The Challenger Sale

THE SECOND BREAKTHROUGH
We don’t know exactly when the producer/collector idea was first
introduced, but we can be very specific about the date of the second great
breakthrough. It happened in July 1925, when E. K. Strong published 
The
Psychology of Selling
. This seminal work introduced the idea of sales

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techniques, such as features and benefits, objection handling, closing, and,
perhaps most important, open and closed questioning. It showed that there
were things people could learn that would help them sell more effectively,
and it gave rise to the sales training industry.
Looking back from the sophisticated perspective of today, many of the
things Strong wrote about sound heavy-handed and simplistic.
Nevertheless, he—and those who followed him—changed selling forever.
Perhaps the most important aspect of his contribution was the idea that
selling wasn’t an innate ability. It was a set of identifiable skills that could
be learned. And in 1925, that was radical indeed. It opened selling to a
much wider range of people and, from anecdotal reports of the time,
brought about dramatic increases in sales effectiveness.
THE THIRD BREAKTHROUGH
The third great breakthrough came in the 1970s, when researchers became
interested in the idea that the techniques and skills that worked in small
sales might be very different from those that worked in larger and more
complex ones. I had the good fortune to be an integral part of this
revolution. In the ’70s I directed a huge research project, tracking 10,000
salespeople in twenty-three countries. We followed salespeople into more
than 35,000 sales calls and analyzed what made some of them more
successful than others in complex sales. From this twelve-year project we
published a number of books, starting with 
SPIN Selling
. This marked the
beginning of what we now call the consultative selling era. It was a
breakthrough because it introduced much more sophisticated models of how
to sell complex products and services and, like the earlier breakthroughs,
brought about significant gains in sales productivity.
The last thirty years have been marked by a lot of small improvements
in selling, but we haven’t seen many game-changing developments that
could claim to be breakthroughs. True, there’ve been sales automation,
sales process, and customer relationship management. Technology has
played a bigger and bigger role in selling. There have also been huge
changes to transactional selling as a result of the Internet. But all these have

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been incremental changes, often with questionable productivity gains, and
none of them, to my way of thinking, qualifies as a bona fide
 
breakthrough
in how to sell differently and more effectively.