The Challenger Sale

AFTERWORD
CHALLENGING BEYOND SALES
THE OBSERVATION CAME 
up at a lunch break at one of our member
meetings in late 2009. We’d just finished presenting the Challenger findings
to the thirty members or so in attendance, and the head of sales from a high-
tech company leaned over and said, “You know, I find this Challenger stuff
really fascinating—not because of what it says about salespeople, which is
interesting, but more because it’s the story of my career at this company.”
Puzzled, we asked what he meant. “I haven’t always been in sales,” he
explained. “I grew up in engineering but then spent time in the IT
department, HR, and marketing. Sales is actually a new thing for me.
What’s interesting is that I would think the Challenger approach would
apply to almost any of these functions.” He continued, “When I was in IT,
we were always talking about how to improve the ability of our folks to
deliver 
value
to our internal business customers . . . you know, to get out of
‘order taker’ mode and be seen as a trusted adviser, a consultant to the line,
that sort of thing. Then, when I went to HR, it was the same discussion.
Ditto for marketing. That’s really what Challenger is all about . . . and that’s
not a problem only for sales reps. Have you guys thought of looking at this
model in a non-sales setting?”
In fact, we hadn’t, but our colleagues here at CEB have.
One of the great things about being part of a company like ours is that
we have hundreds of colleagues around the world producing cutting-edge
content for every corporate function imaginable. CEB Sales Leadership
Council is one offering of our broader Sales & Service practice, one of eight
corporate function practice areas across the company. Our other practices
are in human resources; finance; innovation and strategy; legal, risk, and

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compliance; information technology; marketing and communications; and
procurement and operations. All told, our company serves more than
240,000 business leaders across roughly 10,000 organizations in over 110
countries. That’s a pretty wide angle to get on any business issue. So we
picked up the phone and asked a number of our senior research colleagues
and even some of our members, “Does the Challenger model apply in your
world?”
What we learned was fascinating and suggests that this member might
be on to something.