Champion Sales & Marketing, Inc.

10/06/2026

In sales and marketing, there are rarely surprises.

A company struggles to generate consistent pipeline, and then you look at how it is approaching the most important commercial function in the business.

An intern or an inexperienced person is expected to prospect, qualify leads, help conduct demos, follow up, maintain the CRM, support onboarding, help develop account strategies, and maybe even assist with closing deals.

That is not an internship or for the inexperienced. That is most of the revenue function.

They can be extremely valuable when they are supporting an established sales process. They can research accounts, maintain data, assist with campaigns, prepare materials, and learn alongside experienced sales leadership.

But they should not be expected to figure it out.

(1) Who the company should target.
(2) Why those buyers should care.
(3) How the product should be positioned.
(4) Which problems create urgency.
(5) What messaging earns attention.
(6) How objections should be handled.
(7) How a repeatable sales process should work.

Those are leadership responsibilities.

Too many founders still view sales and marketing as an ex*****on expense rather than strategic capability.

They assume someone junior can send enough emails, schedule enough calls, and demonstrate enough product features to uncover a market.

But activity does not create clarity.

Sales ex*****on only works after a company has validated its target market, audience, value proposition, messaging, and buying process.

That is commercial validation and it is not the same as product-market fit. (PMF)

They can help operate a sales system.

They should not be responsible for inventing one.

09/29/2026

We are always open to sales pitches. We work in sales and respect the effort.

But we receive so many messages that follow the same approach.

“If I could do ABC for you, would you be interested?”

At this point, it reminds us of Bob Ryan from HBO's Entourage series back in 2006:

“Is that something you might be interested in?”

It was funny coming from him but we block and mark spam from anyone who sends us a message like that.

Give prospects a reason to believe you understand their business and make a credible case for how you can help.

Asking whether we want more customers, more revenue, or fewer problems doesn’t work either. Following up with “I’ll assume this isn’t a priority” is really weak, too.

Silence tells you nothing about a prospect's priorities.

We can do much better.

This is a Entourage compilation I made of Bob Ryans quote " Is that...

09/22/2026

Setting up a recurring public demo can give prospects a way to understand your product or service before committing to a sales conversation.

More companies should consider offering one, whether weekly, every other week, or monthly.

Show how the product works.

If you sell a service, walk through your process, a sample deliverable, and the specific problem you help customers solve. Give people enough substance to judge whether it’s relevant to their business.

Prospects may be curious but many are not ready for a discovery call, qualification questions, or a conversation about budget and timing.

Many just want to see what you have internally and how it could help.

Make that easy for them.

Let them attend, listen, and ask questions if they want to.

Be clear about what happens after they register, and make a sales conversation an optional next step.

For the company, the questions people ask can also reveal what your messaging hasn’t explained clearly.

This can be useful for established businesses just as much as startups.

Sometimes the next step in your sales process should be giving prospects space to learn.

09/16/2026

Many founders are naive about what it actually costs to build the infrastructure behind an effective GTM program.

They see a $99 monthly outreach tool, buy a list, connect an inbox, and believe they now have a sales engine.

For an early-stage B2B company, that infrastructure can easily cost $1,000 to $4,000 per month, before accounting for the people responsible for strategy, messaging, campaign management, interpreting buyer behavior, and turning engagement into opportunities.

AI can support that work, but generating outputs is not the same as knowing what to prioritize, what to change, and why.

This doesn’t mean every startup needs an expensive, bloated tech stack either.

It means an effective GTM program requires a realistic investment in the infrastructure needed to operate, measure, and improve it.

Buying an outreach platform does not create a GTM program.

Most of the time it becomes a channel through which to distribute unvalidated assumptions.

The tools provide the infrastructure.

The learning, judgment, ex*****on, and iteration are what turn that infrastructure into revenue.

09/09/2026

There seems to be no shortage of go-to-market experts on LinkedIn.

Over the past six to twelve months, our feed has felt increasingly crowded with new advisors, agencies, frameworks, and promises of predictable growth.

The harder part for founders is figuring out what sits behind those promises.

“GTM expert” can describe people with very different levels of experience, expertise, and understanding of the businesses they advise.

And confidence can make those differences difficult to see.

A confident claim about pipeline or revenue deserves a few reasonable questions:

(1) What stage was the company at?
(2) Was there already demand for the product?
(3) Did the results come from existing relationships or cold prospects?
(4) What resources and budget were required?

Those details determine whether a result is relevant to your business.

What concerns us is how quickly those questions can sometimes trigger defensiveness.

If someone makes a strong claim, examining the assumptions behind it should be part of the conversation. Founders should be able to question the advice they are being asked to invest in.

Belief in an approach is useful. But belief becomes a problem when it overrides what the market is actually telling you.

Elvis Works has a simple view: GTM expertise should include the ability to explain what worked, under what conditions, what failed, and what evidence would make you change direction.

Founders deserve that level of clarity before they commit their time, money, and runway.

09/01/2026

Good feedback isn’t always comfortable. Especially when you’ve spent years building the thing being questioned.

One of the harder parts of working with founders and young companies is that some of the most useful GTM questions can initially sound like criticism.

They’re not intended that way.

When we ask:

(1) Are you currently running outbound, or are you still growing mostly through your network?
(2) How do strangers in your target market respond to your messaging today?
(3) What evidence tells you this is the problem buyers are willing to act on now?

We’re not saying, you’re wrong, we know your business better than you do, or that was a bad idea.

We’re asking whether there might be another way to look at it.

Founders, particularly technical founders, often have years of product knowledge, customer conversations and domain expertise behind their decisions.

