The Challenger Sale

4
TEACHING FOR
DIFFERENTIATION (PART 1):
WHY INSIGHT MATTERS
OVER THE LAST 
fifteen years, most sales training has centered on a core
principle: The shortest path to sales success is a deep understanding of
customers’ needs. If you’re going to sell “solutions,” the thinking goes,
you’ve got to first “discover” your customers’ most pressing points of pain
and then build a tight connection between what’s keeping them up at night
and what you’re seeking to sell.
Not surprisingly, then, sales leaders have spent millions of dollars and
untold hours training reps to ask better questions. Lots of them. Probing
questions. Financial questions. Hypothetical questions. Open-ended
questions. Follow-up questions. All designed to figure out as deeply as
possible customers’ “top three strategic objectives for the coming year,” or
“the two things they’ve got to get right this quarter,” or—better still—their
current “burning platforms.”
The idea being, if we just dig deep enough to find “the story behind the
story,” we’ll eventually get to a place where customers are so forthcoming
about what they truly need that right there on the spot we can craft a highly
targeted offer that provides the perfect “solution” to their problem. A
solution so perfectly aligned with their needs that they have no choice but to
buy it—no matter what the cost.

---

It sounds great on paper, but this approach suffers one major problem: It
doesn’t work nearly as well today as it used to. Certainly it no longer
warrants the massive training investments poured into improving reps’
discovery skills. And that’s not just because improving reps’ ability to ask
good questions proves colossally difficult—especially among core-
performing reps—but, much more important, because this approach is
based on a deeply flawed assumption: that customers actually 
know
what
they need in the first place. That customer needs are simply there waiting to
be unlocked, either willingly or begrudgingly, through the mastery of our
interrogative technique.
But what if customers truly don’t know what they need? What if
customers’ single greatest need—ironically—is to 
figure
out
exactly what
they need?
If this were true, rather than 
asking
customers what they need, the better
sales technique might in fact be to 
tell
customers what they need. And that’s
exactly what Challengers do. When you get down to it, Challengers aren’t
so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers. They
win not by understanding their customers’ world as well as the customers
know it themselves, but by actually knowing their customers’ world 
better
than their customers know it themselves, teaching them what they don’t
know but should.
Across the next two chapters we dive deep into the Challenger’s ability
to teach—arguably the first among equals across the three central
Challenger competencies. A critical part of our teaching story will be a
close, concrete look at what teaching is and is not. What it looks like and
sounds like, how it works, and how to ensure we get paid when it’s done
right. And along the way, we’ll address tough questions with some
surprising answers. Things like:
How exactly is a “teaching” conversation all that different
from a traditional sales conversation?
What kind of collateral do I need to teach effectively?
How much of this is truly a matter of individual skill versus
organizational capability?
What’s the role of marketing in getting this right?

---

And perhaps most important:
Do customers really want to be taught in the first place?
Let’s start with the last question first. That’s really where the rubber hits
the road in any sales approach: with the customer. And in the case of the
Challenger approach, this is the question we hear most often. After all, it
seems on the surface rather arrogant to simply show up and declare to the
customer, “Hello, I’m here to teach you!”
But that’s exactly what we’re saying. Perhaps not in those words per se
—in fact, almost certainly not in those words. But still, after four years of
extensive customer research, what we emphatically know to be true is that
that’s 
exactly
what customers are looking for more than anything else in a
supplier.