The Challenger Sale

Commercial Teaching Rule #4: Scale Across Customers
Done well, Commercial Teaching is much more than simply an effective
sales technique. It’s a powerful commercial strategy. To be sure, it
absolutely works well at the individual deal level, as Challenger reps
opportunistically uncover occasions to teach customers fresh insights
tailored to their specific context. However, there are a number of important
reasons why the approach is unquestionably more effective when deployed
segment by segment rather than customer by customer.
From a tactical perspective, it’s not realistic or fair to expect your reps
to understand their customers’ business better than they do themselves
without at least some organizational support. Your core performers will
struggle mightily with that task no matter how much you train them—
especially if they work across a diverse customer base.
But imagine if you could provide those same reps with a manageably
small set of well-scripted insights along with two or three easy-to-
remember diagnostic questions designed to map the right insight to the right
customer. Then they’d be in a much better position to teach. It would
significantly shift the burden of effective needs diagnosis away from
frontline sales reps and back into the organization, where you’ve got both
the depth of skill and the breadth of insight necessary to figure it out in
advance.
For this approach to truly work, you need a small number of powerful
insights that naturally lead to an even smaller number of unique solutions,

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all applicable across the broadest possible set of customers. In other words,
you need scale. Commercial Teaching is definitely 
not
something you just
want to leave in the hands of individual reps.
Commercial Teaching also requires you to think very differently about
customer segmentation. While traditional segmentation schemes like
geography, product silo, or industry vertical may be sufficient for sales rep
deployment, the companies that do best at this approach have learned to
also segment customers by need or behavior. If you can find a group of
customers with similar needs—irrespective of where they are or what they
sell—those customers will likely all react in a similar fashion to a common
set of insights. For example, we have seen Commercial Teaching work very
effectively around a common need to free up cash, or reduce employee
churn, or improve workplace safety. In each of these cases, the suppliers in
question helped customers think about that need in new and surprising ways
by reframing their thinking, convincingly laying out the fully loaded costs
of inaction, and then providing a credible course of action that naturally led
back to the supplier’s unique solution. And each did it across large groups
of customers who under any traditional segmentation strategy would have
appeared, superficially at least, to have nothing in common. The common
denominator for insight, in other words, isn’t geography, or size, or
industry. It’s a common set of needs.
We’ve done a great deal of work in our Marketing & Communications
practice across the last three years helping members develop and implement
various needs-based segmentation techniques, based on a number of best
practices developed at some of the world’s leading B2B companies. The
one thing every company that’s gone down this path has discovered is this:
Needs analysis is not something you can afford to leave in the hands of your
individual reps. If your reps’ primary goal going into a sales call is to
“discover” the customer’s needs, you’ve lost the battle before you’ve even
begun to fight, because, frankly, your customers don’t want to have that
conversation.
Alternatively, Commercial Teaching equips reps to teach customers
what they really need by challenging the way they think about their
business altogether, providing them with new means to address their
toughest problems in ways they would have never identified on their own.
Granted, there are some important conditions that must be met in order for

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this approach to work. Commercial Teaching must lead to your unique
strengths, challenge customers’ assumptions, catalyze action, and scale
across customers. But when these conditions are met, it works—
phenomenally well, in fact. And the reason why, as we saw, is because more
than anything else customers are looking to suppliers to challenge their
thinking and teach them something they don’t know.
That said, once you’ve laid the groundwork for effective Commercial
Teaching, your reps still have to go out and actually 
talk
to customers. If
they don’t have the skills to challenge, even the most powerful insights will
fall on deaf ears. So what does a “teaching conversation” actually sound
like? Is it really all that different? Absolutely. It’s not just that Challengers
teach that sets them apart, it’s the 
way
that they teach that really matters
most. World-class teaching conversations, it turns out, follow a very
specific choreography, one that takes a traditional sales conversation and
completely stands it on its head. Let’s look at that next.

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