The Challenger Sale

Commercial Teaching Rule #3: Catalyze Action
In a world of limited resources and competing priorities, it’s not enough to
change the way customers think. You’ve ultimately got to get them to act.
We often joke about the customer who responds to your reframe with,
“Huh, I never thought about it that way before! . . . I wonder what’s for
lunch . . .” Like Doug, the dog in the movie 
Up
who becomes completely
distracted every time he sees a squirrel, customers easily lose focus. So if
you want them to take action, you’ll need to build a compelling business
case for why action matters in the first place.
This is well-trodden ground. For most suppliers, the move to
“solutions” is grounded in an effort to justify premium prices for bundled
products and services. As a result, they’ve invested huge amounts of time
and money in a wide range of tools designed to help customers calculate the
“ROI” or “total cost of ownership” of their offerings—usually accompanied
by sales reps’ enthusiastic assurances of the “lifetime value” of their
products. “Yes, we might cost a little more up front, but look at what you
can save over the next four years! Our solution practically pays for itself!”
Unless you can convince your customers they’ll get incremental value for
that premium price, your solution strategy is doomed to fail.
In a Commercial Teaching approach, this is exactly where we find the
biggest difference between companies who 
believe
they do this well and
those who 
actually
do this well. That’s because a well-executed teaching
conversation isn’t about the supplier’s solution at all—at least not initially.
It’s about the customer’s business, laying out an alternative means to either
save money or make money they’d previously overlooked. In a
conversation like that, traditional ROI calculations prove useless because
they’re focused on the wrong thing.
Nearly every ROI calculator we know of is built to help customers
calculate the return on buying the supplier’s solution. But before you
convince customers to take that action, you first have to show them why the

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insight you just shared with them merits any action at all, especially when
that insight competes directly with conventional wisdom. To that end, the
best ROI calculators in a teaching approach have nothing to do with your
solution at all. Rather, they help customers calculate the costs they’re
incurring or the returns they’re forgoing by failing to act on the opportunity
you’ve just taught them they’ve overlooked.
If you’re going to build an ROI calculator, make sure it calculates the
return on pursuing the reframe, not purchasing your products. Before they
buy anything, customers first need to understand what’s in it for them to fix
their problem.