Similarly, marketers need to look at their content. When I talk with sales leaders, I often ask about their sales team’s level of business acumen. However, the type of relationship that buyers value is one that brings insight to the table. What can we learn from this? Are relationships important? Absolutely. Challenger Reps (and Marketers) Lead With Insight Reps and marketers also need to do their homework, learning about the prospect’s business and industry, so they can begin the conversation by bringing valuable insights to the table. Today, it’s not just the buyer that does homework online before the sales process.
“In the emerging model, it’s supplier-generated insight that is valuable to the customer.” “In the traditional model, it’s customer-generated intelligence that is valuable to the supplier.” As salespeople would go in and do discovery first to learn about their business. What is a Challenger? They are the debaters “They have a deep understanding of the customer’s business and use that understanding to push the customer’s thinking and teach them something new about how their company can compete more effectively.” This type of rep outperformed the relational sales rep by a huge margin. The most successful salespeople were the ones are Challengers. The research behind The Challenger Sale discovered the exact opposite. They are able to make friends and build trust.
When we think of successful salespeople, we typically think of reps that have great relational skills. That means we have established relationships of trust and value with multiple stakeholders. I’m not saying we don’t go to the top, but as we do, we better also bring along the rest of the buying team. What does this mean? We may need to rethink our approach to new deals. “The best way you sell more stuff over time isn’t by going directly to the person that signs the deal, but by approaching him or her indirectly through stakeholders able to establish more widespread support for your solution.” However, the research showed that what C-level decision-makers value is buy-in from their team. I was always taught to go straight for the C-Suite. Later in the book, Adamson and Dixon take a deep dive into how successful reps handle team buying teams. To be successful, salespeople, with the help of marketers, need to be able to identify and influence people with whom they may not even get a face-to-face (or Zoom) meeting. What does this mean? In Revenue Growth Engine, I talk about influencing buying teams. “Customers are looking for ways to reduce both the complexity and risk that suppliers’ solutions selling efforts have foisted upon them.” Why? Businesses, and individual decision-makers, have figured out that if a team makes a decision, there is less risk. Later research presented in The Challenger Customer revealed that there is an average of 6.7 decision-makers and influencers on a business buying team. Guess what? If you sell in the B2B space, you don’t sell to one person, you sell to a team. But the Challenger Sale highlights more key changes in how businesses buy. So, in the spirit of going beyond the worn-out “57%” number (and ensuing arguments between marketing and salespeople who vigorously deny this data), let’s look at some of the key takeaways from this amazing book. I believe that this book could aptly be titled, “The Challenger Marketer” because it offers just as much insight for marketing as it does for sales.
The Challenger Sales offers so much more than this. ) Not only is this data now almost 10 years old, it’s a no-brainer. (Read The End of Solution Sales published in the Harvard Business Review.
As marketing professionals, we all have been guilty of quoting one specific piece of data from the 2012 CEB research behind the Challenger Sale: Buyers are on average 57% through the process of making a buying decision before engaging a company or sales rep. “When we unlocked the mystery of high performance in a down econmy, the story turned out to be much bigger than anyone anticipated.”īefore I offer my favorite takeaways, I must offer some repentance. The way the book begins should get our attention:
Based on empirical research conducted at the end of the last recession, this book offers sage advice for business leaders seeking to navigate the questions of how to market and sell in the post-COVID economy. The Challenger Sale is one of these books. Some books are hard to summarize because they are jam-packed with ideas, insights, and practical applications.