Ask the average CSM who their champion is in a key account. They'll name the person they talk to every week. Maybe the one who onboarded them. Maybe the one who escalates when something breaks.
That's not necessarily a champion. That's a contact.
A champion is someone who actively advocates for your product inside the organization. Someone who understands the value, believes in it, and will stand up for it when there's pressure from above to cut costs, switch vendors, or deprioritize the initiative your product supports.
Most CS teams have contacts. Few have champions. The difference shows up at renewal.
Building a champion requires deliberate investment. It's not something that happens because someone uses your product a lot or responds to your emails. It requires three things:
First, you have to identify the right person. Not just whoever answers your messages — the person who has political capital, organizational influence, and an outcome tied to the success of what you're delivering. That person may not be your primary contact.
Second, you have to help them win internally. A champion is only valuable if they can advocate effectively. That means arming them with the right data, the right framing for their internal audience, and the right language for whatever conversation they're having with their stakeholders. You're not just serving the champion — you're enabling them to serve you.
Third, you have to build breadth. One champion is a single point of failure. If they leave, get promoted, or lose internal credibility, your account position evaporates with them. Real champion building means creating multiple advocates at multiple levels of the organization.
Champions don't just protect renewals. They drive expansion. A champion who understands what your product can do and has credibility in the organization is your best expansion conversation — because they're having it without you, with the people who have budget authority, in the language those people respond to.
Build the champions. Everything else in the expansion motion gets easier.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.