The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Dixon and Adamson enumerate six concrete steps for assembling a compelling teaching pitch, which they compare to “purposeful choreography.” Ideally, pitches should feel like compelling stories more than formal presentations, eliciting feelings of drama and suspense to achieve the maximum effect. While data can support claims, a strong pitch must ultimately appeal to the emotional part of the customer’s brain, evoking negative feelings over lost opportunities.

To begin a teaching conversation, Challengers lay out what the authors refer to as “The Warmer” or “Hypothesis-Based Selling.” This step, which seeks to establish credibility, involves discussing challenges at similar companies that may resonate with the customer. Customers see that the Challenger has a hypothesis about what the customer’s present business needs are, which lightens the burden on the customer’s end.

The next step is to immediately shift the customer’s perspective of their business—“The Reframe.” Challengers synthesize the problems discussed in the previous step by identifying a troubling risk or looming opportunity that the customer hasn’t considered yet. Dixon and Adamson emphasize that the insight is something the Challenger has prepared ahead of the conversation and that the goal is to destabilize the customer with an unexpected take. They reiterate some of the various reactions that indicate whether the sales representative has taught the customer something new, noting that a simple articulation of known issues will diminish customers’ expectations.

Following this step, Challengers move to execute “Rational Drowning.” Here, sales representatives discuss the logic behind the reframe, leveraging numbers and data to support such a shift in perspective. The presentation in this step necessarily must skew toward the discomfort of the customer, eliciting their fear of risk and liability. Dixon and Adamson suggest that this is the best place to deploy a return-on-investment calculator but note that it should stick to the returns derived from solving the challenge—not the specific returns associated with the representative’s solution.

Next, Challengers leverage “Emotional Impact,” drawing an explicit connection between the challenge and the customer’s business. The authors suggest relating how similar companies have suffered or outright failed by behaving as the customer’s business does. The object of this step is to evoke a sense of familiarity within the customer, leading them to admit to business errors that echo the Challenger’s anecdote.

The fifth step shows the customer “A New Way.” To address the challenge, the Challenger provides a detailed outline of the capabilities necessary to prevent losses, save money, or boost profits, withholding any references to their own product. Challengers take their time to convince customers of how the solution should look and how the customer’s business would change with implementation.

This leads directly into the sixth step, where Challengers finally reveal “[Their] Solution.” The pitch explores how the supplier’s unique capabilities fulfill the previous step’s description of the ideal solution. Dixon and Adamson stress that the bulk of the pitch should focus on the insight rather than the product, as doing so will effectively build interest in the supplier before the supplier reveals the solution. Deploying the solution any earlier deflates interest and jeopardizes the sale.

Dixon and Adamson provide several reflective questions to help readers assess their approach and sales materials in line with the Commercial Teaching process. They then suggest developing the message of every pitch around the solution, focusing on the underrated benefits of the product. This increases the likelihood that the pitch will inspire new insight and challenge the customer. Once the supplier has established how to present their solution, the next step to develop is “The Reframe.” Suppliers can reflect on why the benefits they’ve identified are underappreciated. This in turn will serve as a springboard to exploring the customer’s worldview. From there, suppliers can begin to consider the alternative views that empirically benefit their business, using data as outlined in the third step. From there, the supplier can flesh out the remaining parts of the pitch.

Dixon and Adamson rebut arguments against the organizational effort to support individual sales representatives in constructing their messages, suggesting that a Commercial Teaching conversation requires across-the-board participation from the supplier’s organization. While individual sales representatives are responsible for closing the sale, the organization ensures that their success is sustainable and replicable rather than accidental. Commercial Teaching equips representatives to customize their pitch according to the customer, ensuring that the conversation is “prescoped,” “prescripted,” and “predefined.” It also provides a framework for collaboration between two functions that typically fail to work together progressively—marketing and sales—using the former’s mastery of customer insight and the latter’s ability to leverage that insight toward a deal. The same framework also functions in a dynamic way, adapting to constantly evolving insights around the customer market.

The authors then draw from SPIN Selling author Neil Rackham and consulting firm KPMG to discuss a framework design assessment called the “SAFE-BOLD Framework,” which ensures that teaching pitches are big, innovative, risky, and difficult. The more pitches harness these qualities, the bolder they are. Unlike the Relationship Builders, who prioritize establishing their identity at the start of the pitch, Challengers embrace the risk of a bold pitch.

Dixon and Adamson share two case studies of Commercial Teaching in practice. The first involves an equipment supplier that improves its catalogue performance by deepening the customer perception of their brand as a solutions service. The second discusses an enterprise software provider trying to differentiate their product in the struggling auto dealership market.

Tailoring for resonance responds to the challenge of consensus buying as described in Chapter 1. Although certain executives function as the decision makers of the customer organization, they rely heavily on the overall sales experience and their colleagues’ perception of the supplier to assess their loyalty to the supplier’s brand. Hence, rather than pursue a direct sale with the decision makers, Dixon and Adamson suggest pursuing an indirect path that accepts the consensus sale as a given.

