The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Dixon and Adamson discuss the frontline sales manager’s role in affecting change at an organizational scale. One of the major hurdles companies face is that many managers lack the skills required to manage business transformations, much less succeed in their position.

The authors turn to the Sales Leadership Diagnostic, a behavioral survey the SEC conducted that determined the world-class manager profile based on key attributes. The SEC found that high-performing managers required fundamental skills such as reliability and integrity, that high-performing representatives were not necessarily high-performing managers, and that knowledge of a star manager profile could enable companies to execute the candidate selection process more effectively.

Star manager attributes fall under three umbrellas:

• “Selling” includes all the attributes that resonate with the sales representative experience, which becomes especially important when higher competencies are required to fill team gaps or close larger deals.
• “Coaching” refers to the capacity to correct and reinforce sales representative behavior, especially in terms of embodying the pillars of the Challenger Selling Model.
• “Owning,” which accounts for nearly half of the significant factors that drive sales management success, determines how much managers commit to their stake in the business, executing operations as though they owned the company. It also includes resource allocation and innovation as attribute subcategories.

Digging deeper into the subcategories under owning, Dixon and Adamson clarify that innovation is less about increasing business value with new capabilities than it is about critically drawing connections between the company’s existing value and the customer’s business environment. Innovative sales managers discover creative ways to overcome unanticipated obstacles in the sales process, working closely with representatives to execute dynamic plans. Hence, this attribute is the most significant aspect of the star manager profile, and the authors stress its role in actualizing the Challenger Selling Model.

Nevertheless, the other categories—in particular, coaching—also require greater understanding and management than is currently the norm to boost sales performance across the organization. Unlike training, which merely shares knowledge with individuals in a contained event, coaching requires ongoing, customized, and behavioral engagement. Effective coaching has little impact on weak and strong performers but significantly improves the performance of core representatives, which boosts employee retention and morale.

Dixon and Adamson advise managers to clearly know the performance standards the organization seeks from sales. To provide a model for coaching managers to follow, they examine a coaching template that outlines behavioral objectives for each stage of the sales process. They also note that while most managers do “spreadsheet coaching”—spotlighting outcomes like conversion rate (the number of leads that turn into customers)—they should instead focus on correcting and reinforcing behaviors.

The authors advise assuming that the present coaching results are less than desirable, making it necessary to seek and implement new solutions. They suggest using “Hypothesis-Based Coaching,” which undercuts several coaching issues by having a clear theory of how the representative can adopt helpful behaviors. The authors break down this approach through the “PAUSE framework,” a step-by-step coaching conversation that centers clarity, intentionality, and continuity as the drivers of behavioral change.

The text returns to the discussion of sales innovation, further breaking it down into three key activities:

• “Investigation” requires managers to learn the underlying causes of a failed sale, identifying the key players and what concerns prevented them from giving approval. In this activity, managers work together with representatives to map out challenges specific to a sale.
• “Creation” involves modifying the factors around a deal to circumvent issues and move the deal forward.
• “Sharing” the fruits of innovation means that managers can replicate their impact by equipping representatives with best practices, as well as the means to solve other challenges in the future.

The authors recall that among the key attributes affecting manager excellence, resource allocation has a weaker impact than selling, coaching, and sales innovation. While resource allocation prioritizes efficiency, the authors suggest that using innovation to become more effective has nearly two times as much impact on the organization. Efficiency centers the organization’s existing competencies and improves their capability to perform them; however, to drive improved results, sales teams should also engage with competency gaps.

The text acknowledges that managers may be naturally prejudiced against complex problems, leading to a mindset the authors call “narrowing thinking.” Prioritizing efficiency, managers try to come up with the best solution in the moment rather than seek alternatives that could create several solutions. Innovative managers exhibit the opposite mindset—“opening thinking”—which begins by raising awareness about the biases that prevent this kind of thinking.

The authors suggest several ways to shift from a narrow to an opening thinking mindset, from directly informing managers of these biases to asking reflective questions. The latter method encourages managers to set aside practicality and consider alternative perspectives, such as those of the stakeholders associated with the customer, by asking prompting questions. They introduce the SCAMMPERR Framework, an SEC tool that uses prompting questions to invigorate brainstorming and innovative thinking.