In our recent post, 5 Ways Marketing Can Help Sales Win Over Big Buying Groups, we recommended starting with the Champion Kit if you only had the bandwidth to build one thing. There's a reason for that. In a multi-person buying group, your champion is doing the selling in meetings you'll never attend. Whatever you hand them has to work without you in the room.
Most reps today still forward a sales deck and hope for the best. That deck was built to be presented, not forwarded. It doesn't make sense on its own, it doesn't speak to the people the champion is actually presenting to, and it puts your opportunity in the hands of someone who has to translate it on the fly.
A Champion Kit fixes that. It's a small, focused package designed to do one job: help your internal advocate make the case for you when you're not there.
Here's how to build one, page by page.
What Goes Inside the Champion Kit?
A Champion Kit is not a brochure and not a full sales deck. It's a handful of pieces your champion can pull from depending on who they're talking to. Here are five recommended components:
- A one-page problem and payoff summary
- A simple ROI worksheet
- An objection-handling cheat sheet
- A short, presentable slide section
- A "what happens next" roadmap
Each piece stands on its own. Together, they cover almost every conversation your champion will have internally.
Page 1: The Problem and Payoff One-Pager
This is the single most important page in the kit. If your champion only forwards one thing, this is it.
The page should answer four questions in plain language:
- What problem are we solving?
- What does it cost us to leave it alone?
- What does the solution look like?
- What do we get out of it?
Keep it to one page. Use short sentences and skip the product jargon.
Example for a security integrator: A regional healthcare network has aging cameras across 14 facilities, no central way to review footage, and a different access control system at each site. The one-pager opens with the real cost of that fragmentation: slower response when something happens, higher liability when incidents are missed, and rising maintenance bills from keeping outdated systems alive. Then it lays out the fix in one paragraph (consolidate onto a single platform with cloud-based video review and unified credentials) and finishes with three outcomes the executive team cares about: faster incident response, lower combined system costs over five years, and one vendor accountable instead of seven.
Example for an A/V integrator: A professional services firm has 40 conference rooms, each set up differently, and an IT team buried in support tickets. The one-pager names the real cost: meetings that start late, employees who avoid certain rooms, and an IT team that spends a third of its week on A/V issues instead of strategic work. The solution is standardization across all rooms with remote monitoring. The outcomes are fewer support tickets, faster meeting starts, and a clear path to scale the same setup to new offices.
Notice what's missing from both examples: product names, technical specifications, and feature lists. Your champion doesn't need those to make the case. They need the story.
Page 2: The ROI Worksheet
Your champion is going to face a budget conversation. Probably more than one. The worksheet gives them the numbers to bring to that conversation, with the flexibility to plug in their own figures so the result feels like theirs, not yours.
Build the worksheet around assumptions the champion can adjust:
- Current annual costs (maintenance, licenses, support hours, incidents)
- One-time investment
- Expected annual savings or gains
- Payback period
- Five-year total cost of ownership compared to staying put
For the security integrator: Inputs include the number of sites, current annual maintenance per site, hours spent monthly on incident review, and average cost of a security incident. The output shows what consolidation saves over five years and when the investment pays for itself.
For the A/V integrator: Inputs include the number of conference rooms, average IT support hours per room per month, and the loaded hourly cost of the average employee whose meetings start late. The output shows the productivity gain plus the IT time recovered.
Keep the math visible. If the champion can't see how the numbers were built, they won't trust them, and neither will the CFO.
Page 3: The Objection-Handling Cheat Sheet
Every champion runs into the same handful of objections. List the five or six most common ones for this type of sales opportunity, with a clear, short answer for each. No more than two or three sentences per response.
For the security integrator, common objections include:
- "Why can't we just patch the existing system?" Because the manufacturer stopped releasing security updates two years ago, which means every site is one exploit away from being a liability event.
- "Can we phase this over three years instead of two?" Yes, and here's what that looks like, though the longer the phase, the longer you carry the cost of running two systems in parallel.
- "How disruptive is the install?" Each site is offline for less than a business day, scheduled around your operating hours.
For the A/V integrator, common objections include:
- "Our IT team can just keep handling it." They can, but here's what those support hours cost annually compared to a managed service agreement.
- "We're remote-first now, do we even need this?" The rooms you have are used more intensely by fewer people, which makes reliability more important, not less.
- "Can we test it in one office first?" Yes, and a pilot is a smart way to build internal support before a full rollout.
The point is to give your champion the answer the first time the question comes up, not the third time after they've already lost ground in the room.
Page 4: The Drop-In Slides
Five to seven slides your champion can drop into their own deck or present as-is. These are not the same as your sales slides. They're designed to be presented by someone who doesn't sell for a living.
What works on these slides:
- Big, simple headlines
- One idea per slide
- Charts that explain themselves
- Minimal text
What doesn't work:
- Product screenshots without context
- Feature lists
- Anything that requires a salesperson's voiceover to understand
A good test: hand the slides to someone with no background on the project and ask them to walk you through what they mean. If they can do it, your champion can too.
For both the security and A/V examples above, the slide set covers the same arc: here's the situation today, here's what it's costing us, here's the proposed approach, here's the expected outcome, here's the timeline, here's what we need to decide.
Page 5: The "What Happens Next" Roadmap
The last piece is a simple visual of what the next 30, 60, and 90 days look like if the group says yes. Buying groups stall when the path forward feels vague. A clear roadmap moves the conversation from "should we do this?" to "when should we start?"
Include:
- Key milestones
- Who owns each one (their team and yours)
- What decisions need to be made and when
- When the first measurable outcome should appear
For the security integrator, the first 30 days might cover site surveys and final design, days 31 to 60 covers installation at the first three sites, and days 61 to 90 covers cutover and training. For the A/V integrator, the first 30 days might cover the pilot room, days 31 to 60 covers the next 10 rooms with feedback adjustments, and days 61 to 90 covers the broader rollout plan.
A roadmap gives the group something concrete to react to. That's often what unlocks the decision.
How to Roll This Out Inside Your Company
Building the kit is one thing. Making sure it gets used is another. A few tips:
- Pick one type of opportunity to start with, whether that's camera upgrades, access control consolidation, or conference room standardization. Build the kit for that scenario first, then expand.
- Assign one person to own the kit and keep it current. Outdated materials hurt your credibility more than no materials at all.
- Train your reps on how to hand off the kit. Walk them through who to give it to, what to say, and how to follow up.
- Build a feedback loop. After every opportunity, ask the rep which pieces the champion actually used and what was missing.
The first version of the kit will not be perfect. That's fine. The second version, built on real feedback from real opportunities, is the one that starts to move numbers.
Why This Matters Now
Buying groups are not getting smaller. The Forrester research we cited in the original article found that the typical decision now involves 22 people, and the larger the group, the more likely it is to approve when given the right information.
Your champion is the one person inside that group fighting for you. Giving them a kit that does some of the work for them is one of the highest-leverage moves a system integrator can make this year.
Ready to Build Your Champion Kit?
Designing a Champion Kit that gets used takes more than a template. It takes a clear understanding of the opportunities you're trying to win, the buyers who decide them, and the gaps in the content you have today. That's exactly the kind of work Vector Firm does with system integrators in security and A/V every day.
If you'd like help building Champion Kits that move your real opportunities forward, contact a Vector Firm consultant to start the conversation. We'll help you design a kit your champions will actually use, and your reps will actually hand off.
