The Challenger Sale

Principle #2: It’s the Combination of Skills That Matters
One of the key lessons from our work is that it’s the combination of the
Challenger attributes—the ability to teach, tailor, take control, and do it all
while leveraging constructive tension—that sets Challengers apart.
If you teach without tailoring, you come off as irrelevant. If you tailor
but don’t teach, you risk sounding like every other supplier. If you take
control but offer no value, you risk being simply annoying. Thus the Venn
diagram you see in 
figure 3.1
. This is a graphical snapshot of what “good”
looks like when it comes to rep performance. Think of this as a single
snapshot of the “new high performer.” Because these skills are most
effective when used in combination, we strongly urge our members to avoid
the temptation to “cherry-pick” when it comes to rolling out the model.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum, companies abhor duplicative
investment. For this reason, we often hear commercial leaders talk about
skipping elements of the model given recent initiatives. For instance, some
companies wish to focus only on tailoring and taking control because they
recently poured money into designing new sales collateral. While we can’t
dictate what companies do with the model, we are up-front with our
feedback around such partial rollouts: Individual elements of the model,
when invested in, can deliver performance improvements over the status
quo, but for the model to really work, all elements must be invested in and
developed. There are no shortcuts to fully realizing the potential
performance gains that the model offers.

---

Source: CEB, CEB Sales Leadership Council, 2011.
Figure 3.1.
Key Skills Within the Challenger Selling Model
Principle #3: Challenging Is About Organizational