What to Do When Your Champion Leaves During a Deal

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If you upsell to the same buyers, manage your own accounts, or have a sales cycle longer than 1 month, you’ve experienced the situation I’m about to describe.

You're in the middle of a deal, and your main contact tells you they're leaving the company. It messes everything up. 

Weeks of calls and convincing your contact that your solution is the right one for them. Then, out of nowhere, the one insider you built a relationship with is leaving.

Unfortunately, this happens to me all the time. It’s usually a huge bummer and ends up delaying the deal. But how you handle the handoff to your new point of contact will determine whether the deal survives or dies. 

Here’s what to do the next time your champion leaves the company. 

The single most important thing you can do is get introduced to whoever is taking over before your champion is gone. A warm handoff from your champion is priceless. 

If possible, ask your champion for an intro call with them on it, even just for 10 minutes. Get on with the new contact, have your champion confirm where things stand, and let the new person hear directly from their co-worker that this deal is worth continuing.

If you can't get a live call, ask for an intro email at minimum. Something that says "I've been working with {your name} on this, here's where things are."

At the same time, build a handoff doc. One page that covers what's been discussed, what's been agreed to, who else has been involved, where the deal stands, and what the next steps are. Send it to the new contact so they don't have to start from scratch. 

In a lot of cases, I’ve found that the new contact is just taking over in the interim until my champion’s replacement is hired. This is totally fine and still worth pursuing as much as possible.

When the replacement is finally hired, this interim contact will be the one introducing you, so put effort into this relationship, even if it feels temporary.

Not every situation gives you the luxury of a clean transition. From my experience, most cases actually aren’t a clean handoff.

Here’s the 3 situations I see the most. 

They give you a week’s notice. This is the best case. You have time to get the intro call, build the doc, and even ask your champion to loop you into a meeting with other stakeholders before they leave. Use every day of that window.

They tell you on their last day. In this case, you have hours. Ask for the name and email of the best contact, and ask them to send a quick intro message before they log off. A two-line email from them to the new contact gives you a much better entry point compared to a cold email.

They already left, and you find out after. This is the toughest one. You send them an email and get hit with an auto-responder saying “Susie no longer works here”. When this happens, the first thing you should do is reach out to Susie on LinkedIn and ask what happened. It’s usually pretty easy to tell if they left by choice or if they were let go. Lead with asking if there’s anything you can do to help them now that they’re no longer there (intro to connections, job opportunities, references, etc.). Once you’ve got the small talk and offer of help out of the way, ask who's taken over their former responsibilities. aka, the person you should reach out to.

Make sure to treat it like they’re doing you a favor, because they are. There’s no incentive for them to do it.

All of the actions described above are reactive. But the correct way to survive a champion leaving is to make sure they're never your only contact.

It’s okay to have one main point of contact or one champion. In my experience, there’s usually one deal “champion” who drives it with multiple decision makers.

Build a close relationship with that champion, but don’t forget about the other decision makers.

During every deal, make it a habit to ask your champion to loop in other people. Every additional contact you build is insurance. If one leaves, you still have someone on the inside who knows your name and understands the value.

Oh, and one more thing... when your champion does leave, follow them to their next role. They already understand your product and believe in it. And now they're at a new company that might need exactly what you sell. That's one of the warmest leads you'll ever get.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.