Dixon and Adamson distinguish two groups of customer team members—decision makers and customer stakeholders (such as influencers and end users)—as components of the consensus sale. Unlike decision makers, stakeholders look to their experience with the individual sales representative to assess loyalty. They expect credibility, trust, and insight from the representative to drive a positive sales experience. Crucially, the insight must reveal needs that these customers have overlooked.

Most sales teams fail because they use their interactions with influencer and end user groups to derive insight rather than deliver it. This stems from the conventional knowledge that the relationship between sales representatives and customer stakeholders is weak compared to the representative’s relationship with the decision maker. Dixon and Adamson propose that the opposite is true: Stakeholder support hugely impacts sale success.

Considering the difference between decision makers and stakeholders as audiences, it is necessary to modify one’s pitch to resonate with their specific concerns. The authors suggest contextualizing the message on a broad industry level before reflecting on how this message changes with narrower audiences, beginning first at the corporate level, followed by the role level, and then at the individual stakeholder level. This presents an inherent challenge for the sales representative—namely, the sheer volume of knowledge that exists on each level of context. However, Challengers usually home in on how the stakeholders’ concerns and objectives align with the overall business so that they can filter that knowledge for relevance. These concerns, also called “customer outcomes,” are predictable and can therefore be used to blueprint outcomes for individuals performing similar tasks or roles across the industry.

To demonstrate this principle, the authors examine the case study of a food ingredient supplier that outlined customer outcomes and messaging guidance on cards. These cards aided sales representatives in adjusting their pitch for empathy and credibility. Once their interaction entered the proposal phase, the supplier actualized the consensus sale by outlining the ways their solution addressed each of the customer stakeholder’s biggest concerns.

The Challenger’s ability to control the sale stems from their confidence that the product value justifies premium pricing, as well as their comfort in resisting attempts to introduce new terms. By using the conversation to teach the customer a new insight about the customer’s business, the Challenger is naturally in a position to bargain. Moreover, Challengers are eager to move the customer along each step of the sales process and are cognizant of the urgency they’ve communicated in their pitch.

Before offering some guidance on taking control, the authors dispel several misconceptions surrounding this aspect of the Challenger sale. First, they distance taking control from negotiation, underlining that Challengers assert control as early as the proposal stage. Momentum enables Challengers to maximize their efforts, which is why they seek it from the customer as soon as possible. Since many Challengers understand the difficulty of the supplier purchasing process, one significant way they take control is to simplify that process for their customers, leading customers to an understanding of how to secure a solution—a tactic that aligns with Commercial Teaching.

Next, the authors refute the idea that taking control only concerns the pricing of the solution, indicating that it extends to ideas as well. They admit that customers will likely react to a reframe with skepticism, prompting the sales representative to assert their stance. Crucially, the Challenger controls the deal by convincing the customer to accept new ideas that change their perspective of their business. In conversations that lead to debate, Challengers welcome the opportunity to maintain control.

Finally, the authors dispel the idea that taking control is a matter of exercising aggression. Challengers are actually assertive, which presumes that their approaches seek to construct rather than attack. They remain empathetic to the customer’s reactions, responding to the customer’s comfortability even as their perspective is challenged. While many executives fear that assertiveness will lead to aggression, most sales representatives assume a more passive stance with customers, as they sense a power imbalance in the dynamic and fear their control will erode over time. However, this behavior is simply an extension of “customer-centric” relationship trends, which sometimes undermines sales performance.

To effectively take control, Dixon and Adamson advise sales representatives, who naturally favor closure, to become more comfortable with ambiguity. Challengers use ambiguity to steer the deal in unexpected directions, wresting control over the conversation. Although the authors admit that this is easier said than done, they push forward DuPont’s practices as training tools for leveraging ambiguity.

In this case study, the authors discuss innovation supplier DuPont’s propensity for strategic planning. DuPont representatives receive a pre-negotiation template that lays out an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of any given deal. This template allows representatives to list the information they require from the customer, anticipate objections the customer may raise, prepare rebuttals, and analyze the various concessions the representative is willing to accept or request from the customer. Internalizing this template brings representatives one step closer to being Challengers, as this is how Challengers naturally think in advance of negotiation calls.

Furthermore, DuPont utilizes a four-step framework to show how representatives can navigate a difficult negotiation. The representative offers closure to an ambiguous situation and then delays that resolution by recalling what the customer already likes about their solution. With the tension partially defused, the representative seeks the customer’s rationale for requesting a concession. With these reasons out in the open, the representative can compare it to other offers that minimize revenue loss. Since the representative has already pre-planned concessions with the DuPont template, they can deploy these offers with the intention of getting the customer to agree on the one that brings the supplier the most value.

Dixon and Adamson remind the reader that taking control occurs across the full scope of the sales process rather than at just the negotiation phase. They then implore sales leaders to train representatives who lack natural assertiveness to direct the sale rather than intuitively seek closure.