Developing Challenger Messages: Lessons Learned

[image error]In mid-July, the SEC had the pleasure of hosting 70+ members for a full-day workshop at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center.  This workshop was designed to help members take the initial steps toward developing the organizational capability necessary to build Challenger-oriented messages.

Below, I’ll describe the two key components of the day and discuss a few takeaways and observations from our experience with the members in the room.

Section #1 – Identification of Unique Differentiators

Why this is important: 

Challenger messages teach your customer to value the unique capabilities of your offering, so the goal of the exercises contained in this section were to help members figure out what differentiates their offering from the competition.

During the session, members responded well to the guidance given around what constitutes a differentiator: 

It’s Unique – it outperforms the competition and is sustainable (difficult for competitors to quickly copy)
It’s Valuable – it has economic impact and value for the customer
It’s Defensible – it’s believable, there is credible evidence of how/why this capability outperforms the competition

Observations & Takeaways: 

It was clear that certain members in the room had a good sense of what differentiators they should focus on, while others struggled a bit to define what truly sets their offering apart.  For the members that felt more confident about their differentiators, our guidance was to push the boundaries , to think laterally and try to make connections that they hadn’t prior to the session; and to take care not to mistake the features and benefits common to their market as true differentiators (e.g. green, innovative, leader, service-oriented, etc.).

We have a number of members who operate in highly commoditized environments (e.g. financial services, manufacturing, industrial supply, etc.), and in those instances, struggling with differentiator identification was a bit more common.  For those members, we encouraged them to look for differentiators in the form of the services their company provides that surrounds their offering (services that allow the customer to reap the value of your commoditized product/solution).

Section #2 – Surfacing Opportunities to Reframe the Customer’s View

Why this is important: 

Insight is the reason for your customers to change behavior.  It’s premised on teaching customers about either new business problems (or opportunities) or better ways to solve and act on known business problems (or opportunities); ultimately reframing the customer’s current viewpoint.  The exercises contained in this section helped to clarify the different methods of “reframing”, and encouraged members in the room to brainstorm customer business problems that relate back to their offering.

During the session, members worked to brainstorm customer problems so they could ultimately figure out what type of reframe is possible.  Here, the exercises focused on revealing customer business problems with either a misunderstood cause, which is leading the customer astray in their efforts to resolve a known issue, or an unrecognized problem, of which the customer is unaware or ill-informed.

Observations & Takeaways:

We found that the exercises that were focused on surfacing customer problems with a misunderstood cause were easier for members to brainstorm but ultimately harder to reframe.  In contrast, brainstorming around unrecognized problems proved difficult but, if identified, can make the message and story creation portion easier and create something that can be very powerful for the customer.

Worth noting: Working hard on this last exercise in particular is absolutely worth the effort.

By connecting the results from the two sections mentioned above, members were able to begin to figure out:

What they know about customer business problems that the customer doesn’t yet know (or has failed to appreciate)
The guidance the sales force can give to customers to help resolve those problems
How that solution to the problem connects back to something our member’s  offering is uniquely positioned to solve

SEC Members, Watch Brent Adamson explain components of Commercial Teaching, learn how to organize your Commercial Teaching pitch, and see an example case study of a peer who has taken this journey.