Here Is Why You Should Read The Challenger Sale If You Are Building A B2B Startup.
As a Business school student, I was recently looking for an internship in the B2B SaaS industry. While going through interviews, I shared with the team some of the business books I read so far (Shoe dog, Never eat alone, Steve Jobs’ biography…). One of the Sales asked me if I read The Challenger Sale. He said that every member of the team must read it before starting making calls.
So I decided to go and buy it. Three days later, the book was read and my life had changed.
So, what this is about?
Well, the author describes five types of sales person : The Hard Worker, The Challenger, The Relationship Builder, The Lone Wolf, The Reactive Problem Solver. Now, what most people think is that the relationship builder would generally be the best salesperson. In fact, it is the Challenger and here is why :
“The Challenger rep is the rep who loves to debate. The one who uses his or hers deep understanding of a customer’s business not simply to serve them, but to teach them: to push their thinking and provide them with new and different ways to think about their business and how to compete”.
How does it materialize in a Sales presentation?
To understand what a Challenger does to close deals better than the others, the book reviews the six steps of a world-class teaching pitch:
Step 1: The Warmer
The first step is all about making your potential customer feel comfortable. Now how you do that ? You need to know your customer’s business perfectly. It sounds like an evidence but in a world of endless products and services you need to do your research.
Let’s say that you’re a salesperson at a CRM provider. You want to sell your solution to an HR Tech Scale-Up. Your introduction should look like this :
“Hi Henry, it’s Simon from X, how are you ? Last year, our CEO decided to use your HR solution and it really changed my life. I’m finally being paid on time! Is your business doing great through the pandemic ?”
You should make the conversation going until you get a few smiles. Until, you start discovering your customer’s pains. Here, the answer could be :
“Yeah, we actually been growing a lot. We doubled our Workforce in just 10 months and our traditional ERP can’t follow our growth”.
Step 2: The Reframe
Now that you have all the knowledge you need and that you understand your potential customer’s pains, you need to reframe it. The author describes it as :
“The Reframe is simply about the insight itself. It’s just the headline. And like any good headline, your goal is to catch your customer off guard with an unexpected viewpoint — to surprise them, make them curiousn and get them wanting to hear more”. It one our case scenario it could be something like :
“You know, we worked with this company (name it) and this one. The year following the shift to our CRM, they increased their Sales performance by 50%”.
Step 3: Rational drowning
Now, you showed your customer that you knew well his business and that you were already providing to some of his competitors/business friends. Now this is your time to show your numbers.
“So now it’s time for the data, graphs, tables, and charts you need to quantify for the customer the true, often hidden, cost of the problem or size of the opportunity they’d completely overlooked”.
“By not having the best CRM you loose customers, customer’s experience, less long time value, higher churn… (adding numbers)”.
Step 4: emotional impact
Following the process the book suggests that you should take your potential customer by the emotion. I’m not a huge fan of this step, if done badly it can seriously damage your pitch. Your customer will think that you are mocking him.
“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 a behavior that the customer will immediately recognize as typical of their own company”.
“Before X started working with us, he used an old ERP. He and his team managed to signed a huge client. However, the old ERP was not giving a way for the team to deliver a great customer experience. 3 months later, they lost this client, costing the company thousands”.
You need to be careful here. If the story is not true, your pitch will sound odd. And you will loose your customer’s attention. Be prepared and go for this step only if you know what you are doing.
Step 5: A New Way
As you can see, the Challenger still hasn’t talk exactly about what his solution does. He talked about his customer’s business, about how he could save money and told an emotional story. Is this the right time to develop your solution ? No.
“This is a point-by-point review of the speficic capabilites they would need to have in order to make good on whatever opportunity to make money, save money, or mitigate risk that you’ve just convinced them they’re facing”.
At this step, It is still about THE solution, not YOUR solution. You need to show your customer that he should act differently.
“With a great CRM here is what you could do : customer information, account planning, time management, team collaboration…”
Step 6: Your solution
There you go! You followed religiously all the steps previously described without being a robot. You engaged a great conversation, you’re now ready to sell :)
“This is where you lay out the specific ways you can deliver the solution they’ve just agreed to in step 5 better than anyone else”.
“At X, we are actually well suited to address all of these concerns…”
Thank you for reading! Have you read it too? What do you think?
