Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns, 20/20/20 Mastery Mission. 20 topics, 20 guests for 20 minutes. We're here to unlock tribal wisdom from tech sales legends to help you get one step closer to mastery. Today we are joined by Espen Sjaavik, Senior Regional Vice President at zero trust cybersecurity leader, Zscaler.

In episode 7, we ask Espen to share more with us on his chosen topic of Sales Champions and the power they have to shape and transform your career.

“If you have a Champion from the beginning, it's like you're driving somewhere, and you have a co-pilot guiding you to where you need to go. It's a top priority. When you create a visible opportunity, you need to make sure that you understand who the Champion should be and then have a plan to build them.”

Without a solid Sales Champion, understanding your client’s pain and accessing the key decision makers becomes much more difficult. Great salespeople know this and actively look for allies within their prospects whom they can nurture to become Champions. However, the question is, how do you find a Champion, and, more importantly, how do you convince them to support you? Offering you unique access to his extraordinary experience and knowledge on this topic, Espen discusses his own strategies for finding and building Champions from the moment a lead turns into a visible opportunity and gives you the tools you need to proactively drive your deals forwards, beat your competitors, and lay foundations for your future career trajectory. Giving an in-depth explanation on how to identify, test and leverage Champions that can guide you through the buying process, Espen shares his multi-dimensional tactics for entering the sales process at various levels and explains the different modes of communication required to access key decision makers within an organisation and build a solid base for your deal. Listen to our story session to discover more on how to apply Espen’s Champion-building strategies to real life scenarios and learn tips and best practices for identifying and developing Sales Champions that have the power and influence to drive change and help close deals.