The Challenger Sale

INTRODUCTION
A SURPRISING LOOK INTO THE
FUTURE
IN THE UNFORGETTABLE 
early months of 2009, as the bottom fell out
of the global economy, business-to-business sales leaders around the world
faced an epic problem and an even deeper mystery.
Customers had vanished overnight. Commerce had ground to a halt.
Credit was scarce, and cash even scarcer. For anyone in business, times
were tough. But for heads of sales, they were an absolute nightmare.
Imagine having to get up every morning, rally your troops, and send them
into a battle they couldn’t possibly win. To find business where none could
be found. True, sales has always been about the good fight—about winning
business often in the face of strong resistance. But this was different. It’s
one thing to sell to reluctant, even nervous customers. It’s another thing
altogether to sell to no one at all. And that’s where we were in early 2009.
Yet therein lay the mystery. Staring directly into the teeth of the
toughest sales environment in decades—if not ever—a small but uniquely
gifted number of sales reps 
were
selling. In fact, they were selling a lot.
While others struggled to close even the smallest of deals, these individuals
were bringing in the kind of business most reps could only dream of even in
an up economy. Were they lucky? Were they just born with it? And most
important, how could you possibly capture that magic, bottle it, and export
it to everyone else? For many companies, their very survival depended on
the answer.
It was into this environment that CEB launched what has become one of
the most important studies of sales rep productivity in decades. Tasked by

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members of CEB’s sales program—heads of sales from the world’s largest,
best-known companies—we set out to identify what exactly set this very
special group of sales reps apart. And having now studied that question
intensively for the better part of four years, spanning dozens of companies
and thousands of sales reps, we have discovered three core insights that
have fundamentally rewritten the sales playbook and led B2B sales
executives all over the world to think very differently about how they sell.
The first insight was something we weren’t originally even looking for.
It turns out that just about every B2B sales rep in the world falls into one of
five distinct profiles, a specific set of skills and behaviors that define his or
her primary mode of interacting with customers. Now, that’s interesting in
and of itself, as you’ll be able to find yourself and your colleagues in these
profiles when you see them. These five profiles prove to be an incredibly
practical way of dividing the world into a manageable set of alternative
sales techniques.
That said, it’s really the second insight that changes everything. When
you take those five profiles and compare them with actual sales
performance, you find there is a very clear winner and a very clear loser:
One of them spectacularly outperforms the other four, while one of them
falls dramatically behind. Yet there is something very disturbing about these
results. When we show them to sales leaders, we hear the same thing again
and again. These leaders find the results deeply troubling, because they’ve
placed by far their biggest bet on the profile least likely to win. This one
insight has shattered the way many sales leaders think about the kind of
reps they need to survive and thrive in a tough economy.
And that brings us to the third and final core insight from this work—
arguably the most explosive of them all. As we dug deeper into the data, we
found something even more surprising. While we’d set out four years ago to
find the winning recipe for sales rep success in a down economy, all of the
data indicate something far more important. The profile most likely to win
isn’t winning 
because
of the down economy, but 
irrespective
of it. These
reps are winning because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because
they’ve mastered a complex economy. In other words, when we unlocked
the mystery of high performance in the down economy, the story turned out
to be much bigger than anyone had anticipated. Your very best sales reps—
the ones who carried you through the downturn—aren’t just the heroes of

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today, but are also the heroes of tomorrow, as they are far better able to
drive sales and deliver customer value in 
any
kind of economic
environment. What we ultimately found is a dramatically improved recipe
for a successful solution sales rep.
We call these winning reps Challengers, and this is their story.

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