When was the last time you updated your sales approach? Personally, it’s been years since I altered the way I run a first meeting with a prospect. Thankfully, The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson (from the member organization known as CEB) was recommended recently by a few different friends and it’s loaded with meaningful ideas for anyone who goes out to kill that night’s dinner. Based on extensive research, the book was released in 2011 and I wish I’d read it then – twice. It’s average in length (just over 200 pages) and yet my copy now has more than 50 sections flagged for review. That’s twice as many as usual and let’s just say there’s work to do, with the core premise being that now is the time to update our skills and strategies so as to be optimally prepared for the next economic downturn, whenever that may occur.
CEB’s research concludes that it’s not what you sell that matters, but how and they’re telling us to be more provocative. Their team discovered that there are five types of salespeople in the marketplace: Relationship Builders, Hard Workers, Lone Wolves, Reactive Problem Solvers, and Challengers. By the book’s title, it’s easy to guess that what the authors term “the big winner” is the last category (think of them as professional cage rattlers). What may surprise you is the least effective type is the first one, where relationship building is tantamount to hand-delivering warm oatmeal cookies straight from an Easy Bake Oven. “If your strategy as a sales rep is largely one of being available to take care of whatever your customer needs,” they conclude, “that can be a recipe for disaster.” The problem is that being Guy Smiley and checking in on your accounts may work for finding business but it doesn’t work for creating it, which is naturally the key for anyone looking to proactively grow profitable revenues. And having a quality deliverable is no longer good enough because what sets us apart as professionals is the value of our insights. In CEB’s model, we can no longer ask the lamer-by-the-day “what keeps you up at night?” line of discovery-based questions. We have to be a step ahead, anticipating the issues our customers and prospects are experiencing, sharing with them valuable information they currently lack. It’s tricky stuff to execute when you don’t want to cross the border into the land of free consulting, so if this concept is appealing you’ll want to read the whole book.
And if all you want to swallow is one more paragraph of this stuff, following are some key takeaways. Knock off the “yes man” approach, because it does no one – you especially – any good. Be willing to rock your customer’s world a bit by sharing potentially upsetting data which they are likely unaware of (and anecdotally, this is an area where marketing departments can truly support sales reps beyond creating another shiny, happy brochure). Decision makers rank price #5 as a value driver, with “widespread support for the supplier” at #1. Don’t “allow personal boundaries to be breached by the customer,” which is exactly what the Relationship Builder abides. Eliminate hasty agreements to requests for price concessions because – well, you’re better than that. And be memorable not agreeable, for as nice as it is to talk about sports and kids, “unless you frame your conversation around an edgy or unique insight” you will be long forgotten in record time. There are dozens more lessons herein, but I’m out of space. In the spirit of the theme of the uncomfortable challenge, I invite you to reflect on the opening line of this review. Because let’s face it – the next global meltdown ought to be here in no time.