The Challenger Sale

BREAKING OUT OF ORDER-TAKER MODE
The corollary to being a Relationship Builder as a salesperson is to be seen
as an “order taker” in other functional areas. We heard this time and again
in our discussions with our CEB colleagues.
Colleagues from our Marketing & Communications practice, told us
that communicators have long been fighting to move upstream in the value
chain with their business customers. They want to move from “managing
the message” to “managing the debate,” but in order to do this, they need to
practice something called “tactical deafness.” In other words, heads of
communications try to get their teams to purposefully 
ignore
the specific
tactic a business customer is asking for (e.g., “We need a press release on
X”) so that they can instead dig for the strategic reason 
driving
the request
(“We need to make sure our competitors see that we’ve moved into this

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space”). Doing this, a savvy communicator will often identify opportunities
to deliver much greater value than what could have been accomplished just
by “taking the order.”
One of the best practices we teach members in our communications
program comes from the VP of communications at an auto manufacturer.
She taught her team to practice a five-step process designed to enforce
rigorous critical thinking about partners’ business problems. The process
ensures that corporate communications’ solutions target the most significant
drivers of partners’ performance gaps. Communications’ use of the
problem-solving process has strengthened the quality and impact of its
solutions to partners’ business problems and has increased the transparency
of communications’ contribution to performance improvements. In this
way, this practice has helped position the function as a consultative partner
capable of driving business results.
Sometimes the stakes are even higher. Companies rely on central
functions like strategy, R&D, and procurement not just to take orders, but to
make sure the business is thinking through its assumptions rigorously—
whether those assumptions pertain to a new market opportunity or the price
to be paid for critical inputs and materials.
Collegues from our Procurement & Operations practice recently looked
at how Purchasing leaders can equip their managers to effectively challenge
line customers’ deeply held beliefs. “In order to generate truly innovative
ideas,” our colleagues explained to us, “procurement must be able to
understand the strategy and—more important—understand the assumptions
that underlie it. With this knowledge, procurement can go beyond analyzing
spend data to find other areas that could benefit from procurement’s
expertise. After learning the assumptions that underlie the business’s
strategy, procurement 
should
push back on weak points to determine which