The Challenger Sale

The Hard Worker
Hard Workers are exactly who they sound like. These are the reps who
show up early, stay late, and are always willing to put in the extra effort.
They’re the “nose to the grindstone” sellers. They’re self-motivated and
don’t give up easily. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more
visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team. And they
enthusiastically and frequently seek out feedback, always looking for
opportunities to improve their game.
A CSO at a global logistics company put it like this: “These guys
believe that doing the right things the right way will inevitably get you

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results. If they do enough calls, send enough e-mails, and respond to
enough RFPs [requests for proposal], it’ll all come together by the end of
the quarter. They’re the ones who were actually paying attention when we
pounded the importance of sales process.”
The Relationship Builder
Just as the name implies, Relationship Builders are all about building and
nurturing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates
across the customer organization. They’re very generous with their time and
work very hard to ensure that customers’ needs are met. Their primary
posture with customers is largely one of accessibility and service.
“Whatever you need,” they’ll tell customers, “I’m here to make that
happen. Just say the word.”
Not surprisingly, one VP of sales we recently interviewed told us, “Our
customers 
love
our relationship builders. They’ve worked very hard to build
customer relationships, sometimes over years. It feels like that’s really
made a huge difference to our business.”
The Lone Wolf
The Lone Wolf will look familiar to anyone in sales. Lone Wolves are
deeply self-confident. As a result, they tend to follow their own instincts
instead of the rules. In many ways, the Lone Wolves are the “prima donnas”
of the sales force—the “cowboys” who do things “their way” or not at all.
More often than not they drive sales leaders crazy—they have no process
compliance, no trip reports, no CRM (customer relationship management)
entries.
“Frankly,” one head of sales told us, “I’d fire them if I could, but I can’t,
because they’re all crushing their numbers.” And that’s the case for most
companies. On average, Lone Wolves tend to do very well despite
egregiously flouting the system, because if they didn’t do well, they’d
probably have been fired already.

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