The champion is a director of operations, and he has spent four calls building the case with the AE. When the AE asks for an economic buyer meeting with the VP of operations, he offers to bring it to her himself. He knows how she likes to see things, and he worries that a vendor in the room will put her on guard.
Two weeks later, the champion reports that she liked it but wants to revisit after 2027 planning. The AE pushes for a direct conversation, and the VP accepts a 30-minute invite for the following Tuesday. She moves it a week, then joins seven minutes late with a hard stop at the half hour. The AE spends twelve of the remaining minutes on slides she has already seen, and she leaves with nothing new to decide.
Most teams log this meeting as a milestone, so the AE works for weeks to get on the calendar and barely plans the minutes themselves. The right use of those minutes is almost never the product, however good the demo went. She needs to hear her own team's problem, the cost of waiting, what could go wrong, and exactly what the approval would ask of her.
An economic buyer meeting is a short conversation between the seller and the person who can approve the spend alone. In MEDDIC and its variants, the economic buyer is the E. She can fund a deal that others hesitate on, and she can stop one that everyone else supports.
Ignore titles at first, because the org chart shows who reports to whom and says little about who can sign. A VP at a mid-size company might sign a purchase this size alone, while a larger company may route it to the CFO. The fastest test is to ask the champion who signed the last purchase of similar size. Then ask who could kill this one if she wanted to.
Be wary when the champion says he makes the call himself. He usually means he can recommend, and a recommendation still needs a signature from someone who has not heard your case. The AE who accepts that answer meets the real approver in December, when the order form reaches her desk and she asks who these people are.
Sellers also tend to schedule this meeting too late, saving it for after pricing as a final blessing. By then she has the least room to shape the deal. The better moment comes once her team agrees on the problem, while she can still say what the approval will require.
When the champion carries your case upstairs alone, he presents it secondhand and in his own shorthand. He drops the cost figures he is unsure of and skips the risks he hopes she will not raise. She forms her view in a meeting the AE never attends. The champion then comes back with a polite deferral and no reason attached.
The usual advice says to protect the champion relationship and let him lead internally. That advice is half right, because he should lead but should not walk alone into the budget conversation. Most champions agree once the AE frames the meeting as cover for questions he dreads, such as why the price moved or who owns the rollout.
Watch how he reacts to the request, because his answer shows how much standing he has with her. A champion who welcomes help wants the deal to close, while one who guards access may have less standing than he claims. Our guide to champion development covers how to tell the two apart and how to build the first kind.
She rarely walks in cold, even if this is her first call with your company. Her team has complained about the problem in staff meetings, and she knows which projects want the same money. She may also have asked an AI tool about the category, or about your company, before accepting the invite.
In a May 2026 press release, Gartner reported on a survey of 645 B2B buyers. According to the release, 69% of them prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. The survey covered B2B buyers in general and did not single out executives, so the AE should read it as a general signal about how buyers check their research.
That changes what the half hour is for. She wants to check what she read, and what her champion told her, against someone who will be accountable for the answer. An AE who opens with the logo slide and the funding history spends the minutes she set aside for exactly that check.
She also sees the deal as one line in a larger plan, competing with headcount and other tools. If the committee around her is still split, the AE should know before the meeting starts. The stakeholder map from our piece on multithreading in sales shows where each person stands.
An executive agrees to a vendor meeting when her own person says it will save her time. That makes the champion the AE's real audience, so each of the four moves below aims to make his next conversation with her shorter and easier.
On the next call, the AE asks the champion what the VP will ask first when he brings this up. A good champion knows right away, and the answer usually involves cost or who has to change how they work. If he cannot answer it himself, that gap is the reason for the meeting, and he will often say so first.
Champions do not write pitches to their bosses. They forward an attachment with a line like "worth 30 minutes?" on top, so the AE should write the attachment. A one-page brief does the job, and the next section covers what goes on it.
Frame the request around a decision she already faces, such as whether this project goes into the 2027 plan. Give the champion a sentence he can repeat to her word for word. "You need to decide on next year's plan, and 30 minutes lets you ask about price and rollout directly" works well. Requests to "introduce ourselves" or "share our vision" give her an easy reason to decline.
Ask for 30 minutes, offer two specific times, and build the agenda so it still works in 20. Executives run late and leave early, and the AE should expect both in the same meeting. An agenda that needs the full half hour will run out of time before the decision question.
This brief travels without the AE, so she has to understand it on her phone between two meetings. Keep it to one page, write it in plain sentences, and leave out product screenshots entirely. It should hold these five things:
The first bullet does most of the work on that page. When she reads a sentence her own manager said on a call, she recognizes the problem as hers. Vendor language about "efficiency" tells her an outsider wrote the page, and she skims it.
Show the champion the draft before he sends it, and let him edit freely. He knows which words will land with her and which cost figure she will question. His edits also make it his document, which matters because his name sits on the forward.
The agenda below assumes she read the brief, or at least skimmed it on the way in. It keeps the AE talking less than half the time and saves the last five minutes for the decision. The champion should speak early, because she trusts her own person more than any vendor.
In the first five minutes, the champion states the problem the way her team described it. The AE then asks whether that matches what she sees from her seat. She will usually correct something, and that correction is the most useful thing the AE hears all month. It shows how she thinks about the problem, which may differ from her team's view.
Next, ask what happens if the problem is still there at the end of the first quarter. Use the figures her team gave you, and leave the vendor ROI calculator at the office. If her team never sized the problem, name the consequence they described and ask how she would size it.
An AE who raises the rollout risk first earns more trust than one who waits for her to find it. Name the concerns her team raised and say how the plan handles each one. After that, ask what worries her that nobody has mentioned yet. Executives often hold one concern back until they see whether the seller will be straight with them.
