The Challenger Sale
Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
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3.5 • 460 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.
The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.
Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.
The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.
Customer Reviews
The Why of Selling
The entire thesis of this book rests on one critical question. “Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?” The approach to answering that question has evolved a lot over time. Price, Service, and Quality being the commonly belabored responses. This book presents an entirely new approach that dispenses with the routine thinking and asks you to stop justifying your costs and start challenging your customer’s assumptions.
I believe the Challenger approach is the truest value based form of selling there is. I like to think of this methodology as Philosophically minded selling. It’s about bringing the “examined life” reflective thinking to the business world. Asking “why” at every discussion to get to the final cause and a more permanent solution. This approach is why I always ask people I interview what they are reading. I want to gauge their curiosity and intellectualism.
What sets this book apart is that it can get the reader to challenger mindset if they are not there already. The authors do a great job of detailing out a framework across the chapters that helps you get into this method of engagement. All of the recommendations and findings are backed by rigorous study and data. The challenger mindset goes beyond sales. I found it most valuable in my consulting days. The key benefit being that we shifted how we were perceived by the customer, from “order takers” to “trusted partners.”
Overrated, Unrealistic, Waste of Company Resources
Challenger...GO AWAY!
Superficial
Not that practical or realistic in what really drives succes.