By Nick Toman and Matt Dixon
As a research team, we’re both humbled and glad to see the huge amount of discourse about the Challenger research and what it says about the changing recipe for sales effectiveness. While not all of the commenters out there agree with our findings or our take on them, you know you’re doing something right when your work sparks debate among some of the biggest names in sales. This debate makes us all better and is ultimately necessary for moving the profession forward.
In the spirit of continuing this conversation, we wanted to flag a few of the misconceptions about Challenger that we’ve seen arise in various blog posts recently. This is the first in a short series of posts designed to address some of these.
The first misconception that we’ll focus on is that Challenger obviates the need for more “traditional” selling techniques. Such techniques include customer questioning, building relationships, and engaging in constructive dialogue with customers. For those who argue such techniques are still necessary, we are in complete agreement.
The idea of leading with insight—the core of a Challenger sales approach–is additive to these sales fundamentals. To be clear, leading with insights and challenging the customer perspective gains you access to the sales conversation – it doesn’t guarantee conversion. A lot of things still need to happen in a complex sale. But challenging the customer’s thinking positions a salesperson far more favorably, credibly, and with greater access than leading with questions alone.
Reflecting on our research methodology for a moment can help reconcile this point. Multivariate regression models highlight differentiators – the performance drivers that separate low from high performance. If nearly all salespeople exhibited a specific behavior, that behavior will not show up as a driver of higher sales performance. Since nearly all salespeople practice questioning techniques, they are unlikely to “pop” as a performance driver.
This doesn’t mean that the best reps in the world don’t rely on questioning approaches – they do. But it does suggest that they are doing something different to engage in a far meaningful commercial conversation, quickly distancing them from the competition. The data clearly indicate that challenging the customer’s thinking with unique insights is what differentiates star performers from their average-performing peers. Interviews that we’ve had with the world’s very best sales performers underscore this finding. These reps argue questioning is vital to a sale, particularly in later stages when it comes to customizing a supplier’s solution, but they also realize customers no longer have the patience or grant access to the “interrogator.” They must first earn the right to ask questions.
Let’s look at the role of questioning from the customer perspective – after all, they are the ultimate arbiter as to the effectiveness of this approach. A thorough examination of purchase and loyalty drivers we conducted across more than 5,000 B2B customers showed the most impactful drivers were (in order of impact):
- rep offers me unique perspectives
- rep helps me navigate alternative approaches for my business
- rep helps me avoid mistakes
- rep educates me on new issues and outcomes
These drivers clearly reflect the importance of sharing insight about the customer business.
Among the least impactful drivers from that analysis (in fact, these attributes are over 40% less effective than those listed above) were the following:
- rep understands my business
- rep can diagnose my needs
Customers know their business. They don’t expect reps to know their business as well they do. Nor do customers have the initial patience to “educate” a rep on the ins and outs of their business. Customers aren’t interested in validation of their preconceived notions through questioning, they’re interested in new ideas that can make them more effective. Answering questions is a privilege, not a right, and it’s one that the customer grants to the salesperson who has brought them new insights for improving their business—not reps who are searching for a way to potentially support the customer business. That distinction is critical.
Can insights be shared through smart questioning? Most certainly – just ask anyone well versed in Socratic reasoning. However, today’s customer no longer needs to be tolerant of rep questioning. They can simply hire a consultant—and in some cases, go online–to assess their needs and evaluate vendors. Today’s customer demands new insights on running their business, mitigating risk, generating growth, or reducing cost. In this respect, the salesperson’s biggest competitor today isn’t actually the competition at all—it’s the customer’s ability to learn on their own.
Irrespective of the tactic used to deliver insight, I think we can all agree that the customer must be shown that their current approach no longer works. Implicitly reps have to say “here’s what’s wrong with the status quo and here’s why you should try a new approach.”
The bottom line is this: In order to get the customer to think differently about you as a supplier, you must first get customers to think differently about themselves.
