The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

The sales book is a subgenre of the business book that offers guidance on achieving sales success. While business books can concern various areas of management and administration, sales books are specific to the issues, trends, and solutions relevant to frontline sales personnel and sales managers. Hence, they usually concern seller-customer behaviors, the art of persuasion, pitch guides, and general sales techniques. Popular examples of sales books include SPIN Selling (1988) by Neil Rackham, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012) by Daniel H. Pink, and Little Red Book of Selling (2004) by Jeffrey Gitomer.

Superficially, Dixon and Adamson’s The Challenger Sale is not different from many other sales books. It presents many of its research-driven insights in step-by-step process guides, enumerating techniques like Teaching Conversations in great detail. Case studies concretize some of these insights with the intention of validating them beyond the realm of conceptual or theoretical discovery. Finally, the book contains elaborate assessment tools and question guides in its appendices.

What the authors claim sets The Challenger Sale apart is its departure from conventional sales wisdom. The notion that customers are the center of every business relationship means that suppliers are usually in the position of reacting to their needs to sustain their business. Regardless of their sales representatives’ individual selling style, managers direct their teams to prioritize building strong relationships with their clients. They further encourage their teams to investigate customer issues and to ensure that their solutions can assuage customer discomfort.

The Challenger Sale suggests that practically all of this wisdom is faulty in practice. Where books like Brian Tracy’s The Art of Closing the Sale (2007) stress the need for establishing trust early on, The Challenger Sale indicates that tension is statistically more effective in sustaining a business partnership. This emphasis on The Rewards of Embracing Discomfort extends to the book’s framing: The authors acknowledge that many of the book’s insights feel counterintuitive, despite the fact that much of it is supported by the data uncovered in a global study. The apparent paradox involves changes in buying and selling behaviors caused by the emergence of the “solution selling” model, which the authors discuss in the book’s opening chapters; this model, they suggest, has fundamentally changed sales in a way that makes much received wisdom useless. The novelty of the book’s takeaways also reflect its grounding in research profiling sales representative behaviors, which no sales book had ever done before on the scale that the SEC achieved.