The Challenger Sale (Book Synopsis)

The Challenger Sale (2011) asserts that there are five behavioral categories of B2B sales reps. The "challenger" category of rep does the best and the "relationship builder" type of rep does the worst. The book examines the challenger rep in great detail and often compares and contrasts that with the relationship builder rep.

Context

The foreward to the book lays out three breakthroughs in sales since the early 1900's. The foreward's author, Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling (1988), claims to have ushered in the Third Breakthrough. The foreword posits that The Challenger Sale could be the Fourth Breakthrough.

The economic recession of 2009 overlapped with the research and the writing of this book. The recession helped shine a light on the star performers, since one can argue that sales are harder to come by in a downturn.

Goal

The goal is: how to make core performers better, more like star performers--and right now. The steps to this goal are teachable and scalable within a company and do not depend on inherent traits.

In any company's sales org, there are low performers, core performers, and star performers. The book ignores low performers, for those reps cannot be helped. The book does not investigate why star performers are star performers, for those reps might be born that way. What the book does commit to is: understanding the difference between star performers and core performers in a company.

Key Research Findings

There are five types of sales reps:

* Challenger

* Relationship Builder

* The Lone Wolf

* The Hard Worker

* Reactive Problem Solver

There is one clear winner: the challenger; while there is one clear loser: the relationship builder. The challenger teaches the stakeholder, tailors the message to the stakeholder's role, and takes control of the sale; in contrast, the relationship builder gets along with others, is likable, and is generous with their time.

Challenger reps are the solution selling rep, not just a down economy rep; they excel in complex sales across longer sales cycles. However, in simpler product-driven sales with shorter sales cycles, Challenger reps are overkill; the Hard Worker reps are good enough to be stars; this is for when call volume is more important than call quality.

The Challenger Selling Model

If you teach without tailoring, you come off as irrelevant. If you tailor without teaching, you risk sounding like every other supplier. If you take control but offer no value, you risk being simply annoying.

The model depends on the organization as much as does an individual rep. The content of the teaching pitch should come from a central place (i.e. the marketing dept) in order to offer the sales dept a scalable and repeatable model. Also, it guarantees that reps won’t sell solutions that the company cannot deliver. The organization should provide business intelligence and research which can help reps tailor their messages. It should also identify which teaching messages will resonate with which stakeholder.

Teaching for Differentiation

The challenger does not ask the customer what they need, but rather tells them. The challenger is not an investigator but rather a teacher. Great questions aren’t enough; you have to have great insights. The best indicator of a successful reframe is not a customer’s excited agreement but rather thoughtful reflection.

Commercial Teaching: the single biggest incremental opportunity to drive growth isn’t in the products and services you sell, but in the quality of the insight you deliver as part of the sale itself. For the pitch, figure out your solution’s unique benefits and how to reframe the customer’s view toward to value those unique benefits.

Tailoring for Resonance

Tailoring is the second defining attribute for Challenger reps. Due to more complex solutions being sold to customers nowadays, consensus buying has emerged. Senior executives and procurement officers prefer widespread support for a supplier across the organization. Challenger reps tailor their stakeholder interactions based on the role of the stakeholder.

Taking Control of the Sale

A challenger rep is confident and resistant to requests for free discounts. With commercial teaching, the rep has built for the customer a burning platform for which the rep's company is the only solution. It is not confidence or dependence on being number one on the market, which the rep's company may not be.

Challengers create momentum. They push for next steps at the end of a meeting. They maintain a sense of urgency and tension. Challengers push for expanded access into an org from the first meeting or so.

When a challenger rep's first contact at a company is a junior employee, the rep asks for expanded access. If denied, the rep cuts off contact with that company and moves on to the next opportunity. On the other hand, a core rep would continue to try to engage the junior employee and fail to make the sale. Sometimes a company already knows which supplier they are going to choose and thus assigns a junior employee to talk to sales reps at other suppliers to appear as if there is a proper vetting process.

In the beginning stage of the sales process, core performers map out who the key stakeholders are; in contrast, challengers map out the who, what, and why of the key stakeholders.

The buying process can be complicated for customers. Core performers learn and react; they let the customer lead the buying process. On the other hand, challengers simplify; they steer the customer how to buy; they teach the customer how to buy, which takes us back to the concept of commercial teaching.

Pre-call planning is important for a rep to be able to be assertive on a sales call. There is a trademarked template “SSN” that is a small set of structured elements to plan for in a sales call where pricing may be discussed.

Summary

The Challenger Sale (2011) lays out a teachable and scalable methodology, backed by research, which can help core performing sales reps be more like star reps.

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