The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

The sales book is a subgenre of the business book that offers guidance on achieving sales success. While business books can concern various areas of management and administration, sales books are specific to the issues, trends, and solutions relevant to frontline sales personnel and sales managers. Hence, they usually concern seller-customer behaviors, the art of persuasion, pitch guides, and general sales techniques. Popular examples of sales books include SPIN Selling (1988) by Neil Rackham, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012) by Daniel H. Pink, and Little Red Book of Selling (2004) by Jeffrey Gitomer.

Superficially, Dixon and Adamson’s The Challenger Sale is not different from many other sales books. It presents many of its research-driven insights in step-by-step process guides, enumerating techniques like Teaching Conversations in great detail. Case studies concretize some of these insights with the intention of validating them beyond the realm of conceptual or theoretical discovery. Finally, the book contains elaborate assessment tools and question guides in its appendices.

What the authors claim sets The Challenger Sale apart is its departure from conventional sales wisdom. The notion that customers are the center of every business relationship means that suppliers are usually in the position of reacting to their needs to sustain their business.