Your "Cliff's Notes" Guide to The Challenger Sale

As a big fan of The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, and as someone who has taught the Challenger content / approaches to selling many times over the past couple of years, I thought...wouldn't it be cool if there was a "Cliff's Notes" type guide it?  Although I've seen a few versions over the web, I pieced this together the below (in under 1000 words) using some of their own language along with some of my spin.  I hope it can serve as a reminder to those who have read the book, and as an initial foundation for those who haven't.  (This does not excuse you from reading the book!)

Your “Cliff’s Notes” Guide to The Challenger Sale

The traditional approach to selling no longer works in today's buying environment. Our deals are increasingly complex and customers have access to more information earlier in the sale than ever before.  As a result, customers are buying in new ways, delaying initial contact with suppliers and requiring greater consensus to move forward.

Because the current buying environment is outpaced by the old sales playbook, the Corporate Executive Board conducted extensive research, from both the seller and customer perspective, into what it takes to win today. Simply stated, winning organizations lead with insight and challenge customer assumptions to mobilize customers around a purchase.

The Right Seller Profile

The Challenger model is a research based approach that classifies sales representatives in the following five types:

1. The Hard Worker
• Always willing to go extra mile
  
• Doesn't give up easily
  
• Self-motivated   
  
• Interested in feedback and development


2. The Challenger
• Always has a different view of the world
  
• Understand the customer's business
  
• Loves to debate
  
• Pushes the customer


3. The Relationship Builder
• Builds strong advocates in customer organization
  
• Generous in giving time to help others
  
• Gets along with everyone


4. The Lone Wolf
• Follows own instincts
  
• Self-assured
  
• Difficult to control


5. The Reactive Problem Solver
• Reliably respond to internal and external stakeholders
  
• Ensures that all problems are solved
  
• Detailed oriented

One clear winner – and one clear loser:  Challenger sales reps are 4X more likely to be high-performers in complex selling environments based on their ability to teach customers new insights, tailor their messages to varying customer stakeholders, and take control of the commercial conversation. These reps successfully make customers-instead of just finding them.  The least likely to be a high-performer in a complex selling environment?  The Relationship Builder.
The Right Commercial Conversations

The biggest incremental opportunity for driving customer purchase and loyalty lies in the rep's ability to differentiate the sales experience. Challengers lead with insight, reframe the way customers think about their business, and offer solutions tied to the supplier's unique strengths and capabilities. This is called Commercial Teaching.

Teach:  Lead To, Not With, Your Unique Differentiators

Common Rep Approach: Reps are most comfortable talking about what they know best—their organization. They typically start their pitch describing their company’s capabilities, history, or products’ features and benefits. In other words, they lead with their unique strengths.

Shortcoming: In the Challenger research they’ve found that, in the minds of customers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell one supplier from the other in terms of what they sell, brand, product quality, and even price.

What You Should Do Differently: Lead to, not with, our unique differentiators. Challengers do this by first teaching customers something new about their business and their needs.

Tailor:  Modify Pitches to Account for Individual Stakeholders' Role and Function

Common Rep Approach: Reps often spend a lot of time memorizing their pitch, and then re-using that pitch with various customer stakeholders, regardless of the individual's role or function.

Shortcoming: Customer stakeholders have different functional responsibilities, goals, and day-to-day worries. As a result, their priorities and measures of success differ. Even the best insight, if positioned poorly, will have little commercial impact.

What You Should Do Differently: First focus on uncovering and understanding the outcomes each customer stakeholder is trying to accomplish. Then create a sense of urgency with each customer stakeholder by framing the implications of action vs. inaction in terms and objectives that are relevant to that individual.

Take Control:  How Challengers Take Control of the Buying Process

There are three distinct ways their research has shown that Challengers take control of the buying process. These differences are highlighted in how Challengers negotiate, how they drive momentum into a deal, and which customer stakeholders they choose to engage.

Negotiation

Common Rep Approach: In a customer interaction, reps often err on the side of being too passive, avoiding tension at any cost to make situations more amicable and encourage collaboration.

Shortcoming: Customers control the interaction and often force price-based negotiations, or delays decision making.

