The Challenger Sale

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SELL, IT’S HOW YOU SELL
Beginning long before the global economy went off a cliff in 2008 and
continuing right through the ensuing downturn, CEB had surveyed well
over 5,000 individuals at members’ customer organizations—everyone
from business owners and C-suite executives to end users, purchase
influencers, procurement officers, and even third-party consultants—in
order to determine what exactly they’re looking for in a business-to-
business supplier.
Specifically, across roughly fifty questions we asked each respondent to
rank the named supplier (i.e., our client organization) versus similar
suppliers in terms of various attributes of their products, brand, service, and
price-to-value ratio. We asked about all the typical reasons why someone
might choose one supplier over another—things like product performance,
product features, brand recognition, service response times. In addition, we
asked those same individuals a number of questions about the sales
experience itself—what it’s actually like to buy from the named supplier
relative to their competitors. Finally, we asked each respondent three
specific questions to gauge their level of loyalty to that supplier: “On a
scale from one to seven, how willing are you to:

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keep buying from this particular supplier;
buy even more from this supplier going forward;
advocate on this supplier’s behalf across your organization?”
We weren’t asking about a customer’s general level of happiness, or
satisfaction, or even likelihood to buy—all of which we’ve found to have
little impact on B2B customer loyalty—but rather about their willingness to
join that supplier on a “solutions journey.” Across years of loyalty research,
we’ve found that the combination of these three questions better predicts
deeper customer relationships and, ultimately, commercial growth than any
other loyalty metric we’ve tested.
When we put all of that information together—tens of thousands of data
points—and then run it through extensive analysis, it allows us to
determine, of all the ways to outperform the competition, what the most
important factors actually 
are
driving up customer loyalty.
The answer is not only fascinating but so unexpected for most sales and
marketing executives that the results have landed in more boardroom-level
conversations than any other piece of research we’ve ever conducted (see
figure 4.1
).
Source: CEB, CEB Sales Leadership Council, 2011.