The Yin and Yang of Challenger Selling

Commercial leaders often ask me how they should be thinking about developing the Challenger approach within their organization.

As many of you know, we’ve analyzed tens-of-thousands of sales professionals to try and get as clear a sense into what is working to drive growth with customers—even in a more complex (and difficult) buying environment. And we concluded that there is an approach that is outperforming others—which we’ve come to call the Challenger Sales Model.

So when asked how to develop this approach within their business, I say to our member executives that they need to think across two separate but reinforcing dimensions:

(1)   The first is skill building. Challenger selling is likely a vast departure from the way that many sales people are selling right now. So before we ask sales people to sell in a different way, we need to make sure that we’re developing the right sets of skills to enable that type of change to happen.

A key to getting this right—or at least giving yourself a better shot at success—is by making reps consciously incompetent. In other words, showing them, specifically, the skills and capabilities that they need to develop or improve to continue to be an effective sales professional. By doing this, you create a (hopefully constructive) sense of fear – that helps get buy in for change. 

SEC Members, register for an upcoming workshop on Challenger Skill Adoption.

That said, skill building is only one aspect. Because you still haven’t equipped them with the messages they need to challenge.

(2)   So the second dimension is message building. Developing the story or stories that reps need to be using to challenge your customers’ thinking in a way that leads back to your unique differentiators.

This is especially critical as our customers proactively try to commoditize us by either putting our business out to bid or at least pitting us against our closest competitors. Sales messages that are working today are designed to disrupt your customers’ buying process—to get them to think differently about the way that they’re approaching a problem or even educating them on a problem that they didn’t even know existed.

SEC Members, register for an upcoming workshop on Challenger Messaging.

In my conversations with member executives, this is what I like to call the yin and yang of Challenger selling. Developing skills without messages is akin to having a really talent player on your sports team, but you don’t give them a playbook and they end up running around unproductively. On the other hand, developing messages without developing the right skills means that you have given someone a tool who doesn’t know how to use it.

So as you think about how you incorporate Challenger in the way you go-to-market—think across these two dimensions. And make sure that you are focusing on both—skill building for competence, and message building for execution.

One more note—while I didn’t mention this above, the front-line sales manager is a critical element to successfully adopting a challenger sales approach. They are the people who will ultimately work to reinforce and coach these new behaviors—OR they won’t, and your ROI will suffer tremendously. So sales managers, as much as sales people, need to be included in the execution of this approach.

SEC Members, also visit the Challenger Rep Starter Kit that houses resources on assessing, equipping, developing, hiring, and sustaining Challengers. To learn more, also register for our upcoming workshops and webinars on Challenger Skills Adoption and Challenger Messaging.