The “customer is always right” is the motto we’re encouraged to follow in sales. But what if they’re wrong? It happens. And when it does, some sales reps — especially those following the challenger sales methodology — will push back. A challenger seller is characterized by taking control of conversations and enjoying a good debate.

Challenger Sales got its name because it emphasizes challenging your customer’s thinking. Read on to learn how this methodology can benefit your sales team.

What you’ll learn

• What is the Challenger Sales methodology?
• How does Challenger Sales work?
• Challenger Sales example
• Key differences between Challenger Sales and other techniques
• The five steps in Challenger Selling
• Tips for training your team to use Challenger Selling
• How to stay ahead with Challenger Sales

What is the Challenger Sales methodology?

The Challenger Sales methodology emphasizes challenging a customer or prospect’s thinking and assumptions. The goal is to bring new insights and value to their business so they can make informed decisions. Above all, Challenger Selling focuses on teaching your customers rather than building relationships with them. The seller is positioned as an expert in their field, and they immediately begin sales interactions by showing the customer what their problem is instead of asking questions to uncover the problem.

How does Challenger Sales work?

The Challenger Sales methodology, first introduced in the book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, stems from research on the attributes, skills, and competencies of successful sellers. The research identified five profiles based on clusters of seller behaviors:

• The Problem Solver: Detail-oriented and reliably responds to customers.
• The Lone Wolf: Self-assured, independent, and follows their instincts.
• The Hard Worker: Self-motivated and will always go the extra mile.
• The Relationship Builder: Builds strong customer advocates and gets along with everyone.
• The Challenger: Pushes the customer and understands their business.

Among these profiles, the Challenger emerged as the one with the best-performing salespeople. The behaviors the Challenger excels at — teaching, tailoring, and taking control — form the basis of the challenger sales model.

• Teach: A Challenger Sales rep possesses a deep understanding of the buyer’s industry. They use this expertise to offer unique perspectives and insights that the buyer had not yet considered and gets them to think differently.
• Tailor: They adapt their message to align with the buyer’s specific challenges, goals, or value drivers, ensuring relevance and resonance.
• Take control: A challenger sales rep uses their comfort with discussing money and applying pressure to guide a buyer toward closing the deal.

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Challenger Sales example

I once sold a session replay product that reproduces a user’s online experience. Despite many similar products in the market, ours stood out for its unique ability to capture everything that happens on a website rather than sampling only parts of it. The feature helped uncover any website issues that could cause the user to have a negative online experience.

For example, my customer had problems on their website’s checkout page that were causing issues with payments. However, they were not aware of the issues because their tool did not sample this section of the site.

With my high level of expertise in session replay, I taught buyers the importance of analyzing the entirety of their website instead of just samples. I used the methodology to challenge my buyers to think differently about how this information was presented to company stakeholders and communicated in internal meetings. As a matter of fact, I tailored my message to the buyers’ specific needs instead of only highlighting product features and capabilities. By taking control of the conversations, I was able to compel the buyer to take action based on where they were to get where they wanted to be.

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Key differences between Challenger Sales and other techniques

Challenger Sales techniques are best suited for complex sales scenarios rather than simple transactional selling, especially in business-to-business (B2B) environments where there are longer sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.

In my experience, buyers in a Challenger Sales situation typically already know of the existing problems within their business. However, they suspect there are other issues they don’t know about. They want to grasp what they are missing. The buyer appreciates it when a seller can use their expertise to teach them about their unknown problems and provide a new way of looking at how to solve them.

A Challenger seller starts the sales call by immediately educating the buyer. They are telling, not asking, about the buyer’s problems. This is different from other sales techniques where you’d begin by engaging in relationship-building chatter, such as inquiring about the buyer’s weekend plans.

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The five steps in Challenger Selling

The Challenger Sales methodology is easier to adopt for large sales teams because it allows sales reps to personalize their interactions with buyers without requiring changes to the team structure. These are the five key steps to the Challenger Sales approach for a seller:

1. The warm-up

You begin by sharing knowledge of the prospect’s challenges and problems. Consequently, the goal is to build credibility with the prospect and show that you understand their needs.

