The Challenger Sale

Figure 5.1.
Deconstruction of a Commercial Teaching Pitch
Step 1: The Warmer

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After initial formalities (e.g., introductions, time check, agenda setting), a
well-designed teaching pitch starts off with your assessment of your
customer’s key challenges. Rather than asking, “What’s keeping you up at
night?” you lay out what you’re seeing and hearing as key challenges at
similar companies. If you have it, this is a great place to provide
benchmarking data. At the very least, this is where you share anecdotes
from other companies that capture the challenges most likely of highest
concern to your customer in ways that corroborate their own experience.
(Never underestimate the value in being able to demonstrate to your
customers that they’re not alone when it comes to their most pressing
challenges.) You then conclude your review by asking for their reactions.
When you put it all together, it should sound something like, “We’ve
worked with a number of companies similar to yours, and we’ve found that
these three challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling.
Is that what you’re seeing too, or would you add something else to the list?”
The whole point of step 1, of course, is to build credibility. Essentially,
what you’re saying to your customer is, “I understand your world,” and
“I’m not here to waste your time asking you to teach me about your
business.” It’s an approach we’ve dubbed “Hypothesis-Based Selling.”
Rather than leading with open-ended 
questions
about customers’ needs, you
lead with 
hypotheses
of customers’ needs, informed by your own
experience and research. Ultimately, customers suffering from “solutions
fatigue” love it not only because it makes the entire sale both faster and
easier for them, but because it feels much more like a “get” than a “give”—
they get your informed perspective rather than having to educate you with
information you should have been able to figure out on your own. A
Commercial Teaching pitch cuts right to the chase. It feels efficient. It
honors the customer’s time and shows that you’ve done your homework. In
other words, you’ve just established yourself as someone worth talking to.
Or, at the very least, for the especially resistant customers out there, you’ve
just bought yourself another five minutes.
So what next? What are you going to do with the goodwill you’ve just
established? Present your solution? Lay out your “value proposition”?
That’s the 
last
thing you want to do now! Although it is the next step
they’re probably expecting, and it’s absolutely the next thing a core-
performing rep would do—and without a doubt what your competitor’s

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sales rep did when he was sitting in the same customer’s office an hour
earlier.
Think about it. You just got your customer to warm up to you by talking
about their business. Why in the world would you want to ruin all that
goodwill by spouting off about 
your
business? You haven’t yet given them a
reason to care. Instead, now you go to a place your customer never saw
coming: the Reframe.