chapter 1 the evolving journey of a seller

• There are five types of sales reps
  • The Hard Worker
  • The Challenger
  • The Relationship Builder
  • The Lone Wolf
  • The Reactive Problem Solver

• The shift to solution selling resulted in customers expecting you to solve a problem and not just deliver a reliable product. As sales teams have adjusted, customers have developed “solution fatigue” forcing supplies to think different if they want to succeeed.
  • The rise of consensus based sales – comped solutions require buy in across the leadership team
  • Increased risk aversion, sometimes it’s better to do nothing
  • Greater demand for customization.
  • The rise of third party consultants
• These new trends have widened the gap of which sellers succeed

Chapter 2 – “the Challenger” the new model for high performance.

• Challengers and Lone Wolfs Product the highest results in performance but lone Wolves are hard to manage and every manager would fire them if they could and replace with a different person who achieves similar results.

Chapter 3 “the challenger part 2”

Exporting the model to the core.

• It’s the Combination of Skills That Matters: One of the key lessons from our work is that it’s the combination of the Challenger attributes -the ability to teach, tailor, take control, and do it all while leveraging constructive tension that sets Challengers apart.
• Teaching for Differentiation: The thing that really sets Challenger reps apart is their ability to teach customers something new and valuable about how to compete in their market. Our research on customer loyalty, which we’ll discuss in depth in the next chapter, shows that this is the exact behavior that wins customers for the long term.
• Tailoring for Resonance: While teaching is above all others the defining attribute of being a Challenger, the ability to tailor the teaching message to different types of customers–as well as to different individuals within the customer organization- is what makes the teaching pitch resonate and stick with the customer.
• Taking Control of the Sale: The final characteristic that sets Challenger reps apart is their ability to assert and maintain control over the sale. Now, before we go any further, it’s important to note that being assertive does not mean being aggressive or, worse still, annoying or abusive. This is all about the reps willingness and ability to stand their ground when the customer pushes back.

Chapter 4 – Teaching for Differentiation

• The number one reason that customers remain loyal to a vendor is for the unique perspectives they provide on the market.
• The power of insights: 

Chapter 5 – Teaching for Differentiation: How to Build Insight Led Conversations

• Step 1: the warmer –  “Hypothesis-Based Selling Rather than leading with open-ended questions about customer’s needs you lead which hypotheses of customers’ needs, informed by your on experience and research. Ultimately, customers suffering from “solution fatigue love it not only because it makes the entire sale both faster and easier for them, but because it feels much more like a “get” than. “give”. they get your informed perspective rather than having to edu cate you with information you should have been able to figure our on your own.
• Step 2: The Reframe – present a new unique insight that makes the customer say “I’ve never thought of it that way” rather than “I agree!”.
• Step 3: Rational Drowning – share metrics or evidence of the true, often hidden, cost of the problem
• Step 4: Emotional Impact – Emotional Impact isn’t about the numbers; it’s about the narrative. You’ve got to paint a picture of how other companies just like the customer’s went down a similarly painful path by engaging in behavior that the customer will immediately recognize as typical of their own company.
• Step 5: A New Way – once you have convinced the customer there is a problem then you need to act on the problem. This is NOT where you pitch your solution. It’s about convincing the customer how much better their life would be if they acted differently.
• Step 6: Your Solution – present now your address the customer’s problems once you have gone through the entire teaching differentiation pitch. You have to open up their eyes to a new way of thinking first.
  • “What’s currently costing our customers more money than they realize, that only we can help them fix?” The answer to that question is the heart and soul of your Commercial Teaching pitch.

1. Identify your unique benefits.
2. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers thinking.
3. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.”
4. Equip reps to challenge customers.

marketing has the tools, the expertise, and the time to generate the insights necessary to challenge customers both scalably and repeatedly. As the head of marketing at a large telecommunications company put it, marketing must serve as the “insight generation machine” that keeps reps wellequipped with quality teaching materials that customers will find compelling. Sales, on the other hand, will have to ensure that reps have the knowledge, skills, and coaching necessary to go out and use that insight in a convincing manner to actually challenge customers. It’s a symbiotic relationship around a core principle.

Chapter 6 – Tailoring for Resonance:

