Since The Challenger Sale was first released in 2011, it’s become a popular read for sales professionals wanting to gain a competitive edge at solution selling. Within it, authors Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon relayed a totally new approach for tackling the complex sale – one that for many went against long-held beliefs about the traits of high-performers and what works.

While the Challenger methodology has its detractors, what resonated so positively for many managers was the author’s focus on demonstrated behaviors (versus more esoteric personality traits such as charm or extroversion), and a manager’s ability to positively affect those behaviors to generate better business results.

Widening Talent Gap

What the Challenger Sale also does well is isolate some acute, yet often hard to categorize trends about the complexity of today’s buyer journey, and the burdens this trend placed on reps. Chief among these trends was the “widening talent gap, ” and the data was stark.  According to Adamson and Dixon, “As B2B sales become more complex, the gap between core and star performers widens dramatically.” In fact, according to the authors, stars were outperforming their peers by almost 200 percent.

To us, Challenger represents yet another sales methodology that aligns perfectly with Qstream’s belief that sales success, (1) requires reps to understand and align with the needs of their buyer, and (2) that real performance improvements cannot be achieved without behavioral change.

On the surface, this makes perfect sense given that at the core of solution selling is the need to get customers to think differently about how they operate and change their behavior. How can your reps get their customers to think and act differently if they are not willing to do the same?

Science to the Rescue

As we’ve discussed in earlier posts, changing the behaviors of your sales team is not an easy task, even for individuals who are highly motivated to excel.  The reality is that your reps are inundated with product, market and competitive information, and many will struggle to retain that knowledge and put it into practice. (But Challengers are supposed to “know the industry and the drivers of business value better than the customer themselves.” Tall order, right?)

Many of our customers are finding success by approaching sales transformation in a new way, acknowledging that reps, like all of us, learn best via simple, yet sustaining sales enablement approaches, not a “one and done” sales training.

If your organization is already implementing, or even considering the Challenger model, how will you ensure your reps can retain those principles and alter their behavior to make these new skills actionable for your customers?

Qstream’s approach, as a complement to Challenger or any methodology, is designed to embrace the way the human brain actually works and increase productivity to anchor real change within your sales force.

How can we help you?