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What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. 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.Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth. Read more
Publisher : Portfolio
Publication date : November 10, 2011
Edition : 5655th
Language : English
Print length : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 8
ISBN-13 : 58
Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
Dimensions : 6.18 x 0.89 x 9.28 inches
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Top Amazon Reviews
Size: Pack of 1
This book comes very highly touted, especially by Neil Rackham himself, who calls it "the most important advance in selling for many years."I personally don't think it reaches quite that level, but overall it is an excellent book, with provocative insights and useful information for salespeople looking for ways to break out of the pack. The key to a really good book is that it makes you say, "I never thought of that before," and to use that insight to improve your life in some way. Interestingly, that's also the key to a really good salesperson, as well. The book is based on extensive research by the Sales Executive Council into the attributes of successful sales professionals. They found that salespeople tend to cluster into five different types, based on their behaviors: Hard Workers, Challengers, Relationship Builders, Lone Wolves, and Reactive Problem Solvers. Research is great when it generates new and unexpected insights, and three are central to the book. Key insight #1: Salespeople matter--a lot! One of the surprising insights generated by their research was that the Sales Experience accounted for 53% of the contribution to customer loyalty, more than company and brand impact, product and service delivery, and value-to-price ratio combined! In other words, the latter three are just tickets to be able to play; how you sell is more important than what you sell. In complex solution sales, star performers outperform core performers by 200%, as opposed to 59% in transactional selling, so it's a critical insight. If how you sell is so important, the next critical insight is about what the most effective reps out of the 6,000 that they surveyed do differently. Key insight #2: They don't care how much you care until they know how much you know Of the five types, relationship builders are the least effective performers. The old saying, "They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care," is better said, "they don't care how much you care until they know how much you know." Relationships are important, but they are the result of successful selling and not the cause (as Rackham says in the Foreword). In other words, what customers value most today is a rep who teaches them something, who challenges their insights and their view of the world. These reps are the Challengers and they comprise the largest component of top performers. Unlike relationship builders who focus on resolving tension and keeping everyone happy, challengers like to produce constructive tension, because major sales are about creating change and change generally requires discomfort. The key is not in discovering the customer's needs and being able to express them, it's in being able to create the need that they didn't even have by getting them to look at their world in a way they had not before. As they say, if your customer's reaction to your pitch is, "That's exactly what's keeping me up at night. You really understand our needs", you've actually failed. What you want them to say is, "Huh, I never thought of it that way before." Of course, if you do this and then they go ahead and solve their problem with a cheaper competitor, all you've done is sold for someone else. So, the other critical piece is to answer the most important question: "Why should our customers buy from us over all competitors?" This question is surprisingly difficult for reps to answer, as I personally have observed in my own training classes. But, with enough thinking and refining, you can answer the question. The thought process then becomes: * What are our strengths? * How do those strengths give the customer the capability to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity they don't know they have? * What do we need to teach the customer so they will value that capability? As the book says, "The sweet spot of customer loyalty is outperforming your competitors on those things you've taught your customers are important." In order to achieve this sweet spot, Challengers do three things very well: teach, tailor, and take control. The middle section of the book explains how to build the teaching conversation, tailor your strengths to individual stakeholders, and take control of the sale. The teaching phase is the most expensive part of the book and appropriately enough, by far the most insightful and most innovative. Just this part of the book would make it worthwhile. Key insight #3: Focus on the core 60% The final two chapters focus on how to implement the approach in the sales organization. Here their most important insight is that the focus should be on equipping the 60% of the sales force who are core performers to be able to follow the Challenger Selling model. The top 20% won't need it, and the bottom 20% won't get it. The only quibble I have with The Challenger Sale is that many ideas which are relatively well-known already are treated as if they are startling new discoveries. I read some of the passages with the same irritation that Native Americans must feel when told Columbus "discovered" America. For example, they introduce the idea of tailoring your insight to the specific individual needs of the different stakeholders, which all good sales methodologies have incorporated for years. (In fairness, though, so many of these ideas that are common knowledge are still not common practice.) I would strongly recommend this book to sales executives, sales managers, and most of all, to sales professionals; I challenge you to read it and apply it.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2011 by J. F. Malcolm
