Beyond the Challenger Sale Part 2: Focus on Value & Make your Product Easy to Buy (with Brent Adamson, Author ”The Challenger Sale” & ”The Challenger Customer”)

Brent Adamson is a former Harvard professor turned Wall Street Journal award-winning author and sales researcher. He co-authored "The Challenger Sale" and "The Challenger Customer" with my former guest Matt Dixon, and these days is challenging us to concentrate on making products easy to buy, not easy to sell.

Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:

1. The Challenger Sale shook up the world of sales, but The Challenger Customer was the inevitable follow up

They did further research after the first book and identified a new protagonist, the "Mobilizer", who can be your best advocate within the company (but not a champion!)

2. It takes 5.4 people within an organisation to make a purchase decision & the number's rising

It's getting more & more complicated selling into organisations, and the buying journey has become like spaghetti. Finding the "economic buyer" is no longer enough to land the sale.

3. There's a difference between emerging demand and established demand

If you're going after established demand and known solutions you're going to get dragged into a price-based bake-off. Challengers find unknown pains, challenge the status quo & break the frame

4. Some customers don't even know how to buy any solution, let alone your solution

Buyer journeys are complex & some customers can be surprised when things get held up. But you're not, you've seen it all before! Give them the info they need to help close the sale from their side.

5. It's not good enough to just be insightful anymore, The smartness arms race ended in a draw

Being really insightful is table stakes. You need to be able to help your customers frame their decision and give them confidence in the decisions they're making for their company.

.. And much more!

Check out Matt's episode

I interviewed Brent's co-author and co-conspirator Matt Dixon about his work and how customer indecision is a critical problem for B2B sales. Check out the episode here.

Buy "The Challenger Sale"

"The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades."

 

Check it out on Amazon.

Buy "The Challenger Customer"

"In The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now they reveal something even more surprising: the highest-performing sales teams don't focus on friendly, attentive customers. Instead, they target challenger customers. Challenger customers are sceptical, less interested in meeting and ultimately indifferent as to who wins the deal. But they also have the credibility, persuasive skill and will to challenge the status quo that will get a deal to the finish line far more often than customers who are easier to connect with."

 

Check it out on Amazon.

Contact Brent

You can hit Brent up on LinkedIn.