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DownloadHow do you make your voice heard in a world of complex deals and risk-averse customers? How can you maintain control to ultimately win customer loyalty and drive sales growth?
Contrary to traditional wisdom that places emphasis on nurturing relationships, Adamson and Dixon reveal the winning skills and behaviors behind The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.
Read this book to unlock the clear-cut strategies that build Challenger behaviors across the entire sales force and make them a part of your organizational DNA.
In 2009, When Business-To-Business Sales Leaders Were Facing The Harshest Sales Environment In Decades, Some Sales Reps Were Closing Near-Impossible Deals. To Understand What Was Happening, Ceb Inc Launched An Extensive Study Surveying Sales Managers From 90 Companies And Over 6000 Sales Reps Across Geographies And Industries. The Research Insights That Emerged On What Sets The Best-Performing Sales Reps Apart Were Completely Counterintuitive, Shattering Existing Industry Wisdom. This Book Documents The Key Insights And Strategies Necessary To Succeed In Today'S Complex Sales Environment.
Questions and answers
Solution Selling is the shift from single product transactions to creating bundled-offerings based on consulting. This was driven by suppliers seeking to escape being commoditized by making it harder for competitors to replicate their offerings. However, to reduce complexity and risk, customers increasingly seek consensus across the team, shift risk to suppliers, demand greater customizations and hire consultants to navigate complex deals.
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This means three things for Suppliers:
The results from the CES study showed that certain rep characteristics tend to occur together in five distinctive groups. These describe the five most common sales rep profiles found in the real world.
CEB's research showed that while core performers were evenly distributed, challengers dominated among star performers accounting for nearly 40%. In complex sales, challengers account for nearly 50% of star performers. In the world of Solution Selling, which demands that reps execute complex sales, Challengers is crucial to the success of a sales force.
Questions and answers
Challengers are defined by their ability to use constructive tension to do three things - teach customers to compete more effectively, tailor for resonance for every stakeholder and take control of the overall sale process. With the right tools, coaching, and incentives, most reps can be trained to act more like Challengers. However, creating Challengers is as much about organizational capability as it is about equipping reps to behave differently.
Questions and answers
Skill 1: teach for differentiation
A CEB survey of 5000 client stakeholders shows that a massive 53% of customer loyalty depends on the sales experience. Customers place the greatest value on actionable insights given by suppliers that help them identify new ways to penetrate markets, reduce risks and increase revenue. Challengers fit perfectly as they understand customer challenges better than customers themselves and teach them new approaches to key business needs.
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Four rules of commercial teaching:
Commercial Teaching is teaching customers something valuable about their business in a way that reliably leads to wins for the supplier organization. There are four rules to commercial teaching:
Six steps to world-class commercial teaching
Commercial teaching relies strongly on building a powerful narrative using both the rational and emotional dimensions to nudge customers into making decisions.
Create your organization's teaching script
The heart of the Commercial Teaching pitch is "What's currently costing our customers more money than they realize, that only we can help fix?". A Commercial Teaching message can only be developed from Step 6 - building consensus across the organization on the unique value proposition the supplier offers. From this, a core insight that creates customer value has to be identified to form The Reframe in Step 2. Then it's a matter of creating connections between Steps 2 and 6.
Questions and answers
The organization prescopes the customer requirements by relying on market segmentation and customer analysis. The conversation is prescripted from the hypotheses to the solution. The actual solution to be proposed is predefined, by creating a set of solutions that are tailored to common needs of customers.
Skill 2: tailor for resonance
The art of consensus building
CEB's research shows that the top concern for decision makers was consensus across their organization. The route to closing a deal is by nurturing stakeholders across the organization. Data shows the support necessary to build consensus can be achieved by teaching insights about their business to end users.
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The new sales flow
In the traditional model, reps pull information from stakeholders to pitch to senior management. The focus is on the connection between the rep and the decision maker. In the challenger model, the link between stakeholders and the rep is strong, with the rep teaching stakeholders. The relationship between stakeholders and the decision maker is used to build consensus and close the deal.
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Tailoring to stakeholders
This model means that reps have to talk to more stakeholders than before. An ideal way to tailor messages is to begin at the industry level and drill down to the company and the individual person's role. Challenger reps tailor to individual stakeholders based on customer outcomes - their value drivers, economic drivers and how they fit into the larger business. These customer outcomes are predictable, finite, stable and scalable.
