MATTHEW DIXON and BRENT ADAMSON

of Corporate Executive Board

The

CHALLENGER
SALE
Taking Control of the
Customer Conversation

The most important advance in selling for many years.

Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling

The

Challenger
Sale
Taking Control
of the Customer
Conversation

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Portfolio/Penguin

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portfolio / penguin
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2011 by Portfolio / Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright The Corporate Executive Board Company, 2011
All rights reserved
Challenger, Challenger Rep, and Challenger Development Program are trademarks and
service marks of The Corporate Executive Board Company.

Summary description of Situational Sales Negotiation training and methodology used by permission of
BayGroup International, Inc. SSN Negotiation Planner and 2009 BayGroup International, Inc. Situational
Sales Negotiation and SSN are trademarks and service marks of BayGroup International, Inc.

Slides from The Power of Planning the Unplanned presentation used by permission of W. W. Grainger, Inc.
library of congress cataloging in publication data
Dixon, Matthew, 1972.
The challenger sale : taking control of the customer conversation / Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-59184-435-8
1. Sales management. 2. Selling. 3. Customer relations. I. Adamson, Brent. II. Title.
HF5438.4.D59 2011
658.85dc23 2011026907
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Garamond Pro
Designed by Pauline Neuwirth
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
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Contents

Foreword by Professor Neil Rackham

ix

Introduction

A Surprising Look into the Future

1 The Evolving Journey of Solution Selling

1
5

2 The Challenger (Part 1):

A New Model for High Performance

14

3 The Challenger (Part 2):

Exporting the Model to the Core

30

4 Teaching for Differentiation (Part 1):

Why Insight Matters

44

5 Teaching for Differentiation (Part 2):

How to Build Insight-Led Conversations

65

6 Tailoring for Resonance

101

7 Taking Control of the Sale

119

8 The Manager and the Challenger Selling Model

140

9 Implementation Lessons from the Early Adopters

170

vii

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Afterword

viii

Challenging Beyond Sales

187

Acknowledgments

197

Appendix A:
Challenger Coaching Guide (excerpt)

205

 ppendix B:
A
Selling Style Self-Diagnostic

208

Appendix C:
Challenger Hiring Guide: Key Questions to Ask
in the Interview

210

Index

215

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Foreword

The history of sales has been one of steady progress interrupted by a few real breakthroughs that have changed the
whole direction of the profession. These breakthroughs,
marked by radical new thinking and dramatic improvements in sales
results, have been rare. I can only think of three of them in the last
century. The first started about a hundred years ago, when insurance
companies found that they could double their sales by a simple change
in selling strategy. Before this first great breakthrough, insurance policiesin common with many other products such as furniture, household goods, and capital equipmentwere sold by salespeople who signed
up customers and then every week visited each of them to collect premiums or installment payments. After signing up a hundred or so
people, the salesperson was too busy collecting weekly premiums to do
any more selling of new business. Then some anonymous genius hit on
an idea that grew into what we now call the hunter-farmer model. Suppose, instead of one person both selling the policy and collecting the
premiums, the two roles were split. There would be producers, who only
sold, backed up by less experiencedand therefore cheapercollectors,
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who came behind to look after existing customers and collect the weekly
premiums. The idea was a spectacular success and it changed the insurance industry overnight. The concept quickly spread to other industries,
and for the first time selling became a pure role, without the burden
of collection.

The Second Breakthrough

We dont know exactly when the producer/collector idea was first introduced, but we can be very specific about the date of the second great
breakthrough. It happened in July 1925, when E. K. Strong published
The Psychology of Selling. This seminal work introduced the idea of sales
techniques, such as features and benefits, objection handling, closing,
and, perhaps most important, open and closed questioning. It showed
that there were things people could learn that would help them sell more
effectively, and it gave rise to the sales training industry.
Looking back from the sophisticated perspective of today, many of
the things Strong wrote about sound heavy-handed and simplistic. Nevertheless, heand those who followed himchanged selling forever.
Perhaps the most important aspect of his contribution was the idea that
selling wasnt an innate ability. It was a set of identifiable skills that could
be learned. And in 1925, that was radical indeed. It opened selling to a
much wider range of people and, from anecdotal reports of the time,
brought about dramatic increases in sales effectiveness.

