The Challenger Sale

Step 5: A New Way
Coming into step 5 you’ve convinced the customer of the problem. Now
you’ve got to convince them of the solution. This is a point-by-point review
of the specific capabilities they would need to have in order to make good
on whatever opportunity to make money, save money, or mitigate risk that
you’ve just convinced them they’re facing. As tempting as it might be at
this point to launch into a review of how you can help, step 5 is still about
the 
solution
, not about the 
supplier
. Facing a customer who enthusiastically
agrees that they’ve got the very challenge your solution directly addresses,
it is deeply tempting to talk specifically about how you can help. For most
reps it simply feels like the obvious thing to do. But step 5 isn’t a story
about how much better customers’ lives would be if they bought your stuff
(which is what most reps want to talk about), it’s about showing customers
how much better their life would be if they just acted differently. It’s about
behaving differently, not buying differently.

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Don’t rush this. Before they buy 
your
solution, the customer has to buy
the
solution. You’re looking for your customer to say something like,
“You’re right, that makes total sense. That’s what we need to do,” or
“That’s the kind of company I want us to be.” 
Now
they’re ready for step 6,
Your Solution.
Step 6: Your Solution
If step 5 is about getting customers bought in to acting differently, the goal
of step 6 is to demonstrate how your solution is better able than anyone
else’s to equip them to act differently. In many ways, of all six steps, this
one is the most straightforward, as it’s what reps have been trained to do
from the very beginning. This is where you lay out the specific ways you
can deliver the solution they’ve just agreed to in step 5 better than anyone
else. It’s also where all of the hard work around identifying your unique
capabilities pays off, because they are front and center in step 6. After all, it
would be absolutely crushing to get your customer all the way to step 6 and
then have that deal go out to an RFP that you couldn’t easily win. If your
competition is still in the running at this point, then you have either failed to
identify capabilities that are truly unique or you have failed to lead to them
as convincingly as you’d hoped.
If, however, you’ve got this right, in steps 1–6 you’ve addressed both
aspects of Commercial Teaching—the “commercial” and the “teaching”—
in one conversation. You’ve taught the customer something new and
valuable about their business (which is what they were looking for from the
conversation), in a way that specifically leads them to value your
capabilities over those of the competition (which is what you were looking
for from the conversation).
Now, when you look back at all six steps together, ask yourself the
following question: Where does the 
supplier
first enter the conversation?
Notice it’s not until the very end in step 6. And for many reps, this is
completely counterintuitive. After all, if I’m going to sell my solution to a
customer, then the first thing I need to talk about is 
my
solution
—what it
does, how it’s different, how it helps. Right? Wrong! That’s not the first

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thing you need to talk about, but the 
last
, for a very simple reason: Your
customer doesn’t care.
That fact that your newly designed XZ-690 runs 15 percent faster,
quieter, cooler, and cheaper than the competition just isn’t that interesting to
most customers. If it 
is
, then why bother with a sales call at all? Just send
them a quote and take the order over the phone. Better yet, sell it through an
e-store on the Internet and get rid of your sales force altogether.
If, on the other hand, you’re going to take sixty minutes of your
customer’s precious time for a face-to-face meeting, you’d better make sure
that whatever you do with that time is valuable to your customer. Listening
to a review of how your XZ-690 is going to save them time and money
isn’t. Talking about the customer’s business in ways that help them boost
productivity is.
Remember, in the Commercial Teaching world everything is built back
from the finding that, in your customers’ eyes, your primary value as a
supplier is your ability to 
teach
them something, not to 
sell
them something.
In the teaching world, the pitch isn’t about the supplier at all. It’s about the
customer. As a result, the best sales reps have found that you can’t win
customers’ interest and loyalty if you lead with your differentiators—all
your products, services, and solutions—no matter how good they are.
Instead, the best sales conversations present the customer with a compelling
story about their business 
first
, teach them something new, and then lead 
to
their differentiators.
By placing your unique strengths in context at the end of a highly
credible teaching pitch you completely change the customer’s disposition
toward your offering. But to get there, there has to be a flow to the
conversation, a purposeful choreography where your solution is the natural
outgrowth of your teaching, rather than the subject of your teaching. And
that’s a huge difference. Don’t lead 
with
, lead 
to
. Remember, the real value
of the interaction isn’t what you sell; it’s the insight you provide as part of
the sales interaction itself.