go out of their way to advance your deal internally. All three matter. But only the third one moves deals. The first two can become the third, if you understand what they need and why it would matter to them personally.
What makes someone a champion
A real technical champion has three things: access, motivation, and credibility.
Access means they're close enough to the decision-making process to influence it. A practitioner who loves the product but has no relationship with the buying committee is a fan, not a champion. They can give you goodwill. They can't give you internal advocacy where it counts.
Motivation means they have a personal reason to want this deal to close, not just because they like the product, but because success with this implementation advances something they care about professionally. Career visibility, solving a problem they own, proving a technical bet they made. When the deal gets stuck, motivated champions do something. Unmotivated ones wait and see.
Credibility means their peers and leaders trust their judgment. A champion with low internal credibility can create more noise than signal, their advocacy can actually make skeptics more skeptical. The people worth investing in are the ones whose technical opinion carries weight.
How SEs build real champions
You can't manufacture a champion. You can create conditions where one emerges naturally, and you can identify who's most likely to become one before you invest heavily in the relationship.
The first signal is who leans in during the technical conversations. Not who shows up (everyone shows up), but who asks follow-up questions, who references something from the last call, who sends you a note after the session. Those behaviors signal engagement. Follow them.
The second step is making your potential champion look smart internally. This means giving them language, frameworks, and early access to information they can use in conversations you're not in. A one-pager they can share. A technical summary of the POV scope written in their team's terminology. A direct line to your product team when they have a question. When you help someone look smart in front of their peers, they become invested in your success.
The third step is asking directly. At some point in a healthy deal, you should be able to say to your champion: "We're heading into the evaluation phase. What does the internal conversation look like, and how can we help you make the case?" If they answer that question openly, you have a real champion. If they deflect or go vague, you have a person who likes the product but isn't ready to go to the mat for you.
When your champion isn't enough
Even real champions hit walls. They may not have access to the final decision. Their credibility may not extend to procurement or legal. They may be advocating in a room where the economic buyer has already made a different decision.
The mistake is treating the champion as a proxy for the deal. They're a signal, not a guarantee. The SE's job is to understand the full account map, who the champion can reach, who they can't, and where the deal needs support that the champion alone can't provide.
Sometimes the right move is to help the champion build their own coalition. Sometimes it's to find a second champion in a different part of the organization. Sometimes it's to be honest with the AE that the deal is thinner than it looks, because the only person advocating internally doesn't have enough reach.
The long game
Technical champions in enterprise deals are also long-term relationships. The person who championed your product at their current company takes that credibility and that relationship with them when they move. In an industry where people change roles every two to three years, treating champion relationships as transactional, useful only for this deal, is a mistake that compounds over time.
The SEs I've seen build the strongest careers are the ones with a genuine professional network, not just a contact list. The champions they built over the years become references, referrals, internal allies at new accounts, and occasionally customers themselves. That takes time and genuine investment. It also compounds in ways that almost nothing else does.