The Challenger Sale

Watch Brent present on The Challenger Sale at Thomson Reuters.

Watch Matt present on
The Challenger Sale.

See Brent at Dreamforce 2011.

Authors

Matthew Dixon

Matthew Dixon is a managing director with Corporate Executive Board’s sales and marketing practice. In this capacity, he has management responsibility for several CEB membership programs, including the Sales Executive Council, Sales Leadership Roundtable and Customer Contact Council, which together serve more than 1,000 sales and customer service organizations globally.

During his time at CEB, Matt has overseen dozens of original quantitative and qualitative research studies of customer service and sales and has presented to hundreds of senior executives and management teams around the world, including those of many Fortune 500 companies, on issues ranging from customer service strategy to sales productivity. In addition to The Challenger Sale, his work has been published in the Harvard Business Review (“Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” July-August 2010). He is also a frequent contributor on sales and customer service topics on the Harvard Business Review’s blog as well as both the Sales Executive Council blog and Customer Contact Council blog.

Matt holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh where he did research on multinational sourcing and technology transfer in the aerospace industry. As part of his research, Matt conducted field research in Japan, China and South Korea. Matt completed his undergraduate work at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he graduated summa cum laude. He currently resides outside Washington, DC in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife and four children. In his spare time, he enjoys training for and competing in triathlons.

Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a managing director of Executive Advisory Services for Corporate Executive Board’s Sales Executive Council. In that role, he serves as the Council’s chief story teller, having worked on numerous sales and marketing studies broadly spanning everything from customer loyalty to sales rep performance to organizational productivity.

With more than 20 years of experience as a professional researcher, teacher, trainer, and facilitator, Brent learned long ago that even the world’s best research only drives action when wrapped in a compelling story. Well known for both his passion and excitement for great ideas, Brent is a sought after speaker and facilitator. In his nearly 10 years at CEB he has worked with tens of thousands of sales leaders all over the world in meetings, seminars, workshops, and retreats, to redefine what good looks like when it comes to commercial excellence. He has been privileged to work with some of the greatest thought leaders in B2B sales and marketing to further the professionalization of sales as a function. Brent is a frequent contributor on sales topics on the Harvard Business Review’s blog as well as the Sales Executive Council blog.

Brent joined CEB from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, where he received his MBA with distinction. Prior to that, he served on the faculty of Michigan State University as a Professor of German and Applied Linguistics. In addition to his MBA, Brent holds a BA with distinction in political science from the University of Michigan along with MAs in political science and German, and a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Texas. Brent currently resides in Leesburg, Virginia with his wife and two daughters.

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Test Your Challenger Skills Build a Challenger Sales Force

The Challenger Sale is giving my team a great track for extending a sales strategy we initated four years ago. The timing was perfect and it's one of the best most relevant approaches or perspectives ever developed. It validates my impression that you are the best in the business at doing timely, relevant research and extracting the implications for Sales and Marketing."

Tim Treu
SVP Sales, O.C. Tanner Co.
Groundbreaking, timely and disciplined research – presented in a way that is both intuitive and completely actionable – it has already impacted our organization by creating a customer lens that impacted our sales recruiting, hiring, training and deployment."

Jeff Connor
Senior Vice President & Chief Growth Officer, ARAMARK Global Food, Hospitality and Facility Services
The Challenger Sale shows you how to maintain control of the complex sale. The output of this superbly researched body of work is that you will know how to better differentiate your organization, your offering, and yourself in the mind of the customer."

Adrian Norton
VP of Sales, Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals
This is a must-read book for every sales professional. The authors' groundbreaking research explains how the rules for selling have changed—and what to do about it. If you don't want to be left behind, don't miss this innovative book providing the new playbook for selling success.”

Ken Revenaugh
VP, Sales Operations for Oakwood Temporary Housing
The amazing thing is that the Challenger sales rep has been hiding in plain sight all these years. The Challenger Sale breaks the winning elements of this powerful approach into a set of teachable skills that can take even a top sales team to a new level of results delivery in the post-financial crisis era."

Dan James
Former Chief Sales Officer, E.I. DuPont
The most important advance in selling for many years.”

Neil Rackham
Author of SPIN Selling
There is a healthy dose of constructive tension throughout this brilliant book. Tension that will bring insight and clarity into how customers buy today and how your sales team must sell. If you are seeking to raise the bar in your organization—The Challenger Sale is a must read.”

Tom Meek
Vice President Sales Henkel Adhesives Technologies
After reading this book sales leaders will have a roadmap for creating a sales culture that will differentiate them from the competition. The approach is reproducible and scalable.”

Tyrone Edwards
Former SVP Sales and US Commercial Operations, Merck
Dixon and Adamson offer here an absolutely stunning whack on the side of the head to any sales leader who is perplexed and paralyzed about how to get their whole team performing in the never-been-so-tough world of complex, B2B sales. It’s a must read. That’s M-U-S-T.”

Dave Stein
CEO & Founder, ES Research Group, Inc.

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Principal Contributors

Karen Freeman
Karen led the research team during the Challenger Sale work, helping the team interpret the quantitative results and connect them to best practices. She has taken her leadership and research skills and has applied it to support heads of marketing and contact centers.

Todd Burner
Todd Burner served as the project manager on the Challenger Sale work, leading a team of analysts as they conducted quantitative and qualitative research into the profile of the high performing sales rep. His efforts helped surface the best practice examples of how companies can effectively build Challengers in their organizations.

Timur Hicyilmaz
Timur Hicyilmaz spends most of his time figuring out analytically what works and what doesn’t – which included his quantitative analysis leading to the Challenger Sale work. He has spent the last 10 years building studies for Corporate Executive Board’s sales and marketing practice.