What You Should Do Differently: Prepare to take charge of the buying process and focus the conversation. Customers likely focus on a limited set of negotiables—mostly driven by price—Challengers help broaden the customer perspective.

Stakeholder Selection

Common Rep Approach—Reps either try to find the “true” decision-maker (or economic buyer) who can overrule an indecisive group, or to find an advocate (or coach) who can guide them through the organization and champion their solution internally.

Shortcoming: CEB Sales research has documented that senior decision makers are increasingly unwilling to make a decision without broader organizational consensus. Faced with the task of building consensus, sellers often turn to advocates/coaches in the customer organization. However, CEB Sales research reveals that true advocates rarely exist (<1 individuals="" of="" span="">

What You Should Do Differently: Their research shows that customer stakeholders fall into one of seven distinct profiles. Not all of the profiles are equally useful—some excel at rallying their organizations around a purchase and ultimately driving consensus. These are the customer stakeholders that your high performing reps target; which are referred to as Mobilizers. Rarely are these Mobilizers supportive of a given supplier—rather, they are supportive of good ideas for their organization.

Driving Momentum into a Deal

Common Rep Approach—Reps tend to seek out a "coach" or advocate on the customer side to help the deal move forward and build consensus.

Shortcoming: Customers faced with new or complex purchase decisions are often unable to articulate the full set of stakeholders, timelines, decision milestones, or likely objections, and as a result, good business easily loses momentum.

What You Should Do Differently: Prepare to take control of the sale by coaching customers through the purchase process. Actively guiding customer stakeholders through the consensus building process via a mutual sequence of events document is a clear high-performer approach.

What Diets and Sales Have In Common

Are you on a diet? Have you ever been on one? I’m going to guess the answer to one of those questions is "yes", considering that the Boston Medical Center approximates that over 45 million Americans diet each year…


With that, what did you measure? How did you know you were on track to accomplish your goal?

I’m going to assume that you set a goal to lose a certain number of pounds within a certain timeframe, as measured by your numerical weight. But then, did you just go about doing what you always have done, then measure your weight at the end of the timeframe to see how you did? Or, did you start to look at your metrics day one…like calorie intake and/or carb / sugar intake. Did you start to also look at your ratios…like the number of calories burned in a day through exercise compared to the number of calories you consumed?

Why did you measure? Was it because your partner / spouse made you?

Let’s shift the conversation to your sales world. Your goal is your bookings / quota. However, how many of you actually measure metrics and ratios that contribute to your ability to achieve that target? Or, do you just get to the end of the quarter, get on the scale (i.e., look at your CRM dashboard), and say to yourself, “Oh, crap! Didn’t make it…”

So often, we think of metric and ratio measurement as a big-brother activity, where our bosses use it to understand whether we’re actually doing our job when they’re not watching. However, metrics drive your ability to control your own destiny. Much like the ratio of calorie intake to calorie burn controls your ability to hit your weight loss goal, there are activities and ratios you can measure immediately that control your ability to hit your targets.

How many outbound prospecting calls do you make per day? How many result in scheduled appointments (and what’s the ratio)? Of those appointments, how many result in qualified opportunities (and what’s the ratio)? Then, how many of those qualified opportunities result in closed deals (and what’s the ratio)? Finally, what’s your average sale value?

From there, it becomes a relatively easy activity to work backwards from the target you want to achieve. When you know those ratios, you begin to know exactly how many calls you’ll need to generate the results needed. You also immediately know what ratios you can focus on to improve yourself professionally.

Metrics play a key role in that for your overall business for many of the same reasons…your company’s ability to proactively predict and adjust to help achieve the business targets. The business knows what proactive measures it needs to look at, and often drives those measures down to the sales org.

In your diets, and in your focus to attain your 2013 targets and beyond, control your destiny by focusing on your metrics and ratios today. Happy to help you figure out where to start…

Todd

Four Fundamentals of Building Presentations

Every presentation has a person who is speaking, and an audience that is listening. To be successful, knowing how the human brain works is vitally important. The more you know about human cognitive function, the more likely you'll be able to put together a presentation that inspires, challenges and motivates your audience to take some sort of action…which is likely your ultimate objective.