Size: Pack of 1
The Challenger Sale (TCS) is an important book for sales professionals and sales managers involved in complex B2B sales as it proves that a number of commonly held beliefs about sales behavior are obsolete. Unlike many other "how-to-sell" books based on theories and ideas on improvingsales performance, TCS is underpinned by rich and extensive data from more than 20,000 member sales professionals from more than 100 member companies, gathered over the past four years. You are a Prospect for Challenger Sales Training I don't have a problem that TCS is produced by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) and that the CEB is a member organization providing for profit sales training for its members. They want to sell you Challenger Sales Development Services...in the same way every other author of sales performance literature wants to sell their services. It happens that we are very much aligned in our view of the sea-change that has occured in buyer behavior and the need for new approaches in engaging buyers. If you are selling complex software, enterprise hardware or services in a B2B environment and haven't read The Challenger Sale yet, then perhaps this article might convince you it's worth reading at least once...regardless of where you get your sales development services. Relationship Selling is Dead I and many of my peers were brought up in a World where, as a territory rep, our goal was to establish a relationship with the buyer, and over time, gain access to the organization to earn the opportunity to position our products/solutions. Through factor analysis of the data, TCS identifies the five distinct profiles or behavioral tendencies of sales people of which the relationship sales person has been the least successful in the past four years for both transactional and complex sales. Take-away: Today, when buyers have an abundance of information about vendors products and solutions at their fingertips, any salesperson that brings insight to the table that can create new opportunities for the buying organization can have a relationship based on that value. Buyers simply have no time or need of relationships with salespeople who do not create value. Challengers are Winners, Rain or Shine Based on an analysis of the data, in transactional selling, the star performers outperform the core by 59%. Hard Workers are the top producers in transactional selling. In complex B2B selling environments, the research indicates that star performers outperformed core performers by almost 200%. As the sale becomes more complex, the gap between the core and star performers widens dramatically...companies are becoming more dependent on fewer sales people to carry the day. It happens that Challengers were the only cohort to make their numbers in the downturn and today are the top performing behavior type by a wide margin. The 5 Sales Profiles The Challenger Lone Wolf Hard Worker Reactive Problem Solver Relationship Builder Challenger Behaviour Attributes From the 44 attributes in the survey, six of them were statistically significant in defining the Challenger rep: Offers the customer unique perspective Strong 2 way communication skills Knows customer value drivers Can identify economic drivers of customers business Is comfortable discussing money Can pressure the customer The exciting news is that with the right training, coaching and sales tools, even relationship builders can learn to take control of the customer conversation like a challenger. Challenger Selling is Journey The Challenger model is developed around the following pillars: Teaching for Differentiation Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control The authors point out that the Challenger Selling Model is simple in theory, but complex in practice and the book lays out the best-practices, tools and lessons learned in implementing the Challenger Selling Model. I recommend it highly. Bon Voyage! Resources Join The Challenger Sale Group on LinkedIn Visit the Challenger Sales Website View an excellent recent interview with the authors by Anthony Iannario (you may need to join the TCS group to view it) To read the full review with graphics and links, visit[...] The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
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Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2012 by Mark Gibson
Size: Pack of 1
The idea of a "challenger" has stuck with me since I read it. It's not something you will live by, but it's a very useful concept to have handy when navigating conversations & customer relationships. Teach, tailor, control.
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2024 by djacks
Size: Pack of 1
I mean yea. it's a decent book. I don't know anything about sales though so not sure really. What I will say is it's focused on B2B sales not B2C (which is kinda what I actually need)... That said, I think a lot of the concepts carry over.
