The Challenger Sale Quotes

“There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“what sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight—new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Put it all together and you get: “What’s currently costing our customers more money than they realize, that only we can help them fix?” The answer to that question is the heart and soul of your Commercial Teaching pitch.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“But what if customers truly don’t know what they need? What if customers’ single greatest need—ironically—is to figure out exactly what they need?”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Just as you can’t be an effective teacher if you’re not going to push your students, you can’t be an effective Challenger if you’re not going to push your customers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“We’ve worked with a number of companies similar to yours, and we’ve found that these three challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling. Is that what you’re seeing too, or would you add something else to the list?”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“customers aren’t looking for reps to anticipate, or “discover,” needs they already know they have, but rather to teach them about opportunities to make or save money that they didn’t even know were possible.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“customer loyalty survey—specifically, that 53 percent of B2B customer loyalty is a product of how you sell, not what you sell.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Identify your unique benefits. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’ thinking. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.” Equip reps to challenge customers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“One of our recent studies revealed that while all reps start their sales efforts by mapping out stakeholders within the customer organization, core performers then move to what would seem like the logical next step—understanding needs and mapping solutions against those needs. But high performers do something very different. They extend this part of the sales process by digging into these individual stakeholders’ varying goals and biases, as well as business and personal objectives.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“you teach without tailoring, you come off as irrelevant. If you tailor but don’t teach, you risk sounding like every other supplier. If you take control but offer no value, you risk being simply annoying.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Challengers aren’t so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“In other words, the consensus sale isn’t something you should be fighting—it’s something you should be actively pursuing. You can’t just elevate the conversation and cut everyone else out because it’s exactly that team input that the decision maker values most when it comes to loyalty.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“it’s also about helping member companies generate the sort of “social demand” they need in order to avoid the perception that the training is just another top-down mandate.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The solution to overcoming passivity is straightforward: Teach reps the importance of clarity of direction over quick closure, and teach them how to create real value within the sales process. When combined, these skills can help any sales rep to create a powerful proxy for natural assertiveness.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“make progress against their goals.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“shift to solution selling results in customers’ expecting you to actually “solve” a real problem and not just supply a reliable product. And that’s hard to do. It requires that you not only understand the customer’s underlying problems or challenges as well if not better than they do themselves, but also that you can identify new and better means of addressing those challenges, articulate clear benefits from using limited resources to solve that problem versus competing ones, and determine the right metrics to measure success.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation

“we live in an era when product innovation alone cannot be the basis for corporate success. How you sell has become more important than what you sell.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation

“The Warmer starts with the customer’s challenges. So the opening is, “We know you face a host of challenges every day, such as production line issues, workers’ comp costs, maintenance and safety issues. Especially those challenges that are critical to keeping your business open and running every single day.” After reviewing a couple issues and providing some general color from other companies, the rep then asks the customer to select for discussion one or two that are particularly pressing in their organization. The idea is to get the customer pulled into the conversation right away and talking about their challenges relative to what Grainger has already seen at other companies. Grainger has found that this one page can lead to an incredibly robust and valuable conversation—all because the rep led with a hypothesis of customer need rather than an open-ended question to “discover” customer need.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Remember, the real value of the interaction isn’t what you sell; it’s the insight you provide as part of the sales interaction itself.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The Challenger rep wins by maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. The Relationship Builder, on the other hand, strives to resolve or defuse tension, not create it. It’s”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Meanwhile, as the Challenger is focused on pushing the customer out of their comfort zone, the Relationship Builder is focused on being accepted into it.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Figure 2.3. Challenger Versus Relationship Builder Profile”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“A Challenger is really defined by the ability to do three things: teach, tailor, and take control:”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“six of them showed up as statistically significant in defining someone as a Challenger rep: Offers the customer unique perspectives Has strong two-way communication skills Knows the individual customer’s value drivers Can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business Is comfortable discussing money Can pressure the customer”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“One CEB member described the problem solver as “a customer service rep in sales rep clothing.” As she put it, “They come into the office in the morning with grand plans to generate new sales, but as soon as an existing customer calls with a problem, they dive right in rather than passing it to the people we actually pay to solve those problems. They find ways to make that customer happy, but at the expense of finding ways to generate more business.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“All deserts have intense heat and sand, but intense heat and sand are not unique to deserts.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The first thing we did was to run a factor analysis on the data. Put simply, factor analysis is a statistical methodology for grouping a large number of variables into a smaller set of categories within which variables co-present and move together.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“There, they outperform by almost 200 percent. The gap is four times greater. Put another way, as sales become more complex, the gap between core and star performers widens dramatically”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation