The Challenger Sale

Tailoring for Resonance
While teaching is above all others the defining attribute of being a
Challenger, the ability to tailor the teaching message to different types of
customers—as well as to different individuals within the customer
organization—is what makes the teaching pitch resonate and stick with the
customer.
Tailoring relies on the rep’s knowledge of the specific business priorities
of whomever he or she is talking to—the specific outcomes that particular
person values most, the results they’re on the hook to deliver for their
company, and the various economic drivers most likely to affect those
outcomes.
If a Challenger rep is sitting across the table from a head of marketing,
he understands how to craft his message to resonate with her specific
priorities. And if he’s meeting with someone in operations, he knows how
to modify the message accordingly. But this isn’t just a measure of business
acumen, it’s a measure of agility—the rep’s ability to tailor the story to the
individual stakeholder’s business environment. What specifically do they
care about? How is their performance measured? How do they fit into the
overall customer organization?
An example that demonstrates the power of effective tailoring comes
from our member at a business services provider. Two of their reps had
been jointly working one account for approximately six months, building
rapport with the business leaders across the organization, all the while
preparing for a big proposal presentation to the company’s CEO and
management team. After multiple meetings and presentations, the reps
homed in on what they thought was most needed by the customer—an
outsourcing solution that would deliver cost savings to the business.
But just a week before they were about to present to the CEO and his
team, the reps attended their own company’s annual sales meeting, which
had focused on building Challenger skills across the sales organization. At
the session on tailoring, the reps realized that they hadn’t fully investigated
the personal motivations and business objectives of the customer’s CEO
and were potentially unprepared to make their best pitch at the upcoming
meeting.

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They called a last-minute meeting with some of the key stakeholders in
the customer organization to better understand the personal goals and
objectives of the CEO—all in an attempt to see if there was some insight
they could bring to the table that would personally appeal to him. What they
learned in this meeting proved invaluable. They found out that the CEO was
extremely focused on the poor customer satisfaction scores the company
had recently received. And they learned that the CEO was himself a
technology junkie.
Instead of going into the meeting with the cost savings–focused pitch
they had already prepared, they switched gears and focused the
conversation on ways in which the solution they were proposing not only
would cut costs but could at the same time improve customer satisfaction
and issue resolution response time by leveraging new technologies the
supplier had recently developed. What’s more, the technology would allow
everyone from the CEO down to line managers to get real-time visibility
into customer service issues and issue resolution response times.
The CEO immediately sat up and listened with rapt attention to the sales
pitch. What was to be a standard review of a supplier proposal turned into a
surprising discussion of one of the CEO’s hot-button issues. At the end of
the presentation, the CEO thanked the reps for shedding new light on a
persistent business problem and demonstrating capabilities that he didn’t
realize the supplier had. While the competitors stuck to their standard
proposals, this supplier won the business by tailoring their message to what
the CEO cared about most. In a time when consensus is more important
than ever to get the deal done, it’s no surprise that the rep who wins in this
environment is the one who can effectively tailor the message to a wide
range of customer stakeholders in order to build that consensus. This is a
topic we’re going to explore in a lot more depth in 
chapter 6
.