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What good looks like: the Solae story
Solae, a manufacturer of soy-based food ingredients aimed to sell complex solutions to expand beyond its traditional applications. This dramatically increased the number of stakeholders involved making life difficult for reps. To address this, Solae documented what each stakeholder cared about in the form of Customer Outcomes Cards. These contained demographic information, high level decision criteria, metrics monitored, key concerns and potential value areas. The tool shows reps the stakeholders important for a solution and their most important high-level outcomes. It also offers suggestions on connecting Solae's solution to each stakeholder's goals. With this a rep can talk to a stakeholder in their language about the outcomes they care about.
Questions and answers
During the sale Solae uses a template to document customer buy-in. This documents the specific outcome the solution offers to each stakeholder, their objections and measures to handle the same. This information is determined through conversations and mapped with the tool. Most reps get stakeholders to sign off on the template. Finally, during the discussion with a decision-maker, the document is presented as proof of consensus across the entire organization. Solae's approach treats every stakeholder as the customer.
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Skill 3: take control of the sale
Taking control of the sale boils down to two things: the ability to maintain momentum across the sales process and comfort with discussing money. The ability to push back on discounts comes from the confidence based on having created value by teaching the customer something they did not know before. Challengers take control by teaching the customer the process of buying a complex solution and coaching the customer on who needs to be involved.
Questions and answers
They push the customer to look at new ideas about their commercial challenges. Even when there is customer pushback, the challenger holds firm with insights and data. This is important because the solutions to be sold depend on the customer accepting the insights. The Challenger pushes the customer, but with respect and firmness not aggression.
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The misplaced fear of aggression
The fear that encouraging reps to be assertive will make them aggressive is misplaced. The reps usually tend to be passive because they believe that power rests with the customer. A survey by BayGroup International shows that 75% reps believe procurement has more power, while 75% procurement officers believe reps have more power. Challengers know that there is always more room for negotiation. Another reason for passivity is because they underestimate the value of their company's technical and implementation expertise and overestimate customer objections. Taking control means recognizing the value brought to the customer, particularly in teaching them new insights. Finally, the increased managerial emphasis on being "customer-centric" makes reps think of giving them what they want.
Questions and answers
Take control the DuPont way
DuPont provides products and services sold across industries. To help reps take control during negotiations, DuPont gives them a template for prenegotiation planning. The template documents the "power positions" of the supplier including brand, pricing, product and relationships documenting relative areas of strength and weaknesses. This gives the rep a clear picture of the value provided by the supplier to approach the negotiation with confidence. It prepares them for questions they might face from customers, recognize supplier needs and understand where concessions can be made.
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Master keys to a successful negotiation
DuPont uses a four-step framework for maintaining constructive tension in a negotiation.
Sales managers are the crucial to the actual success in implementing the Challenger model. However, 63% of CEB members reported that their managers don't have the skills needed for the evolving sales model. Three high level factors mattered most in manager excellence: Selling Skills - 25%, Coaching - 28% and Sales Innovation – 29%. Sales innovation is the single biggest contributor to manager performance.
Questions and answers
Coaching for the known
Coaching has three key dimensions: 1) it's ongoing, 2) it's customized to the individual rep, and 3) the focus is on behaviors not only knowledge. It works best when its formal and highly structured. CES studies show good coaching can boost the performance of the median by almost 19%. Therefore, it makes more sense to focus coaching efforts towards the core group.
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Before you coach, pause
Hypothesis Based Coaching is designed to help managers make the "double jump" from product-selling to solution-selling and become experts in coaching others in these sales interactions. This uses a framework called PAUSE which stands for:
Drive sales innovation
Sales innovation is driven by three key activities: investigation, creation, and sharing. Investigating is working closely with the rep to identify what is preventing a deal from advancing. Creating solutions includes innovative mapping of supplier capabilities to meet customer challenges and creating cross-sale opportunities. Great managers share their innovation efforts to enable replication elsewhere.
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While coaching is improving performance on known behaviors, innovation is the ability to drive performance in unforeseen contexts. Data shows that coaching and sales innovation skills occur independently of each other. Supplier organizations are designed for efficiency in a world where effectiveness through innovation is far more valuable than efficiency.
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Insights for sales leaders:
Insights for marketing leaders:
Insights for senior management:
The Challenger Model does not stop with sales alone. Internal business customers are increasingly going beyond efficiency to demand insights on how to compete more effectively. Delivering compelling insights help expand influence and earn "a seat at the table" in critical strategy meetings. The Challenger model gives a way for internal teams to stand up and be taken seriously.
Questions and answers
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