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2026 by DallasCaley
Size: Pack of 1
The premise of this book is very simple, but very powerful. The most effective salespeople bring insights to customers, ones they had not thought of, that help them increase revenue, lower costs, or control risks. It is a very simple premise but powerful when you consider that most salespeople that I interact with either (a) push company credentials & product features, OR (b) spend lots of time figuring out what keeps me up at night even though what keeps me up is probably the same thing that keeps up everyone else in my role at other companies. I appreciated that the authors developed their findings through surveying, dynamic cluster analysis, and multiple regression. I would have appreciated a scientific appendix to show their approach, but I suspect I am in the minority among conventional readers in that desire. Academics would probably find some flaws (ex: I cannot recall the authors sharing the R^2 for their analysis which is important in justifying how predictive their model really is.) I'm giving the book 5 stars for the premise and the research which has unusually strong rigor for a mainstream business book. However, t was a very tedious read due to issues other readers have cited including: a. redundancy (mainly due to hierarchical narrative structure that revealed pretty much everything up front) b. way too many references to the authors' employer which made it feel like a commercial c. seemingly random treatment of topics covered in depth in other books (ex: various forms of decision making biases) Disclosure: I work for a major competitor to the company the authors work for. This review is my independent opinion.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2014 by Jeremey Donovan
Size: Pack of 1
I'm a skeptic. With very few exceptions, sales books leave me flat. In the past 30 years, the only books that really stoked my intellectual fires were some put out by the Miller Heiman folks and one by Rackham, but besides these, I find the books either: 1) too technical and unwieldy and boring, 2) too impractical to use, or 3) too fluffy - aimed at emotions or tactics. Not so with The Challenger Sale. The book relates to what is happening in the sales world NOW - in the 2000's, I believe, we have gone from evolution to revolution in the way buyers buy, and so a revolutionary answer is required. The data gives us that - the Challenger. He or she teaches, tailors, and takes control. Each of these are HUGE concepts within themselves. This great book does not devalue relationships, it strengthens them by showing that relationships are built on an ability to reach smart, busy, driven people with insights, and how to lead with those insights, to your unique solution. The lessons are too many to list here, but some key to me were: 1) HOW to align Marketing and Sales (we all know we need to, but how) and the "how" is around Biases that vertical markets and roles within organizations naturally provide - marketing and sales have to work together to collaborate on collateral that helps deliver relevant messages that the customer has not yet considered, 2) that Challengers have certain behaviors - find them or coach them, but drive them into your organization, 3) the makeup and process of the Commercial Pitch, etc. My advice to sales process skeptics - read the book - the practical advice and the research will grab you, but putting this into practice could transform the way you sell or coach your team to success.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2012 by M Monroe
Size: Pack of 1
Best book on sales I have read in a long time. The conventional wisdom is go in and ask what is your pain? That is a weak opening. You are taking instead of offering. In the Challenger sale they teach you to walk in and teach, for example people where you are usually struggle with this and this, is that would you find? You are giving something and it shows them you know what you are talking about. Nice!
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Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2026 by Amazon Customer
Size: Pack of 1
I'd say read it - and don't expect too much in the way of earth-shattering revelations or some actionable sales methodology. The authors spend a lot of time up front in the book validating the credibility of their research. Throughout the book, they refer to their case study clients as "members" - as if they are the Sam's Club of business insight. (The Corporate Executive Board is a "for-profit" BUSINESS TRAINING company, not a non-profit member association) I always held the belief that relationship-only salespeople were creepy, unproductive and non-scalable generalists - and now, thanks to this book, I have the data to prove it. Their branded "Commercial Teaching" is when marketing is forced into actually helping salespeople create compelling and provocative messages vs. non-value added brochures and seminars. After reading the book, I was left wanting something that brought it all together as a repeatable sales methodology or process. Unfortunately, that wish was never satisfied. The book was very good at debunking bad techniques like "answering a question with a question", asking rhetorical and irritating questions like "what keeps you up at night?" and does an all out assault on "inquiry only" sales calls & methodologies. The section on coaching was very good and applicable to most sales improvement programs - and didn't seem overly unique to coaching to whatever the "The Challenger Sale" actually is. Here is the highlight reel: 1) Relationship-only reps are the typically worst performers 2) Have marketing & sales co-create a good, orchestrated script that anticipates customer problems, creates disruptive tension and ends with innovative ways of addressing client issues 3) Hand the script to a rep and tell them to learn it and tailor it 4) Provide coaching to make it stick 5) Rinse & repeat with every client interaction.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2012 by Amazon Customer