The Challenger Sale

A NEW WAY FORWARD
In this world of dramatically changing customer buying behavior and
rapidly diverging sales talent, your sales approach must evolve or you will
be left behind.
So the question now is: What do you do about it? If you’re going to win
going forward, you’ve got to equip reps to generate new demand in a world
of reluctant, risk-averse customers—customers who are struggling to buy
complex solutions just as much as you are struggling to sell them. That’s
going to take a very special kind of sales professional indeed. As the world
of sales has evolved dramatically across the last ten to twenty years, our
research indicates that the best reps have evolved a set of unique and
powerful skills to keep up. And that’s where our story goes next.

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2
THE CHALLENGER (PART 1):
A NEW MODEL FOR HIGH
PERFORMANCE
THE NEED TO 
understand what your star-performing reps are doing to set
themselves apart from their core-performing colleagues has never been
more urgent. The world of sales is changing. The pre-recession recipe for
sales success won’t get the job done in a post-recession economy. That said,
the economy itself serves only as a backdrop to this story. The real story
revolves around the dramatic change in customer buying behaviors across
the last five years that we reviewed in the previous chapter—all in response
to suppliers’ efforts to sell larger, more complex, more disruptive, and more
expensive solutions.
Still, if nothing else, the global economic collapse served to throw the
widening gap between core and star reps into stark contrast. Even in the
depths of the downturn, when most reps were far behind quota, some reps
—quite inexplicably—still managed not just to hit their goals, but to exceed
them. What were they doing differently? Generally, the tendency in sales is
to simply chalk up the difference to natural talent and assume stars are just
born with it. It’s not as if you can just take their skill, bottle it, and sprinkle
it over your core performers to close the gap. Right?
Well, what if you could? What if you could track down the replicable