The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation

A Challenger is really defined by the ability to do three things: teach, tailor, and take control:

show that they put the highest value on salespeople who make them think, who bring new ideas, who find creative and innovative ways to help the customer’s business. In recent years, customers have been demanding more depth and expertise. They expect salespeople to teach them things they don’t know. These are the core skills of Challengers.

Solution selling is largely driven by suppliers’ attempts to escape dramatically increasing commoditization pressure as individual products and services become less differentiated over time.

Personally, I believe that a customer relationship is the result and not the cause of successful selling. It is a reward that the salesperson earns by creating customer value.

The problem with all of this “discovery” is that it can often take on the feel of a protracted ping-pong match between the supplier and customer.

Solution selling comes in many flavors, but generally describes the migration from a focus on transactional sales of individual products (usually based on price or volume) to a focus on broad-based consultative sales of “bundles” of products and services.