The Champion-Move Priority Score: Chase Now, Nurture, or Pass

When a batch of your past champions all change jobs at once, you cannot work every move with equal energy. This guide is a triage rubric for account executives, SDR leads, partnerships teams, and founders selling their own product: score any single champion move on four dimensions in under five minutes and land on a chase-now, nurture, or pass verdict. It sits before the champion-move playbook, not inside it - it decides which moves earn the playbook's hours.

Most guides on this topic are written to sell an alert tool. The tool that fires the alert is the easy part. The hard part is that alerts arrive in bursts, your calendar does not expand to match, and the wrong ones look identical to the right ones until you have already spent an hour. What follows is a vendor-neutral scoring model built on published conversion-by-role numbers and on seat-scarcity figures from Refolk's index.

Why a triage score, and not just an alert

A champion-move alert tells you something changed. It does not tell you whether the change is worth your afternoon. Triage is the missing step between the notification and the outreach, and it is worth building because the payoff for working the right moves is large and specific.

Warm, prior-relationship contacts convert far above cold. Involving a past contact in an opportunity is tied to 114% higher win rates, 12% shorter deal cycles, and 54% larger deals in UserGems' benchmark. Champify frames the same effect as former advocates converting 6.3x more efficiently from first touch to closed-won. But those lifts are averages across a mixed population. Inside any batch of movers, the yield is wildly uneven, and the whole point of a score is to separate the 49% contacts from the 19% ones before you spend time.

6.3x

The second reason to score: detection lag. Most teams find out a champion changed jobs 3 to 6 months after the move, usually via a LinkedIn notification someone happens to see. By then the window has often closed. If you treat every alert as fresh, you will pour effort into moves that are already cold. Scoring forces you to check the true start date, which quietly reclassifies a meaningful share of your "chase" list as "pass."

The four dimensions and what each one proves

Four dimensions decide the verdict: advocacy strength, new-seat authority, account fit, and timing. Advocacy strength carries the most weight, because role sets the base rate and everything else only multiplies it.

Here is what each dimension proves, and what it looks like when it lies to you.

Advocacy leads for a measurable reason. Role determines a 49% versus 33% win-rate spread, a 16-point gap that persists regardless of window. Timing does not add points; it multiplies whatever base rate already exists. A perfectly-timed passive user still converts near cold, while a genuine buying-committee alum discovered late still carries the highest base rate in the population. Weight advocacy heaviest and let it break every tie.

Score advocacy strength: champion, coach, or passive user

Advocacy strength answers one question: at the last account, did this person spend their own political capital to advance your deal, or did they just hand you information? The MEDDICC framework draws the line cleanly. A coach gives you useful context such as account details or stakeholder names. A champion does that and uses their own influence to push the purchase forward, investing political capital and actively supporting your success.

You can settle the tag from CRM history in about a minute with three tests:

• The Objection Test. When you shared a challenge, did they work to overcome it internally, or just relay it back to you?
• The Advocacy Test. Is there evidence they pitched your solution to others on their side without you in the room?
• The Skin-in-the-Game Test. Could they articulate the personal impact they expected if the deal landed?

Tag each contact genuine champion, coach, or passive user. The payoff for getting this right is the largest single lever in the model.

Win rates are from Champify's 2025 Impact Report; the multiples are derived against the roughly 19% SaaS average. In a separate 300-plus opportunity study cited by one practitioner, the presence of a high-level champion lifted the win rate to 90%. Treat that as directional rather than a target, but it points the same way: the buying-committee alum is the highest-yield triage target because both hard steps, building trust and proving the category, are already done from the last engagement.

Score new-seat authority: up, lateral, or down

New-seat authority asks whether the champion can now move money they could not move before. No published method reads budget authority off a profile, so use title-band movement as the observable proxy, and read scope, not just the title string.

Compare the old and new roles on three things: title band (Director versus VP versus C-level), scope words ("Global," "Head of," a broadened remit), and team size. Mark authority up, lateral, or down. A move that reads as a promotion in the title can still be a lateral in authority if the new remit is narrower, so check the scope before you commit.

A true step-up is rarer than it feels, and that rarity is exactly what makes it worth chasing. Refolk's index shows how the senior bands narrow.

number: 4.8x
label: Size of the US Director band versus the US VP/CXO band
note: From Refolk's index of professional profiles. Most moves are lateral within a band, so a genuine step-up into budget authority is the exception.