The Challenger Sale

1
THE EVOLVING JOURNEY OF
SOLUTION SELLING
IN EARLY 2009, 
CEB set out to answer the most pressing question on the
minds of sales leaders at the time: How can we sell our way through the
worst economy in decades?
It was a question naturally accompanied not only by urgent concern—
even fear—but also by a sense of real mystery. In a world where B2B
selling had ground to nearly a complete halt, sales executives were
surprised to find a handful of reps still bringing in business typical of the
best of times, not the worst. But what were they doing differently? How
were these reps still selling well when virtually no one else was selling at
all?
In studying this question in significant depth we discovered something
surprising. What set these best reps apart wasn’t so much their ability to
succeed in a down economy, but their ability to succeed in a complex sales
model—one that places a huge burden on both reps and customers to think
and behave differently. That model is often referred to as “solution selling”
or a “solutions approach”—or simply “solutions”—and has come to
dominate sales and marketing strategy across the last ten to twenty years.
The story we found in our research, however, told us something very
important about the world of solution selling. It’s evolving dramatically. As
suppliers seek to sell ever bigger, more complex, disruptive, and expensive
“solutions,” B2B customers are naturally buying with greater care and
reluctance than ever before, dramatically rewriting the purchasing playbook

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in the process. As a result, traditional, time-tested sales techniques no
longer work the way they used to. Core-performing reps struggle mightily
in all but the most straightforward of sales, leaving an alarming number of
half-completed deals in their wake as they attempt to adapt to changing
customer demands and evolving buying behaviors.
From this perspective, the down economy that so troubled senior sales
executives when we first launched this work proved to be a red herring. The
downturn exacerbated the widening gap between core- and star-performing
reps, but it didn’t cause it. In fact, the story laid out here isn’t about the
economy at all. It’s about the evolving world of solution selling and the
skills necessary to drive commercial success across the foreseeable future
irrespective of economic conditions. As the world of solution selling
continues to change, our research clearly indicates that a specific set of
sales rep skills has emerged as significantly more likely to drive
commercial results than those emphasized in either traditional product
selling or early solution selling. To understand why those skills matter so
much, it’s helpful to first examine the evolution of the sales model itself.