The Challenger Sale

Individual Skill and Organizational Ability Are Best
Developed in Parallel
While it’s clear that companies must invest in both organizational
capabilities and individual skills to get the full benefit of the Challenger
Selling Model, it’s less clear whether there is a proper sequencing of those
investments. Should companies first build organizational capabilities or
develop rep skills? This is a question we hear often from our members. Our
answer is that the best organizations will invest in both elements of the
model concurrently.
We have heard from companies that attempted to develop Commercial
Teaching messages without also boosting sales rep awareness and skills that
their reps rejected the new teaching messages, preferring to go back to what
they’re comfortable and familiar with. Similarly, companies that invested in
rep skills but not in organizational capabilities left reps feeling that they

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lacked the tools to truly execute on the model as it was intended to be
employed. By contrast, organizations that pursue both tracks simultaneously
are primed for effective, dynamic collaboration. Reps, seeing the power of
the Challenger approach, create pull-through demand for teaching messages
from marketing, while marketing, having similarly bought into the vision of
the Challenger approach, enlists sales as a powerful source of insight raw
materials (i.e., messages being delivered by high-performing Challengers
right now).
Don’t Just Change the Training, Change What Happens
Before and After
Outside of compensation, sales training represents one of the biggest
discretionary spending areas for a sales organization. It also represents one
of the biggest time and money sinks. Research by Neil Rackham has shown
that 87 percent of sales training content is forgotten by reps within thirty
days.
The Challenger Selling Model requires large-scale behavior change
from reps, putting heightened pressure on sales L&D (learning and
development) functions to deliver change and sustain it over time. Coaching
is a principal lever for boosting training stickiness. But there are other
important considerations as well. In a recent study, we found that some of
the biggest opportunities for improving sales training content retention have
little to do with improving the training itself. Instead, it’s what companies
can do before and after training that really makes a difference.
Leading companies are doing three things to significantly boost the ROI
of their training investments: First, they are boosting rep demand for change
and generating training buzz before it is rolled out; second, they are
engineering high-quality experiential learning that gives reps a sense of
“safe practice” focused on real accounts; and third, they are creating
sustained behavioral certification programs to reinforce learning over time.
This is one of the big differences in the way our Solutions group has
designed our Challenger Development Program. While the content of the
training is obviously unique since it is built around the Challenger
behaviors, it’s also about helping member companies generate the sort of

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“social demand” they need in order to avoid the perception that the training
is just another top-down mandate. In addition, we focus heavily on the
concept of “safe practice,” delivering experiential learning in the classroom
that’s led by former sales leaders from companies like DuPont, Merck,
Nike, IBM, Bank of New York Mellon, and Procter and Gamble. And it’s
important that we get beyond the usual “did you learn anything?”
assessments that most companies focus on as a way to gauge whether
training “stuck” at all with reps, and instead focus on a structured approach
to reinforcing the training on an ongoing basis (spending a lot of time with
managers, who will drive this change through ongoing coaching) so that we
can certify that reps are actually 
practicing
the new behaviors they learned
in the classroom and achieving the intended sales results.
These principles are smart to adhere to. We advise all of our members to
think hard about the “before and after” of their training so that they can
make sure there’s demand for it among reps and so that they know they’re
getting a return on this important investment.