The Challenger Sale

prescoped
. Reps don’t start with a blank
sheet of paper and diagnose each customer’s needs individually. Much of
that work has been done inside the organization through better segmentation
and customer analysis, significantly reducing the burden on the one skill
reps probably struggle with the most.
Second, the conversation is 
prescripted
. A teaching rep still has to
interact with the customer in a live setting, answering questions and
adapting to unanticipated objections. However, the rep’s opening set of
hypotheses is already laid out in detail, and every step along the way is
clearly marked through the teaching choreography. Because the teaching
pitch follows the same talking points again and again, reps will naturally
improve as they learn from experience, becoming more compelling over
time. In that respect, Commercial Teaching supported by the organization is
much more concrete than running an open-ended needs analysis. It’s easier
for reps to learn, and easier for managers to coach.
Finally, the solution the rep is working toward is 
predefined
. The burden
on the rep to determine the right solution for an individual customer is
significantly reduced, as the solution is largely determined in advance
through organizational identification of the supplier’s unique benefits and
needs-based segmentation of customers. One company we work with refers
to these prebuilt solutions as “Happy Meals,” based on McDonald’s famous
“meal solution” for young children. They’re off-the-shelf solutions that feel
customized to customers, because they’re well tailored in advance to those
customers’ most common needs.
Of course, this approach still requires greater skill than the simple world
of transactional selling. But compare it with a world of classic solution
selling or “consultative selling” where reps are expected to figure all of this
out on their own. While your stars will get it right at least some of the time,
your core reps will struggle mightily all of the time. But if you’ve done
your homework inside the organization to build a solid teaching interaction

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to begin with, your reps are far better prepared to succeed when they’re in
front of the customer.
So who should do the work? Commercial Teaching is as much a team
sport as an individual one. Just as you’ll need to align individual reps to the
Challenger profile to make it work, you’ll need to align sales and marketing
around the core capabilities implicit in the Commercial Teaching
choreography:
1. Identify your unique benefits.
2. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’
thinking.
3. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead
to.”
4. Equip reps to challenge customers.
Commercial Teaching also provides a concrete and very actionable road
map for addressing arguably one of the toughest challenges in all of B2B
sales and marketing, namely getting the two functions to work together in
the first place.
Given the chance, any head of sales or marketing will be happy to
regale you with examples of the historically poor—or nonexistent—
collaboration between the two functions. At best in most organizations
there’s a thinly veiled antipathy across the sales/marketing divide. At worst,
it’s outright hostility. We’ve all seen the statistics. Eighty percent of
marketing collateral winds up in the trash, while 30 percent of sales time is
spent reproducing the very collateral they just threw away.
The underlying cause of much of this discord typically goes
unaddressed. Most companies fail to define an agreed-upon framework for
what the two functions should actually do together in the first place. Many
commercial executives who lament the need for greater sales and marketing
“integration” fail to consider the problem from the opposite perspective,
which is: What 
shouldn’t
they do together?
Commercial Teaching provides a road map for integrating around a
limited number of activities that truly matter. The approach defines a very
specific framework for “what good looks like” for the entire commercial

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organization, allowing for the identification of concrete roles, tasks, goals,
and responsibilities. For example, only marketing has the tools, the
expertise, and the time to generate the insights necessary to challenge
customers both scalably and repeatedly. As the head of marketing at a large
telecommunications company put it, marketing must serve as the “insight
generation machine” that keeps reps well equipped with quality teaching
material that customers will find compelling. Sales, on the other hand, will
have to ensure that reps have the knowledge, skills, and coaching necessary
to go out and use that insight in a convincing manner to actually challenge
customers. It’s a symbiotic relationship around a core principle.
Either way, at the end of the day your message library, your collateral,
and your pitch can’t be static. They must constantly evolve to stay current
with the customer’s business environment and with a competitive, dynamic
landscape. This is a big job—hundreds of products, dozens of customer
segments, multiple channels, and a customer environment that evolves on a
quarterly basis. Therefore, Commercial Teaching isn’t a one-time exercise,
it’s an “always-on” capability. With input from the sales force—and at their
behest—organizations must invest in training marketers to articulate
differentiators and constantly source fresh and compelling teaching
messages.