Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson tell us that surveys suggest that customers place the highest value on salespeople who make them think, who bring new ideas to them and who find innovative ways to help their business. Customers expect salespeople to teach them things that they don’t know. These are the core skills that Dixon and Adamson aim to teach us.
Lesson 1: Sales Reps R Us
Dixon and Adamson want us to be challengers. Salespeople who are challengers are representatives who understand the customer’s business and make them think deeper and differently. Challengers are not afraid to be controversial. Challengers are able to grow the customer’s own knowledge through engaging in robust two-way dialogue. Additionally, because the challengers possess a superior understanding of a customer’s economic and value drivers, they are able to deliver the right message to the right person within the customer organization.
Lesson 2: “I’d like to teach the world to buy…”
Teaching in sales is all about offering customers unique perspectives on their business and communicating those viewpoints to draw the customer in. This is how the challengers do it. And for us to do these two, there are 3 rules.
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Lead to Our Unique Strengths. Our teaching should lead back to what we do better than anyone else, putting us in the best position to show how we outperform the competitors
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Challenge Customers’ Assumptions. We have to directly challenge the customer and speak directly to their world in ways they haven’t thought of before. Whatever insight we provide must change their perspective.
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Kick-off Action. Customers are easily distracted, so our message needs to be so compelling they remain focused. We need to get them to act.
Lesson 3: Taking Control of the Sale
Challengers understand that the goal is to seal a deal, not just have a good meeting; they are focused on moving ahead. Challengers take control across the entirety of the sales process, not just at the end. In fact, one of the prime opportunities for taking control is actually right at the beginning of the sale. If the customer isn’t interested then neither is the Challenger. They’ll not waste their time. They’ve moved on to the next opportunity. Do you have the confidence to say no? Taking control means that we know the value of those resources and we don’t bring them to bear willy-nilly on a customer who isn’t serious about the decision. Before they buy our solution, the customer has to buy us and our perspective of the solution.