The Missing Link to the "Challenger" Sales Model

Over the past three years, "The Challenger Sale" has been one of the hottest business/sales books on the planet.  The premise by the authors essentially put forth that "relationship builders" were the least effective sales people and those who they deemed "challengers", that is those who weren't afraid to challenge the customer, were the sales people found to be most effective.  (Heinz Marketing did a great summary of the book/model here)

As more and more B2B companies began adopting the principles behind the Challenger methodology, they found a whole new host of sales execution issues. The biggest issue isn't necessarily with the model, it's with the mis-interpretation and execution of the model.  

The main crux of the challenger sale is the need for the sales person to be an effective teacher, to tailor their content and to take control of the process.  What we've seen when we've been called in to clean up a challenger mess is that, mostly due to mis-interpretation and lack of effective coaching, the sales person interprets the model as a license to go in and essentially tell the buyer "why they've been wrong for the past year by not understanding "xyz" and oh, by the way, here's what you should be doing differently and oh, by the way, I'm going to need you to make sure your boss and his boss are in the next meeting which I'd like to see take place next week."  

Here's what we know.  People buy from people they trust.  They trust people they like and they like people they connect with.  This is 1/2 of the equation.  The second half is that people buy from people they respect and they respect people they find credible.  It takes both personal trust (connection) and professional trust (credibility) to successfully and consistently move the complex sales needle.  This is the missing link that so many companies are desperate to find.    

The challenger model does a really nice job of setting up the "credibility" side of the equation but almost de-emphasizes the need for personal trust.  The model assumes that sales people intuitively know how to do that.  Some do.  Most do not.

When you "challenge" a customer's status quo with really effective insight but without personal trust, the customer gets defensive (subconsciously) and you, the sales person don't even realize the customer is bowing up against you in their mind.  This is the proverbial "calling the baby ugly" effect.  They start to resent you and your "insight."  However, if you've established personal trust through an authentic connection, the customer views the same challenging insight through a completely different lens in their brain.  Because they already trust you...have a good gut feeling about you, they view the insight as helpful and illuminating.  It becomes the "status quo" that is the enemy now, not the messenger.  

Don't take my word for it.  Ask any number of large B2B companies what their challenges have been with the "challenger" model and most will tell you that it works "some of the time" and with "some of their" people.  Guess who it works with?  The people who are intuitively great at building personal trust prior to challenging the status quo with insight.  

What if there were a B2B sales conversation model that could teach the neuroscience of both connection and credibility?  What if this same model actually took solution selling, spin selling, and the challenger model, stripped away the ineffective transactional aspects and put the rest on steroids with simple and easy to use tools?  What if that model led to consistency of best practices and turned a potentially robotic sales team into master storytellers across your sales organization?

Oh, yea...I almost forgot...there is such a model.  www.braintrust101.com   It's not rocket science but it is neuroscience.  (Yes, I know.  Shameless plug.  Feel free to shred me in the comments. :)

Here's to us getting back to genuine, problem solving sales teams who understand the art and science of effective sales communication.  

Jeff Bloomfield, CEO, Braintrust