The Third Breakthrough

The third great breakthrough came in the 1970s, when researchers
became interested in the idea that the techniques and skills that worked
in small sales might be very different from those that worked in larger
and more complex ones. I had the good fortune to be an integral part
of this revolution. In the 70s I directed a huge research project, tracking 10,000 salespeople in twenty-three countries. We followed salespeople into more than 35,000 sales calls and analyzed what made some
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of them more successful than others in complex sales. From this twelveyear project we published a number of books, starting with SPIN Selling. This marked the beginning of what we now call the consultative
selling era. It was a breakthrough because it introduced much more
sophisticated models of how to sell complex products and services and,
like the earlier breakthroughs, brought about significant gains in sales
productivity.
The last thirty years have been marked by a lot of small improvements in selling, but we havent seen many game-changing developments that could claim to be breakthroughs. True, thereve been sales
automation, sales process, and customer relationship management.
Technology has played a bigger and bigger role in selling. There have
also been huge changes to transactional selling as a result of the Internet. But all these have been incremental changes, often with questionable productivity gains, and none of them, to my way of thinking,
qualifies as a bona fide breakthrough in how to sell differently and more
effectively.

The Purchasing Revolution

Interestingly, there has been a breakthrough development on the other
side of the selling interaction. Purchasing has gone through a major
revolution. From being a dead-end function in the 1980s where those
who couldnt cut it in HR went to die, it has emerged as a vibrant strategic force. Armed with powerful purchasing methodologies such as
supplier segmentation strategies and sophisticated supply chain management models, the rise of the new purchasing has demanded fundamental shifts in sales thinking.
Ive been waiting to see how the sales world would react to the
changes in purchasing. If ever there was a time for the next breakthrough, its due in response to the purchasing revolution. But nothing
big has appeared on the sales scene. Its been a bit like waiting for the
inevitable earthquake. You know its going to come someday, but you
cant predict whenyou just have a feeling that its due; something is
about to happen.
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The Fourth Breakthrough?

Which brings me to The Challenger Sale and the work of the Sales Executive Council. Its too soon to know whether this is the breakthrough
that weve been waiting for: Only time will tell. On the face of it, their
research has all the initial signs that it may be game-changing. First,
like the other examples, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. But
we need more than that. Many crazy ideas violate established thinking.
What makes this different is that, like the other breakthroughs, once
sales leaders understand it, they say, Of course! Its counterintuitive,
but it makes sense. I should have known. The logic youll find in The
Challenger Sale leads to the inescapable conclusion that this is very different thinking and it works.
Im not going to spoil their story by telling either the details or the
punch line. Thats for you to read. But I will tell you why I think the
research that they have done is the most important advance in selling
for many years and may indeed justify the rare and coveted label of sales
breakthrough.

Its Good Research

The research is solid, and believe me, I dont say this lightly. Much of
the so-called research in selling has methodological holes so big that you
could fly a jumbo jet through them. We live in an age when every consultant and every author claims research to prove the effectiveness of
what they are selling. Once research was a sure way to gain credibility;
now its fast becoming a sure way to lose it. Customers are rightly cynical about unsupportable claims that masquerade under the name of
research, such as, Our research proves that sales more than doubled
after taking our training program, or We found in our research that
when salespeople used our seven customer buying styles model, it caused
customer satisfaction to increase by 72 percent. Claims like these are
unprovable assertions that erode the credibility of genuine research.
I was at a conference in Australia when I first heard that the Sales
Executive Council had some startling new research on sales effectiveness.
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I must admit that, while I respected the SEC and their good track record
of solid methodology, I had been bitten enough by poor research to
think to myself, This will probably be yet another disappointment.
When I got back to my office in Virginia, I invited the research team to
spend a day with me and we went through their methodology with a
fine-tooth comb. I admit that I confidently expected to expose serious
flaws in what they had done. In particular, I had two concerns:
1. Putting salespeople into five buckets. The research claimed that salespeople fell into one of five distinct profiles:
The Hard Worker
The Challenger
The Relationship Builder
The Lone Wolf
The Reactive Problem Solver
This sounded nave and arbitrary to me. What, I asked the team, was
the rationale for these five buckets? Why not seven? Or ten? They were
able to show me that these were not invented categories but ones that
emerged out of a massive and sophisticated statistical analysis. And they
understood, in a way that many researchers dont, that their five buckets
were behavioral clusters, not rigid personality types. I was satisfied that
they had passed my first test.
2. The high- versus low-performer trap. A large percentage of the
research into effective selling compares high performers with low performers. In the early years of my own research I did the same thing.
As a result I learned a lot about low performers. When you ask people
to compare their rock stars with their losers, you find that they can
dissect the losers with surgical precision but find it hard, if not impossible, to put their finger on exactly what makes their rock stars rock.
I soon learned that I ended up with a detailed understanding of poor
performance and not much else. If my research was to have any meaning I had to compare top performers with average, or core, performers.
It was reassuring to find that the SEC research had adopted exactly
that approach.

