The Challenger Sale

BUILDING THE INSIGHT GENERATION MACHINE
When you step back and consider the scope of what we’re proposing here,
you can begin to see how this approach reaches deep back into the
organization. Yes, you need Challenger reps to deliver the teaching, but the
actual construction of the conversation—the unique benefits, the surprising
customer insights, the tightly packaged teaching choreography—require
input from the entire commercial organization.
Many companies choose to shield sales reps from the complexity of the
six-step choreography altogether by simplifying the approach into three key
elements: (1) Providing customers with game-changing insight, (2)
specifying and personalizing the potential impact of that insight, and (3)
introducing your capabilities as the best possible means of acting on that
insight. It’s the same journey, but it’s simply easier to process for reps
traditionally accustomed to “leading with” rather than “leading to.”
It’s possible you’ve begun wondering: “Identifying unique benefits . . .
segmenting customers by need . . . generating compelling customer
insight . . . developing teaching-based collateral . . . For a book about
individual sales performance, it seems like we’ve wandered a long way
away from the individual rep.” But remember, this book is absolutely about

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individual sales reps and how they can perform significantly better, yet you
wouldn’t want to leave any of 
these
things in the hands of your individual
reps. These are organizational capabilities, not individual skills. A critical
lesson of the Challenger approach is the significant need for organizational
involvement to make it truly sustainable and not just the result of incidental
sales rep excellence. Few but the very best of your reps could pull off this
kind of teaching on their own consistently over time.
When sales leaders first see Commercial Teaching, they usually tell us
something like, “I’m having a hard enough time getting my guys to 
sell
, and
now you want them to 
teach
? Good luck!” But it doesn’t have to be that
way. At least in terms of teaching, the most important steps you can take to
migrate your sales force closer to the Challenger profile have less to do with
the individual reps themselves and much more to do with the organization
that supports them. In fact, in many ways, Commercial Teaching is likely
easier
for individual reps than what we’re asking them to do right now.
Much of the heavy lifting necessary to its success happens long before an
individual rep ever gets in front of a customer.
To understand why, think about the journey from transactional selling to
solutions selling that just about every B2B sales organization has
undertaken across the last five to fifteen years (see 
figure 1.1
). As part of
that move, sales skill requirements have gone up dramatically. With
transactional selling, reps sold largely on product features and benefits; in
the new world of solution selling, reps probe for individual customer needs
in the moment, allowing them to suggest specifically tailored solutions to
whatever they hear in response. In its purest form, solution selling is
customization in the moment. It’s an incredibly high bar for any sales rep.
It’s no wonder, really, that sales organizations all over the world struggle
mightily to help their teams make this transition.
With Commercial Teaching, you can significantly back off on your
expectations for individual customization ability, as the organization steps
in to offer crucial support around the very thing that customers have told us
they value most in supplier interactions, namely the sharing of commercial
insight. The reps’ primary job shifts from discovering needs to guiding a
conversation. That allows the organization to lay out the framework for that
conversation in advance—to “chalk the field,” as one head of sales put it.

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There are a number of ways in which that conversation might still take
an unexpected turn or go off the rails altogether, and individual skill is still
hugely important in allowing the best reps to navigate those scenarios better
than anyone else, but Commercial Teaching places significant guardrails
around the sales interaction to provide real support for the rep.
First, the customer’s needs are