The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation - Book

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seminal: strongly influencing later developments.

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The Challenger Sale, what exactly does this mean?

It means approaching sales differently than you might've in the past.

• Rather than being apologetic about trying to sell to the customer, you'll own the conversation.
• Rather than following a similar sales pitch, you'll approach each prospect differently.

As a Challenger, you'll have an in-depth understanding of your prospect's business and their struggles. You can then push back at the right moment to drive them toward making a decision.

While the hero is Challenger, Adamson and Dixon don't just talk about them in the book. They also cover four other types of sales reps.

The Five Types of Sales Reps Though all sales rep profiles have distinct qualities, these categories aren’t mutually exclusive. The authors clarify that you can exhibit qualities of all types or have them in any combination.

The five types of sales reps follow.

The Challenger:

• Understand what brings them value and leverage that information to deliver an irresistible pitch.
• Customized approach to each prospect’s unique problems.
• Find ways to tactfully pressure them.

Remember the three T’s:

• Teach something valuable
• Tailor the sales pitch
• Take control of the conversation

In the study, Adamson and Dixon found that:

• 40% of high sales performers used the Challenger style.
• High performers were over 2x more likely to use a Challenger approach over any other approach.
• More than 50% of all-star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales.
• Only 7% of top performers took a relationship-building approach — the worst-performing profile.

The Hard Worker strives to improve their role but doesn’t necessarily focus on the customer’s value drivers. They’re strict towards work processes and meeting their sales goals.

The Lone Wolf is a high performer but not a team player. Confident in their selling skills, they exceed quotas but are difficult to deal with interpersonally. They don’t like collaborating, but that makes them more creative and resourceful.

The Relationship Builder, patient, emotionally intelligent, and willing to go the extra mile to connect and form bonds with gatekeepers at their target company. They then slowly try to create an internal advocate.

The Problem Solver is adept at finding solutions for issues in both the team and the prospect’s business. They can look into complex problems and identify solutions while keeping all stakeholders in the loop.

These profiles determine how a salesperson interacts with prospects and closes deals.

Challenging is about organizational capability, not just an individual rep's skills.

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/challenger-sale-summary

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The Challenger Sale model: How to lead the conversation

Reps have taken the prospect’s problem, reframed it, gained their trust and offered up a solution to solve it. The only thing left for reps to do is fill in the blank and show their prospect that they have that exact solution.

If reps follow all the steps in the process correctly, this final step should be painless and quick, because with challenger sales, the sales rep is already leading the conversation from the beginning. How they introduce your product will depend on what you’re selling. If your company is a SaaS product, reps might offer their prospects a demo. If you are a web development agency, reps may provide a detailed walkthrough of what working with your company would look like.

Sales processes are becoming more complex and prospects are doing more research on their own before they make contact with a sales rep, this is where the Challenger sales model and methodology comes in handy.

Sales leaders and sales organizations must try to find ways to get ahead. When tackling complex sales cycles, research has proven that the Challenger sales model helps sales teams close deals and come out on top. By taking a prospect on a rollercoaster and teaching them that the solution they thought was best may not be so, sales reps can take control of the selling process.

The result? A prospect’s thought process is stripped back, and they are taught something new. If done right, your product can go from one of many options to the only plausible solution in solving their problem.

https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/challenger-sales-model

Many sales strategies would lead you to believe that building relationships with prospects is an integral part of the sales process. However, the authors of “The Challenger Sale”, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, have different ideas, which they explain through their challenger sales model. The authors say that when it comes to top-performing sales reps, building relationships is the least effective strategy in closing sales. Instead, they argue that sales reps who take control of a sale and teach their prospects how to solve their problem are more successful than sales people who spend long amounts of time building a relationship with their lead.

Research from Gartner highlights a growing trend in the customer buying journey. Gartner’s research found that when considering a purchase, B2B buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. Instead, they’re spending 27% of their time researching independently online.

This tells us that prospects are coming into a selling environment with preconceived ideas about what features they want and how much they’re willing to pay.

It’s in this environment where the Challenger sales model shines. The prospects aren’t as interested in being told about the product features and benefits, as they already know about them from their own research. Buyers are inundated with and have access to high-quality information readily available on the internet. Because of this power, most prospects already know what's out there.

