Champion Tracking: The Next Generation of Contact Tracking

Since it’s easier to sell to folks who already use your products, today’s most effective sales teams use contact tracking to monitor job changes so they can take action soon after power users, champions, and buyers switch companies or positions. 

At a high level, contact tracking tools send sales teams automatic notifications when folks they’ve already established relationships change jobs. With more than 50% of people considering switching jobs this year, contact tracking can be a godsend when it comes to finding warm pipeline.

But contact tracking isn’t just about monitoring all of the contacts in your CRM to see when folks get promoted or change jobs. A more effective approach to contact tracking is champion tracking, which focuses on ensuring your sales team always knows what the biggest users and decision makers of your product are up to.

In this piece, we explore the ins and outs of champion tracking, including why it’s effective, how to get started, and how to measure champion tracking success. 

Why champion tracking works

Champion tracking has become essential for today’s top-performing sales teams because it helps them adapt to rapid workforce changes. With the average sales rep holding their job for 18 months — and the average CMO jumping ship within three or four years — building lasting relationships with advocates inside client organizations is a tall order. 

Enter champion tracking. When champions move roles, they often bring their product preferences with them. By tracking champions, sales teams can follow these individuals as they move between companies, creating new opportunities within other organizations, with potentially faster sales cycles since reps don’t have to start pitching from scratch. 

When it boils down to it, people are creatures of habit and tend to use familiar tools and platforms as they change companies. A champion who trusts your product and has used it effectively may advocate for it at their new job, opening the door for new business without having to exert enormous amounts of energy. 

By keeping up with a champion’s career trajectory, sales reps can tap into the individual’s brand loyalty and gain valuable internal support early in the sales cycle. What’s more, champion tracking also speeds up the sales cycle by creating a well-informed team and empowering reps to engage the right person with the right message at the right time. 

Champion tracking bridges the efforts of sales, marketing, and customer success teams, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and has the same view of key contacts and their influence within target accounts. When these departments share insights about a champion’s preferences and past interactions, they can create a cohesive strategy that caters to the contact’s needs and pain points. This collaboration not only improves the customer experience by ensuring consistent messaging across channels, it also strengthens internal alignment, ensuring that each department works together to build and expand the relationship over time.

On top of this, champion tracking also plays a key role in land and expand strategies, as it enables teams to get a foothold into an organization through key advocates. By establishing trust with champions and delivering value that meets their specific needs, sales can start with small initial contracts and grow from there, creating more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling as the champion’s influence encourages wider adoption across the organization.

Add it all up, and the benefits of champion tracking speak for themselves. In the next section, we’ll examine how you can start tracking your champions.

How to get started tracking champions with ease

Champion tracking has the power to transform your sales organization. And the best part? Getting started doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, quite the contrary: With the right approach and tools, integrating champion tracking into your sales processes can be seamless. 

With that in mind, let’s examine four essential steps your sales org can take to begin tracking champions effectively — tapping into the full potential of the contacts you already know and get along with.

1. Identify if champion tracking makes sense

If you don’t have any customers to begin with, how can you track your champions?

Champion tracking is best suited for companies with an established customer base and complex sales processes involving multiple stakeholders. For businesses working with enterprise clients or large accounts, tracking champions can accelerate sales cycles, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth. Word-of-mouth marketing is persuasive, making it an easier sell when champions promote your solutions within their own organization.

On the other hand, startups and early-stage companies might not find champion tracking as useful out of the gate. When the focus is on customer acquisition and proving product-market fit, it’s usually more practical to prioritize lead generation and refining the sales approach. Champion tracking adds more value once you have loyal customers who already see your product’s benefits and are likely to advocate for it. So, if you’re just starting out, champion tracking is something to keep in the back of your mind for the future.

If your organization has a strong customer success function, you’re likely in a good spot for champion tracking because happy, supported customers are more likely to become advocates. Depending on how mature the function is, you may want to incorporate champion tracking as an effective next step to deepen engagement with existing accounts.

2. Evaluate and select contact tracking options

Once you’ve determined that champion tracking makes sense for your sales org, it’s time to start evaluating contact tracking solutions to see which tool is the best fit. 

Unless you’re keen on manually copying data from one system to another, the ideal contact tracking solution should integrate seamlessly with your CRM, ensuring that all champion interactions are easily logged and accessible. Effective contact tracking tools should also allow your team to track champions’ career changes, view historical interactions, and create automatic reminders for follow-ups. Of course, you’ll also want a solution that scales and can keep pace with your needs as your network of champions grows.

Other key features to consider include ease of use, data quality, and real-time updates. A tool with automated tracking can save your team tons of time by providing updates whenever champions change roles or companies — enabling reps to strike while the iron is hot. We might be a bit biased, but we think LeadIQ is an ideal choice for contact tracking for sales teams due to our user-friendly interface, ease of implementation, and high-quality contact data that’s proactively verified each month.

