The Challenger Sale

A PERMANENT RESET?
At CEB, we offer a number of similar training programs for corporate
center staff across our memberships. CEB HR and CEB Finance Leadership
Academies, for instance, are heavily focused on building consultative skills
for high performers within these different corporate functions at our
member companies. Similarly, our market research program offers
consultative skills and presentation skills training. All of these offerings are
consistently sold out, suggesting that this is—at least for now—a pressing
issue for functional leaders. But will demand for these kinds of skills and
capabilities fade?
It’s hard to predict what skills will be in vogue in five or ten years in
large companies, but we would argue that it’s unlikely that business
customers will lower the bar anytime soon for their corporate center
colleagues. Internal customers, like outside ones, will continue to be open
to new ideas for saving money or making money and they will reward
suppliers—whether external suppliers or the corporate functions that

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support them internally—who bring insight to the table. While the business
may have no option 
but
to work with an internal supplier, they often hold
the purse strings, and the gap between funding to keep the lights on and
funding for large-scale projects and solutions can be quite wide indeed.
We suspect that the Challenger concept resonates so well with other
functional areas beyond sales because it suggests a promising alternative to
the current state in which many functional leaders find themselves today.
Just like the supplier fighting for a customer’s loyalty, functional leaders
want—for themselves and their teams—a seat at the table where the biggest
business decisions are made. The Challenger model offers at least a starting
point for these teams to stand up and be counted in a way that is
fundamentally different from the reactive, order-taking world.

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