The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results Paperback
Author: ID: 0241196566
Done.
PaperbackPublisher: Portfolio Penguin Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0241196566ISBN-13: 978-0241196564 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces Best Sellers Rank: #610,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #60054 in Books > Business & Money
What often differentiates great sales people from the also-rans is their understanding that their success in delivering revenue and retiring quota, is the result of a dynamic alignment and balance between selling and buying. Any imbalance, leads to either no revenue, less or lesser quality revenue, longer time to revenue, or a toxic combination of all of these.
The great, focus more on the buy side, the Buyer and the purchIDg process, leveraging that as a pull-through for sales. The pack is more likely to focus on selling and intentionally or unintentionally trying to impose their “sale” on the buyer. This difference may explain why nearly half of B2B reps do not make quota, and why many of their “sales” are in reality orders they were given, rather than being earned, or the proverbial nut blind squirrels tend to run in to.
A few years ago, in an effort to help differentiate and understand how sellers can better navigate through the buy/sell process, the folks at CEB, presented us with The Challenger Sale, which presented a number of insights, many of which are still being debated and digested. Among these was how sellers can drive and ensure that dynamic buy/sell balance leading to more success for all involved. But there is no denying that the perspective was very much that of the “sale”. Now the same team extends things, and presents a book looking more closely at the “Buyer” perspective in “The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results”.
While the book will resonate with sellers, front line to executive leaders, offering both perspectives and specific actions sellers can take to win more deals, it goes beyond and speaks directly to marketers, and buyers themselves.
"The Challenger Customer" by Adamson, Dixon, Spenner and Toman is an excellent treatise on how to move sales forces toward success in satisfying customer needs and building the base methodically. When salespeople enter an organization, all sorts of problems arise from eliciting the real needs of clients, to dealing with resistance to change and finding the right facilitators to manage organizational conflict optimally.
The authors deal with some classic customer employee profiles forthrightly. For instance, the go-getter always delivers more than asked and champions good causes. The skeptic views unclear projects as risky. The friend is very receptive and enjoys long conversations with reps. The teacher often explains new insights to challenging problems. The guide knows the organization and can direct vendors to the most relevant information quickly. These are just a few of the practical problems in implementation explained by the authors.
Oftentimes, customers present challenging problems which require gathering the knowledge of experts to make complex decisions. For instance, a railroad traffic engineering department faces a complex task in choosing the optimal switch signalling devices and designs to minimize downtime and lengthen the MTBF ( mean time between failures). A fleet owner may be having problems deciding whether or not to purchase more trucks from a domestic or foreign manufacturer. The dynamics of the decision could rest on the availability of parts and the ease of repairing the fleet. And so, parts availability and cost of maintenance could favor buying from a domestic manufacturer.
The gist of the book is as follows:
#1 Challenge buyers by showing them their status quo is not good enough and is cutting into profit, wasting effort, and/or increIDg risk.
#2 Partner with and enable "Mobilizers" inside the buying organization to drive consensus around the problem, the solution, and vendor selection.
Like The Challenger Seller, I gave this book 5 stars for the quality of the overall insights. Of the two books, this one is better (and is inclusive of the content in its predecessor). Also, like The Challenger Seller, this one suffers from a LOT of redundancy and out of order content – a natural consequence of having too many authors without painstakingly meticulous editing. Unlike The Challenger Seller, the Challenger Customer does a much better job of justifying conclusions & recommendations by providing references to studies with decent sample sizes.
Here is a more detailed summary:
Closing a complex deal requires collective consensus from, on average, 5.4 decision makers as they march through the three main stages of the buying cycle: (1) problem definition (2) supplier-independent solution identification (3) supplier selection.
“On average, customers are 57 percent of the way through a typical purchase process prior to proactively reaching out to a supplier’s sales rep for their direct input on whatever it is that they’re doing.”
Successful reps:
a. Challenge customers’ beliefs with a new and compelling insight to make money, save time, or lower risk. This insight must provide a compelling reason to take action now by explicitly laying out why the customer’s current behavior is not “good enough” and is costing them time or money in ways they never realized.
b.
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