Over the past few years, I've collected some nuggets that can quickly help you put together a vastly improved experience for your audience. Here are the four primary areas to keep in mind when creating and structuring a presentation that will ensure it has the greatest impact:


Number 1: People learn in small chunks…not a long firehose of PowerPoints. I encourage you to check out www.ted.com. It's a collection of great talks by people on a whole host of topics. You'll notice that the majority of those talks are less than 20 minutes long. Why is that? Realize that the "sustained" attention span of an adult is thought to be no longer than 15-20 minutes. And, that's for someone performing surgery, handling fragile objects, or anything else requiring consistent results on a task over time. Listening to your presentation likely isn't one of those things…so count on your audience's attention span being much less.


With that, when a person loses focus, they can choose to re-focus as well…but it's our job to create that re-focus. When putting together your presentation, think about that. If the presentation has to be longer than 20 minutes, then think about how you can give the audience a brain rest every 5-10 minutes. The best ways to do that are to tell a relevant story, engage the audience with a question or an activity, or anything else that forces the disengagement then re-engagement.


Number 2: Remember that most people can't read and listen at the same time. If they're reading your text laden slides, they're not listening. If your slides are covered in text, it will take a while for your audience to start listening to you. When possible, use pictures to emphasize your points rather than words. When putting together a presentation, try to build it out without using ANY slides first. Then decide what a slide can do to emphasize the points you're making.


If you have to use text, keep them short. Don't use sentences unless you're showing a quotation or a definition. Also, keep in mind that most people can only hold around 5 items in short term memory.

If you have more than 5 bullets on a slide, the majority of the audience won't be able to remember them without re-reading the slide…which means they're not going to be listening to you. Remember, your slides aren't your speaker notes.


Number 3: If you want people to act, you have to call them to action. At the end of the presentation, be specific about what you want your audience to do. Will your audience be motivated to do something at the end of the presentation? If so, what is that something?


Number 4: Have passion for your topic. The words you use only equate to part of your audience's engagement. If you're passionate about the topic, don't bottle that excitement up…let it flow. Your audience will mirror your emotion. If you're excited and passionate about a topic, they will be more likely to be excited and passionate about it as well.


So much of that passion needs to come through in your first two minutes…when the audience is deciding whether to invest the cognitive attention to listen and engage. When practicing, record your first few minutes, then ask yourself while playing it back, "Would I want to listen to me for the time allotted?"


Take these four learnings to heart, and I promise you your next presentation will do more to inspire, challenge & motivate your audience.


Todd

Say "No" to BANT, & Take Your Prospect’s TEMP Instead

I published this on my blog three years ago this week, and I just heard BANT come up again, so I thought I'd republish.  

Since the beginning of time, the acronym BANT has been the basis for qualification of potential opportunities.

B – Budget
A – Authority
N – Needs
T – Timing

With the changing of the selling "era" comes the necessary change in the way we decide what opportunities to pursue. It's time to throw out BANT. In its place, I'm coining and proposing the creation of a new acronym. We should start taking the TEMP of our opportunities instead.

Waiting to check off all the boxes on BANT will inevitably either (a) cause you to pre-maturely decide not to work on / disqualify an opportunity, or (b) result in a highly competitive, highly discounted, low margin deal.

The primary issue with BANT is in terms of B – Budget. Let's think about "Challenger" selling for a moment:

1. When a customer is already in-the-market (IMP) for our category of solution, they can find their way to just about any piece of information about us without ever talking to us. When we engage, our role is often to reframe and disrupt their thinking…to teach the customer that a potentially better solution exists versus the one they had in mind. By doing so, we often open the eyes and minds of the customer to a much bigger potential outcome, too. If we're working with or have access to the right people in the organization, the budget-creators versus the budget-spenders, budgets get created for high impact, high ROI projects attached to high priority business issues.
2. When a customer is not in-the-market for our category of solution, and we're trying to teach them about an under-appreciated problem they don't even realize they have, they probably haven't created a budget for that unrecognized problem, right?

