Earlier this month, we sat down with Jeff Reekers, the Co-Founder and CEO of Champion, to learn more about his career arc. Jeff zoomed in from Minneapolis, where he lives after a previous stint in New York. Prior to launching Champion, Jeff helped build out the go-to-market engine as the unofficial “US cofounder” at Aircall, where he experienced firsthand the transformative power of customer champions. Today, his company systematizes that same customer advocacy, helping B2B organizations harness authentic relationships to cut through the noise.

We spoke with Jeff about the origins of Champion, the challenges of overcoming buyer skepticism in the age of generative AI, and why the Midwest offers a distinct edge for building a generational tech company.

Preston DeGarmo (PD): Let’s start with the inception of Champion. Was there a specific eureka moment that brought the idea to life, or was it a gradual realization?

Jeff Reekers (JR): It was a mixture of both. I knew I wanted to build an enterprise AI company for marketers and go-to-market professionals, people like my peers. But the real “aha” moment came from my experience growing and scaling Aircall in the North American market.

When we were first starting to build the U.S. presence for the company, one of our major early logos was a New York City-based e-commerce brand. The buyer at that account became our ultimate champion. Not only did he sign one of our largest deals, but he also introduced us to countless other direct-to-consumer companies in his network. He would literally come over to our office and help us close deals.

Four and a half years later, Aircall was past $100 million in revenue, and my final marketing activation at the company was a webinar with that very same buyer. He was still driving seven-figure revenue impact for us half a decade later, but the sobering reality was that with all our new hires, almost no one at the company knew who he was or what he had contributed. At scale, a business should ideally have hundreds of those advocates. Instead, organizational silos form: customer success protects the relationship, or product wants them for beta tests, or marketing wants them for webinars or case studies, and you end up either locking away your most strategic growth asset or burning those advocates out.

So Champion was founded to systematically identify, orchestrate, and activate those champions.

PD: You’ve built an impressive founding team alongside Gianna and Courtney. How did this team assemble, and how do your strengths mesh?

JR: We are almost a perfect triangle. Gianna and I worked together for years at Aircall, where she was GM of North America. She is our revenue leader and has an incredible ability to build sales, operations, and holistic company culture. Courtney came out of Salesforce and is a phenomenal engineering leader. She brings the discipline required to build enterprise-grade software from day one, which gives us immediate credibility when selling into Fortune 500 accounts.

Where I fit in is setting the long-term vision and strategy, looking past current customer workflows to define what human-led GTM looks like in a changing technological landscape. We share common foundational values around human-centricity and the kind of company we want to build, but our operational skill sets are entirely distinct.

PD: You’re based in Minneapolis, and your engineering core is in Indianapolis, with GTM anchored in NYC. How does building across the Midwest shape your brand identity and operating discipline compared to coastal startups?

JR: It starts with the brand. If you look at Champion’s colors, we are primarily black and purple. That’s no accident. It’s an explicit nod to Prince and Purple Rain. We actually have an internal question we ask: “If Prince were going to buy enterprise software, would he buy Champion?” I like to believe he would.

More holistically, the Midwest has become a major strategic advantage for us. On the talent side, our engineering team is entirely based in Indianapolis under Courtney’s leadership. Unlike the Bay Area, where startups compete constantly with the next shiny object, we have had 100% retention on our engineering team since day one. We aren’t cycling through people who leave and come back; we are compounding institutional knowledge and engineering velocity.

Second, enterprise sales requires facetime with customers. From Minneapolis, I can fly to almost any major market for a working session or an executive dinner and be home in time for dinner. That central proximity lets us travel efficiently to build relationships and close deals without spending days trekking coast to coast. Finally, the support from Midwest-focused investors like Armory and the regional tech community provides a collaborative ecosystem that you rarely find elsewhere.

PD: Inboxes are overflowing with AI outbound and slop. How is that noise shaping buyer skepticism, and how does Champion help enterprise sellers break through?

JR: Enterprise trust was already fragile. Review platforms like G2 were increasingly gamed, with virtually everyone sitting at a 4.5-star rating. Generative AI simply amplified that dynamic by lowering the barrier to mass outreach, flooding buyers with high-volume, low-authenticity messaging.

When noise increases, buyers construct higher barriers. Recently, one of our customers was in the final procurement stages of a deal when a competitor live-coded a handful of prototype features on Lovable over the weekend and demoed them as though they were in production. Our customer saved the deal by bringing in an actual human champion, someone who had used that competing product, migrated away, and could speak directly to its true capabilities.

That is why we view Champion as something like the CAPTCHA for the AI age of enterprise buying. Just as CAPTCHA verified human users in the internet era, an authentic, validated champion is the only proof point strong enough to verify a vendor in an AI-saturated market.

PD: Historically, customer advocacy often felt like a chore, the obligatory $25 gift card in exchange for a favor. How do you convince skeptical revenue leaders that this is a core driver of ROI?

JR: It starts with moving away from an extraction mindset. You cannot view advocacy as: “I need something from you, so here is a $25 gift card.” That doesn’t build a sustainable relationship. Genuine advocacy requires two things: highly personalized human recognition and dual-value opportunities.

When our champions help us, we recognize them personally. For example, when a champion recently completed several reference calls for us, we arranged a date night for him and his partner at a local brewery they love, complete with a booked babysitter. That goes a little further than an Amazon gift card.

Enterprise leaders also participate because of the peer network. When two executives connect on a reference call, both gain strategic value from the relationship. For the CRO, the skepticism vanishes once you attach hard attribution to the motion. Champion automates the tracking of deal velocity, win rates, and expansion influenced by specific advocates. We have enterprise customers attributing tens of millions of dollars in ARR directly to their champion networks. When advocacy produces clear ROI data rather than soft marketing metrics, it shifts from an afterthought into a core revenue driver.

PD: What’s one product you yourself would strongly champion? Tech or otherwise?

JR: Warby Parker. I was 72 hours away from flying to Paris for a board meeting and realized my new glasses hadn’t shipped (I had accidentally stepped on my old pair). I started panicking, thinking I wouldn’t be able to read my slides, and I called support, stressed out of my mind. They immediately rushed an overnight order to me. When I got back from my trip, they had proactively shipped me a second backup pair for free. They turned a highly stressful situation into an experience that made me a customer for life.

PD: One book you’d strongly recommend to other founders?

JR: The River of Doubt by Candice Millard. It’s the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s expedition down an unmapped river in the Amazon. It’s a harrowing tale about what comes out of people during incredibly taxing times. It feels very applicable to the startup experience, reading about doing hard things while doing hard things!

PD: Favorite restaurant in Minneapolis?

JR: Diane’s Place. It’s a phenomenal Hmong-American restaurant. If you’re ever visiting, I’ll take you there for breakfast or lunch. It’s amazing.

PD: If you were exiled from the tech industry for life, what would you do?

JR: When I first moved to New York, there was a quirky shop in Greenwich Village dedicated entirely to The Big Lebowski. If I couldn’t work in tech, I’d open a highly niche, in-person retail outlet like that. I love the idea of an automatic community qualifier. If someone walks through the doors of that store, you instantly know they share your passion.