2. The reframe

Next, you take the prospect’s challenge and reframe it in a way they may not have considered. You are shifting the prospect’s perception from what they initially thought was their problem to something much bigger, scarier, and more problematic.

3. The emotional impact

Now you tell a relatable story about a customer or company that faced similar problems but didn’t solve them. This helps the prospect see themselves in the story and realize the potential consequences of continuing on their current path.

4. The value proposition

At this stage, you still haven’t mentioned your product as the solution. Instead, you emphasize your product’s value proposition to show the prospect how it could solve their problem.

5. Your solution

In the final step, the prospect is convinced of the need for a solution. Now, you present your product as the perfect answer to the problem.

The five Challenger Sales steps should form a wave of positive highs and negative lows for the prospect. The wave starts at the neutral position of the warm-up, rises to the high of the reframe, lowers to the emotional impact, returns to the neutral value proposition, and ends on the high note of your solution.

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Tips for training your team to use Challenger Selling

Sellers often begin sales conversations talking about their product or service because it’s what makes them comfortable. That’s why the warm-up and the reframe are hard to train a sales team to do, as these steps do not focus on the product.

One way to get your sales team comfortable with the Challenger Selling approach is to consider managing the content of your sales presentation. A traditional sales deck typically includes details about who you are, what you do, and how your product can benefit the prospect. But a Challenger Sales deck only introduces the reframe and includes no mention of your company or product. The deck enables your team to get closer to having the type of meaningful conversations with a prospect that are essential for Challenger Sales.

Another strategy is to train your team to be knowledgeable about the prospect’s business so they can confidently educate as part of the warm-up. These are some ways to research the prospect and their business and industry:

• Job descriptions: Read the job description of the person you are selling to. Consider why they were hired and what they would most likely be fired for.
• Product review sites: Examine the products your prospect is purchasing and why they like them. This helps determine the problems they are trying to solve with these products.
• Industry conferences: Investigate the major conferences your prospect attends. Analyze the agenda and sessions to identify the topics that attract attendees and get an idea of what the industry is focused on and cares about.
• Customer interviews: Some companies do not allow their sellers to contact a prospect’s customers directly. A workaround could be to see whether your marketing or product team could make the call instead. The goal with this research is to find out more about the buyer’s end user.
• Focus on the prospect’s personal values: These might include being liked by their team or becoming influential within the company. Personal values tie in with Step 3, where you create the emotional impact by guiding the prospect to envision themselves in a familiar story. When you do this effectively, you increase the likelihood that your buyer will be an internal champion of change within their business.

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How to stay ahead with Challenger Sales

Reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling, according to the Salesforce State of Sales report. The rest of the time is spent on critical but tedious tasks such as researching prospects (9.3%) and manually entering customer and sales information (8.8%).

To be more efficient and effective with their time, challenger sales reps use sales software tools such as:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) system: A CRM manages a seller’s interactions with customers and prospects. The system unifies customer data and tracks progress across the long sales cycle that is typical in challenger sales. You can unify all sales activities such as emails, phone calls, social touches, and tasks into a single to-do list.
• AI: Use artificial intelligence to automate the prospect and account research that are critical for the challenger sales warm-up. You can summarize leads and opportunities to identify the likelihood of closing a deal and pinpoint which competitors are involved. Pull in real-time data to understand relevant industry updates happening in the news.
• Conversation insights: Have your CRM create a playlist collection of your challenger sellers’ successful calls so your other reps can replicate what works. Highlight the challenger sales best practices and skills in the calls to coach sellers on how to teach, tailor, and take control with the model.
• Onboarding: Need to quickly get new sales reps up to speed on your challenger sales approach? Gather your winning sales strategies in a library of pre-built, customizable templates for sales processes such as account planning, mutual close planning, customer briefings, and more. Use the library as a resource to onboard and train reps so the entire team works from a standardized set of materials that can be tailored to the customers’ challenges.

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Are you a Challenger?

Consider this if you’re still wondering whether Challenger Sales is right for your sales team: The research done for the Challenger Sales book found that nearly 40% of sales team star performers were in the Challenger category. Take the proven methodology, implement the five steps of the Challenger Sales approach, and train your sellers, and you’ll be on your way to fielding your own team of star performers.