• Decision makers today (sr executives or procurement) tend to lean on consensus from their director to make decision.
• Wide spread support j’s the #1 reason Sr. Leaders make decisions on a product. They trust their directors to inform them on what product to purchase.
• Sr. Leaders buy from companies, not individuals.  Influences buy from people not companies
• The #1 driving force in garnering widespread support is offering a unique valuable perspective.
• Sales orgs typically over rotate on getting in from of the c suite when they really need to gain acceptance from every part of the business.
• Traditional sales Workflows include the stakeholders informing the rep who sells to the Sr. Leaders. Modern strategies involve the rep arming the stakeholders with the information to nudge the decision maker (Sr. Leader) towards the right decision.
• 
• How does your sales team approach addressing your customers on a variance of different levels?
  • Individual
  • Role
  • Company
  • Industry
• Reps need some industry and company context in the sales pitch. What’s going on in terms of industry trends and current events? Has a big competitor recently folded or has there been a meaningful merger? Is the customer rapidly gaining or losing share? What about regulatory changes? What do the company’s recent press releases and earnings statements suggest about strategic priorities?
• Tailoring message case study
  • Create a battle card for reps that shows outcomes each industry and stakeholder cares about.
  • Speak to customers in their own language on how to achieve better outcomes
  • Include these outcomes in a project proposal and get each stakeholder to capture the agreed upon high level proposals.
  • This information is determined through conversations and then captured using the tool. Though it’s not required Solac’s very best reps actually ask that stakeholder to sign off on the al umn indicating their agreement with the plan.

Chapter  7 – Taking Control of the Sale

• Misconception #1 – taking control Is negotiating.
  • Taking control means you won’t put a lot of work into the sale (big meetings, responding to RFPs, long discovery) unless decision makers are involved.
    • “We’re going to put out best people on this and it will cost us $x. We’re willing to do it but only if we see similar investment from your side.
• Misconception #2 reps take control regarding only matters of money
  • Why is it important to take control around ideas? Because it’s extremely unlikely that a customer, especially a seasoned executive, is going to roll over and accept the reframe that the Challenger delivers without a healthy does of skepticism. More likely, he’ll push back. He’ll ask why. He’ll ask to see the supporting data. He’ll say his company is different.
  • The challenger needs to take
• Anatomy of negotiation:
  • “What are you looking to achieve with a 20% price reduction?”
• Taking control Case Study – DuPont
  • You have to have a plan in order to take control
  • DuPont developed a “Negotiation Analysis & Action Plan” that highlights where you as the vendor have strengths and weaknesses going into the conversation, delta in pricing, info needed from the customer, difficult questions to expect, etc.
  • Our research shows that one of the biggest differentiators of high-performing reps is the amount of time they spend planning–this is a prime example. Like a great chess player, high performers are focused not just on the current move, but on the scenarios that will play out several moves ahead.

Chapter 8: The manager and the Challenger Selling Model

• Attributes contributing to manager excellence fall into 3 categories: selling, coaching and owning.
  • Selling (offering customers a unique perspective) and coaching (guiding reps to tailor their message, how and when to assert control) are both ~27% of managerial effectiveness
  • Owning, which includes resource allocation and sales innovation accounts for 45% of effectiveness.
  • Innovation is the most important part of the sales managers job – This is about creatively connecting the suppliers sing capabilities to each customer’s unique environment and then panting those capabilities to the customer through the specific lens dichaever customer obstacle is keeping that deal from closing.
• Coaching has the smallest impact on the top and bottom performers but the greatest impact on the middle performers. great coaching can rise media. Performers from <100% to quota to >100% to quota.
• Good coaching also helps improve employee retention.
• Innovation is the far and away the manager attribute that matters most. Innovation allows managers to work with reps to find creative ways to get deals done when deals look dead from the start.
  • Most suppliers have minimal information on how how their customers make decisions. This is partially because customers aren’t always sure themselves how the organization makes decisions.
  • The second way innovative managers stand out is by crafting solutions. This might include repositioning the supplier’s capabilities to better connect to the customer’s challenges or shifting risk from the customer to the supplier in exchange for a longer-term contract or access to additional cross-sale opportunities. ie Don’t take no for an answer.
  • Innovative managers also share their findings across the organization. This is how you get those ideas to scale.
• Narrow thinking vs closed thinking – Narrowing chinking is all about looking at a complex problem, weighing existing options, and producing a single solution. The alternative is “opening thinking” which is characterized by the generation and vetting of as many alternative options as possible.
• Managers like all humans possess biases which can hinder opening thinking. The six most common biases are:
  • Practicality bias: Ideas that seem unrealistic should be discarded.
  • Confirmation bias: Unexplainable customer behaviors can be ignored.
  • Exportability bias: If it didn’t work here, it won’t work anywhere.
  • Legacy bias: The way we’ve always done it must be best.
  • First conclusion bias: The first explanation offered is usually the best or only choice.
  • Personal bias: If I wouldn’t buy it, the customer won’t either.
• Counter your bias with good questions:
  • If you were the customers CFO, how would you view this offering?
  • What would we do differently If we had unlimited budget?
  • What outside ideas could be adopted to this project?
  • What else must be going on behind the scenes for this to be true.

Chapter 9: Implementing Lessons from Early Adopters

• Why should your customer buy from you and not anyone else?
• What does your key customer do and struggle with for ten hours every day?
• Avoid using these words in your pitch decks and sales messaging because everybody uses them and they look just like everybody else’s pitch (Leader, Leading, Best, Top, Unique, Great, Solution, Largest, Innovative, Innovator)