The Challenger Sale

INTERNAL BUSINESS CUSTOMERS WANT INSIGHT TOO
By this point in the book, one thing that should be very clear is that what
customers want more than anything else is for their suppliers to deliver
insight to them—new ideas for saving money and making money that
they’d not previously considered. It should come as no surprise that 
internal
business customers want—or perhaps more appropriately, expect—the
same thing of the corporate functions they work with.
Take, for example, HR. Through our HR practice, we have found that of
all of the things that 
could
account for recruiter effectiveness, it was the
recruiter’s ability to be a strategic adviser that accounted for 52 percent of
effectiveness, compared with 33 percent that was driven by pipeline
management and only 15 percent by the ability to manage the recruiting
process. That’s a striking finding. But what was more interesting was that
only 19 percent of recruiters would currently qualify as true talent advisers
to the business partners, according to heads of recruiting.
We’ve heard something very similar from our colleagues in CEB’s IT
practice. Last year, they looked at the question of how to improve the value
that IT business liaisons (the IT staff who interface with line executives)
deliver to their internal customers. Historically, this has been an area where
IT departments have a lot of opportunity to improve.
They found that between 2007 and 2009, the percentage of business
leaders rating their IT departments as “effective” at applying IT capabilities
to business needs actually 
declined
. In 2007, 31 percent of business leaders

---

rated IT as “effective,” but that number shrank to 26 percent in 2009. And
it’s not just senior leaders who think IT has room to improve; it’s end users
too. In a 2009 survey of more than 5,000 end users, we found that a
stunning 76 percent 
disagreed
with the statement that their job performance
had improved because of a new system delivered by IT.
What we’ve found in IT is very similar to what we’ve found in
recruiting and, of course, sales. Business customers want their IT business
liaisons to bring them new ideas for how they can use technology to save
money or make money. Efficient service delivery is all well and good, but
what the business really values is insight into how they can compete more
effectively.
Think about the parallels here. In our study of business customers, we
found that 53 percent of loyalty was driven by the sales experience—
namely the supplier’s ability to deliver unique insight to the customer.
These are very similar results to what we learned makes recruiters and IT
business liaisons effective in their jobs. We also found that the reps who can
deliver the unique insights customers are looking for—the Challenger reps
—represent only 27 percent of all salespeople. Again, this is very similar to
what our colleagues in recruiting and IT found.