Yet, rather than feeling confident in their purchase path forward, buyers are becoming overwhelmed by the seemingly endless good choices and need help making a decision. If they reach out to a sales rep, they are most interested in their purchase experience and the answer to ‘why’ they should buy, rather than ‘what’ they should buy.

So, is the Challenger sales methodology the answer to these new buying behaviors?

The Challenger profile allows reps to build up to a sale by creating constructive tension. Challengers intentionally dispute their customer’s way of thinking and force them to contemplate a new perspective. This creates some slight tension in the form of a casual debate. By encouraging their customers to consider new opportunities, the Challenger sales rep can begin to offer an alternative way forward.

The Challenger sales method relies on delivering insight about an unknown problem or opportunity in the customer’s business that the supplier is uniquely positioned to solve.

It captures a prospect’s assumptions or beliefs, pinpoints flaws or untruths in them, and then makes room for a sales rep to offer a better solution.

"Challengers aren’t so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers. They win not by understanding their customers’ world as well as the customers know it themselves, but by actually knowing their customers’ world better than their customers know it themselves, teaching them what they don’t know but should.”

Customers now have more access to information than ever before. A quick search online can uncover endless details on a product and customers’ experiences with it.

As a result, customers are delaying contact with salespeople while they do their own research, and by the time they’re speaking to you or your sales team, they already have a pretty clear idea of what they want, and what you offer.

It’s in this complex sales process where businesses can use the Challenger sales model to their advantage. Studies have found that the Challenger sale approach is the best solution to complex sales conditions. While other methods stagnate, the Challenger methodology is a winning sales formula when it comes to complex selling.

“Challengers are most effective at selling in the complex world of buying today and tomorrow because they take control of the purchase conversation in a way that leads customers back to the unique strengths of their organization." -Gartner

PRO Offers the customer a unique perspective on a product that other sales methods struggle to accomplish. Has a solid understanding of the customer's value drivers. Can identify the economic drivers of the customer's business and opens the doors to discussing budget comfortably.

Sales Reps Perspective Reps should first evaluate their prospect’s needs and background, and then decide if the Challenger sales methodology is the right fit. Reps must start to think like teachers, instead of relationship builders.

https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/challenger-sales-model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvQNm5VD9E0

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Sense Making

Since the inception of our groundbreaking Challenger™ sales research more than a decade ago, we have argued that to sell complex, large-scale B2B solutions, sales people must adapt to new B2B buying behavior.

What the Sense Making Approach does differently — and why it matters

The Challenger Sale is all about challenging customers and disrupting their current thinking to teach them something new. Sense Making is about building customers’ self-confidence by:

Connecting customers to carefully curated, helpful information Clarifying information by explaining, simplifying and clarifying apparent inconsistencies Collaborating on customer learning through Socratic guidance The response from B2B customers? More confidence and less skepticism, with sales reps seen as less pushy and self-serving.

Three critical questions about the Challenger Sale versus Sense Making approaches Both research initiatives stemmed from the need to identify best practices in B2B sales in a complex environment. In particular, we sought to answer three main questions:

1. What sets the best sales reps apart in a complex sales environment?
2. How do you replicate winning sales behaviors?
3. How do you create a differentiated sales experience?

How does Sense Making differ from the Challenger Sale approach? In practice, Challenger Sale and Sense Making operate independently:

Challenger Sale is based on a supplier-out view. It captures how the best sales reps explain what makes their offerings distinctive and powerfully share their capabilities with the customer.

Sense Making is based on a market-in view from the customer’s perspective. With Sense Making, sellers essentially adopt the customer’s position so they can jointly look out at the market, noting the variety of good — if conflicting — information and possibilities, and admit the scenarios may seem like a mess.

Is the Challenger methodology still effective? Challenger, while more than a decade old, is still highly effective. However, just as products and solutions face increasing commoditization, we are also seeing “good-enough” credible information crowd out even the best sales messages.

We advocate for having a sharp sales message — at best, a true commercial insight. But that’s increasingly necessary and not nearly as sufficient as it once was.

"80% of the sellers who used the Sense Making approach closed high-quality deals (premium-priced, large-scope solutions) that buyers didn’t later regret"

https://www.gartner.com/en/sales-service/insights/challenger-sale