The Challenger Sale

Greater Demand for Customization
Third, as deal complexity goes up, so does customers’ natural tendency to
want to modify the deal to more closely meet their specific needs. Whereas
suppliers typically see customization purely from a cost perspective,
customers see customization as part of the promise of a “solutions” sale: “If
you’re going to ‘solve’ my problem, then this is what I need it to do. Why
should that cost more money? After all, if it doesn’t do that, then it’s not
really a ‘solution,’ is it?” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.
Customization: Everyone wants it; no one wants to pay for it.
The Rise of Third-Party Consultants
Finally, over the last several years, we’ve seen a dramatic and troubling rise
in the number of third-party consultants employed by customers to help
them “extract maximum value from the purchase decision.” A well-
established practice in some sectors—corporate health insurance in the
United States, for example—this trend really took off globally in late 2009,
forged by the need of most companies to cut costs on the one hand, and the
even more urgent need of recently laid-off industry experts to find a job on
the other. Typically, these newly minted consultants sold their services
largely on the basis of their ability to save companies money. In that case,
“extracting maximum value from the purchase decision” really was nothing
more than code for doing everything possible to stick it to suppliers on
price, up to and including going back and auditing prior deals to uncover
grounds for renegotiation.
Over time, however, larger organizational players have become deeply
involved in the purchase as well. In their case, “extracting maximum value
from the purchase decision” typically translates into something closer to
helping customers navigate solutions complexity. The fact of the matter is
that as suppliers seek to sell increasingly broad solutions to ever more
complex customer problems, as often as not the complexity of those

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problems is so high that customers are themselves unqualified to navigate—
let alone evaluate—potential courses of action on their own. They need
help. Rather than turning to the suppliers for that help, however, they look
to “neutral” third-party experts.
As a result, suppliers today are frequently confronted with new and
aggressive third-party intermediaries looking to take their share of “value”
from the deal. And you can be sure that that pound of flesh is going to come
from the supplier side, not the customer side, given whom these consultants
are working for. In this world, you can easily wind up with all the
customer’s business, but none of their money.
All four of these trends in customer buying behavior have led to a hard
truth for sales organizations all over the world—and especially for the reps
who sell for them: While the economy has gotten better, selling hasn’t
gotten any easier. It’s the physics of sales: Suppliers called the solutions
play, and customers have made their countermove. Customers are looking
for ways to reduce both the complexity and the risk that suppliers’ solution
selling efforts have foisted upon them.