The Challenger Sale

Commercial Teaching Rule #1: Lead to Your Unique
Strengths
First and foremost, commercial teaching must tie directly back to some
capability where you outperform your competitors. If what you’re teaching
inevitably leads back to what you do better than anyone else, then you’re in
a much better position when it comes to winning the business.
We often put it like this: The sweet spot of customer loyalty is
outperforming your competitors on those things you’ve taught your
customers are important. Yes, you’ve got to get a customer thinking about
new opportunities to save or make money—opportunities that move them to
take action. But you’ve only really succeeded when the customer asks,
“Wow, how can I make that happen?” and you’re able to say, “Well, let me
show you how we’re better able to help you make that happen than anyone
else.” That’s the magical moment. You’ve shared new, relevant insight—
which is what customers are looking for—but at the same time, you’ve tied
that insight to your unique solution. You’ve taught your customer not just to
want help but to want 
your
help.
There are two important caveats, however, to doing this well. First, in
order for this approach to work, you’ve got to make sure that you actually
can
help. From the customer’s perspective, there’s nothing more frustrating
than a supplier that teaches them a new and compelling way to save or
make money, but then can’t actually do anything about it. One head of sales
we work with refers to this as “teaching your customer into the desert.” You
leave them troubled by a new problem they never knew they had and with
no real way of doing anything about it. Yes, customers want insight on how
they could operate more productively, but insight they can’t do anything
about actually makes things worse, not better. Then you really 
have
given
them something to keep them up at night!

---

Second, and this is the big caveat, in order to ensure that your teaching
efforts ultimately lead to your unique strengths, you actually have to know
what your unique strengths 
are
. Sure, it sounds obvious. But we have been
consistently surprised by the number of executives who struggle mightily
on this issue. Here’s how one head of marketing at a well-known
manufacturing company put it: “If I polled a hundred reps on our core value
proposition, I’d get 
at
least
a hundred different answers.” We hear this all
the time, usually coupled with a slow shake of the head and a rueful sigh;
it’s one of those age-old truths of sales and marketing.
Yet notice that this executive’s lament really captures only part of the
problem. Yes, it’s hard enough to get reps to agree on a broad description of
what the company does well. But ask those same reps what the company
actually does 
better
than the competition, and instead of a hundred different
answers you’re just as likely to get none at all. At best you might hear
something like, “Yeah, the competition can do something like that too, but
we do it so much 
better
!” Or even more common: “Sure, you could go with
the other guy, but keep in mind we’ve been in this business longer than
anyone else. We’ve been serving leading companies for over fifty years
with innovative solutions backed by a deep commitment to product quality
and a laser-like focus on serving customers.” Blah, blah, blah. As if your
main competitor didn’t have a “laser-like” focus on customers either. Of
course they do!
How is a customer supposed to choose between two suppliers that are
more or less undifferentiated? It’s actually rather simple: They choose the
cheapest supplier. Who wouldn’t? In today’s world, 
everyone
is
“innovative,” “solutions-oriented,” “customer-focused,” and—of course
—“green,” so why pay more for it?
In a recent survey of B2B customers, CEB found only 35 percent of
companies able to establish themselves as truly preferred over the
competition. And still more troubling, even among preferred companies,
when we tested the impact of each of the benefits they believed to be
unique, we found that customers perceived only 
half
of them to be actually
relevant to their needs. And among those, customers told us that most
weren’t delivered consistently enough to actually influence their preference.
When you put it all together, only 14 percent of companies’ so-called
unique benefits were perceived by customers as both unique and beneficial!

---

And as you might imagine, being “innovative,” “customer-focused,” and
“green” were not among them. When it comes to differentiation, your
customers hold you to a much higher standard.
It’s no wonder, then, that reps continually revert to price. It’s not just
that they struggle to articulate the value of their solution; they struggle to
articulate the 
unique
value of their solution. And this, it turns out, is the
hardest part of commercial teaching: understanding and agreeing on what it
is that your company does 
better
than anyone else. It requires a very deep
understanding of who you are and what you do. Much of CEB’s work
across the last several years has aimed at providing members the tools to
figure this out—everything from step-by-step self-guided exercises, to
facilitated leadership workshops, to customer survey builders, to actual
customer diagnostics.
But no matter how you go about addressing it, all of this work
ultimately boils down to a single question you must answer. We sometimes
refer to it as the “Deb Oler question,” named after Debra Oler, vice
president and general manager of Grainger Brand at W. W. Grainger, Inc.
As Deb puts it, “Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?”
That’s it. It’s disarmingly simple. But that one question can take your entire
commercial leadership team to a very dark place as you realize it’s much
harder to answer than you might have thought. In fact, most companies
can’t answer it, at least not in a way that’s compelling to customers (again,
being “innovative,” “customer-focused,” and “solutions-oriented” doesn’t
count). And for the few companies that can answer it, even fewer still
would find agreement on that answer across their entire sales force.
So where does that leave us? Well, first and foremost, it means that if
you’re going to build Challenger reps to teach customers something new
about their business, you’ve likely got some work to do in your own
business first. Unless you can ultimately connect the insights you teach
your customers back to capabilities only you can offer, you’re much more
likely providing free consulting than Commercial Teaching. That’s a
dangerous place to be unless you happen to also be the lowest-cost provider
in that market (which is improbable since lowest-cost providers, by
definition, can’t afford the added cost of teaching customers).

---