T-Timing is also an issue with BANT. In my opinion, it's a senseless metric in analyzing whether a potential opportunity is "qualified". Timing changes. The timing identified at the beginning rarely matches the end result. Again, this is a senseless metric.

Thus, the creation of a new acronym…which should lead us to taking the TEMP of our customers and prospects regarding potential opportunities:

T – Trigger
E – Engagement
M – Mobilizer
P - Profile

T – Trigger: Simply put, has something occurred in the buyer's world that has them looking for a change? Whether we've created that trigger or not, this is also known as the "compelling event" or the understanding of what happens if a change does not occur.

E – Engagement: Is the customer / prospect Engaged? Do we have a scheduled next step? Evidence of a qualified opportunity is shown in the customer's willingness to set aside time in their calendar and start to create a plan of the buying journey with you. If they say they'll "call you next week" or you have to chase them down, you don't have the customer's engagement.


M – Mobilizer: Have we connected with the individual or individuals capable of Mobilizing an organization to make a change? This is a big shift in the way customers buy. We can't always get to the executive suite, but if we find "mobilizers" within an organization that have the trust and confidence of the executive suite, and can make change happen within an organization, you have the makings for a strong opportunity.

P – Profile: Does this customer fit the ideal customer Profile within a standard deviation or two? For example, if you're selling to large retailers, one can assume that a senior leader from Wal-Mart if a fit.  Sometimes this is a no-brainer, while other times it takes a question or two…but if you know where your solution has high impact and where it doesn't, then does this target fit the profile?

Like the new acronym for qualification? Make sense? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject…

Thanks,

Todd



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The perplexing battle for 2nd place in the Chicago mayoral race...

In the Chicago mayoral race, I can’t figure out how Carol Moseley Braun is in 2nd place in the poles. Who, their right mind, would select her as the best choice? I don’t live in Chicago, but I’m close enough to be effected by the outcome, and I’m not a Democrat, either.

The City of Chicago is a 35,000+ employee, 3+ billion customer business enterprise. I understand why Rahl Emmanuel is out in front. He’s clearly qualified. And, unless he runs his Escalade into a tree & a bunch of ladies fall out of it ala Tiger Woods, he's going to run away with this victory.  However meaningless, I still can’t figure out how Moseley Braun is out in front of Gery Chico.


Moseley Braun, who’s in 2nd place:

a) Hasn’t been able to successfully run even a small business, having run it right into the ground,
b) Hasn’t been able to even pay her property taxes on time 5 out of the last 6 times,
c) Wasn’t able to even run a clean, successful election campaign. In her only winning election in 1992 for Senate, she did it illegally, having admitted to improprieties to the Federal Elections Commission in 1993 over $249,000 in unaccounted-for campaign funds,
d) Wasn’t able to garner enough belief that her 1 term in the Senate was worthy of another one, losing in her reelection bid in 1998.
e)  For some reason, she thought she could run for President in 2004, but came to her senses before even the first caucuses in Iowa.  Jeesh...I could do that!  And...
e) ...the list goes on-and-on. Just punch her name into Google, and you’ll get a laundry list of craziness (see the 1996 story on her trip to Nigeria, or her response to George Will’s article in 1998 regarding Moseley Braun’s corruption allegations).

She’s currently beating Chico, who, on the other hand:

a) Was the former Chief of Staff to Mayor Daley here in Chicago,
b) Was the former President of the Chicago Public Schools’ board,
c) Was the former President of the Chicago Park District, and,
d) Was the former Chairman of the City Colleges of Chicago.

Again, running a city like Chicago is a huge undertaking.  Moseley Braun hasn't shown the ability to do any job cleanly & successfully.  If you're going to vote, at least pick up a newspaper first...just a tiny bit of research would be appreciated!

The Understated Trait of Successful Chicago Sports Coaches

I know this isn't aligned with what I typically talk about, but as a Chicago sports fan, during the search for the Cubs managerial opening, I have to draw the line on the candidates they're interviewing.

