The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

This book comes very highly touted, especially by Neil Rackham himself, who calls it "the most important advance in selling for many years."I personally don't think it reaches quite that level, but overall it is an excellent book, with provocative insights and useful information for salespeople looking for ways to break out of the pack. The key to a really good book is that it makes you say, "I never thought of that before," and to use that insight to improve your life in some way. Interestingly, that's also the key to a really good salesperson, as well. The book is based on extensive research by the Sales Executive Council into the attributes of successful sales professionals. They found that salespeople tend to cluster into five different types, based on their behaviors: Hard Workers, Challengers, Relationship Builders, Lone Wolves, and Reactive Problem Solvers. Research is great when it generates new and unexpected insights, and three are central to the book. Key insight #1: Salespeople matter--a lot! One of the surprising insights generated by their research was that the Sales Experience accounted for 53% of the contribution to customer loyalty, more than company and brand impact, product and service delivery, and value-to-price ratio combined! In other words, the latter three are just tickets to be able to play; how you sell is more important than what you sell. In complex solution sales, star performers outperform core performers by 200%, as opposed to 59% in transactional selling, so it's a critical insight. If how you sell is so important, the next critical insight is about what the most effective reps out of the 6,000 that they surveyed do differently. Key insight #2: They don't care how much you care until they know how much you know Of the five types, relationship builders are the least effective performers. The old saying, "They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care," is better said, "they don't care how much you care until they know how much you know." Relationships are important, but they are the result of successful selling and not the cause (as Rackham says in the Foreword). In other words, what customers value most today is a rep who teaches them something, who challenges their insights and their view of the world. These reps are the Challengers and they comprise the largest component of top performers. Unlike relationship builders who focus on resolving tension and keeping everyone happy, challengers like to produce constructive tension, because major sales are about creating change and change generally requires discomfort. The key is not in discovering the customer's needs and being able to express them, it's in being able to create the need that they didn't even have by getting them to look at their world in a way they had not before. As they say, if your customer's reaction to your pitch is, "That's exactly what's keeping me up at night. You really understand our needs", you've actually failed. What you want them to say is, "Huh, I never thought of it that way before." Of course, if you do this and then they go ahead and solve their problem with a cheaper competitor, all you've done is sold for someone else. So, the other critical piece is to answer the most important question: "Why should our customers buy from us over all competitors?" This question is surprisingly difficult for reps to answer, as I personally have observed in my own training classes. But, with enough thinking and refining, you can answer the question. The thought process then becomes: * What are our strengths? * How do those strengths give the customer the capability to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity they don't know they have? * What do we need to teach the customer so they will value that capability? As the book says, "The sweet spot of customer loyalty is outperforming your competitors on those things you've taught your customers are important." In order to achieve this sweet spot, Challengers do three things very well: teach, tailor, and take control. The middle section of the book explains how to build the teaching conversation, tailor your strengths to individual stakeholders, and take control of the sale. The teaching phase is the most expensive part of the book and appropriately enough, by far the most insightful and most innovative. Just this part of the book would make it worthwhile. Key insight #3: Focus on the core 60% The final two chapters focus on how to implement the approach in the sales organization. Here their most important insight is that the focus should be on equipping the 60% of the sales force who are core performers to be able to follow the Challenger Selling model. The top 20% won't need it, and the bottom 20% won't get it. The only quibble I have with The Challenger Sale is that many ideas which are relatively well-known already are treated as if they are startling new discoveries. I read some of the passages with the same irritation that Native Americans must feel when told Columbus "discovered" America. For example, they introduce the idea of tailoring your insight to the specific individual needs of the different stakeholders, which all good sales methodologies have incorporated for years. (In fairness, though, so many of these ideas that are common knowledge are still not common practice.) I would strongly recommend this book to sales executives, sales managers, and most of all, to sales professionals; I challenge you to read it and apply it.