As you continue narrowing down your options, evaluate each provider’s support and training capabilities. As is the case with any piece of technology, there may be a bit of a learning curve. A vendor that offers solid support can ensure your team leverages the tool to its full potential and doesn’t get stuck in any bottlenecks. 

3. Identify champions

With a contact tracking solution in place, you’re ready to start identifying champions — the folks who see the value of your product to the point they’re willing to advocate for it. To find these people, start by analyzing client interactions to see who consistently engages with your product, provides constructive feedback, or demonstrates strong product knowledge. These are often signs of a champion in the making — and chances are you’ve got a couple names in mind already.

Look for champions in roles where they can influence decision-making — like team leads and managers. Tools like CRM reports and feedback from customer success teams can also reveal the folks who actively participate in onboarding sessions, support calls, or even leave positive reviews on sites like G2 and TrustRadius. By identifying your champions, you can establish a direct line to internal decision-makers, streamlining your sales process because of it.

To help you identify champions, here are some key characteristics these people tend to have in common:

• Decision-making influence, with authority in their department and the ability to persuade key stakeholders.
• Frequent engagement by using the product regularly and sharing feedback often.
• Sharing positive sentiments with customer success teams.
• Cross-functional reach by interacting with multiple departments, making it easier to extend your product’s reach.
• Longevity and seniority, since folks who have been at companies longer or have more senior positions tend to have more trust and credibility. 

4. Build and launch champion tracking sales plays

After identifying your champions, it’s time to build and launch champion tracking sales plays to engage advocates effectively and maximize their influence within target accounts.

By analyzing champions’ interactions, career moves, and preferences, sales teams can create strategic plays that leverage existing relationships to drive growth, deepen engagement, and increase product adoption. This data-driven approach ensures that each sales play addresses champions’ needs and pain points.

To make the most out of contact tracking data, consider launching these sales plays:

1. Career move play. When a champion changes roles or companies, jump on the opportunity to introduce your solution to the new environment. Reach out with personalized messaging that acknowledges their past experience with your product and highlights how it can support their new team’s goals. Worried you don’t have enough time to personalize these messages at scale? Don’t sweat it. Using generative AI writing tools like LeadIQ Scribe, you can create personalized messages in just a few clicks. Problem solved! 

2. Expansion play. Identify champions within accounts where you already have a foothold, and work with them to expand product adoption across other departments. Engaging champions with success stories from similar teams and offering demos and exclusive resources can make it easier for champions to advocate internally. 

3. Re-engagement play. If a champion’s engagement has slowed, use tracking data to reach out proactively with updates, feature releases, or training opportunities. Re-engagement plays keep champions involved and help ensure they continue advocating for your solutions within their organizations.

How to evaluate champion tracking success

No matter how effective your champion tracking initiatives turn out to be, you can always improve. 

To evaluate the success of your program, you first need to ensure that sales and marketing are aligned on the individuals you’re targeting and the channels you’ll use to engage them. Account-based marketing is a great approach here because it allows for highly personalized and strategic outreach to key champions within high-value accounts.

Kick things off by ensuring that all contact data is flowing seamlessly into your CRM so both teams can act on the same data in real time. After all, the effectiveness of champion tracking hinges on consistent and timely follow-up, so teams must be proactive in reaching out when sales triggers materialize.

Next, confirm that your team is using the established sales plays built for champions — like career move outreach, expansion opportunities, and re-engagement strategies. Consistent execution of these plays ensures that you’re capitalizing on every opportunity to build relationships and influence decision-making.

Once your average sales cycle has passed, evaluate the success of your champion tracking efforts using sales dashboards and other performance measurement tools to determine how many opportunities were influenced by champions, how many resulted in closed deals, and whether there was an acceleration in the sales cycle. You can use this data to fine-tune your approach for future rounds of champion tracking engagement — getting better and better results over time. 

How to implement LeadIQ for contact tracking

At LeadIQ, we’re laser-focused on helping sales teams crush their goals, so we’re always shipping new features designed to speed up workflows and make it easier for reps to connect with the right person with the right message at the right time.

To this end, we’re one of the first companies that developed a contact tracking feature that automatically notifies reps when people in their CRM change jobs or get promoted.

If you’re looking to try contact tracking and champion tracking, LeadIQ can help. Even better, getting started is a breeze. Here’s all you need to do:

1. Sign up for a free LeadIQ account or schedule a demo with our team to learn about all the features in our Prospecting and Data Hubs.
2. Connect LeadIQ to your CRM for continuous data flow.
3. LeadIQ automatically flags any accounts or prospects that change jobs or get promotions, updating the record or creating a new one with all the relevant contact information updated (e.g., new job title, new company, new email address, and LinkedIn URL).
4. LeadIQ can also alert your account executive and customer success teams, letting them know an individual is no longer at a company.
5. You can also receive email alerts or notifications within your CRM about contact tracking changes depending on how you configure LeadIQ.

That’s it. You’re up and running before you know it.

To learn more about how easy it can be to get started with champion tracking at your organization, request a demo today.