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The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

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Description

What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio; 5655th edition (November 10, 2011)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 58


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.28 x 0.86 x 9.29 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #6,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #22 in Sales & Selling (Books) #46 in Business Processes & Infrastructure


#22 in Sales & Selling (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Strong research and important sales insights
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2011 by J. F. Malcolm
    • Important insights for marketing
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2011 by John Gibbs
    • Well worth the time to read and internalize
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014 by Chris Maginn
    • Great book
Half way through, love it
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2024 by Sam

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