The Challenger Sale (TCS) is an important book for sales professionals and sales managers involved in complex B2B sales as it proves that a number of commonly held beliefs about sales behavior are obsolete. Unlike many other "how-to-sell" books based on theories and ideas on improvingsales performance, TCS is underpinned by rich and extensive data from more than 20,000 member sales professionals from more than 100 member companies, gathered over the past four years. You are a Prospect for Challenger Sales Training I don't have a problem that TCS is produced by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) and that the CEB is a member organization providing for profit sales training for its members. They want to sell you Challenger Sales Development Services...in the same way every other author of sales performance literature wants to sell their services. It happens that we are very much aligned in our view of the sea-change that has occured in buyer behavior and the need for new approaches in engaging buyers. If you are selling complex software, enterprise hardware or services in a B2B environment and haven't read The Challenger Sale yet, then perhaps this article might convince you it's worth reading at least once...regardless of where you get your sales development services. Relationship Selling is Dead I and many of my peers were brought up in a World where, as a territory rep, our goal was to establish a relationship with the buyer, and over time, gain access to the organization to earn the opportunity to position our products/solutions. Through factor analysis of the data, TCS identifies the five distinct profiles or behavioral tendencies of sales people of which the relationship sales person has been the least successful in the past four years for both transactional and complex sales. Take-away: Today, when buyers have an abundance of information about vendors products and solutions at their fingertips, any salesperson that brings insight to the table that can create new opportunities for the buying organization can have a relationship based on that value. Buyers simply have no time or need of relationships with salespeople who do not create value. Challengers are Winners, Rain or Shine Based on an analysis of the data, in transactional selling, the star performers outperform the core by 59%. Hard Workers are the top producers in transactional selling. In complex B2B selling environments, the research indicates that star performers outperformed core performers by almost 200%. As the sale becomes more complex, the gap between the core and star performers widens dramatically...companies are becoming more dependent on fewer sales people to carry the day. It happens that Challengers were the only cohort to make their numbers in the downturn and today are the top performing behavior type by a wide margin. The 5 Sales Profiles The Challenger Lone Wolf Hard Worker Reactive Problem Solver Relationship Builder Challenger Behaviour Attributes From the 44 attributes in the survey, six of them were statistically significant in defining the Challenger rep: Offers the customer unique perspective Strong 2 way communication skills Knows customer value drivers Can identify economic drivers of customers business Is comfortable discussing money Can pressure the customer The exciting news is that with the right training, coaching and sales tools, even relationship builders can learn to take control of the customer conversation like a challenger. Challenger Selling is Journey The Challenger model is developed around the following pillars: Teaching for Differentiation Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control The authors point out that the Challenger Selling Model is simple in theory, but complex in practice and the book lays out the best-practices, tools and lessons learned in implementing the Challenger Selling Model. I recommend it highly. Bon Voyage! Resources Join The Challenger Sale Group on LinkedIn Visit the Challenger Sales Website View an excellent recent interview with the authors by Anthony Iannario (you may need to join the TCS group to view it) To read the full review with graphics and links, visit[...] The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

25 years of B2B sales and senior sales management in complex sales environments (along with tons of training and sales advice consumption reveals this: Yes, this book is a rehash. It is also packed with sage advice about really doing your research on you prospect instead of wasting valuable face time doing interrogation (Q and A) finding out information you should have known going in. Having a Point of View that is compelling and thought provoking is the most effective way of gaining attention and establishing credibility. "Leading to" and not "Leading with" is timeless, valuable sales advice. Sometimes in this book I did find myself rolling my eyes a bit at the oversell of a client's emotional reaction, but in the end it didn't take away from the excellent messaging. Oh, and yes......restating and repackaging a great idea in a new book just means that we get to "re remember" advice we've heard before...and that isn't a bad thing. Everyone who lives in a commercial selling environment (whether as a sales, C level, or marketing professional) should read this book, and in my case I have taken specific action using specific concepts articulated here to craft sales presentations for prospects.

The premise of this book is very simple, but very powerful. The most effective salespeople bring insights to customers, ones they had not thought of, that help them increase revenue, lower costs, or control risks. It is a very simple premise but powerful when you consider that most salespeople that I interact with either (a) push company credentials & product features, OR (b) spend lots of time figuring out what keeps me up at night even though what keeps me up is probably the same thing that keeps up everyone else in my role at other companies. I appreciated that the authors developed their findings through surveying, dynamic cluster analysis, and multiple regression. I would have appreciated a scientific appendix to show their approach, but I suspect I am in the minority among conventional readers in that desire. Academics would probably find some flaws (ex: I cannot recall the authors sharing the R^2 for their analysis which is important in justifying how predictive their model really is.) I'm giving the book 5 stars for the premise and the research which has unusually strong rigor for a mainstream business book. However, t was a very tedious read due to issues other readers have cited including: a. redundancy (mainly due to hierarchical narrative structure that revealed pretty much everything up front) b. way too many references to the authors' employer which made it feel like a commercial c. seemingly random treatment of topics covered in depth in other books (ex: various forms of decision making biases) Disclosure: I work for a major competitor to the company the authors work for. This review is my independent opinion.