With five minutes left, the AE asks what she would need to see to approve this for next year. Then the AE confirms the next step before the call ends, with a date and her name on it. If the AE leaves with only "send me something," the decision has drifted back to the vendor.
A VP who accepts the invite and then moves it once has told the AE very little, because executives move vendor meetings every week. Before proposing a new time, the AE should ask the champion what took the slot. Whatever bumped the meeting shows where this project sits in her week. A board prep session is normal, but a new internal initiative may mean the budget is moving.
Skip the "just checking in" email after a reschedule, since it gives her nothing to read. Resend the brief with one line updated, such as a new figure from her team or a closer deadline. A second reschedule usually means the champion never sold her on the reason. In that case, go back to the first move and ask him again what she needs answered.
When she joins late or announces a hard stop, the AE should say so out loud and adjust in front of her. "We have twenty minutes, so let's go straight to your two questions" shows her the AE respects the time. Then cut the agenda to the problem and the decision question, and drop everything else without apology.
Both meetings below fill the same slot on her calendar, and both show up in the CRM as a completed meeting. What separates them is who does the talking and what she leaves with.
| Part of the meeting | Recap meeting | Decision meeting |
|---|---|---|
| Before the call | AE sends the deck to the champion | One-page brief the champion forwards |
| First five minutes | Company overview | Her team's problem in their words |
| Numbers | Vendor ROI estimate | Figures her own team shared |
| Risks | AE answers if she asks | AE names them up front |
| Who talks most | The AE | The VP and the champion |
| Last five minutes | Product questions | What she needs to approve |
| Next step | AE sends pricing | VP takes an action with a date |
The follow-up goes out the same day, addressed to her with the champion copied. Most AEs send the recap to the champion and let him relay it, which puts the deal back into the secondhand relay the meeting was meant to replace. She is the one who has to act, so the next step belongs in her own inbox.
Keep the note short enough to read on a phone in one pass. Restate the problem in the words she used on the call, especially anything she corrected. List what she said she needs to decide and the one action she agreed to take, with its date. A line like "You mentioned raising this at the planning review on the 12th" keeps the decision with her.
Leave the deck out of the follow-up, since she has already seen more slides than she wants. If she asked for a reference call or a rollout plan, send only that item and say when it arrives. For deals with several open steps, add her action to the mutual action plan so the champion can track it.
Then update the CRM with what she said, beyond her name in the economic buyer field. A manager reviewing the deal later needs to know what she will approve and by when. Her name on its own answers neither question, so the next deal review ends up guessing.
A typical AE gets only a few of these meetings each quarter, which leaves little room for practice. Frontline managers can close that gap with a short prep session before each one. The session takes about half an hour, and it catches the mistakes that usually cost AEs the meeting.
Start by asking the AE to state the problem in the buyer's words, without notes. If the AE describes the product instead, the champion calls did not surface enough about the problem. In that case the manager and the AE listen to one of those calls together. After that, the two of them read the brief and cut any sentence the VP could have read on the vendor's website.
Then run the 20-minute version as a role play, with the manager playing a VP who joins late. Have that VP ask about price first, before the AE reaches the agenda. Many account executives freeze when an executive skips their plan, and one rehearsal usually fixes it. After the real meeting, the manager and AE review the recording and check when the decision question came up.
Rafiki AI records the champion calls and the executive meeting and transcribes each one. Transcription covers more than 60 languages, which helps when the buyer's team spans regions. The brief depends on what her team said, and a conversation intelligence platform keeps those words after the AE's notes fade.
Before writing the brief, the AE can use Gen AI Search to find where the buyer's team described the problem. Ask Rafiki answers questions about the account, such as what the champion said the VP cares about. After each call, Smart Call Summary summarizes the conversation, so the problem and the risks sit in one place.
Smart Call Scoring scores every call against any methodology, including MEDDIC, or against custom criteria. A manager can add economic buyer coverage as a custom criterion and see which calls on a deal never addressed it. Rafiki AI also maps which stakeholders took part in each call, so the AE can see whether the VP ever joined one.
Smart CRM Sync fills in methodology fields from the calls, including the MEDDIC economic buyer field and any custom CRM fields. After the executive meeting, Smart Follow Up drafts the email, and the AE edits it to match her words. For rehearsal, AEs can practice the 20-minute version with an AI buyer in AI Role Play.
This week, list every deal forecast to close this year where nobody has spoken with the economic buyer. On the next call for each one, the AE asks the champion what the VP will ask first. By Monday, draft the brief for the deal with the earliest close date and send it to the champion for edits.
Aim to have that first meeting booked before the first week of November. If her 2027 plan locks in November or December, a deal that misses it may wait until spring. At the end of October, check which deals now have a meeting booked and which champions still cannot answer the question.
Rafiki AI's conversation intelligence platform starts at $19 per seat per month, and it keeps every recorded champion call searchable for the afternoon the AE writes the brief. Create a free trial account before your next champion call, then quote his team's exact phrasing in the draft you send him. If your team has questions for a person before signing up, book a demo with Rafiki AI.
The economic buyer is the person who can approve the spend without anyone else's sign-off. Depending on the deal size and company, that may be a VP, a general manager, or the CFO. The quickest way to find out is to ask the champion who signed the last similar purchase.
Ask once the buyer's team agrees on the problem and before pricing is final. At that point, she can still shape what the approval requires. Meetings held after pricing tend to become a final review with little room to change the deal.
Ask him what the VP will ask first, and offer to answer that question in the meeting for him. Champions usually agree once the meeting protects them from questions they cannot answer. If he still refuses, he may have less influence than he claims, so look for another path through the committee.
Ask for 30 minutes and plan an agenda that still works in 20. Executives often join late or leave early, so the decision question needs to come before the final five minutes. If the meeting runs short, drop the product discussion first.
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