The Challenger Sale: The Power of Sales Reps Profile

I have been facilitating sales trainings for the last 25 years and in most of these sessions the focus was on sales techniques and on sales metrics. While these subjects are important, they are only part of an overall sales success. Very few managers know or understand the importance of the profile of sales reps in topping up sales, while this profile is an integral part of any successful sales system. I read a book lately that described the direct link between sales success and sales reps profile, and I thought about sharing with you, in brief terms, the outcomes of the research conducted by CEB and described in “The Challenger Sales” book (Matthew Dixon and Brant Adamson). It is a wonderful read that will probably change the way you look at sales and selling.

The decline of relationship selling

Conventional wisdom has long held that selling is about relationships and that in complex sales, relationships are the underpinning of sales success. Yet over the last ten years there have been some disturbing hints that relationship-based selling may be less effective than in the past. In the book, the authors indicate that when they asked 1,100 customers what they valued in salespeople, they were surprised at how little these customers mentioned ‘relationships’. They argue that the old advice “build relationships first and sales will follow” no longer holds true. That is not to say that relationships are not important. However, a better explanation is that ‘relationship’ and ‘purchasing decision’ have become decoupled. Today you’ll often hear customers say: “I have a great relationship with this sales rep but I buy from his competition because they provide better value.”

In early 2009, during the worst economic downturn in recent history, 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? In a world where B2B selling had ground to nearly a complete halt, sales executives were surprised to find that a handful of reps were still bringing in business that was typical of the best of times, not the worst. What were these sales reps doing differently? How were they still selling well when virtually no one else was selling at all?

In studying this question in significant depth, the authors discovered something surprising. What set these best reps apart was not so much their ability to succeed in a depressed 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”- and has come to dominate sales and marketing strategy for the last ten to twenty years.

The research found that 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 in the process. The story laid out here is not about the economy at all. It is 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, the research clearly indicates that a specific set of sales rep skills has emerged and is significantly more likely to drive commercial results than those emphasized in either traditional product selling or early solution selling.

Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, “The Challenger Sales” argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large scale business-to-business solutions. The author’s study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one - the Challenger - delivers consistently high performance.

The Challenger Sale research revealed that every B2B sales rep falls into five different profiles.

The “Challenger Approach” to sales is the most correlated approach with actual sales performance among high performers.

In the study, they found that:

• 40% of high sales performers primarily used a Challenger style - as opposed to one of the other four sales styles the book identified.
• High performers were more than twice as likely to use a Challenger approach as any other approach.
• More than 50% of all star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales.
• Only 7% of top performers took a relationship-building approach – the worst performing profile.

This is a disruptive finding, as most sales training and sales teams today are geared towards creating and encouraging the "Relationship Builder," the least effective of the five profiles.

The Challenger Sales Model believes all five sales profiles can learn to be a Challenger.

What makes Challengers unique are teachable skills that the average sales rep can learn to replicate. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force.

These profiles define the skills and behaviors sales reps use when interacting with customers. They also describe a rep’s natural mode of interacting with a prospect, and are not mutually exclusive.