Challenger Selling and Whiteboarding - a perfect combination of tools

Posted by Mark Gibson on December 12, 2011

0 comments | 1128 reads

I've just finished reading and can recommend a new book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Addington entitled "The Challenger Sale” and I enjoyed the quality of the writing and the research underpinning the work.

The challenger sales type has been identified as the most effective in complex B2B selling and was the only sales cohort from the extensive research conducted by the Sales Executive Council to achieve success during the downturn. Figuring out what Challengers are doing differently, cloning that behavior and recruiting and training more challenger types is a priority recommendation in this book.

The 5 Sales Profiles

The Challenger
Lone Wolf
Hard Worker
Reactive Problem Solver
Relationship Builder

The Challenger Sale is an essential read for sales managers and sales professionals looking to improve sales performance.

A Widening Talent Gap

In transactional selling, the star performers outperform the core by 59%. In complex B2B selling environments, the research indicates that the star performers outperformed the core performers by almost 200%.

Challenger Attributes

What is it that Challengers do differently that sets them apart from other sales people? 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

Disrupt Status Quo with an Informed Opinion

The book talks about teaching the buyer about a problem they did not know they had as a winning attribute of the Challenger. The idea of the salesperson disrupting the status quo with an informed opinion or reframe about how the buyer could improve an aspect of their business is not new.

What is new is the research and analysis of how effective the Challenger sales type is vs. the other sales profiles and the core performers in the organization.

Challenger Selling Whiteboard Conversations

We have adapted our Whiteboardselling methodology over the past year to integrate the Killer Products method of early buyer engagement and the initiation of the value captured or value created buying process, by :

leading with an informed opinion backed by in depth research;
educating the buyer on new opportunities central to their success,
bringing internal and external issues into focus that the buyer may not have been aware of and.
making the buyer aware of the risks in the journey.

We ran a Whiteboardselling training session last week for a major system integration company and the whiteboard story we created used subtle positioning against a balanced field of competitors and made insightful and clear distinctions between the value captured in our approach and risks associated with alternate approaches and offered a road-map to begin the journey.

Whiteboard Storytelling a key tool for enabling the challenger sale.

I’ve been working on messaging as a core element of sales performance improvement for the past 7 years and as an affiliate with Whiteboardselling for a year now and have completed more than 60 messaging engagements that involved Whiteboard storytelling and our prior Messaging Architecture and Buyer Relevant Messaging Template approach.

The Whiteboard storytelling method is the ideal mechanism to capture the Challenger Sale positioning and value creation story into a visual story that salespeople will quickly internalize and that customers will engage in, can easily understand and that they will remember.

It was a surprising omission from the book - the lack of reference to whiteboarding; there was a reference to the need for marketing to help develop the message and then to sales management and training to help engage the training methodology to adopt the technique internally....but not a whisper about a Whiteboard story.

Capturing your Challenger story in a whiteboard and varying it slightly for your audience is a core best practice of Whiteboardselling. Proof points will change, value emphasis will change based on the buyer, but the core ideas and value creation message will remain constant.

Capturing the image of your discussion in a visual confection on one page, highlighting their issues in red, your solution in green and agreed next steps in blue is a best practice after a successful whiteboard session. The next best practice step is embedding it in a meeting summary letter to follow up the sales call. This is one of the single most powerful tools in getting your ideas shared at the executive level and vital for surviving the internal funding battle in the positioning phase of the buying process.

Links to Resources.

Challenger Sale book

Recent blogs

http://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/78707/Are-Your-Salespeople-Chall...

http://saleschallenger.exbdblogs.com/2011/08/30/5-lessons-on-developing-...

Republished with author's permission from original post by Mark Gibson.

Mark Gibson

Mark Gibson has been at the forefront of developing sales and marketing tools that create clarity in messaging value for 30 years. As a consultant he is now engaged in helping sales, marketing and enablement teams to get clear about value creation. Clarity attracts inbound leads, clarity converts visitors into leads and leads into customers, clarity builds mindshare, clarity engages customers, clarity differentiates value, clarity helps onboard new hires clarity helps raise funds, clarity + execution win markets.

About Mark Gibson |
Connect:

Categories:

Sales Performance

1128 reads
Print
Email

0 comments »

Post new comment

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

Input format

Filtered HTML

Allowed HTML tags: <a> <img> <hr> <table> <tr> <td> <th><ul> <ol> <li> </li><blockquote> <colspan> <rowspan><object>
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

Post

Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

More information about formatting options

Notify me when new comments are posted

All comments

Replies to my comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image?: *

Enter the characters shown in the image.

MarketPlace

Global Customer Experience Management (CEM) Certification Program

[May 30-31, Frankfurt; July 25-26, Hong Kong] An internationally recognized program with proven track record of success - being run for 34 times in 13 cities with attendees from 50 countries, the program is developed based on the U.S. patent-pending Branded CEM Method which aims to drive customer loyalty and brand differentiation with quantifiable business results. Limited offer: USD300 early bird discount.

Join us on May 29th in New York City. Stuart Ryder, SVP, Mobile Research Lead for Ipsos IOTX & Roxana Strohmenger, a leading Forrester analyst, will be in attendance to share best practices and new trends in mobile market research.

[June 12, Sir Francis Drake Hotel] Gregson Siu, Vice President, Ariba Business Operations, Ariba and Bob Thompson, CustomerThink, will be in attendance to share best practices, new trends and latest research to help you develop your customer experience program.

Social Networking and sCRM International Congress in Colombia

[June 25-26, Bogota] Thirteen international thought leaders will present, from different perspectives, the trends, the uses, and the magic - as well as the reality - of Social Networking and how it impacts the way customers are doing/will do business.

Driving ROI With VoC

Walker has identified multiple ways to measure ROI – there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This paper will address each and conclude with some recommendations to help B-to-B practitioners evaluate which ROI approach will work best for their particular business need.