The Challenger Sale

Capability, Not Just Rep Skills
Many organizations assume that the migration to the Challenger Selling
Model is a question only of improving individual rep skills. For the model
to really work, that is emphatically not the case. This journey is actually just
as much about building organizational capabilities as it is about developing
individual skills.
Building a teaching capability, which we will discuss in much more
detail in the following chapters, is not something that you just want your
individual reps out there figuring out on their own. While it is true that
some of your existing Challengers can do this effectively, an organization
that leaves the teaching content up to its individual reps will be pulled in
many different directions as reps promise customers solutions to myriad
business issues—including many your company is not equipped to solve.
The act of delivering a teaching pitch is a skill, to be sure, but the
content
of a teaching pitch—the business issues you teach customers to

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value, the idea around which you reframe how the customer thinks about
their business—must be scalable and repeatable, and as such, must be
created by the organization (in most organizations, this is the job of
marketing).
The same can be said for parts of tailoring. While there is a clear role
for the individual rep on the tailoring front, namely, recognizing how to
modify the teaching message for different individuals across the customer
organization, the organization has an important responsibility when it
comes to tailoring as well. First, organizations can leverage business
intelligence and research assets to help developing Challengers better tailor
their messages to each customer’s industry and company context. The
organization also bears the responsibility for identifying which teaching
messages will resonate with which stakeholders. A one-size-fits-all teaching
message is unlikely to be tenable for most suppliers, aside from those who
sell in a single line of business to a highly homogeneous set of customers.
Yet individual customer stakeholder segmentation at this level, again, is just
as much an organizational capability as it is an individual skill.
If tailoring is half individual/half organizational, the only component of
the Challenger model that can truly be called a 
largely
individual skill is
taking control. Here is where rep upskilling will pay significant dividends,
and in 
chapter 7
 we will explain the best way to drive this behavior into the
front line. However, it is worth noting that even here, the organization has a
role to play. Namely, Challenger reps armed with powerful teaching
messages produced by their organizations will be in a much better position
to take control of the customer conversation. As well, our recent research
shows that the organization plays an important role in equipping reps to
identify and properly engage with the right stakeholders on the customer
side—an important part of taking control of the sale.