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Its Based on an Impressive Sample

Its common for sales research to be based on small samples of fifty to
eighty participants drawn from just three or four companies. Larger-scale
research is harder to do and significantly more expensive. My own research
had used samples of a thousand or more, not because we liked megastudies
but becausegiven the noisy data of real-life sellingwe had no choice
if we wanted to draw statistically meaningful insights. The initial sample
in the Challenger research was 700, which has since grown to 6,000.
Thats impressive by any standard. Whats even more impressive is that
ninety companies participated in the research. With a sample this wide
we can rule out many of the factors that normally prevent research from
generalizing its results to cover selling as a whole. The SEC findings are
not about a particular organization or a specific industry. They apply across
the whole spectrum of selling, and thats important.

It Didnt Find What the Researchers Expected

I always mistrust research that finds exactly what it seeks. Researchers,
like everybody else, have a bundle of prejudices and preconceived ideas.
If they know what they are looking for, by gosh they will find it. I was
really pleased to hear that the researchers themselves were stunned to
discover that their results were almost the opposite of what they had
expected. Thats a very healthy sign and a frequent characteristic of
significant research. Look again at their five profiles:
The Hard Worker
The Challenger
The Relationship Builder
The Lone Wolf
The Reactive Problem Solver
Most sales executives, if they were forced to choose just one profile
to make up their sales force, would have chosen the Relationship Builder,
and thats just what the research team was expecting to find. Think
again. The research showed that Relationship Builders were unlikely to
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be star performers. In contrast, the Challengers, who are awkward to

manage and assertive both with customers and with their own managers, came out on top. As youll see in the book, Challengers won out not
by a small margin but a massive one. And the margin was far greater in
complex sales.

The Decline of Relationship Selling

How can we explain these counterintuitive findings? In the book, Matt
Dixon and Brent Adamson build a very persuasive case. Let me add my
own two cents worth to what they say. Conventional wisdom has long
held that selling is about relationships and that in complex sales, relationships are the underpinning of all sales success. Yet over the last ten
years there have been some disturbing hints that relationship-based
selling may be less effective than it used to be. My own studies of what
customers value from salespeople would be a good example. When we
asked 1,100 customers what they valued in salespeople, we were surprised at how few times they mentioned relationships. It seems that the
old advice, Build relationships first and then sales will follow, no longer holds true. Thats not to say that relationships are unimportant. I
think a better explanation is that the relationship and the purchasing
decision have become decoupled. Today youll often hear customers say,
I have a great relationship with this sales rep but I buy from her competition because they provide better value. 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. If
you help customers think differently and bring them new ideaswhich
is what the Challenger rep doesthen you earn the right to a relationship.

