The Challenger Sale

DEVELOPING A PURPOSEFUL CHOREOGRAPHY
So how do you 
build
a Commercial Teaching message? The place to begin
is actually at the end with step 6, your solution. You can’t build a
compelling story unless you first know what it’s building to. You’ve got to
have both clarity and agreement across your organization around the unique
benefits that only you can offer your customers. That said, as you nail those
benefits down, you’ll want to focus in particular on the ones your customers
currently 
under
appreciate. Now that might feel counterintuitive at first.
Wouldn’t you do the opposite? Focus on the unique benefits that your
customers truly value? After all, that’s Marketing 101, right? Exactly.
But if you want to 
teach
customers something new and not just
reinforce what they already know, you’ll need to ensure that the “punch
line” of that teaching contains an element of surprise as well—a new and
unexpected way to think about how you can help. Alternatively, if your
customers already place high value on your benefits over those of the
competition, you likely don’t need to teach them anything at all. Just take
their order. But beware: By focusing solely on the 
known
value of your
offering, you forgo an opportunity to challenge customers’ thinking, which
they value even more than whatever you’re selling. You win their business
in the short run, but potentially lose it over time. By helping customers
think differently about 
their
company, you ultimately want them to think
differently about 
your
company.
Once you’ve established clarity around step 6—Your Solution—your
next stop in building a powerful Commercial Teaching conversation is step
2—the Reframe. You need to identify the core insight, or ah-ha! moment,
that will get your customer to say, “Wow, I never thought about it that way
before.”

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To get there, start with the unique benefits you’ve identified for step 6
and then ask yourself, “Why don’t my customers value those benefits
already
?” What is it about how they view their world that precludes them
from appreciating those benefits as much as we think they either could or
should? That’s the view you need to change. And to change it, you’ll need
to provide them with an alternate view (the Reframe), and then convince
them that that alternate view—were they to pursue it—could either save or
make them more money than they realized (step 3). After that, it’s simply a
matter of fleshing out the rest of the story to create a logical and compelling
path from step 2 to step 6.
Put it all together and you get: “What’s currently costing our customers
more money than they realize, that only we can help them fix?” The answer
to that question is the heart and soul of your Commercial Teaching pitch.