The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“As suppliers seek to sell ever bigger, more complex, disruptive, and expensive ‘solutions,’ B2B customers are naturally buying with greater care and reluctance than ever before, dramatically rewriting the purchasing playbook in the process. As a result, traditional, time-tested sales techniques no longer work the way they used to.”

Here, Dixon and Adamson discuss the dilemma around the solution selling model, which involves its increasing complexity. When the authors declare traditional sales techniques obsolete, they invoke The Evolving Nature of Business and Its Methods as one of the book’s central themes.

“As a result, in the world of complex solutions, supplier success is often measured by the performance of the customer’s business, not the supplier’s products.”

Dixon and Adamson cite increased risk aversion as one of the issues that arises from solution selling, noting that customers are more eager than ever to see a return on their investment. Since suppliers offer “solutions” to their customers’ business issues, Dixon and Adamson comment upon the irony that suppliers are no longer evaluated by their ability to deliver a product or service.

“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.”

Dixon and Adamson use tone to implore business leaders to respond to the evolving nature of business by adopting new tools. They express their plea with a sense of urgency by spelling out the dire consequence businesses will suffer should they fail to evolve. As they go on to argue, emotion is a key part of successful sales pitches, So it is one the authors themselves deploy.

“The world of solution selling is almost definitionally about a disruptive sale. It’s not that you’re asking customers to buy your product and put it up on the shelf with all of the other products they’ve bought. Rather, you’re asking customers to change their behavior—to stop acting in one way and start acting in another.”

This passage asks the reader to reframe their understanding of the sales pitch and its objective. Conventionally, one might have seen sales as a means of dispensing services and products with beneficial features. In solution selling, however, the objective is to fundamentally change a customer’s sense of the way their business operates. The process of reframing that this passage exemplifies is itself part of the Challenger sales technique.

“If you’re on the journey to more of a value-based or solutions-oriented sales approach, then your ability to challenge customers is absolutely vital for your success going forward.”

Where people might assume that an organization’s success depends on its place in the economy, Dixon and Adamson propose that it actually depends on the organization’s ability to anticipate and challenge the customer’s business vision. This view of business pegs the idea of value to usefulness rather than cost to produce or monetary worth, which becomes a crucial point of contention for Challengers as they take control of the sale.

“The act of delivering a teaching pitch is a skill, to be sure, but the content of a teaching pitch—the business issues you teach customers to value, the idea around which you reframe how the customer thinks about their business—must be scalable and repeatable, and as such, must be created by the organization (in most organizations, this is the job of marketing).”

This passage centers The Importance of Organizational Synergy as a theme, foreshadowing a later discussion on the parallel development of individual skills and organizational capability. Where most organizations place the burden of developing pitches on their sales team, Dixon and Adamson implore organizations to craft consistent messaging for the sales teams to draw from.

“Teaching is all about offering customers unique perspectives on their business and communicating those perspectives with passion and precision in a way that draws the customer into the conversation.”

Dixon and Adamson offer a radical revision of the sales pitch as a teaching conversation—another example of their use of the “reframing” technique. As they define “teaching,” they notably omit any mention of the supplier’s product, which affirms the notion that insight is the center of a solution-oriented sales pitch, not the product.

“In a time when consensus is more important than ever to get the deal done, it’s no surprise that the rep who wins in this environment is the one who can effectively tailor the message to a wide range of customer stakeholders in order to build that consensus.”

By discussing tailoring for resonance, the authors provide a direct solution for the emergence of the consensus-based sale. Although decision makers exist in each organization, their aversion to risk drives them to consult other stakeholders to share in decisions. Hence, the solution must be relevant not only to the decision makers, but to stakeholders as well.

“The Challenger rep doesn’t give in to the request for a 10 percent discount, but brings the conversation back to the overall solution—pushing for agreement on value, rather than price.”

This quote resonates with the earlier passage on usefulness as value. Challengers can take control of the sale because they understand how their solution uniquely meets the customer’s business needs. With this in mind, they can push back on customer requests and justify premium pricing.

“What if customers’ single greatest need—ironically—is to figure out exactly what they need?”

This passage lays out a key assumption regarding customer behavior. Although most sales representatives prefer to probe their customer to get a full picture of their business, Dixon and Adamson consider the possibility that business insights can reveal issues unknown to the customer. This frees the sales representative from the burden of probing.

“When you get down to it, 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.”