That’s our point of view. What’s yours?
on September 14, 2012
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Nick and Matt,
It’s good that you are responding to the “huge amount of discourse”
I want to comment on two points you make within this latest post: First of all, you state “Interviews that we’ve had with the world’s very best sales performers underscore this finding.” I am curious to learn how you know that having interviewed 0.0006% of the world’s sales population, that these really are “the world’s very best sales performers”
Secondly, I would take issue with your assertion that “reps” do not need to understand a client/customer/prospect’s business or industry: My experience is that they do not indeed have time to educate the seller, but they do expect us to have an intimate knowledge of their industry and sector. This is actually what differentiates top performers.
The ability to have meaningful dialogue, that is not always focused on making a sale, where the salesperson can share commercial and even competitive intelligence, elevates our role, and can often lead to us moving to “trusted advisor” status. I could argue that today that in successful selling, knowledge is not only power, it is THE power
Jonathan
on September 15, 2012
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Great clarification article; thank you for the added insight.
on September 17, 2012
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Jonathon,
Thanks for expressing the concern re the statistical validity of our data, as well as the general research approach we take. I thought it might be helpful if I outline a bit of our process, as well as provide a light primer on the types of multivariate regression, factor, and other cluster analyses we conduct.
Before we go there, let me quickly correct your second and third point. I also would suggest you re-review TCS in light of tailoring. Knowing the customer’s economic drivers and being able to articulate insights in light of those value drivers is fundamental to Challenger Selling. Teach, tailor, take control. Additionally, the entire premise of Challenger Selling, particularly teaching customers, is to have a conversation about improving the customer business, not just selling your products. So to that point, I agree. Now, onto your first point…
Several times over I have seen your posts claiming that the Challenger model is not valid since it accounts for a fractionally small percent of the universe of salespeople. I am happy to conduct a phone call with you personally and go deeper to ensure you understand our model, our approach, and other details. Should it prove helpful, we can even include folks on our quantitative analysis team. I would kindly (and with the utmost respect) please ask that refrain in your critique until you’ve had this opportunity. (Conversely, I’d ask that once you’ve had this opportunity you amend your comments across several webpages and forums since they are unfounded and misinformed).
While it is true that we have .00000X% of salespeople captured in our model, the way that any type of social or behavioral science is conducted, is to understand what a representative population to the broader universe thinks/does/perceives/demonstrates/etc. Our analysis is no different than the scientific experiments you rely upon, for example, for the prescriptions you take. Pharma companies cannot run experiments with all of the world’s population to ensure a drug is safe, so clinical trials are conducted. These trials represent a fractionally small, but representative population to ensure drugs are fit for consumption. Think of our analysis in a corollary fashion – only in terms of understanding what drives sales effectiveness.
When building such models, we do several things to ensure statistical validity (and make sure that our advice on the backend is sound, applicable, and justified):
1) Adequate controls. Control variables are added into any model to help ensure that the results are indeed applicable across a variety of scenarios. Among the extensive controls that we include in our models are geography, industry, sales cycle length, sales channels, territory size, organizational structure, etc. (this list is quite extensive and I won’t bore you with the details). These controls allow us the see if any outliers exist within the analysis. For example, this would help us determine if a particular driver of sales effectiveness was not applicable in Asia, or for highly transactional companies, or in key account channels, etc. Without such controls, there is no way to ensure validity or applicability, so these are paramount to our modeling efforts. These controls help us understand the “broader story” in the dataset, as well as account for the invariable marginal differences across geo/industry/channel/etc. The Challenger story, as told, is the universal truth we found which accounts for this control set. So in US manufacturing markets, for example, Challengers still teach, tailor, and take control just as they do in EMEA technology markets.
2) Adequate sample size. Folks outside statistical fields falsely believe there is “magical” number threshold that must be met for a data set to be valid. There are various confidence factors we look for in models to essentially tell us we have an affirmative pattern in the data (given the variety and complexity of these confidence factors, I won’t go into great detail). One of the more common confidence factors is a chi-squared test. I would encourage you to read about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson's_chi-squared_test – this will help explain what these confidence factors are. Remarkably, provided one has a decently representative data set, one can product quite high confidence factors in the data, and therefore have a statistically valid data set. Indeed, in our models, we started seeing clear patterns with an n of 600 sales reps. In fact, these pattern held true as we added upwards of 33x respondents to the dataset (and continue to add to that). With a data set representing north of 20,000 reps (again, representative of a global set, across industry, etc.), you can not only understand what is “crudishly” driving sales effectiveness, but get quite precise with the analysis.
