The Challenger Sale

A ROAD MAP FOR THE REST OF THIS BOOK
What’s the best path to building Challenger reps? Here is how we’ll tackle
this question in the following chapters:
In chapters 
4
 and 
5
, we’ll look at the notion of teaching.
We’ll address the questions of why teaching works and what
your reps should be teaching in the first place—as well as
what the content of their “teaching pitch” should look like.
Much of this chapter will center on the critical role that the
organization—in most companies, marketing—plays in
identifying “customer-worthy insights” that lead to a
supplier’s unique capabilities.
In 
chapter 6
, we’ll look at tailoring. We’ll take a deep dive
into why tailoring is an effective approach in today’s sales

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environment and look at what the best sales organizations do
to equip their reps to tailor—in other words, get them to
adapt their sales approach and message to specific
individuals across the customer organization. A critical part
of the tailoring story is the shift we discussed in 
chapter 1
toward consensus buying within customer organizations.
We’ll spend some time unpacking this trend in more detail in
chapter 6
.
In 
chapter 7
, we’ll dig deep into the area of taking control
and discuss techniques for getting reps to increase their
assertiveness without becoming aggressive. As mentioned
before, taking control is an easily misunderstood
 
element of
the Challenger Selling Model. Poorly applied, it will do
more harm than good, but correctly applied, it can be the
difference between a decision and “no decision.” In a world
where the customer’s status quo is really your worst enemy,
and customers are so increasingly risk-averse, the ability to
take control can be a game-changer for your sales reps.
In 
chapter 8
, we will look at the critical role of the frontline
sales manager in building Challengers across the sales force.
Specifically, we’ll look at the issue of coaching—something
most sales organizations continue to neglect. This is an area
of deep expertise for us and one where we have some
counterintuitive data and powerful best practices to share
with you. The story doesn’t end with coaching, however. In
some recent work we’ve completed, we’ve found that high-
performing sales managers also possess a unique ability to
innovate at the deal level with their reps. If coaching is about
imparting skills known to drive sales success, sales
innovation is about moving individual deals forward in a
purposeful manner. They’re different skills, but both are
hugely important in an organization seeking to make a shift
to the Challenger model.
In 
chapter 9
, we’ll offer some additional words of guidance
to leaders who are seeking to transform their commercial
organizations into Challenger organizations. If you’re going

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to embark on this journey of building Challengers, how do
you design the change effort so that it leads to real, long-
term change and not just the next “flavor of the month”
upskilling effort?
Lastly, in the 
afterword
, we’ll look at the notion of
challenging beyond the world of sales. The Challenger
model is one that, we believe, is a business concept, not just
a sales concept, and is one that we’ve seen effectively
employed in a variety of corporate settings—from IT to HR
to finance, legal, and strategy—and we’ll discuss this in
more detail in this closing section of the book.

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