The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The profile most likely to win isn’t winning because of the down economy, but irrespective of it. These reps are winning because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy.”

This passage establishes the Challenger’s disruptive capacity to succeed in spite of the sales issues that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Although Dixon and Adamson will later elaborate on the relationship between Challenger success and the complex solution selling model, they observe that sales success does not necessarily depend on the state of the economy.

“As suppliers seek to sell ever bigger, more complex, disruptive, and expensive ‘solutions,’ B2B customers are naturally buying with greater care and reluctance than ever before, dramatically rewriting the purchasing playbook in the process. As a result, traditional, time-tested sales techniques no longer work the way they used to.”

Here, Dixon and Adamson discuss the dilemma around the solution selling model, which involves its increasing complexity. When the authors declare traditional sales techniques obsolete, they invoke The Evolving Nature of Business and Its Methods as one of the book’s central themes.

“As a result, in the world of complex solutions, supplier success is often measured by the performance of the customer’s business, not the supplier’s products.”

Dixon and Adamson cite increased risk aversion as one of the issues that arises from solution selling, noting that customers are more eager than ever to see a return on their investment. Since suppliers offer “solutions” to their customers’ business issues, Dixon and Adamson comment upon the irony that suppliers are no longer evaluated by their ability to deliver a product or service.