In today's Chicago Tribune, the four finalists for the open Cubs position appear to be Mike Quade, Ryne Sandberg, Eric Wedge and potentially Joe Girardi.  There's something fundamental and understated that each of these candidates is missing, based on Chicago sports history (or at least the last 35 years). 

When looking back at Chicago championship teams over that period, it's the mustache that has presided.  Yes, the mustache!



Mike Ditka: Classic & bold...looked like a caterpillar who overdosed on "five hour energy" drinks when Ditka would beat a piece of gum like it owed him money



Phil Jackson: The tall, gangly zen-master realized the importance of his mustache as he started his reign. Does that guy know everything?

Ozzie Guillen: As a player, possessed a classic pencil mustache. Has since rounded it out into a well manicured goatee.

Joel Quenneville: Burly, hockey mustache...obviously did his homework on Chicago championship history.

The Bulls have hired a practically hairless guy in Thibodeau. The Bears Lovie Smith couldn't grow a mustache with a tank full of hair tonic.  The Bulls & Bears have written their own ticket...no championships as long as their current coaching staff is in place...

The Cubs must look away from Quade, who was bald at the age of 11 (yes, I'm not making that up!).  None of the candidates possess a mustache...however, there is a perfectly capable guy in the booth who should be heavily pursuaded to change his mind.  Where's this picture from???

Oh, yeah...it's Bob Brenly from the year he won the World Series with the Arizona Diamonbacks.  Looks like a mustache got them over the hump, too. 

Cubs fans...reject the hairless...if we're going to end the curse, the mustache is obviously the key ingredient.

How the Fear of Inaction Drives Top Software Companies' Growth

I do a lot of work for software companies, which is the primary area of my background. I’m now working for a smaller software company, and realized a connection to how these small software companies create action in their prospect base and eventually experience explosive growth.

They sell to the fear of inaction in their prospect base.

If you go to Hoovers.com, which is a company database service that serves as a key pre-calling planning tool for researching your targets, you’ll find almost 3,000 companies in the United States whose primary industry is Computer Software. Every one of these companies will claim to have a strong value proposition – otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.

Now, think about some of the big software companies in the world – companies like SAP & Oracle, who have experienced explosive growth. Take a look at a company like Hyperion who was acquired by Oracle for $3.3B. They have strong value propositions, right? However, what was it that made them what they are today? Was it that SAP’s marketers and sales professionals focused on how they could automate and integrate back office functions? Was it that Hyperion’s marketers focused on how they could tackle the vexing problem of information availability throughout the organization? In some ways, the answer is “yes”, but the reason these companies have the value they do is because they found the fear of inaction in their prospect base, and focused on that.

SAP really took off in the late 90’s, where it was like selling at a drive-thru window (Companies basically came to the window, told them they needed their technology now, and handed over millions of dollars). It wasn’t because these companies wanted to enter sales order information only once, and have that data flow seamlessly to finance, manufacturing, distribution and human resources. It was because SAP found the fear of inaction in their prospect base – Y2K (the result of a practice in early computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000, scaring the world to believe that the world would end, planes would fall out of the sky and cats & dogs would live together in harmony because systems would think that January 1, 2000 was actually January 1, 1900).

Hyperion had a value of $3.3B not only because of how they help organizations do their financial consolidations better – it was because they found the fear of inaction in their prospect base – Sarbanes-Oxley (a United States federal law passed in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals including those affecting Enron, Tyco International, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom, thus creating a scare within publicly held companies that has them believing their executives would live the rest of their lives in an orange jumpsuit if they don’t comply).

What fear do your customers have if they don’t act NOW? Is simply doing what they do now, but better, enough for them to take action? If it was, then companies all over the world would be spending all of their money on software.

For whatever solution you’re selling, think about the “what if”. What if my prospect decides to keep doing things the way they currently are at the pace they’re currently doing it? If the answer is basically “nothing”, then you could be facing slow growth, or eventual slow decline. People DO, in fact, buy things because it will make their lives better. But companies spend lots of money fixing problems that cannot be ignored.

This isn’t an easy thing to figure out – but if you can make the connection, your sales cycles will shorten, your deal sizes will rise, and you may have a company that we will all have heard of.