The hidden progression from relationship to internal advocacy in complex B2B sales
There is a sentence I have heard countless times in opportunity reviews:
“We have an excellent relationship with the customer.”
It sounds reassuring.
The salesperson has access. Calls are answered. Meetings happen. Conversations are comfortable. Perhaps the relationship has existed for years.
And yet, some of these opportunities are eventually lost.
Which raises an interesting question:
If the relationship was genuinely strong, why wasn't it strong enough to influence the decision?
I don't believe the answer is that relationships don't matter.
Quite the opposite.
Relationships are fundamental to complex B2B selling.
But perhaps we have been measuring the strength of a relationship using the wrong indicators.
The Relationship Illusion
Think about how salespeople commonly describe a strong customer relationship:
“They always take my call.”
“We get along extremely well.”
“They share a lot with me.”
“They've been our customer for years.”
“I can meet them whenever I want.”
“They really like our company.”
All positive signs.
But none of them necessarily tell us what will happen when a decision has to be made.
That distinction becomes particularly important in complex B2B sales.
Because the person who likes you may not control the budget.
The person who meets you may not define the evaluation criteria.
The person who wants your solution may not be able to convince procurement.
And the person telling you that everything looks positive may have very little influence when senior management eventually discusses the investment.
This is why I believe we need to distinguish between:
Relationship strength and relationship impact.
They are not always the same.
The Relationship Progression
Over the years, I have come to look at customer relationships through four levels:
ACCESS → TRUST → INFLUENCE → ADVOCACY
The mistake is assuming that reaching the first or second level means we have reached the fourth.
Let's look at each one.
LEVEL 1: ACCESS
The customer takes your calls.
Responds to messages.
Accepts meetings.
Allows you into conversations.
This matters.
Without access, very little else happens.
But access simply means:
“You are allowed into the room.”
It doesn't necessarily mean you have influence once you're there.
I have seen salespeople with extraordinary access to customers who still had very little understanding of how decisions were actually being made.
So when someone tells me:
“I have a fantastic relationship with this account.”
One of the things I want to understand is:
What is that access actually giving us?
LEVEL 2: TRUST
Something changes when access becomes trust.
The conversation becomes different.
Customers start sharing information they don't necessarily share with every supplier.
They may tell you:
What's frustrating them.
Where an internal initiative is struggling.
What senior management is concerned about.
Why the previous solution failed.
What procurement is likely to challenge.
Which stakeholder isn't convinced.
What isn't written in the RFP.
This is incredibly valuable.
Because now we aren't simply receiving information.
We are beginning to understand context.
But even trust has limitations.
A customer can trust you enormously and still choose somebody else.
Why?
Because trust creates openness. It doesn't automatically create preference.
LEVEL 3: INFLUENCE
This is where the relationship starts becoming strategically interesting.
Influence happens when the customer doesn't simply share their thinking with you.
Your perspective begins affecting their thinking.
Perhaps they originally believed price was the most important criterion.
Your questions helped them consider lifecycle cost.
Perhaps they believed they needed a particular technical specification.
Your conversation helped them rethink the underlying business requirement.
Perhaps they were solving one problem.
You helped them recognize the implications of leaving another problem unresolved.
That is a very different relationship.
You are no longer simply responding to the customer's buying process.
You are contributing to how the customer thinks about the decision itself.
For me, this is one of the most important transitions in consultative selling.
The salesperson moves from:
Information provider → Thinking partner.
And that's when value begins to look very different.
LEVEL 4: ADVOCACY
Now we reach the level I believe salespeople often underestimate.
At some point in a complex sale, you will not be in the room.
The customer will be.
Imagine the internal conversation.
Procurement says:
“Their price is higher.”
Finance asks:
“Why do we need to spend this now?”
Another stakeholder says:
“The incumbent can do this.”
Someone else suggests:
“Let's postpone it until next year.”
And your competitor may already have someone else advocating for them.
You aren't there to explain.
You aren't there to present another slide.
You aren't there to overcome the objection.
So who is selling now?
Your customer is.
That is advocacy.
Your contact understands the value well enough to articulate it internally.
They can defend the business case.
They can explain the consequences of doing nothing.
They can navigate resistance.
They can bring other stakeholders into the conversation.
And sometimes they can influence the decision when you cannot.
This is why I believe one of the most revealing questions in an opportunity review is:
“Who is advocating for us when we are not in the room?”
If the answer is nobody, the relationship may not be as commercially strong as we believe.
There is another problem: one advocate may not be enough
Complex buying decisions have become increasingly multi-stakeholder.
Technology may care about integration.
Finance may care about economics.
Operations may care about disruption.
Procurement may care about commercial terms.
The business leader may care about outcomes.
The end user may care about usability.
And each may define value differently.
Which means another dangerous statement in sales is:
“My contact is completely convinced.”
Wonderful.
Who else needs to be?
A strong relationship with one stakeholder can sometimes create a false sense of security while an entirely different conversation is happening elsewhere in the organization.
That is why stakeholder mapping isn't merely identifying names and titles.
We need to understand:
Who cares?
Who decides?
Who influences?
Who benefits?
Who loses something if the change happens?
Who can quietly stop the decision?
And critically:
Who is willing to advocate?
A simple test for your next opportunity review
Take one of your most important opportunities.
Instead of asking only:
“How strong is our relationship?”
Try these four questions:
ACCESS
Who are we able to reach?
TRUST
What are they willing to tell us that we couldn't learn from an RFP or website?
INFLUENCE
Where has our perspective changed or expanded the customer's thinking?
ADVOCACY
Who will represent our value internally when we are not there?
You may discover something interesting.
Some relationships you considered very strong are actually sitting at Access.
Others may have reached Trust.
And perhaps only a handful have progressed all the way to Advocacy.
That doesn't make the earlier relationships weak.
It simply tells us what needs to happen next.
In My View
I have always believed relationships matter enormously in sales. And despite all the technology, automation and AI entering the profession, I suspect human relationships will become more valuable, not less. But I also think salespeople need to become more sophisticated in how we define a “good relationship.”
Being liked is valuable.
Having access is valuable.
Being trusted is even more valuable.
But in complex B2B sales, I would ask one more question:
Does the relationship have enough depth to influence what happens when I am no longer in the room?
Because ultimately, the strongest customer relationship may not be the one where the customer always takes your call.
It may be the one where they are willing and able to carry your value into conversations you will never hear.
That, in my view, is when a relationship begins becoming a competitive advantage.
And perhaps that's the question worth taking into your next opportunity review:
Who inside this customer's organization would sell for us if we weren't there?
If no name immediately comes to mind, you may have just discovered something important about the opportunity.
Sales Igniter
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