Best book on sales I have read in a long time. The conventional wisdom is go in and ask what is your pain? That is a weak opening. You are taking instead of offering. In the Challenger sale they teach you to walk in and teach, for example people where you are usually struggle with this and this, is that would you find? You are giving something and it shows them you know what you are talking about. Nice!

These days, almost every new hire in sales is told to read "The Challenger Sale." It's a great book based off one of the largest studies ever done in sales. Problem is, when you're learning how to sell on the job with a giant quota hovering over your head ... you don't have any time to read. The Challenger Sale research revealed that every B2B sales rep falls into five different profiles. These profiles define the skills and behaviors sales reps use when interacting with customers. They also describe a rep’s natural mode of interacting with a prospect, and are not mutually exclusive – The “Challenger Approach” to sales most correlated with actual sales performance among high performers. ... hence the name of the book. In the study, they found that – 40% of high sales performers primarily used a Challenger style - as opposed to one of the other four sales styles the book identified. High performers were more than 2x likely to use a Challenger approach than any other approach. click to tweet More than 50% of all star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales. click to tweet Only 7% of top performers took a relationship-building approach – the worst performing profile. click to tweet We should note that the Challenger approach only worked better among high performers. Among average performers, all profiles were roughly as successful as one another. This is a disruptive finding, as most sales training and sales teams today are geared towards creating and encouraging the "Relationship Builder," the least effective of the five profiles.