Dixon and Adamson advance the revision of the sales pitch as a teaching conversation by drawing an analogy between sales representatives and teachers. In the same way that teachers diagnose and address learning problems in their students, sales representatives should enter the sales pitch already knowing what issues prevent their customers from succeeding.

“Instead, what sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight—new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.”

In a solution-oriented selling model, Dixon and Adamson suggest that product quality should no longer act as the differentiating factor between companies. Instead, suppliers must inspire customers to adopt new organizational approaches that the supplier solution can support.

“The sweet spot of customer loyalty is outperforming your competitors on those things you’ve taught your customers are important.”

The ideal endpoint of the sales process is customer loyalty—the customer’s willingness to remain with the services of one supplier over all others. Notably, the authors indicate that loyalty is built into the Commercial Teaching mechanism. If the sales representative can convince the customer that their product uniquely addresses the customer’s business concerns, then the customer will always choose the supplier as the default option.

“Disruptive change is as much about following your gut as it is about following your head.”

Dixon and Adamson assert that teaching pitches are rational and emotional at the same time. No truly successful sales representative is either one or the other; an overly rational pitch runs the risk of boring the customer, while an overly emotional pitch tests the customer’s trust in the solution. Balancing both maintains credibility while also urging the customer to act.

“Your solution isn’t the subject of your teaching but the natural outgrowth of your teaching.”

This passage relays one of the key tenets of Commercial Teaching, which centers the pitch around the insight rather than the product. The insight should provoke customers, leading them to adopt the supplier’s solution by the end of the pitch.

“Customers will repay you with loyalty when you teach them something they value, not just sell them something they need.”

Once again highlighting customer loyalty, this passage distinguishes between insight and product. The latter, Dixon and Adamson suggest, may be essential to the customer’s business, but that alone will not earn the supplier customer loyalty. Instead, customers rely on suppliers when the supplier assumes an advisory role—one that presents the customer with immediate value in the form of insight.

“When a rep comes in not just with a sales pitch, but with a sense of what’s going on in that customer’s company and industry, you’ve got the beginnings of a tailored message.”

The first step to crafting a tailored message involves an awareness of the customer’s business concerns. The hard sales pitch will not immediately resonate with the customer. On the other hand, an understanding of what challenges the customer’s organization faces from competitors, as well as what issues currently impact its ability to cater to a market, already engages with the customer’s day-to-day thinking.

“There is a natural human tendency—one that reps have to overcome—to want closure in uncomfortable situations. Succumbing to this tendency is one that absolutely kills the average rep.”

Dixon and Adamson consider The Rewards of Embracing Discomfort, noting that people generally prefer to remain in their comfort zone. Because Challengers are set apart by their ability to constructively leverage tension, however, sales representatives must learn to welcome uncomfortable situations to reach success.

“Training is good for sharing knowledge. Coaching is about acting upon it.”

This passage introduces a crucial distinction between teaching and coaching, especially as the latter falls within the sales manager’s purview. Teaching imparts the conceptual knowledge that informs a skillset, while coaching enables the sales representative to actualize the skill. Sales managers catalyze Challenger attributes in their team by modeling, reinforcing, and correcting behaviors.

“If they’re going to grow revenue in today’s environment, driving efficiency around the known must give way—in part at least—to an ability to collaboratively innovate around the unknown.”

In another passage that hints at the rewards of embracing discomfort, Dixon and Adamson point out that organizations cannot grow if they continue to improve on well-established competencies. Instead, organizations must develop capabilities within their competency gaps, opening the door to new markets and revenues.

“If you truly want to build a ‘customer-centric’ organization, then you’re actually going to have to build an insight-centric organization—a commercial enterprise specifically designed to generate new-to-the world insights that teach customers to think differently not about your products and solutions, but about their business.”

Harkening to the importance of organizational synergy, Dixon and Adamson suggest that it isn’t enough for organizations to turn their sales teams into drivers of insight. Organizations must also transform to value insight generation over direct customer conversion to sustain sales performance.

“The trick is not to describe your differences, but to make customers value them.”

Dixon and Adamson share the secret to differentiating one’s product from that of other suppliers. Ironically, it doesn’t involve direct differentiation, but Commercial Teaching—persuading the customer to believe that one’s product is the only solution that meets their overlooked business needs.

“High performers share a common code—they are always eager to understand how they can improve their own performance.”

Regardless of one’s sales profile, the willingness to improve is the common denominator among all high performers. In some ways, this constitutes a secret fourth attribute to the Challenger Selling Model; the model itself remains dynamic, seeking improvements to its execution, as well as to the insights that drive it, in order to remain sustainable.