You have a favourite contact inside the account. They take your calls, they reply the same day, they tell you what is really going on, and they genuinely like what you have built. The deal has not moved in eleven weeks. Those two facts are related.
A friendly contact and a champion look identical from the outside. Both are warm, both are helpful, and both make you feel good about the deal. Only one of them can get you signed. The difference has nothing to do with how much they like you, and everything to do with what they are willing to spend on your behalf when you are not in the room.
A champion is defined by what they risk, not what they say
This distinction is not new. In The Challenger Customer, the CEB research team (now part of Gartner) sorted buyer-side contacts into three groups: Mobilisers, who can drive change inside their own organisation; Talkers, who are pleasant and informative and cannot; and Blockers, who slow you down.
One of their Talker profiles is called the Friend - accessible, easy to meet, happy to network with you. That is not a criticism of the person. It is a description of their position. Most founders are spending their best hours with a Friend and calling it a pipeline.
The room is bigger, and angrier, than you think
Gartner puts today's B2B buying group at five to 16 people, across as many as four functions. In a survey of 632 B2B buyers, 74% of buyer teams showed "unhealthy conflict" during the decision - conflicting objectives, disagreement on the way forward, or being overruled by someone outside the group. Buying groups that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to call the deal a high-quality one.
Read that again with your stalled deal in mind. Your friendly contact is not lying to you. They are one of up to sixteen people, and they are quietly losing an argument you have never seen. Gartner lists "consensus creation" as one of the six jobs a buying group has to finish. A Friend cannot do that job. A champion can, because they are prepared to be unpopular for a fortnight.
Four questions that sort it inside two weeks
You do not need a personality test. You need evidence. Ask these, in this order:
- Can they name the others? A champion knows who else is involved, what each person cares about, and who the sceptic is. A Friend says "I'll take it to the team."
- Will they introduce you to a specific person? Not "the team" - name someone by role and ask for the meeting. A champion arranges it. A Friend offers to pass your material on.
- Can they say the cost of doing nothing out loud? In their own numbers, not yours. If they cannot, they cannot defend the spend to anyone else either.
- Have they done anything when you were not watching? Circulated the business case, booked the internal session, got it onto an agenda. Actions, not sentiment.
Notice what none of those ask. None of them asks whether the person likes you.
Why this catches New Zealand founders hardest
We are a small, well-connected, polite market. Almost everyone is one introduction away, warmth costs nothing, and saying a flat no to someone you will see at a conference in March is genuinely uncomfortable. So people are lovely to you for months.
That is a wonderful place to live and a terrible place to forecast from. In a bigger market, indifference shows up as silence and you know where you stand. Here it shows up as a friendly coffee. I have watched capable founders carry a deal for two quarters on nothing but good manners.
What to do when the answer is "friendly contact"
Do not drop them. They are still your best asset in that account - just not the one you thought. Recruit them into finding the real owner of the problem.
The most useful sentence I know here is a plain one: "Who else has to be comfortable with this before it can happen?" It is not a pushy question, it is a helpful one, and it moves the conversation from one person's opinion to the group's decision. That matters more than it sounds. Gartner found that content pitched at the buying group lifted consensus by 20%, while content pitched at the individual knocked it back by 59% - selling harder to your favourite contact can actively make the group less likely to agree.
Then make it structural, so you are not relying on instinct next time. Put a rule in your CRM: no deal moves past your qualification stage on a single contact. One name is not an opportunity, it is a conversation. That is the difference between a seller having a good week and a revenue engine that tells you the truth.
So open your biggest deal and answer the first question honestly. Can your best contact name everyone else in the room?
Is your pipeline telling you the truth?
My free Growth Scorecard takes about 6 minutes and scores seven dimensions of your revenue engine, from positioning to pipeline to process, then names your weakest link and the first thing to fix. If you want the full diagnosis and a sequenced plan, the Growth Roadmap is the step after it.
Get your free scorecard → See how we could work together →Sources. Buying group size, conflict and consensus: "Buying groups are more diverse than ever, ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions"; 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the buying decision process; buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report the deal was high-quality; tailoring for buying group relevance improves consensus by 20% while individual-level relevance has a 59% negative impact. All from Gartner, press release of 7 May 2025, based on a survey of 632 B2B buyers conducted August to September 2024 (gartner.com). The six buying jobs, including consensus creation, are from Gartner's B2B buying journey research (gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey). Mobiliser, Talker and Blocker profiles, and the Friend as a Talker: The Challenger Customer, Adamson, Dixon, Spenner and Toman, CEB (now Gartner), 2015. What I left out: there are widely quoted figures claiming multi-threaded deals win at several times the rate of single-threaded ones. I could not trace any of them to a published primary study rather than a vendor blog, so I have not used them. My own observation: the four questions and the New Zealand market comments are drawn from my own deal reviews with NZ tech founders, not from published data.