When your champion leaves, send the successor the business case and the mutual action plan as the record of a project already running, then test them as a champion from scratch.
Your champion has left the company. The deal has gone quiet, and nobody has told you who owns it now.
Do not restart. Take the two documents the deal has already produced, the written business case the champion carried into their internal meetings and the mutual action plan with its steps, owners and dates, and send both to whoever inherits the seat. Send them as the record of what their predecessor signed up to and where the work had got to, not as a pitch, so the successor reads themselves into a project that is already running. If several people on the buying side have gone at once, as in a round of layoffs, find out who inherited each person's responsibilities and go to them, not to the org chart you had.
Then do the half sellers skip. The successor inherits the job title, not the conviction, so test them as a champion as if you had never met the account. Whatever they score is the deal's qualification now. The old one left with the old champion.
Nobody publishes the two documents and the re-qualification as one move. The combination is the library's own.
Jamal Reimer's champion tests, from the Enterprise Sellers newsletter of 29 October 2024. Ask what a timeline for putting this in place might look like. Ask who will be involved, who plays what role and what the next steps are. Ask who inside the account is for and against it, and how to ease their concerns. Put your draft org chart in front of them and watch what they change. Ask them to go through your slides before the next group session. His reading of the results runs against instinct: edits and corrections are a good sign, and a champion who replies "looks good - no comments" is the worse outcome.
The two documents. The business case is Nate Nasralla's one page, set out in his 30MPC write-up and described under Ghostwrite what the champion has to send. The plan is the mutual action plan, such as Dock's template, described under The mutual action plan.
MEDDICC's Andy Whyte on the moment itself. Use your other contacts to find out who the replacement is, whether they have started yet, and who is covering the departing champion's work in the meantime. Then use the gap as a reason to engage the economic buyer. He says nothing about handing the successor a written case or a plan.
Nobody has measured it. No study compares sellers who handed a successor the business case and the plan with sellers who started again, or tests whether re-qualifying a successor changes the outcome.
The nearest research runs the other way round. Neeli Bendapudi and Robert Leone studied what happens when a key contact leaves the vendor, not the buyer, in the Journal of Marketing in 2002. They talked to business customers, key contacts and managers about what customers value in the contact and what worries them when that person goes. One of their answers is to keep the departing person's knowledge even when you cannot keep the person, the same instinct as this move. The paper offers propositions to test, not results.
Medicine has measured the handover document. Amy Starmer and the I-PASS Study Group reported in 2014 on a handover programme for junior doctors across nine hospitals: a standard format for spoken and written handovers, with training and observation. Across 10,740 admissions, medical errors fell 23% and preventable adverse events fell 30%, while adverse events nobody could have prevented did not change. The same group repeated it across 32 hospitals, published in 2023, and reported handover-related adverse events down 47%.
Banking has measured what a successor does with a predecessor's commitments. Barry Staw, Sigal Barsade and Kenneth Koput followed 132 California banks over nine years, published in 1997. When senior managers changed, the banks set aside more money for bad loans and wrote off more of them, and it was the change of manager that came first, not the write-offs. New people write off what their predecessors committed to, because the commitment was never theirs.
The handover evidence comes from clinicians handing over in person to a named successor, trained in a shared format, while the outgoing person is still there. In a stalled deal the champion has usually already gone, and you write the handover for a project the successor never chose. The banking study says a successor is freer to kill a predecessor's commitment, not that a document stops them. Nobody has tested whether the case and the plan slow that down or just give the successor a tidier summary of what to cancel.
Send the successor the business case and the mutual action plan as the record of a project already under way, instead of restarting discovery. Then run Reimer's tests on them before the deal keeps its old forecast. Structured handovers cut failures in hospitals, and successors wrote off their predecessors' commitments in banks. Neither finding has been tried on a deal, so use the move to find out quickly whether you still have one.