3) Test a wide array of hypothesis and expected variables. The time, planning, thought, and collaboration with heads of sales and their teams that goes into a single survey we conduct is extensive. The reason is simple – we cannot test an infinitude of variables (as much as I’d often like to!). Sales reps and managers, like anyone, have a tolerance for survey length. Make it to too long and no one finishes. So we must be deliberate in what we test. We have ideas and hypothesis, and we need represent those with our in our variable set. We also must include variables that anyone with familiarity in sales would expect to see in model. No survey is comprehensive, but we try to be as comprehensive as one can with these surveys. Were there other variables we could have tested in that data set? You bet – and I would have loved to test more – but practically speaking, surveys over 20 minutes long are unlikely to yield a good number of completed surveys for doing the full analysis.
4) Analyze realistic performance differences. As mentioned in our blog (cited in my comment above), statistical analysis is derived from variability in populations – in this case sales reps. High performers do things differently – and we care a lot about what they do. But to analyze what they do, we need to contrast their approach with the “rest.” We would find lots of variability in the performance levels of low performers versus high performers – and we’d have a really interesting model as a result. However, expecting a sales organization to use that analysis to help make low performers (bottom 20%) into high performers (top 20%) isn’t realistic at all. We’d be doing a disservice to our clients if we conducted analysis that way. So we look at the differences in the core/average performing rep population (middle 40%) versus high performers. This gives us a reasonable proxy for driving incremental improvement into the sales force.
Beyond the quantitative analysis that has gone into this body of work, we have conducted extensive qualitative analysis. This comes in the form of hundreds of interviews with heads of sales, their operations teams, their L&D leaders, key directors, secondary managers, FLSMs, and most importantly their salespeople. I say most importantly since reps are without fail, the greatest source of qualitative data at our disposal.
We ask our clients – Heads of Sales – for their top performers over time. These are individuals who are continual President’s Club recipients, crush their quota year on year, and often serve as a key thought partner to the sales head. In other words, they are qualified.
Additionally, we interview average performers too. The contrast in average versus high performer perspective is very helpful and helps us string together our data analysis.
I hope this helps clarify.
Thanks for the continued dialogue!
NT
on September 18, 2012
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Hi Nick, I found the background on your research and that you shared on how Challenger arrived at some of its conclusions very illuminating. It did surprise me to learn that if all or nearly all salespeople exhibited a specific behavior such as questioning that that behavior did not show up as a driver of high performance.
Based on my many years of experience, including that with the new buyer in this current business environment, I would estimate that 99% of salespeople when asked if they probe for needs will say they do. And in fact that is true. But the issue is not every salesperson questions the same way or with the same portfolio of knowledge, depth, and skill.
By excluding questioning from the mix of what distinguishes high performers is it possible your research may have eliminated the substrate or underlying layer of what makes insight sharing so powerful with customers and helps salespeople earn the right to ask smart questions there and then?
That customers want ideas and insights is undisputable. My big concern is that the “tack used to deliver insights” makes a critical difference.. Leading with insight is essential today but to assume that the insight is relevant or meaningful to the customer or that the customer is ready to hear it”, before seeking feedback on the customer’s perspective, experience, challenges, and drivers and to delay asking questions until “later in the stages” is to ask salespeople to sell in the dark when the light is there for the asking.
The questions salespeople ask can no longer be the long list of time honored product need questions. Everything you say about the need to change questioning is on target. But working with salespeople and customers extensively we see the best way to leverage leading with insights is to create a tight fusion between insight sharing and smart questions in the early stages of sales conversations.
To answer to question posed by the Sales Executive Council, Does Challenger Undermine Questioning Skills? I truly regret to say relegating questions to later in the sale, segregating questions from what distinguishes high performers, under representing questioning in your important Challenger book, titling a recent article The End of the Solution Sale, and direct comments minimizing the need dialogue intentionally or not undermine questioning. And with that it can easily close down opportunities that are winnable.
