What people don’t get about ‘The Challenger Sale’
It was 2011 when Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon published ‘The Challenger Sale’, a book that revolutionized the sales methodologies world: I read it for the first time when I was 25, 2 years ago.
The book is considered one of the most influential in sales and, as every strong change, the methodology created both fan and opponents: it also contains useful suggestions about how sales managers can improve their coaching, sales training and overall customer loyalty.
What I like of ‘The Challenger Sale’ is that this sale methodology is based on the creation of Economic Value: starting from an insight on the buyer’s industry, the seller challenges the buyer taking control of the conversation, teaching something new by building constructive tension.
This constructive tension is crucial for the buyer to understand what’s going on in his area of business, which things should be improved and what the impact of the improvements will be.
Most of ‘The Challenger Sale’ detractors argue that a challenger approach may damage a buyer-seller relationship: in their view, no one wants to be told what’s wrong in their business.
In my opinion, they don’t consider that in this hypercompetitive business world an insight shows interest, professionalism and that ‘you’ve done your homework’.
It helps for the price negotiations, that most often turn into discount negotiations if you’re not able to build value during the whole sale.
It gives confidence and allows a sales rep to teach something new to a buyer, creating value since the early sale by precious insights, ideas and advices.
This creation of insights and ideas turn out as a real advantage in today’s business world: a recent RAIN Group research shows that 75% of the purchases are strategic and only 14% of buyers discovers opportunities from salespeople, rather than from other people and personal research.
It means that buyers are looking for ideas, but only a few sellers bring them forward.
Naturally, it’s not so easy to find a challenger salesperson: not so many people have commercial acumen and confidence to teach something new, create value and drive the conversation since the beginning.
But the benefits of this methodology are several and they’re related to its deductive nature: thanks to the insight based on the customer’s industry, the buyer and the seller identify the problem moving from the general to the particular.
And this methodology contains an ugly truth too: it teaches you that a relationship is the consequence of a sale, not the starting point for it.
