I often extol the virtues of being a Challenger, but what if I told you there was a lot to be gained from pursuing the biggest fish in the sea?
I’m not talking about the C-suite necessarily, but the most challenging customers on your roster. These are the customers who are difficult to collar and often have complex paths to approving the sale. What happens when you bring your challenger sales background to a sales situation where you’re being challenged at every turn?
The Challenger Customer is the perfect book to take on these obstacles. Written by the same authors as The Challenger Sale, it’s an indispensable supplement for navigating these situations. This includes the prospects who aren’t interested, play hard to get or offer objections and complications at every turn.
Oftentimes the most difficult projects prove to be the most rewarding. If you find yourself facing a reticent customer, consider it a good thing. After reading this, you’ll see the benefits of seeking them out!
Here is the summary from Amazon:
“Four years ago, the bestselling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge.
“Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need.
“Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be?
“The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is.
“It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers.
“The Challenger Customer unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the ‘Talkers’ from the ‘Mobilizers’ in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.”
