CHALLENGER SALE
'Challenger Sale' is a buzz word in sales these days, and refers to the bestselling book "The Challenger Sale" by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. Behind their recommended sales approach is research of 6,000+ salespeople and 90+ companies across different industries to determine the characteristics and approaches that successful sales reps take, and provide a roadmap for selling more effectively.
Contrary to what some might think, the challenger model does not reduce the necessity for a sales rep to know 'the fundamentals'. However, it is based upon the belief that conventional solution selling is no longer effective, and buyers are fed up with answering questions and probes from sales reps who deliver no value. Further, it suggests a sales approach where the sales reps teach their prospects something (new) about their business and how to think about commercial needs, and then tailor their pitch to resonate with customer concerns.
Finally, the Challenger model argues, based on research, that every B2B sales rep falls into five different profiles that define the skills and behaviors they use when interacting with customers. These profiles describe a rep’s natural mode of interacting with a prospect, and are not mutually exclusive
In the study the book is based on, what the authors call the “Challenger Approach” to sales is the one that’s most correlated with actual sales performance among high performers. In the study, they found that
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40% of high sales performers primarily used a Challenger style - as opposed to one of the other four sales styles the book identified.
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High performers were more than 2x likely to use a Challenger approach than any other approach.
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More than 50% of all star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales.
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Only 7% of top performers took a relationship building approach – the worst performing profile.
That last bullet point is a shock to many, and forces countless sales people and their managers to rethink their own professional behaviour and the way sales is executed.
If this made you think, talk to us about it.
Source: 'Signals' by HubSpot (Justin Mares)