The sales landscape has changed, continues to change as we speak, and all of our processes must continue to evolve if we are to provide the right guidance to sales organizations that look to and trust our answers. Nick, thank you for the open dialogue and for asking the question. Linda
on September 21, 2012
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Linda,
This is great open exchange. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary and dialogue. Apologies for the length of response, but I’ll offer a few thoughts…
First, our analysis did test questioning skills, as assessed by sales managers of reps. Your point that some questions are delivered more tactfully is a good one. Our assumption is that managers would have a strong directional sense as to whether a rep was good or not-so-good at questioning and discovery skills. I’m sure the Richardson definitions have lots of shades of grey that distinguish the best questioning from mediocre. Our survey didn’t have that level of sensitivity – we left that to manager discretion.
That being said, what our data did show is that questioning skills are not a performance differentiator. To the point of the above blog, they do play a role, but we didn’t find them to be a huge performance differentiator. Here are a few reasons why…
We agree on the role that insight plays in the sale, which is foundational to the new era of insight selling we are now in. As CEB has defined insight (this too is based on significant amount of research), this is an idea which upends customer thinking. This idea must run counter to what a customer understands – it must break their “mental model,” if you will. This is not simply an additive or new idea, but must displace their current thinking with a new idea. The ideal customer response to insight is “huh… never thought of it that way before… tell me more about what you mean.” Moreover, this specific insight MUST lead back to the supplier’s differentiator – the thing they can do better than anyone else. Indeed, insights are held to a high bar.
To convey such insight, which upends customer thinking and highlights a differentiator, through questioning is difficult (at best) since questioning implies that the customer already knows what they need. The customer must be aware enough to answer a question. (I will admit, there could be a roundabout way to lead the customer through a gauntlet of questions to help them realize “huh, never considered that….” I can’t help but be reminded of Plato’s Parmenides…yes, I’m a complete nerd . But that strikes me as awfully difficult approach to train, execute, and quickly get a customer to the proper realization that they need you.) Back to my point… You cannot easily get to an insight that 1) upends the customer thinking and 2) articulates how your solution is uniquely positioned to help take action on that insight. The insight must come directly from the supplier. Tell it like it is.
This is why we devote so much real estate in the Challenger Sale and in our work to discussing how critical it is to nail your unique differentiator, and surfacing (and backing up with data) unique/counterintuitive insights which introduce new problems or new opportunities that help the customer value your unique differentiators more than they currently do.
For instance, take the story from Grainger in our book. They taught customers to value their unique differentiators (more distribution/retail hubs, and more inventory in those hubs than any other MRO provider) by teaching customers they had an unplanned spend problem. Customers didn’t think about managing unplanned MRO spend – they just had a budgeted amount for emergency supplies. The thought that unplanned MRO spend could be strategically managed if the supplier was close by and had inventory for emergency purchases wasn’t a realization. Grainger had to teach customers that unplanned spend could be managed, and Grainger was best positioned to save customers millions by being the supplier of choice. Asking a customer questions (even great questions) would have never helped a customer make these connections.
That being said, we do think that questions play a terrific role in helping understand how insights are resonating with a customer, and moreover, helping surface information that can be used to increasingly tailor that insight to other stakeholders in the customer organization.
Also, it’s a fair observation that our book/HBR piece/blog posts, etc. send the message of “lead with insight, not questions.” I think the reality of the situation is more like “don’t just ask questions, lead with insight.” But, in the spirit of driving change and getting salespeople to engage in a new way of selling, we are creating dissonance with the old model, the question-based/discover-based model of selling. Our research, our views on conveying insights, and what we’re seeing generate significant sales impact, all suggests that questions have indeed taken a back seat to insights that challenge customer thinking. Questions help confirm, insights create opportunity.
We don’t want to suggest we’re link-baiting or shouting “fire!” in a crowded room here because we’re not. It’d be unfair to everyone (and certainly ourselves) if we were to make a big claim and then not back it up. We think we’ve backed up our claims with data, best practice examples, and results where companies are selling by leading with insight. We firmly believe this is the most effective way of selling to today’s information-rich customer.
Thanks again for the continued (and I suspect continuing) dialogue.
NT
on September 23, 2012
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LInda, Nick…great conversation…I enjoy reading respectful exchanges of viewpoints and counterpoints. Thank you.
on September 24, 2012
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Nick I agree with you that when a salesperson offers new insights, it’s unfair for the salesperson to ask the Buyer to answer questions about something new, when the Buyer has no frame of reference to draw their answer from.