But the market has information too. And sometimes the fastest way to find that information is to challenge an assumption before spending another six months scaling it.

We see this even with our own LinkedIn audience.

Some posts attract new followers and some cause people to unfollow.

But it is just information.

Our job isn't to make everyone agree with us.

It's to ask useful questions, observe how the market responds, and keep learning.

That’s also how we approach our work with founders.

We’re not interested in ridiculing an idea or proving someone wrong.

Our goal is the same as theirs:

Help a young company turn an idea, product and ambition into something the market understands, values and buys.

Sometimes that means confirming what you already believe.

And sometimes it means discovering there may be a better way.

The objective isn't validation of the founder.

It's validation from the market.

08/25/2026

Your sales funnel should be a diagnostic system.

Not just a revenue-reporting mechanism.

Most companies use the funnel to report what happened.

Early-stage companies should use it to understand why it happened.

That means looking beyond opportunities, pipeline and closed-won revenue and asking a few more fundamental questions.

(1) Are enough qualified prospects entering the system?
(2) Are those prospects engaging with the commercial message?
(3) What percentage of engagements turn into legitimate sales conversations?
(4) Do those conversations consistently become opportunities and customers?

Once there is enough volume, those relationships become measurable.

If you understand how many qualified prospects typically create an engagement, how many engagements create conversations, how many conversations create opportunities, and how many opportunities become customers, you can begin modeling revenue from the top of the funnel instead of waiting for the bottom.

More importantly, you can identify where the process is breaking, which is a better way to diagnose real sales obstacles.

The funnel starts telling you what needs to be fixed.

That is particularly important for startups and growth-oriented companies because increasing activity before understanding these relationships often just creates more activity.

You don't scale activity until you understand the relationship between activity and outcomes.

A good sales funnel doesn't just measure revenue.

It helps explain how revenue gets created.

08/18/2026

Most companies don't have a pipeline problem.

They have a visibility problem.

We were recently discussing sales operations with a company and made a fairly bold statement:

If you give us enough historical data, we should be able to tell you how many new qualified leads need to enter the CRM to produce a reasonably predictable number of opportunities, customers and revenue.

Not because we are guessing.

Because the sales process is mathematical.

The problem is that many companies only begin measurement once a prospect becomes an opportunity.

But the sales process starts long before that.

Think about the full conversion path.

(1) Lead = Engagement
(2) Engagement = Contact
(3) Contact = Meeting
(4) Meeting = Opportunity
(5) Opportunity = Closed-Won
(6) Closed-Won = Revenue

If you're only measuring opportunities and closed-won business, you're seeing roughly the last third of your own story.

And you're ignoring the part of the process where a significant amount of sales and marketing work actually happens.

That's also where some of the most valuable questions live.

(a) What percentage of our target market engages with our messaging?
(b) How many engaged prospects become conversations?
(c) How many conversations create meetings?

Once those ratios are measured consistently, something much more valuable than a dashboard becomes possible.

You can start asking:

If we improve engagement-to-contact conversion by 5%, what does that ultimately mean for revenue?

If meeting volume falls, is the problem activity, targeting, messaging or conversion? You can isolate the real sales problems faster.

If two salespeople receive similar lead volume but produce very different outcomes, where does their performance actually differ?

And probably most importantly:

How many new qualified prospects need to enter the system today to support the revenue we want or need several months from now given our sales cycle?

That's why I don't think of sales operations as CRM administration.

It's the infrastructure that connects activity to outcomes.

And when companies build visibility across the entire sales process, the CRM stops being a database of what already happened.

Instead of historical data, it becomes a tool for understanding what is likely to happen next.

That's a much more powerful way to run sales.

08/11/2026

Many startup websites target people already halfway through the buying process.

The visitor already understands the problem, knows there are solutions for it, and is actively looking at options.

That makes sense for an established category but it can be a problem for a startup.

Most young companies are still trying to earn attention from people who have never heard of them and may not even think about the problem the same way the company does.

But then you get to the website and most of the messaging is about the product.

What it does and then book a demo option that no one ever uses.

The problem is that a stranger may understand the product but still have no reason to care.

Before someone evaluates your solution, they usually have to believe there is a problem worth doing something about.

That is where commercial messaging matters.

(1) Why does this matter now?
(2) What is wrong with how companies handle it today?
(3) What happens if nothing changes?
(4) What business outcome improves if they solve it?

Those questions come before product descriptions, benefits, and features.

We see this often with early-stage companies. The website is doing a decent job of explaining the solution, but almost no work convincing a new visitor that the problem deserves their attention.

The distinction is...product messaging tells us what you built and commercial messaging gives us a reason to keep reading.

If your growth depends on reaching people outside a founder's network, referrals, investors and other warm relationships, your website has to work for strangers too.

Not just people who already know they need what you sell.

08/04/2026

For the sales and marketing function, the market is not simply something you sell into.

It is a domain you must understand and own.

That includes positioning, pricing, customer insight, competitive dynamics, buyer behavior, sales messaging, and the process through which strangers become customers.

The challenge for many early-stage founders is that they are also trying to own the product and lead its development.

Both are full-time jobs.

Building a strong product requires focus. Building the commercial foundation around that product requires a different kind of experience, expertise, and continuous market interaction.

This is where many companies lose valuable time.

The product continues to improve, but the positioning remains unclear. The features expand, but the message does not become more relevant. Activity increases, but the company still struggles to earn attention from people outside the founder’s network.

Speed matters, but so does the quality of each iteration.

Founders need experienced guidance to help them interpret market feedback, refine the commercial strategy, and build the foundation required to consistently turn strangers into customers.

Because warm relationships may help launch a company.

The cold market determines whether it can grow.