The Challenger Sale

EARNING A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Just getting rid of jargon and speaking in business terms might make the
business listen to what you have to say, but it’s unlikely to earn you an
invitation to critical strategy meetings or make you a “must-have” voice at
high-risk decision points. It’s a way to not get ignored, but probably not a
way to get sought out. To earn a “seat at the table,” corporate center staff
need to deliver compelling insights, and there aren’t a lot of second and
third chances given out here by busy line executives.
One of our favorite tactics for picking those occasions to “plant the
flag” and make your team an indispensable business partner comes from
our collegues in the Marketing & Communciations practice. Market
researchers struggle with all of the problems we’ve discussed so far—they
have, in most companies, propagated their own reputations as nothing more
than “order takers,” and they struggle to relate to business partners because
of how steeped they tend to be in their own technical domains.
The practice in question comes from a high-tech company whose
research leader had identified a number of opportunities for market research
to substantially inform strategic debates going on at the highest levels of the
company. The problem was that the market research function was newly
centralized in the company and hadn’t yet earned a seat at the table with
these other senior leaders. As the head of research at the time explained,
“We were able to identify areas where we could advise the firm strategically
but were not yet in a position to be heard by management. They first needed
to experience exactly what a strategic adviser is capable of doing, so the
challenge was finding the opportunity to show my group’s abilities.”
To make sure that his group put its best foot forward, he established a
handful of criteria that would ensure they wouldn’t waste an opportunity to

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make the right first impression with senior leadership: (1) The project had
to correspond to an issue of significance on management’s agenda; (2) there
had to be a high likelihood that the research team would uncover significant
insights; (3) the project had to be within the group’s expertise; (4) there had
to be a high probability of resolution to the issue; and (5) the project had to
have low resource requirements. Sound familiar? The criteria of the head of
market research bear a real resemblance to what makes for a good teaching
pitch. In fact, some of them are identical to the SAFE-BOLD Framework
we discussed in 
chapter 5
.
The criteria helped the research department deliver compelling insights
in their first presentation to the management team, ultimately doubling the
number of strategic projects they were asked to complete and increasing the
department’s budget by 65 percent. “The trick,” the director of the team
explained, “is finding the right issue. Once you achieve those early
successes, doors start opening and executives make time for the group
because they know we are going to have something important to say.”