Challenging Behaviour

Between 2009 and 2011, a group of researchers surveyed 6,000 sales reps.

They were trying to understand what skills, behaviours and attitudes made the best sales people successful.

They measured the attributes of the sales people and grouped them into five roughly equal types:

Relationship Builders – Focus on personal connections and customer service.

Hard Workers – Deliver maximum effort but may lack strategic impact.

Lone Wolves – Independent, instinct-driven and hard to manage.

Reactive Problem Solvers – Good at responding to issues but not proactive.

Challengers – Uncovers customer’s needs, enjoys debate, pushes the customer.

And as they expected they found that the Relationship Builders were the top performers.

Actually they weren’t - they were the worst.

It was the Challenger group that was most successful.

40% of the star sales performers were Challengers.

% of Star Performers (Star Performers are the top 20% of sales reps)

“Challengers won out not by a small margin but a massive one.” - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, “The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation”, Penguin (2012)

Challenging Solutions

Challengers are solution sellers.

They think like a consultant.

They are focused on addressing “the story behind the story”.

They seek to be product experts, fully understanding their own services.

They strive to understand exactly how the customer's business works, so that they can uncover the biggest problems they face.

They know that the customer doesn’t know enough about the product being sold to understand what they really need.

In complex situations the customer doesn't know best.

They relish debates and are confident enough to push their customers to think differently about their own business.

And they tailor their service to solve the customer’s key problem, providing the best possible commercial solution for all.

And they don’t stop with the customers.

They also challenge their own business to work more effectively - which top-down managers find very hard to deal with.

Challengers are not necessarily likeable but they are highly effective.

“The world of solution selling is almost definitionally about a disruptive sale. You’re asking customers to change their behavior - to stop acting one way and starting acting in another. To make that happen, however, you have to get customers to think differently about how they operate. You need to show them the way to think about their business. From that perspective, it's really no surprise that in this more complex world only one profile wins - and it wins by a country mile.” - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Challengers win challenging sales

In a low complexity sale, the best performers are actually the Hard Workers closely followed by the Lone Wolves and only then do the Challengers appear.

But the difference between a star performer and an average performer is small - a star performer is just 1.5x more effective.

So if you are looking for an SDR, focus on finding people who are willing to work very hard and keep doing it.

It's when the scenario becomes more complicated the Challengers excel.

In highly complex solution sales the Challengers dominate, accounting for more than 50% of all star performers.

And in complex sales star performers are absolutely essential, outperforming the average sales rep by 4x.

By selling the right product at the right price their conversion rate is better.

And importantly, by selling a feasible solution their sales are more likely to work in the long term and less likely to churn.

In a complex sale the people who are Hard Workers and great SDRs struggle to make the jump to being sales reps.

And in this situation, the Relationship Builders (that make up 1/5th of the workforce) are completely ineffective.

“The Challenger rep wins by maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. The Relationship Builder, on the other hand, strives to resolve or diffuse tension, not create it.” - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Some people are natural Challengers, but the good news is that you can teach and learn it too.

Challenger Thinking

If you work in sales, you’re probably familiar with the Challenger Sale.

What I find interesting is how applicable this insight is across other roles too.

Once a certain level of complexity arrives in almost all jobs, the people who really succeed do it through Challenger Behaviour.

If you are looking for a sales leader, promote a Challenger.

The most successful Customer Success people are Challengers.

The most successful COOs are Challengers

The most successful Product Managers, Support people, CTOs, Marketers, and CEOs, are all Challengers.

Everywhere you look, the people who ask questions, have a drive to learn, challenge entrenched assumptions, and push themselves and others to think differently are the star performers.

Are you a Challenger?