The Challenger Sale

FINDING #2: ONE CLEAR WINNER AND ONE CLEAR
LOSER
If you step back and look at the five profiles, ask yourself: Which would
you prefer to have on your team? In many ways, they all look good.
But as interesting as it is that reps fall into one of five distinct profiles,
it’s really the second finding that’s proven so completely surprising. When
you take these five profiles and compare them to actual sales performance,
you find something very dramatic. One in particular performs head and
shoulders above the other four, and one falls dramatically behind, yet the
results go against conventional wisdom. When most sales leaders see how
each profile performs, they tell you quite frankly, they’ve indeed placed
their biggest bet on the profile least likely to win.
So who wins? The answer is the Challenger by a landslide. Take a look
at 
figure 2.2
.
Source: CEB, CEB Sales Leadership Council, 2011.
Figure 2.2.
Core and High Performers by Profile

---

In comparing the five rep profiles with actual sales performance, the
first thing we did was separate core performers from star performers and
analyze each independently. To determine star performers, we asked
participating companies to tell us which of their reps in the sample fell into
the top 20 percent of their sales force as measured by performance against
goal. Once we had categorized all the reps in our sample by performance,
we then determined the distribution of each group across the five profiles.
And what we found was fascinating.
First, the distribution of 
core
performers across the five profiles is fairly
even. No profile dominates among average sales reps. It turns out core
performers aren’t average because they gravitate to a specific profile;
they’re average because well, they’re average. They show up in all five
categories and achieve average performance in every single one. In other
words, there’s not one way to be average, but five. Mediocrity comes in
multiple flavors. Indeed, you see this in 
figure 2.2
 in the relatively even
distribution of the lighter-shaded bars across the five profiles.
But when you look at the distribution of 
star
performers across these
same five profiles, you find something completely different. While there
may be five ways to be average, there’s clearly a dominant way to be a star.
And that, by far, is the Challenger profile, comprising nearly 40 percent of
all high performers in our study.
You’ll remember that the Challenger rep is the rep who loves to debate.
The one who uses his or her deep understanding of a customer’s business
not simply to serve them, but to teach them: to push their thinking and
provide them with new and different ways to think about their business and
how to compete.
So what truly sets them apart? In our analysis, of the forty-four or so
attributes we tested, six of them showed up as statistically significant in
defining someone as a Challenger rep:
Offers the customer unique perspectives
Has strong two-way communication skills
Knows the individual customer’s value drivers
Can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business
Is comfortable discussing money

---

Can pressure the customer
At first glance, this list may seem like a strange mix of unrelated
qualities. In fact, when we first put together the list of attributes to be tested,
it’s unlikely anyone would have picked these particular six as the key
components of star performance. Nonetheless, that’s how the analysis came
out. Each of these attributes represents a particular way in which Challenger
reps significantly outperform their colleagues in the core.
That said, if we group the attributes into three categories we find they
paint a very clear picture of who the Challenger truly is. A Challenger is
really defined by the ability to do three things: teach, tailor, and take
control:
With their unique perspective on the customer’s business
and their ability to engage in robust two-way dialogue,
Challengers are able to 
teach
for
differentiation
during the
sales interaction.
Because Challengers possess a superior sense of a
customer’s economic and value drivers, they are able to
tailor for resonance,
delivering the right message to the right
person within the customer organization.
Finally, Challengers are comfortable discussing money and
can, when needed, press the customer a bit. In this way, the
Challenger 
takes control 
of the sale.
These are the defining attributes of the Challenger—the ability to teach,
to tailor, and to take control. They’re the pillars of what we’ve come to call
the Challenger Selling Model, and the rest of this book will provide a road
map for building these capabilities in your sales force.
Before we turn to a closer analysis of Challengers, however, let’s return
briefly to our overall results. Because as big an ah-ha! as it has been for
sales leaders around the world that the Challenger is so much more likely to
win than any other profile, it’s proven equally surprising—and frankly
much more troubling—for sales executives to learn that the Relationship
Builder falls so far behind. In our study, only 
7
percent
of all star

---

performers fell into the Relationship Builder profile, far fewer than any
other. And this finding should be a real red flag for all sales leaders
encouraging their reps to simply go out and “build deeper relationships”
with customers, or, as one company told their reps in the depths of the
recession, to go out and “hug your customers.”
Now, before we go any further, we should emphasize that these results
by no means suggest that customer relationships aren’t important for sales
—this would be a naïve conclusion. Of course they are important,