The key to effective teaching is to identify the supplier’s unique value proposition.Customers place the greatest value on actionable insights given by suppliers that help them save or make money differently. A massive 53% depended on the overall sales experience. Better value for money accounted for a mere 9%. A CEB survey of 5000 individuals at client customer organizations showed that brand, product, and service accounted for only 38% of customer loyalty.Challengers are defined by their ability to use constructive tension to do three things - teach customers to compete more effectively, tailor for resonance for every stakeholder, and taking control of the overall sale process.This makes Challengers crucial to the success of a sales force. In complex sale scenarios, the dominance of Challengers is 50% of star performers while the share of Relationship Builders drops to nearly zero. Rep fall into five distinctive profiles - the Hard Worker, the Relationship Builder, the Lone Wolf, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Challenger.The value in narrowing the performance gap halfway from good to great results in a 100% performance jump. In solutions selling, the gap widens dramatically to nearly 200%. In transactional-selling, the performance gap between average and star performers is 59%.

Top performers are incredibly valuable in Solutions Selling.

This has made selling much more challenging than before.

Solution Selling has led to increased complexity and risk for the customers who increasingly seek consensus-based sales, demand customization, hire third-party consultants and shift a part of the risk to the supplier.

This model was driven by suppliers seeking to escape the pressure of being commodified by making it harder for competitors to replicate their offerings.

Solution Selling is the shift from transactional sales of single products to creating bundled-offerings based on consulting.

Synopsis of the challenger sale