Markets Deliver

The Challenger Sale

The Challenger Sale is a business-to-business approach that teaches, tailors, and takes control of the commercial conversation.

The questionWhat does the seller who wins complex business-to-business deals do differently in the conversation?

Model · Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, 2011

1
Teach Bring a new view of the customer's business
2
Tailor Fit the message to each stakeholder
3
Take control Steer price, timing and the next step

Simplified view of the three behaviors of the Challenger approach, read left to right.

When to use it

A client sells a complex business-to-business offering and keeps losing to "do nothing" or to price comparisons after good relationships and well-run discovery calls.
Sales leadership hires, coaches, and promotes on the belief that relationship strength drives results, and wants to test that against win data.
Marketing content describes the product, and customers already know what the product does.
You are designing sales training and need a specific set of behaviors to coach.

When to avoid it

The sale is small, quick, or repeat, and the buyer already knows what it wants and wants speed. Teaching in that call is friction.
The company has no real commercial insight to teach with. Without a defensible view of the customer's business, challenging the buyer is just contradicting them.
The reps meet one contact, and the real problem is agreement among several buyers. The authors' own later work found that consensus is the harder problem, and Miller Heiman is the better starting point for mapping who decides.
You need an evidence base wider than one research firm's member companies. Treat the study as one source to test, not as settled science.

Overview

The Challenger Sale is a model of complex business-to-business selling built on a study of more than 6,000 sales reps. It sorted reps into five profiles and reported that Challengers were the most likely to be high performers, especially in complex sales. The Challenger teaches the customer something new about its own business, tailors the message to each stakeholder, and takes control of the commercial conversation, including price.

Read it as behaviors, not a personality. It rests on one research firm’s member base and on complex sales, so treat it as a strong hypothesis to test against the client’s own win and loss data. It also says little about getting agreement across a buying group, which the authors’ later book on the Challenger Customer takes up.

The three behaviors and the five profiles

Teach

Bring the customer a view of its own business that it has not formed, and lead from it to what the supplier does. The aim is to differentiate on insight when the products look alike.

Tailor

Shape the message for each stakeholder, with the economic, operational, and personal priorities of that person in mind. Several people in one account will need different versions of the same argument.

Take control

Be comfortable raising price and timing, press back when the customer's stated plan will not solve the problem, and steer the next step. The authors describe this as constructive tension, not aggression.

Challenger profile

Offers the customer a distinct view, understands the customer's economics, and is comfortable debating and pushing. The profile the study reported as most likely to be a high performer.

Hard Worker

Reliable effort, persistence, and a willingness to take feedback. Over-represented among average performers in the study.

Relationship Builder

Builds advocates inside the account, gives time generously, and avoids conflict. Reported as the profile least likely to be a high performer in complex sales.

Lone Wolf

Follows their own instincts and is hard to manage. Can succeed when the setting suits the style, and is hard to replicate.

Reactive Problem Solver

Responsive and detail-oriented, and makes sure the problems customers raise get solved.

What it is not

A license to be combative. The authors define the profile by teaching insight, tailoring, and keeping tension in the sale. A rep who only argues has skipped the insight.
A finding that relationships do not matter. The study reported that the Relationship Builder profile was the least likely to be a high performer in complex sales. It did not say that rapport has no value.
A hiring filter alone. The authors present the behaviors as teachable, and CEB claimed that up to 80 percent of reps could learn them. Training and content are the intended response.

The steps

Read your own deals first

Pull twenty to thirty recent complex deals and code each as won, lost to a competitor, or lost to no decision. Record what happened in the first two meetings. See whether the pattern the study describes shows up before you buy any assessment or training.
Find the commercial insight

Look for something the supplier can see across its customers that a single customer cannot, and that leads naturally to what the supplier sells. Test it with customers. If it does not change how they see their problem, it is a sales pitch. Keep two or three that hold up, each with evidence.
Build the teaching conversation

Start with something the customer recognizes, bring the unexpected finding, show the cost of staying as they are, and only then show the way out and where the offer fits. Reps need an outline they can adapt, not a script.
Tailor by stakeholder

For each role in a typical buying group, write what that person cares about and what evidence would move them. Have reps prepare a variant before each meeting.
Coach the control moves and measure

Role-play raising price, asking for access to other buyers, and pushing back on a customer's proposed solution. Review real calls. Run it with one team, and compare win rate and no-decision rate to a baseline from that team.

In practice

Three of the last five losses at a payroll software vendor shared one shape: warm contact with the HR director, a good demo, and then the prospect chose to stay with what it had. The call notes were mostly the prospect's stated needs and the vendor's features. We rebuilt the first meeting around a pattern in the vendor's own customer data, that turnover among hourly staff tracked how long pay errors stayed unfixed. Reps opened with that, asked the prospect to test it against its own numbers, and then showed what the product changed.

The second meeting was tailored. The HR director heard about turnover, the finance director heard about overpayment cost, and IT heard about the integration load. Reps were coached to ask for the finance director's time in the second meeting, and to state price range early. In the pilot team, no-decision losses fell over two quarters. The team was small, and we reported that as a result to repeat, not a proof.

What you leave with

A coded set of recent deals that shows where they were lost and what happened early in each.
Two or three commercial insights, each tied to evidence and to something the client sells.
A conversation outline and stakeholder variants that reps can adapt.
A coaching rubric for the three behaviors, and a pilot team with baseline win and no-decision rates.

Failure points

Insight that is a product pitch

Reps are told to teach and deliver a feature talk under a new title. The customer recognizes it at once, and the credibility the approach depends on is gone.

Training without insight content

Reps are trained to challenge, and nobody supplies anything to challenge with. They improvise, contradict the customer, and lose deals they would have won by listening.

Typing people from a quiz

Assessment results are used to label reps and move them. The profiles came from one study, the assessments are commercial products, and a label in a performance review sticks.

Applying it to simple sales

Heavy teaching in a call where the buyer wants a price and a date. The approach was built on complex sales and does not transfer by default.

Challenging a single contact

The rep pushes hard on the one person it meets, while the decision belongs to a group. The contact is persuaded, cannot persuade colleagues, and the deal ends in no decision.

The failures above are usually Commercial Acumen: the work was not tied to money, for the client and/or for you.

Origin

Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and colleagues at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) published The Challenger Sale in 2011. The work came from CEB's Sales Executive Council. Managers rated more than 6,000 business-to-business sales reps on 44 attributes, and a factor analysis produced five profiles: Challenger, Hard Worker, Relationship Builder, Lone Wolf, and Reactive Problem Solver. CEB's own summary puts the Challenger at 27 percent of the sample and reports that Challengers made up about 39 percent of high performers overall and 54 percent in complex sales. These are reported figures from one firm's member base, and the book is about complex sales. Gartner acquired CEB in 2017.

The authors followed with The Challenger Customer (2015), which turns to the buying group and the problem of getting several stakeholders to agree. CEB and Gartner mark "Challenger" as a trademark. The training, assessments, and materials built on it are commercial products, and this note describes the ideas in general terms.