Because I feel that presenting new insights requires inductive vs. deductive thinking, would you agree, Nick, that it’s best to first share a customer story before the salesperson engages in questions, because it allows the Buyer to form a vision of what their world could look like with this new insight? By allowing the Buyer to take this new insight out for a virtual test drive, wouldn’t they understand it from the inside out, and then be better able to provide context to their own situation when they answer the salesperson’s questions?
But Nick, what would you say about deductive insights? Could Granger be a deductive insight example, since they’d be asking their Buyers questions about something within the context of their current business? Couldn’t Granger’s salespeople just ask “How much are you spending on unplanned purchases?” “Do these purchases go through your purchasing department?” “Do these expenditures benefit from your contractual volume discounts?”
Sharing a story may be a softer quicker and easier to deliver; however, for an experienced superstar salesperson with high social intelligence, why couldn’t they just use questions?
on September 24, 2012
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Ok, Nick some really great points, but I wonder if conclusions are a bit spurious, only because of how questions were asked. Our research at least 10 data sets over 15 years with buyers in a specific narrow context consistently says planning, the solution, getting information and then giving it drive purchases by an agent in a choice situation where they must choose one vendor. Limitations to be be sure, how much does the situation drive the results and have we left some important things out. Now I don’t know if you asked about planning nor how you defined performance, but I am sure it is different than in our work. What I guess surprises me is how can one provide all that insight without understanding the business and needs; and how does one get to that point of understanding; one way is questionning, but planning and all the work that goes into that certainly helps. I don’t think there is any question that what you call providing insight and I have called over the years several different things is a key, but I would argue a bunch of things have to happen to make that work. In supply chain we look at buying, selling, moving people and goods that have to be coordinated across the chain, but overall it is communication that drives it all. So the bottom line in supply chain is coordinating communication and every day I see more and more emphasis on that. Unless that happens the other things do not or at least not very well.
SO 1. Is the model quite right?
2. Is there some mispecification going on here because not all the drivers were asked?
3. Would another methodology such as behavioral measurement provide some more insight?
Great discussion.
on September 24, 2012
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Michael – thanks for the thoughts and contribution. Love that this discussion has become so lively!
I would put yourself in the customer shoes in that instance… As mentioned to Linda, yes, I suppose you could get there through questions. But how tolerant would one have to be to 1) get the customer to articulate the current way of doing something, 2) arrive at why that is no longer a viable option, 3) arrive at a better way forward that exists, and 4) arrive at that better way as best supported by the person asking me these questions. This also means suffering through the variability of answers a customer might pose to the questions. There’s a lot of risk and implicit calculation in that approach. It’s hard. Not many can deductively lead a customer down that path. Is it possible? I suppose. Is it probable to effectively nail such a conversation? Unlikely.
At some level this conversation orients us to a deeper conversation around customer psychology. Presumably questions “help the customer arrive at their need” which is, again presumably, more empowering to a customer and therefore better for sales. We’ve tested customers at this level and the results have been clear – busy customer executives and other stakeholders want to know what they’re missing. Be it opportunity, costs, or other risk. Our data shows customers find little value in seller question.
In fact, analysis we conducted on stakeholders most able to drive a purchase decision showed that customers don’t care where good ideas come from… they just want good ideas. (Side note: these are the Mobilizers discussed in our HBR piece on the End of Solution Sales). Interestingly enough, these folks don’t tend to engage with salespeople. Salespeople better bring them a darn good idea or get out. While we haven’t tested Mobilizers vs questioning explicitly, I cannot imagine a scenario where a Mobilizer would sit through a questioning session so they could arrive at their own “insight.” A Climber (another stakeholder from our analysis, mostly concerned with self-promotion), yes, they’d love to be the stakeholder with the big idea. Extrapolating from the data, I would venture their tolerance for answering questions to be higher (we definitively know they are more likely to take a sales call compared to Mobilizers). But, as our research shows, this stakeholder fails at driving concensus for a purchase. Additionally, I suspect this pattern holds true for the Guide and Friend, two other stakeholders who love to chat with sellers, but fail at driving a purchase decision forward.
