# Jeff Reekers

Jeff Reekers writes about building Champion, a company focused on helping businesses grow through customer marketing, advocacy, and customer champions who can provide firsthand proof in sales.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/jeff-reekers/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreekers
- LinkedIn followers: 14,794
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, sales, enterprise-sales
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-02

## Summary

Jeff Reekers is most useful for explaining how customer champions provide verifiable proof in B2B sales.

- Best for: B2B SaaS companies rebuilding customer-advocacy-led sales motions or seeking a talk on customer proof.
- Not for: Consumer brands seeking paid short-form video partnerships for young lifestyle audiences.
- Check first: Confirm paid partnership or talk offerings, audience demographics, engagement, and whether earlier signature work is public.

### Takeaways

- A customer champion helped a buyer tell proven product experience from a competitor's claims.
- A weekly retro maps executives, procurement, legal, technical reviewers, and champions in the buying committee.
- A year-end post cites 100% GRR and about 130% NRR in enterprise.

## Main ideas

- **Customer champions are verifiable proof, and AI makes that proof more valuable**: Reekers argues that as AI makes it cheap to demo capabilities that do not exist yet, buyers can no longer tell promised features from shipped ones. A customer who has actually used a product becomes evidence a competitor cannot fabricate. They frame a roster of champions as sales infrastructure, not marketing garnish, and connect the argument to a third-party signal they read.
- **Grow through the success of your existing customers**: Reekers argues that revenue should come from the success of existing customers, not new-logo acquisition alone, and backs the case with retention figures from Champion's enterprise segment. That belief underpins everything else they write about advocacy.
- **Use AI to identify who will advocate, then route their proof into revenue work**: Reekers draws a practical line around AI: use it to find which customers are real champions, then feed that proof into workflows that already drive revenue. They call the identification algorithm a competitive moat and pair it with community and advocacy programs, where AI amplifies people already willing to speak up.
- **Decisions run through a full buying committee, so map every voice**: Reekers argues that no deal is decided by one person and that sales teams should plan for each participant instead of assuming the economic buyer settles it. The lesson is about preparation and coverage, not persuasion technique.
- **A Midwest base is a strategic advantage, not a limitation**: Reekers argues that being based in the Midwest is a positioning strength, citing proximity to large industries, a central location for face-to-face meetings, investors who behave as partners, and a founder network that wants peers to win. They credit the framing to someone else.
- **Publish the retrospective: name one priority, then state the action**: Reekers teaches through a recurring public format. Their "Weekly retro building Champion" posts use the same headings — Reflections, Learnings, Action — and each lesson ends with something to do. The recurring themes are attention and preparation: keep the vision in front when small problems eat the week, pick one most important thing each morning, show up fully prepared in every meeting, and name the teammates who drove progress.
- **Make business more human, and say so as a mission rather than a slogan**: Across the posts, Reekers's stated through-line is a mission to make business more human: prioritize relationships, partner closely with customers, build culture, and treat people as people first. They repeat the mission in their own words and extend it from company matters to family.

## Work to read

- [The deal a competitor's demo almost stole — and the customer champion who saved it](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreekers_an-ae-at-one-of-our-customers-was-about-to-activity-7487647016114679808-NCkM)
- [A year-in-review with the numbers: 100% GRR, ~130% NRR, and an AI champion-finder](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreekers_2025-was-a-year-where-mission-was-front-and-activity-7412156483880144897-xeIW)
- [Weekly retro: one most important thing, and mapping every voice in the buying committee](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreekers_weekly-retro-building-champion-back-at-it-activity-7443407464449978369-pcqA)
- [Turning a Midwest location into a strategic advantage — and category creation as a theme](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreekers_tim-schigel-said-something-a-while-back-that-activity-7496257145303130113-XceO)
- [A lighter retro on an onsite week, team culture, and a running joke](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreekers_compromise-is-the-shared-hypotenuse-of-success-activity-7511854974960562176-3Z9T)

## Brand relationships

- **Champion** (owned_business)
- **Salesforce** (mention)
- **Refinery Ventures** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

Jeff Reekers’s posts focus on building Champion, a customer-marketing and advocacy company, and cover customer champions, go-to-market strategy, team-building, and the Midwest startup scene—not brand collaborations. They mention no sponsorship, paid-partnership, or media-kit offering, so there’s no published format, rate, audience package, or deliverable to assess for a campaign. Discuss any partnership directly rather than assuming one from the posts. Their subject-matter expertise in advocacy, proof, and customer champions may suit a B2B SaaS talk or advisory engagement.

## Alternatives

- Gianna Scorsone: Choose Scorsone when the client wants a programme it will still be running a year after the talk, not a single stage slot arguing why customer proof matters. Scorsone writes about building the machinery: eleven years in a revenue-operations role, programmes for doing more business inside an existing account, a layer letting regional account owners swap success stories so a customer reference actually gets used, and following a departed contact to a new employer to open a door. For a customer-marketing team that already believes champions matter but has no repeatable process for finding and deploying them, that account-level programme design is closer to the real work than a keynote on proof. Scorsone also documents losing a deal to a buyer who went to a competitor, and turning that loss into playbooks for customer marketers, lifecycle marketers, revenue operations, and chief marketing and revenue officers, which suits a client that wants the unglamorous version of how advocacy programmes get built.
- Nayaja Lewis: Choose Lewis when the room is front-line sellers and first-line sales managers rather than customer-marketing leadership, and the session needs to move people as well as inform them. Lewis's deal post makes one argument cleanly: deals are rarely won in the room where the pitch happens, so the job is not to convince the champion but to arm them with the business case, the ROI, customer success stories and prepared answers to the objections that are coming. That fits a sales kickoff or enablement session where the ask is a specific field behaviour rather than a market argument. The reviewed set also includes a first-person post about a hard morning, a teammate's note, and the difference between a dashboard and what people carry, giving a client a second, culture-facing theme to pair with the craft session if the internal audience is a sales team under pressure.
- Aleksandra D.: Choose Aleksandra D. when the client wants a method its own team will run after the session, or when the budget sits with learning and development or people operations rather than sales. The posts walk through a decision guide for whether a problem is a good candidate for an AI proof of concept, testing tool gap, process bottleneck, process gap, skill gap, motivation, communications breakdown and product issue in turn. They then build a business case with actual arithmetic: thirty minutes of manager preparation before each one-to-one, twice a month across a team of eight, eight hours a month, and what is recovered if that drops by a third. A company that wants its staff to repeat the exercise on its own problem gets a tested, step-by-step scaffold instead of an argument, and the public series makes the reasoning easy to inspect before committing.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/