The Challenger Sale

Start Now
We said it before, but we’ll say it again. If you are looking for a quick fix,
look elsewhere. We have seen quick wins from rolling out the Challenger
Selling Model—one company we helped implement the model reported 6
percent market share growth in twelve months, and another brought in their
largest-ever deal within a quarter of rolling out Challenger training—but
getting it fully “installed” won’t happen overnight.
The Challenger Selling Model is a commercial transformation. Getting
it right requires significant changes to the way sales and marketing interact,
to the kind of tools you arm your reps with, the sort of reps you recruit, the
kind of training you deliver to them, and the way managers interact with
them. Getting this right—all of it—is hard. The majority of the companies
profiled in this book would tell you that this transformation took not
months, but years, and that their work continues to this day. As we said
earlier in this book, the Challenger Selling Model is a new operating system
for the commercial organization, not just another “bolt-on” application to
the existing system.
It’s not all bad news, however. Moving now means changing the way
your reps interact with customers before your competitors do—and the data
is very clear about what customers want. While the competition sends out
Relationship Builders equipped to have only fact-, feature- and benefit-
focused conversations, your Challenger reps are leading with insights,
teaching customers about problems they didn’t even know they had. The
competition’s reps will earn glances at the clock and disingenuous offers to
“get back to them on their proposals.” Your reps will earn more time from
the customer, open invitations to come back, and sincere promises to take
action. While the competition focuses its energies on 
finding
customers, you
will be out there 
making
customers.

---