The Challenger Sale

NOT JUST ANY TEACHING. 
COMMERCIAL 
TEACHING

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Still, as important as teaching is, it is not enough to simply build a team of
Challenger reps and tell them, “Go forth and teach!” That may be good for
customers, but not necessarily good for business. Here’s how the global
head of sales at a large enterprise software company put it to us: “What
happens,” he asked, “if my rep goes out, teaches a customer something
completely new and compelling about their business, gets them all excited
to take action, and that customer then takes that insight, puts it out to bid,
and my competitor wins the deal? In that case, it doesn’t feel like I’ve really
won anything.”
And he’s right, you haven’t. All you’ve really done is provide free
consulting. Sure, you’ve given the customer exactly what they want, but in
the process you’ve actually given your competitor exactly what 
they
want
too—your business. And that is truly a bad place to be.
It’s one thing to challenge customers with new ideas, and another thing
altogether to ensure you get paid for it. Even the world’s best Challengers
can’t win if they’re teaching customers to value capabilities they can’t
competitively provide. So how do we ensure that our teaching efforts
actually lead to more business for us and not the competition? Well, to do
that, we find that your teaching efforts have to meet some very specific
criteria.
We call this approach Commercial Teaching. A bit unimaginative,
perhaps, but we like the name nonetheless because it perfectly captures
what Challengers ultimately must do: teach customers something new and
valuable about their business—which is what they want—in a way that
reliably leads to commercial wins for us—which of course is what we want.
It sounds a bit like jujitsu, but it’s actually pretty straightforward; it’s just
not necessarily easy. Commercial Teaching has four key rules:
1. Lead to your unique strengths.
2. Challenge customers’ assumptions.
3. Catalyze action.
4. Scale across customers.
As we work through these rules, you’ll find that they are as much about
building an organizational capability as they are about developing an

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individual skill, a key lesson of the Challenger selling model we discussed
in the previous chapter. This approach is about much more than simply
building Challengers; it’s about broad, long-term commercial
transformation. More on that shortly. For now, let’s review the four rules of
Commercial Teaching.