The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

The Challenger is a type of sales representative who purposefully uses insight to reframe a customer’s perspective about their own business. These insights usually represent an overlooked aspect of the customer’s business and present the customer with an opportunity to either reduce losses or improve profits. Described as team debaters, the Challenger’s name derives from their ability to confidently challenge a customer’s assumptions and leverage the resulting tension to drive the customer’s sense of urgency; more than any other type, they embody The Rewards of Embracing Discomfort. Challengers exemplify three core abilities: teaching for differentiation, tailoring for resonance, and taking control of the sale. Dixon and Adamson suggest that these three abilities are the attributes other sales representatives can harness to emulate Challengers.

Dixon and Adamson distinguish between “training,” which largely consists of imparting abstract knowledge, and “coaching,” which aims to put knowledge into practice. In stressing that sales managers have a key role to play in coaching individual representatives on the Challenger model, the book affirms The Importance of Organizational Synergy; individuals who attempt to pattern their selling on this model without institutional backing are likely to fail, the authors suggest.