the deal that dies the moment it leaves the champion's hands

a client call this week described a pattern i've seen enough times now to call it a rule rather than bad luck: the internal champion gets fully convinced, genuinely excited, ready to buy, and then the deal goes up to whoever actually signs, and it dies there. not because the champion stopped caring. because the case that convinced them was built for them, not for the person above them who has a completely different set of concerns.

the fix people usually reach for is more pressure on the champion, more collateral, a bigger deck. that mostly doesn't work, because the problem isn't the champion's conviction, it's that nobody built a version of the pitch for the decision maker who's actually going to say yes or no. that person usually cares about risk and budget and precedent, not about the thing that got the champion excited in the first place. if you never build that second version, you're relying on your champion to translate your pitch into a completely different language, under time pressure, in a meeting you're not even in.

the same conversation had an honest moment i respected. the founder, unprompted, said his own company wasn't currently fundable given where traction actually sits, using his own background in finance to make that call rather than dressing it up. and in the same breath mentioned that a well known investment firm had reached out on their own, unprompted, genuinely interested. those two facts sitting next to each other, not fundable by my own honest math and a serious investor wants in anyway, aren't actually a contradiction. traction and fundability measure different things. investors sometimes see a signal in the room, the team, the category, that a spreadsheet full of user counts doesn't capture yet.

if your deal has a champion who's fully sold, have you actually built the version of the pitch for the person above them, or are you hoping the champion carries it up alone?