The good news about The Challenger Sale is that Dixon and Adamson further the concept of consultative selling. Even better, in my estimation, is that the authors seemed to use some solid data on which to base their theories. I like some of their approach such as, “Lead to your solution not with your solution,” and “Differentiate yourself by showing your customer something new about their industry that they didn't know or provide them with a different view.” I believe the authors also get it right when they state, “In this world of dramatically changing customer buying behavior and rapidly diverging sales talent, your sales approach must evolve or you will be left behind.” However, they missed an opportunity to move complex sales to the next level. By complex sales, I mean to segregate commodity sales from the intangible products and services that require trust. And by the next level, I mean a salesperson who authentically has the customer’s best interest at heart and not just their own. The subtitle of this book is “Taking control of the customer conversation.” As though to inoculate themselves from criticism, the authors state that they know some people will interpret this statement as being “arrogant” while stating that it isn't. They also speak about “educating the customer” and recognize that the same interpretation may be made about that point as well. Indeed, this reader believes that the mindset of a salesperson who takes it upon themselves to control the conversation and educate the customer/client is absolutely being arrogant. The authors seem to give short shrift to the human capacity to sense when they are being talked down to or manipulated. While you may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, most customers will sense when they are being manipulated. Many consumers today are, for the most part, immune or at least becoming immune to advertising and sales tactics that are focused on achieving the salesperson’s goals. They are skeptical. They listen to their friends and associates and depend on organic search results (not paid results) when researching a purchase. Product, solution and consultative selling (which includes Challenger Sales) are all still focused on gaining the salesperson’s goal of selling a product. Yet, between all the self-serving tactics and training, this book does provide some nuggets of insight for the alert reader. The authors have defined two categories of sales people, core performers and high performers as well as five major “salesperson profiles”: The Hard Worker, The Challenger, The Relationship Builder, The Lone Wolf and The Reactive Problem Solver. In their research, the authors found that The Challenger was the person who continued to make sales quotas even through tough times like the 2008 recession. “The Challengers are the debaters on the team” and have a deep understanding of the customer’s industry. [Debate: to engage in argument by discussing opposing views.] They took control of the conversation, challenged the customer’s thinking and differentiated themselves by educated the customer on things about their industry/customers that were new to the customer. The Hard Workers are just that, they show up early, stay late and are persistent. The Relationship Builder is an unfortunate profile title. A better profile title would be “The Appeaser.” In this profile, the salesperson believes the relationship is the most important aspect of their job and will do nothing to jeopardize that customer relationship. They appease the customer at any cost – including the cost of losing a sale. The Lone Wolf is the prima donna of the salesforce. They do things their way, AND, they are high performers despite being difficult if not impossible to manage. The Reactive Problem Solver is focused like a laser on solving the customer’s problem. They will sacrifice spending time generating new sales as soon as an existing customer calls with an issue or new problem. According to the data presented by the authors, The Challengers are by far the best salespeople in terms of results with 39% of that profile in the “High Performer” category. The Lone Wolf (25%), Hard Worker (17%), Problem Solver (12%) and Relationship Builders (7%) profiles follow in order. A clearer and, in my opinion, better model for the “new” consumer driven market is that outlined by Patrick Lencione in his book Getting Naked and Charles Green in his book, Trust Based Selling. In both of those books, the authors make it clear that the proper mindset for sales is to authentically have the customer’s best interest at heart, not just the salesperson’s best interest. Any model that incites a mindset or intention that is designed to sell rather than to let the consumer buy will eventually be a roadblock to success. In my opinion, a closer reading of the data and parsing of the survey results will show that the so called Challenger Salesperson is someone who first builds a trusting relationship by demonstrating that they have the customer’s best interest at heart, not just their own, and then help their customer better serve the end customers. They earn the right to share insights rather than simply build credibility from a position authority. They share rather than sell, tell or educate. They listen more rather than debate. They recognize that by representing a specific company with a specific set of products and services that they are already suspected of having a self-serving and highly biased point of view. Anything they say is suspect the same way that paid results in a Google search are suspect. They work hard to gain trust to offset the natural skepticism. If we take the author’s research and survey results to the logical conclusion and combine that with how consumers are skeptical of large companies and “vested interests,” we would wind up with the best salespeople being independent consultants and manufacturer’s representatives rather than our own direct sales employees. Our products or services would be employed only by the customers who would truly be best served by using them as determined by someone who had nothing to gain by selling one manufacturer or consulting service over another. That is, presumably, how large complex ERP systems are sold – independent consultants and the customer review the large complex software offerings, determine the most suitable fit and the selection is made by the customer with only “arm’s length” influence by the software vendor. We would be forced to recognize that the “new customer” (i.e. the consulting firm) is as knowledgeable as or perhaps even more knowledgeable than we are. We would definitely change our approach to be more based on trust and competency. Words are important and will establish a mindset in those who are listening. The authors have chosen words that will create aggression rather than assertiveness, being didactic rather than sharing information and focusing on the salesperson rather than on the customer. It is unfortunate since the authors are exactly correct that “In this world of dramatically changing customer buying behavior and rapidly diverging sales talent, your sales approach must evolve or you will be left behind.” Sadly, their prescription will result in more of the same salesperson focused tactics. Ironically, if you want to sell more you have to stop selling. Instead, build trust, demonstrate competence, be dependable and always authentically have your customers best interest at heart, not just your own.

Everyone knows that the most successful type of sales rep is a relationship builder who gets along with everyone and is generous in giving time to help others. Unfortunately, everyone is wrong, according to Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in this book. When the Sales Executive Council conducted research to find the characteristics which distinguished the most successful sales people from the rest, the results were surprising. When the research data was analysed, the researchers found that sales reps could be classified into five different types according to their dominant characteristics: the hard worker, the challenger, the relationship builder, the lone wolf and the reactive problem solver. When selling simple items or services, there were high performing sales reps in all five categories, but when selling complex solutions the highest-performing reps were challengers and the lowest-performing were relationship builders. The book goes on to explain in depth the three key activities of a challenger - teaching, tailoring and taking control - and it explains that challengers are made, not born, so that any sales force can be trained according to the Challenger Selling Model. There are chapters on the three key activities, as well as a chapter on how a sales manager can coach for optimum success and another on building challenger organisations. The hardest part of becoming a challenger seems to be coming up with an insight which is valuable to customers and differentiates your organisation from your competitors. Once you have such an insight, it seems logical that a potential customer's degree of enthusiasm will be proportional to the perceived value of the insight. I am not fully convinced that research results are strong enough to show that every organisation should adopt the Challenger Sales Model espoused by the authors. For low-complexity selling, hard workers did better than challengers, and even for high-complexity sales there were numerous star performers who were not challengers. Nevertheless, in my opinion this is an outstanding book containing important insights which are likely to make it an important text for anyone involved in marketing.