The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Published by Portfolio/Penguin in 2011, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation is a business and sales book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. It pushes a new approach for business-to-business (B2B) sales called the “Challenger Selling Model,” which leverages tension and insight to challenge the customer’s assumptions about their business and show how the supplier’s solution is suited to address overlooked business needs. The text’s discussion of this approach highlights themes of The Evolving Nature of Business and Its Methods, The Rewards of Embracing Discomfort, and The Importance of Organizational Synergy.

Dixon and Adamson drew their takeaways for The Challenger Sale from extensive research performed by Sales Executive Council, the sales arm of American advisory firm Corporate Executive Board. While working for the company, Dixon and Adamson also co-authored The Challenger Customer with Nick Toman and Patrick Spenner, published by Portfolio/Penguin in 2015. As of 2023, Dixon continued to spearhead research-driven organizational growth as a consultant, while Adamson served as a guru on B2B sales.

This study guide is based on the 2011 hardcover edition of The Challenger Sale published by Portfolio/Penguin, which includes a foreword by Neil Rackham.

Summary

The book consists of 12 chapters, including an introduction and an afterword, as well as Rackham’s foreword. In the first four chapters, Dixon and Adamson explain their work with the Sales Executive Council (SEC) in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Intrigued by the fact that some sales representatives continued to perform well despite the recession, the SEC researched those representatives’ practices. Their data turned up five distinct kinds of representatives, one of which—the “Challenger”—significantly outperformed the others. Dixon and Adamson therefore argue that the Challenger is the only one of the five profiles whose attributes can address the issues surrounding the complex solution sales framework that dominates the B2B market. In the hopes of improving overall sales representative performance, the book distills the key attributes of the Challenger into three replicable attributes—teaching for differentiation, tailoring for resonance, and taking control of the sale.

The next four chapters dissect these attributes in detail. Teaching for differentiation requires sales representatives to deploy insights that reframe the customer’s perspective of their own business and lead the conversation toward a discussion of the supplier’s unique solution offerings. While such insights can be discomfiting in the short term, they are ultimately what customers are looking for within the solution sales economy. Tailoring for resonance sees sales representatives connecting not just with the decision makers, but also with the stakeholders who influence consensus decisions; this means that sales departments must prepare dynamic pitches that can be “scaled” according to each of these audiences. Finally, taking control of the sale describes the Challenger’s natural aptitude for asserting the value of their solution without veering into aggression. Otherwise, customers may look to other companies for solutions.

The last three chapters of the book move away from sales representatives to discuss how Challenger Sales Model adoption requires management at various levels of organization, beginning with the frontline sales manager who serves the crucial function of coaching sales teams, to embody Challenger attributes and overcome obstacles through sales innovation. Dixon and Adamson then address other corporate leaders—namely sales leaders, marketing leaders, and senior leaders—to underscore the importance of committing to the Challenger model across the organization. No matter how finely calibrated their technique, individual sales representatives may struggle if the organization as a whole does not have a clear grasp of what solutions it is offering. The book ends with the notion that the Challenger model may be applicable across all areas of business, showing case uses in areas such as legal, human resources, and information technology.