the most important takeaways from the challenger sale book

Customers quickly learn that a Challenger can be a veritable fount of profitable insights. Challengers consistently teach customers new and valuable information about how they can improve their businesses. Challengers know when to push back on a customer request.Īnd these 3 abilities reinforce each other.

And they do all these things while maintaining constructive tension with the customer. (Also of note, the more complex the sale became, the worse the Relationship Builders did.)ĭixon and Adamson identify a Challenger based on 3 abilities: they teach for differentiation, they tailor for resonance, and they take control of the sale. Additionally, the research uncovered that the more complex the sale became, the better the Challengers did. These results came as quite a surprise for anyone expecting their Relationship Builders to lead their star performers (and the company overall) to victory. Hard Workers, Reactive Problem Solvers, and Relationship Builders came in at 17%, 12%, and 7%, respectively. Lone Wolves made up 25% of the star performers. While the distribution of core performers was approximately the same across the profiles (i.e., an average sales agent was equally likely to be categorized as any of the five profiles), 39% of the star performers were Challengers. Star performers were defined as the sales reps in the top 20% of their team (as measured by performance against goal).

Their research separated star performers from core performers. Using factor analysis on their data, Dixon and Adamson were able to identify 5 distinct salesperson profiles: the Challenger, the Hard Worker, the Lone Wolf, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Relationship Builder. The authors argue that this evolution in selling requires a similar evolution in sales training. Generally, companies have moved from selling single products in discrete transactions to focusing on selling broader consultative “bundles” of products and services that competitors cannot easily replicate. Over the last few decades, solutions selling has become more popular. Rather, they had traits that made them more likely to succeed in a complex sales model (also known as “solutions selling” or “solutions approach”). CEB learned that these agents did not have a magic formula for selling during a downturn. The sales research is based on a sample of 6,000 respondents from 90 companies (which is a substantial sample size for sales research).Įxecutives found that during this difficult selling environment (in which B2B sales seemed to stop entirely), there were sales agents who were still selling well. CEB began their sales research in early 2009 to determine how companies could weather the Great Recession. Before I get to the pricing takeaways, let’s set the stage.

The most important takeaways from the challenger sale book