49 pages • 1 hour read
Matthew Dixon, Brent AdamsonThe Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Evolving Nature of Business and Its Methods
The Challenger Sale opens with the premise that sales models have become increasingly complex. By the time the SEC conducted its 2009 study, the dominant approach in B2B sales was “solution selling,” an organic framework that grew progressively more complex as more disruptive players enter the market. This resonates deeply with a motif that sales guru Neil Rackham lays out in the Foreword: The business world is constantly seeing breakthroughs that reinvent the rules of business. The emergence of new issues and trends demands new tools and methods, which are precisely what The Challenger Sale sets out to provide.
Every breakthrough, the book contends, is preceded by issues that time-tested methods cannot resolve. Tellingly, Dixon and Adamson declare early on that one of the book’s most novel and significant insights—the five sales representative profiles—was not originally part of the SEC study’s scope. With the market failure resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, their original intent was to determine why certain sales representatives were outperforming expectations. Under the initial research paradigm, the SEC’s assumption was that certain key attributes could enable representatives to perform better and that organizations could simply highlight those attributes for skill training. The paradigm shift came from noticing common behavioral patterns that were observable in a solutions-dominated market.
Once they discuss some of the emerging issues surrounding the solutions model—e.g., the rise of third-party consultants who extract value on the supplier side—Dixon and Adamson implore the reader to adopt new methods to sustain their business: “In this world of dramatically changing customer buying behavior and rapidly diverging sales talent, your sales approach must evolve or you will be left behind” (13). Although Challengers already exist in the sales market, the book presents their methods and techniques as a replicable new model that meets the needs of the complex solution selling framework. The authors go so far as to affirm that the Challenger model is “absolutely vital for [the supplier’s] success going forward” (29).
That said, the authors also clarify that the Challenger Selling Model is uniquely suited for the challenges of the dominant solutions framework. In simpler transactional business, they suggest investing in building a sales team around the Hard Worker profile instead. This implies that while Challengers can face the issues of the solution selling model head-on, they may not be as equipped to face customers should the market regress to an older sales model or adopt a new paradigm entirely. The business world is always in flux, so all solutions are ultimately context-specific.
The Rewards of Embracing Discomfort
Challengers embody a risky and seemingly cavalier attitude, especially in the way they leverage tension and discomfort in customer relationships. While traditional managers might encourage sales representatives to keep customers in their comfort zone, Challengers push them out of it. Without a clear rationale for the Challenger’s behavior, their technique may strike some as being reckless.
Dixon and Adamson argue that the opposite is true. The Challenger is neither careless nor imprudent; rather, they are confident that their perspective can open new doors for their customers. As they dig into the Challenger’s methods, the authors reveal that this type of sales representative arrives at customer insight long before the pitch: “They win […] by actually knowing their customers’ world better than their customers know it themselves, teaching them what they don’t know but should” (45). In raising new perspectives, they necessarily work outside of the customer’s comfort zone, but Dixon and Adamson argue that this is precisely what allows them to land a sale. In addition, taking control of the sale sees the Challenger pushing customers to commit to the risk of a new business element by asserting the value of the solution. The Challenger gets the customer to admit that the solution is as unique as the Challenger says it is. Challengers embrace behaviors that seem risky to the average sales representative because Challengers have already calculated a pathway to success and are willing to overcome the risks to reach their reward.
This awareness mirrors the authors’ response to the tension surrounding the book’s proposed value. Several times throughout The Challenger Sale, Dixon and Adamson underline the “counterintuitive” nature of their takeaways. Since the results of their 2009 study rub against conventional sales wisdom, the repeated emphasis on the unconventionality of Challenger thinking implies an awareness that the approach may encounter reluctance or skepticism. As a new model, the Challenger model is naturally perceived as being fraught with risk. Mirroring the risk aversion of customers who become “concerned about whether they’ll ever see a return on their investment” (9), suppliers who read the book may, Dixon and Adamson imply, hesitate to adopt the model without guaranteed returns. Moreover, Dixon and Adamson stress that the process of adopting the Challenger model will be difficult. However, without embracing risk and challenge, the supplier slips into the behavior that defines most core performers, prioritizing comfort above everything else.
Still, to alleviate some of readers’ potential anxieties, the authors include abundant data drawn from the SEC’s research, as well as case studies that support their findings in practice. While this data might not mitigate the risk that falls on organizations adopting the model, it qualifies that the risk is at least backed by proven results. This is how Challengers operate as well, leading with the insight that informs the risk of challenging customers in the first place. In turn, they enjoy high-performance results that set them ahead of the average sales representative.
The Importance of Organizational Synergy
Dixon and Adamson stress that adopting the Challenger Selling Model is anything but an individual effort. As they discuss the widening talent gap between star performers and core performers, they highlight the dangerous possibility of star performers single-handedly “carrying the entire company” (12). In this scenario, core performers have no function in the company and pose a liability to operations. Hence, much of the book aims to help sales leaders improve their core segment’s performance, which requires the collaboration of not just the sales team and its leadership but other functions as well.
In Chapter 3, Dixon and Adamson discuss the four principles of the Challenger Model, one of which revolves around organizational capability. They argue that if sales representatives are left to determine the content of their teaching conversations on their own, the organization risks the dissonance of either downplaying sales promises that it cannot deliver or hard selling features that some representatives may have left out of their pitches. Thus the task of determining unified content for delivery must belong to the organization and should align across various levels and functions, which is also true when it comes to tailoring that message according to audience.
In Chapter 5, the authors give a concrete example of synergy in practice, bringing up the “historically poor” relationship between sales and marketing: “At best in most organizations there’s a thinly veiled antipathy across the sales/marketing divide. At worst, it’s outright hostility” (80). However, as a pillar of the Challenger Selling Model, Commercial Teaching requires leaders to integrate different functions across the organization to best equip the sales representative for their pitch. Salespeople, for instance, need to enter the conversation with clear knowledge of the customer’s industry and the issues it hasn’t realized. The authors describe marketing as the “insight generation machine” (80)—the only function that has the resources to uncover and prepare insights that the sales representative can dispense sustainably. Where sales previously disregarded marketing output, sales must now depend on them to do their job. Similarly, units like research and business intelligence can work together with marketing to deepen those insights as much as possible. The book closes with an invitation to consider how the Challenger Selling Model might even enhance operations in functions such as legal and information technology.
If anything should be left to the individual representative, the authors say, it should be the last key Challenger skill—taking control of the sale. However, without the entire organization’s help in crafting a clear message, even the most assertive pitch is doomed to cause more harm than good.
