The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Dixon and Adamson discuss the frontline sales manager’s role in affecting change at an organizational scale. One of the major hurdles companies face is that many managers lack the skills required to manage business transformations, much less succeed in their position.

The authors turn to the Sales Leadership Diagnostic, a behavioral survey the SEC conducted that determined the world-class manager profile based on key attributes. The SEC found that high-performing managers required fundamental skills such as reliability and integrity, that high-performing representatives were not necessarily high-performing managers, and that knowledge of a star manager profile could enable companies to execute the candidate selection process more effectively.

Star manager attributes fall under three umbrellas:

• “Selling” includes all the attributes that resonate with the sales representative experience, which becomes especially important when higher competencies are required to fill team gaps or close larger deals.
• “Coaching” refers to the capacity to correct and reinforce sales representative behavior, especially in terms of embodying the pillars of the Challenger Selling Model.
• “Owning,” which accounts for nearly half of the significant factors that drive sales management success, determines how much managers commit to their stake in the business, executing operations as though they owned the company.