I have just finished reading “The Challenger Sale” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. There is a fair amount of hype around this book and while there is a heap of excellent content and food for thought within, the cynical part of me surmises that it’s possibly primarily designed to sell CEB's Sales & Service consultative offerings. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; that’s clever marketing!
I’m not a huge fan of prescriptive sales methodology. “Open up with this statement; lead the client to the punch line; show this slide now and that slide then and hey-presto, you’ll double your closure rate, guaranteed!” For me, sales should be more intuitive than that, customers just aren’t that easily manipulated. For this reason I approach most sales teachings with a healthy scepticism.
While there was a little of that in the book, it didn’t prescribe to the notion that simply improving a sales rep’s script and sending them out with a new set of presentation slides would somehow turn them into a selling superstar. If you’re hoping for that sort of a quick fix, this book isn’t for you.
I won’t go into what “The Challenger Model” is as far as trying to describe the nature of the model and the stats behind the research. The book does a pretty good job of outlining that in detail, including case studies demonstrating how companies have introduced the model and are making it work for them.
Instead I’ll try and frame some of the messages in the book, because the real gold nuggets for me were not so much about “The Model” itself, but in some of the more high level concepts that the book contained.
The Challenger Sale advocates examining the sales process through a company-wide angle lens. It encourages companies to dig into their collective knowledge and collate insights that can add value to their customers, over and above the price tag and a feature/benefit analysis of their product.
It stresses the need for sales and marketing teams to work together. Rather than seeing their roles as disparate, sales and marketing should be intertwined and focused on the mining and delivery of insight to their customer base.
During those meetings that are aimed at closing a deal, there is immense power in a sales rep’s ability to deliver information – something that challenges a customer’s pre-conceived ideas about their business or their industry – but the weight of the insight should be driven at an organisational level, not simply left up to the rep to discover and disseminate.
The book outlines a set of behaviours that CEB’s research shows to be necessary for effective sales. It highlights the fact that without constructive, ongoing and personalised coaching, sales reps are often left to their own devices and results can be unpredictable, or worse, completely predictable.
Over and above training for skills and knowledge, coaching for the right behaviours is an essential ingredient. (It could be said that coaching for the right behaviours should extend far deeper into a company than simply at the sales-training level).
The other essential ingredient is innovation; looking at a sale with a view to doing things in new ways and taking the time to really prepare, research and understand the sale and the prospect, so that empirical innovation can occur.
The authors challenge companies to have a close look at their messaging. Is their marketing material full of buzzwords that focus on their company, their history, their solution, how unique they are? Does it talk about how customer focused they are, how innovative they are?
This book invites all marketing executives to revisit the material they are producing and ask two questions.
- Why should customers buy from us over our competition?
- What truly makes us different from everyone else?
“Ironically, the more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same. The utter sameness of language…we simply end up sounding like everyone else.”
I don’t agree with a one size fits all, prescriptive model for sales success, nor do I think this book is advocating it, although the hype around the book in some ways makes out that's what this is.
To me, it's moreover promoting the concept of an organisational push to better understand core competencies and competitive advantage and then arming everyone with the tools necessary to deliver that message to the customer.
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