So in theory Michael, I agree. In practice, I tend not to… Questioning at the outset of a sale is a high beta activity with questionable impact… I’d take the low beta, high impact teaching approach any day. Questions will come later in the sale, and be far more welcomed by the customer at that point.
on September 24, 2012
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Thanks Nick, I agree, but I knew I’d like hearing your thoughtful perspective. Thank you.
on September 24, 2012
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Dick – As always, great questions! (We love it when academics join the session!). So first, I’ll answer the less contentious questions regarding performance… We analyzed performance against gap to goal. Essentially creating a distribution of low, core and high performers. To keep the modeling “realistic” and limit unnecessary variability into the model, we focused on what drove performance differences between core and high performers.
Second, on the point of offering insight without understanding the customer business… This is why we are so particular that insights must be created by the broader commercial organization. Developing insights cannot and should not be left to individual reps. They often do not have the broader perspective to know what’s happening in the customer market (what’s changing and why), what the conventional customer approach to those conditions are (i.e. the approach that the vast majority of customers believe is “right answer”), why that conventional customer approach can be wrong or misinformed, and how the customer should be thinking about that situation. Insights scale. They scale across segments, customers, product lines, sometimes even across all the solutions an enterprise offers its customers. Again, this is why developing insight is NOT a rep skill but rather an organizational capability.
Yes, insights are held to a high bar. But we have yet to encounter a company that doesn’t have great insights about their customers. They’re hard to ID and teach, but they’re there. Always are.
To also be clear on the creation of insights, reps can play a role in helping organizations arrive at good insights. They know the customer thinking well – often they are the best source of identifying “conventional wisdom” of how customers typically approach business problems. They are a great input to insight – they should not be the only input however.
As a rep, it’s not that they don’t need to know the customer business – they do. But they can engage a customer in a meaningful conversation about their business, even if they don’t initially have all the info because their insights are strong. Through conversation, they can learn more about the customer organization and increasingly tailor those insights for the next round of conversation. As I mentioned in the blog above, “But challenging the customer’s thinking positions a salesperson far more favorably, credibly, and with greater access than leading with questions alone.”
Insights earn you the right to dig deeper.
Regarding other drivers or analysis approaches, I do suspect they’d lend further understanding! Each study we run continues to shed more light on these major shifts we’re observing.
Thanks again for the considerations Dick.
on September 24, 2012
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Nick, great read and its great to see some new research come about.
Some thoughts that came to mind when talking about questions. I know Huthwaite and Neil Rackham spent a lot of time in their research in determining that not all questions carry the same weight or impact. They focused in particular in the impact of ‘Implication’ Questions and that these were key in generating the needs from customers that drove them into action.
I was wondering how you would categorize the types of questions being asked by the Challengers? I think this complements Huthwaite’s extensive research in this area that not all questions carry the same weight nor capture the attention of the customer.
on September 25, 2012
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Sean – thanks for sharing. Regarding the SPIN method, in particular, I think you raise a good point with the implication questions, particularly in light of the “tailoring” competency we see in Challengers. Business implications, role and individual implications all matter and will vary within each customer organization. Teaching isn’t done just once, particularly in today’s consensus-driven sale. Its done time and time again. The degree to which more relevant implications can be woven into the insight does matter.
SPIN is foundational work, no doubt, and we have tremendous respect for Neil Rackham and his work. As he explains in the Challenger Sale book forward, only a handful of major breakthroughs have occurred in sales, SPIN among the last generation, and Challenger among the current. Like Neil, we believe Challenger Selling, builds on the foundations of it’s predecessors.
on September 26, 2012
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Interesting debate. I like the Challenger Sales concept, but see it more of an extension and clarification of SPIN. At the moment I think you are underestimating the impact of questioning Nick. A couple of points:
I think you need to expand on Linda’s point that leading with insight without checked relevance or readiness is inherently dangerous. Perhaps you could look back at your data and let us know the success rate of the Challenger sale for the small number of sales people that were rated by their managers as not being great at questioning. I would expect that the Challenger who doesn’t ask good questions is likely to be shown the door very quickly. “Hey Mr Customer, before I sit down and ask you what’s important in your business at the moment, can I tell you you’re doing it wrong?”
