How Do I Avoid the Sales “Anti-Champion”?
Ever feel like your deal is getting sabotaged from the inside? Uh oh, you might have inherited an anti-champion.
We love our champions. And we know how hard they fight for us internally. We love ’em so much that we often forget that the competitor may have one too—working just as hard to keep us out as we’re working to find a home. These sales anti-champions can be a major hurdle in the sales process.
Sales anti-champions rarely identify themselves. They’re often quiet, easy to talk to, but generally only active in group settings. So, how can you spot and manage a sales anti-champion? Here are some strategies to help you navigate these tricky waters.
There’s a structural reason a sales anti-champion tends to stay silent in the room rather than argue with you directly. Most B2B deals aren’t decided by one person. Gartner’s research on B2B buying groups found that the majority of buying teams experience real internal disagreement over the course of a purchase decision, even when the group presents a united front to the vendor sitting across the table.
A sales anti-champion knows this. Disagreeing with a colleague in front of you, the outside vendor, carries social risk that disagreeing with you privately doesn’t. It’s easier, and safer, to nod along in the group meeting and do the real work of steering the deal elsewhere afterward, in hallway conversations and side channels you’re not part of.
Firstly, be vigilant in group meetings. Pay attention to individuals who seem agreeable on the surface but may subtly undermine your efforts. These sales anti-champions can be difficult to identify, but their influence can be significant. If you suspect there might be a sales anti-champion lurking about your deal, take proactive steps to isolate and engage with them one-on-one.
A quiet stakeholder in a group setting is only one signal. A few others worth tracking across the deal: responses that get noticeably slower once a specific person is looped into the thread, questions that keep circling back to a competitor’s strengths without ever landing on an objection you can actually address, and internal summaries from your champion that seem to soften or hedge points you thought were settled. A new requirement or evaluation criterion that surfaces late in the process, one that conveniently favors a competitor’s approach, is also worth a second look. None of these confirm a sales anti-champion on their own, but together they’re worth taking seriously.
One effective approach is to ensure that you have at least one, one-on-one session with each key stakeholder you meet in group settings. This way, the anti-champion can’t hide in the crowd. You’ll get a clearer sense of their true position and influence one-on-one.
The strongest version of this tactic isn’t reactive. Build a standing habit of getting one-on-one time with every stakeholder you meet in a group setting, on every deal, whether or not you suspect a sales anti-champion is present. By the time you actually need that private read on someone, you’ll already have the relationship and the baseline conversation to compare against.
This is the same instinct behind Hoffman’s Work The Deal™ methodology, which is built around confirming buying signals and stakeholder positions directly rather than assuming a group meeting told you the whole story. Treating one-on-ones as standard practice, not a symptom of a problem you’ve already spotted, is what makes it possible to catch a sales anti-champion early instead of after they’ve done real damage.
It also makes the conversation itself easier to have. A one-on-one that’s clearly part of how you always run a deal doesn’t put anyone on the defensive. One that only happens because you’ve grown suspicious of a specific person is much harder to conduct naturally, and a sharp stakeholder will usually sense the shift in tone.
During these one-on-one sessions, ask direct questions and listen carefully to their responses. Try to understand their concerns and motivations. By building a rapport and addressing their issues head-on, you can potentially turn a sales anti-champion into an ally or at least mitigate their negative impact.
Not every quiet or skeptical stakeholder is working against you. Some people are naturally reserved in group settings and perfectly candid one-on-one without ever having an agenda to hide. Others have a legitimate, unaddressed concern, a real gap in your product, a bad past experience with a similar vendor, a budget constraint they haven’t voiced yet, that looks like resistance but is actually just an unanswered objection.
Treating a genuine skeptic like a saboteur can backfire. If you go into a one-on-one assuming someone is working against you, you’re more likely to be defensive or dismissive of a concern that’s completely legitimate, which can turn a fence-sitter into an actual anti-champion where none existed before. Use the one-on-one to find out which situation you’re actually in before you decide how to respond to it.
The simplest way to tell the difference is what happens once you address the concern directly. A genuine skeptic who gets a real answer to their objection tends to soften, even if they don’t fully come around. A true sales anti-champion tends to raise a new objection instead, because the original one was never really the point.
Sometimes a one-on-one confirms the worst case: the person genuinely prefers a competitor, or has a relationship or incentive you can’t outweigh with a better product or a stronger business case. In that situation, the goal shifts from converting them to containing them.
That usually means strengthening your relationship with the actual economic buyer and your champion so a single dissenting voice can’t quietly redirect the outcome, and making sure your champion knows this person’s real position so they aren’t blindsided by objections in a later meeting. You’re not trying to win every stakeholder. You’re making sure the ones who matter most have accurate information and enough conviction to carry the deal despite one person pulling in the other direction.
Dealing with a sales anti-champion requires vigilance, strategic isolation, and direct engagement. By identifying and managing these individuals effectively, you can protect your deals from internal sabotage and improve your chances of success. So, next time you feel like your deal is being undermined, remember the importance of identifying and managing a sales anti-champion.