The Challenge of Challenge

At the heart of this book is the demonstrated superiority of Challengers
in terms of customer impact and therefore sales results. Many people
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are taken aback by this findingand I suspect some readers will feel
the same. But while the articulation of the Challenger idea is new, the
evidence has been visible all around us. Surveys of customers consistently
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 customers business. In recent years, customers have been demanding more depth and expertise. They expect salespeople to teach
them things they dont know. These are the core skills of Challengers.
They are the skills of the future, and any sales force that ignores the
message of this book does so at its peril.
Ive been in the business of sales innovation all my professional life,
so I dont anticipate that the publication of this important research will
bring an instant revolution. Change is slow and painful. But I do know
this: There will be a few companies that will take the findings that are
laid out here and will implement them well. Those companies will reap
huge gains and significant competitive advantage from building Challenge into their sales force. As the SEC research shows, 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. An effective sales force is a more sustainable competitive advantage than a great
product stream. This book gives you a well-articulated blueprint for
building a winning sales force. My advice is this: Read it, think about
it, implement it. You, and your organization, will be glad that you did.
Professor Neil Rackham
Author of SPIN Selling

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Introduction

A Surprising Look
into the Future

In the unforgettable early months of 2009, as the

bottom fell out of the global economy, business-to-business
sales leaders around the world faced an epic problem and an
even deeper mystery.
Customers had vanished overnight. Commerce had ground to a halt.
Credit was scarce, and cash even scarcer. For anyone in business, times
were tough. But for heads of sales, they were an absolute nightmare.
Imagine having to get up every morning, rally your troops, and send
them into a battle they couldnt possibly win. To find business where
none could be found. True, sales has always been about the good fight
about winning business often in the face of strong resistance. But this
was different. Its one thing to sell to reluctant, even nervous customers.
Its another thing altogether to sell to no one at all. And thats where we
were in early 2009.
Yet therein lay the mystery. Staring directly into the teeth of the
toughest sales environment in decadesif not evera small but
uniquely gifted number of sales reps were selling. In fact, they were selling a lot. While others struggled to close even the smallest of deals, these
individuals were bringing in the kind of business most reps could only
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dream of even in an up economy. Were they lucky? Were they just born
with it? And most important, how could you possibly capture that
magic, bottle it, and export it to everyone else? For many companies,
their very survival depended on the answer.
It was into this environment that the Sales Executive Council (SEC)
a program within the Corporate Executive Boardlaunched what has
become one of the most important studies of sales rep productivity in
decades. Tasked by our membersheads of sales from the worlds largest, best-known companieswe set out to identify what exactly set this
very special group of sales reps apart. And having now studied that
question intensively for the better part of four years, spanning dozens
of companies and thousands of sales reps, we have discovered three core
insights that have fundamentally rewritten the sales playbook and led
B2B sales executives all over the world to think very differently about
how they sell.
The first insight was something we werent originally even looking
for. It turns out that just about every B2B sales rep in the world falls
into one of five distinct profiles, a specific set of skills and behaviors that
define his or her primary mode of interacting with customers. Now,
thats interesting in and of itself, as youll be able to find yourself and
your colleagues in these profiles when you see them. These five profiles
prove to be an incredibly practical way of dividing the world into a
manageable set of alternative sales techniques.
That said, its really the second insight that changes everything.
When you take those five profiles and compare them with actual sales
performance, you find there is a very clear winner and a very clear loser:
One of them spectacularly outperforms the other four, while one of them
falls dramatically behind. Yet there is something very disturbing about
these results. When we show them to sales leaders, we hear the same
thing again and again. These leaders find the results deeply troubling,
because theyve placed by far their biggest bet on the profile least likely
to win. This one insight has shattered the way many sales leaders think
about the kind of reps they need to survive and thrive in a tough economy.
And that brings us to the third and final core insight from this work
arguably the most explosive of them all. As we dug deeper into the data,
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we found something even more surprising. While wed set out four years
ago to find the winning recipe for sales rep success in a down economy,
all of the data indicate something far more important. The profile most
likely to win isnt winning because of the down economy, but irrespective
of it. These reps are winning because theyve mastered the complex sale,
not because theyve mastered a complex economy. In other words, when
we unlocked the mystery of high performance in the down economy, the
story turned out to be much bigger than anyone had anticipated. Your
very best sales repsthe ones who carried you through the downturn
arent just the heroes of today, but are also the heroes of tomorrow, as
they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any
kind of economic environment. What we ultimately found is a dramatically improved recipe for a successful solution sales rep.
We call these winning reps Challengers, and this is their story.

I n t r o d u c t i o n : A S u r p r i s i n g L o ok I n t o t h e F u t u r e

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