It is my view that your description of the Challenger rep is actually the description of an expert questioner. I know that you dispute this – but you have excluded questioning technique as a variable based on an assumption (and it is a critical assumption) that the managers of the sales reps you included in the study are able to make a good assessment of their reps questioning technique. It would a methodology concern that I’m not sure whether this is always true, and I’m also not sure what the explicit or implicit motivations were for the sales managers you asked this question. For instance, there aren’t many sales managers who would willingly admit to managing a team of reps who are universally poor at questioning.
The Challenger you describe is a question expert that asks the right questions which tailor/hone down to real needs and then (needs pay-off here) reveal genuine benefits. The problem and implication questions from question experts will always be challenging – if they’re not, then they’re bad questions. And if they’re not revealing something new to the customer, they’re bad questions. Otherwise it’s just stating the obvious and the customer could solve it themselves.
So I think its great you’re helping clarify Rackham’s model and point to the requirement for better value assessment of questioning, but without building in a pre-requisite for good initial questioning into TCS model I think sales reps could be pushing insights alone, and that is potentially risky.
on September 26, 2012
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Allow me to also thank everyone for the terrific exchange of ideas here – I am also a senior researcher/advisor with CEB/SEC/SLR and therefore similarly biased :). But one point I think is missing in this exchange is far is acknowledgement that one of the key Challenger skills is “two way communication.”
Delivery mechanism of the insight aside, the data clearly shows that the best reps are collaborative and empathetic in how they lead with insight. It’s also a big part of the way they tailor and contexualize the insight. But I think Nick’s points above highlight our experience of leading with questions and the high risk associated with the strategy.
Moreover, there is a difference between questions that are designed to diagnose (old school solutions sales) and questions that seek to contexualize insight and identify downstream purchase objections (as being separate from value/need objections). Naturally, that type of collaborative, two-way discussion would happen after earning the right by getting the customer to think differently about their business.
on September 28, 2012
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While we can debate the nuances of conversation Nick, Matt and Simon and the Challenger Sale’s Team have presented quantitative and qualitative research that is changing the perceived “best practices” of sales, marketing and executives. It looks like the thousands who have bought The Challenger Sales book, the companies that buy Challenger research/ insights and the companies who are using Challenger methodologies and research might agree that “status quo” is no longer enough to compete.
It is interesting to note the Challenger critics imply that Challengers may not have an appropriate dialog with prospects and customers. The Challenger Sale’s book on page 47 lists the following attributes of a good Challenger Sales Representative:
1) Offers the customer a unique perspective
2) Has strong two communications skills
3) Helps navigate alternatives
4) Knows the individual customers value drivers
5) Educates me on new issues and outcomes
6) Helps me navigate potential land mines
7) Can identify economic drivers of the customers business
Based on these attributes it looks like a Challenger Sales Representative knows to have a two way conversation. Or am I missing something? Or have Challenger’s competitors not read the book?
The Challenger’s Sale’s best practices recommendation is to lead with insights with your prospects/customers based on research and evidence looks like a proactive and powerful way to lead conversations and discussions. Sure looks like common sense to me that this strategy can lead to better results for our clients and more productive sales meetings. I don’t have to ask The Wharton School to figure this out.
The research on the Challenger Sales Persona has provided invaluable information on how companies can better hire, train and retain effective sales professionals based on qualitative/quantitative research and studies backed up by case histories. What company would not want to have more productive sales reps? I can personally attest to this when I took a Challenger Sales Assessment that offered me valuable insights on how I can improve my sales strategies, assess my strengths/weaknesses and improve my conversations. As a result I am more confident, resourceful and more willing to have Challenger discussions/conversations with my clients that have led to higher sales productivity.
In a hyper competitive world insight, strategies, solutions to challenging problems and methodologies emphasized by the Challenger Team are needed now more than ever. As a sales professional provide me with best sales practices based on research. Leave the debate to the class room. I have clients and prospects to serve.
Challenger Team – special thanks for taking the lead in providing powerful insights and world class research you have provided in The Challenger Sale book and research to your member companies. Do not pay attenton to the naysayers and laggards. Keep attacking!