Library Required reading How the best reps sell
Your Best Reps Sell Differently, Not Harder
Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson studied more than 6,000 sales reps and sorted them into five types. Every type showed up among the average reps, and one type dominated the stars.
Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson · The Challenger Sale · 2011
What it is
The Challenger Sale comes out of a study Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson and their colleagues ran at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) through its Sales Executive Council. Portfolio published it in November 2011.
It starts with a simple question. Every team has a few stars, so what are they doing that everyone else isn’t? To find out, the council studied more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies and sorted them into five profiles, the Relationship Builder, the Hard Worker, the Lone Wolf, the Reactive Problem Solver and the Challenger.
What you’ll take from it
The finding to take with you is how those five types split. Among average reps, all five profiles showed up in about equal numbers. Among the stars, one profile took over.
“But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star.” Dixon & Adamson, “Selling Is Not About Relationships,” Harvard Business Review, September 30, 2011
Challengers made up close to 40% of the star reps in the study, and 54% of the stars in complex, solution-selling environments. Relationship Builders, the profile most sales organizations have bet on hiring and training, came in last, at 7% of high performers overall and 4% in complex sales. The Hard Worker, who out-dials just about everyone on the team, is one of the five ways to be average.
What Challengers do differently comes down to three things. They teach the customer something new about how to make or save money, they tailor that message to each person in the account, and they take control of the sale, including on price.
Where it shows up in your numbers
Five ways to be average and one way to be a star is the same shape as your customer book. Your reps’ output is heavy-tailed. A few reps carry the number, and they get there by selling differently, not by doing more of what the average rep does.
So look at what your scorecard rewards. Calls, visits and meetings booked are the Hard Worker’s numbers, and they rank your team by volume. Even the study picked its stars on quota attainment (the top 20%, per the authors’ 2012 HBR article), and quota measures bookings against a target, not which accounts the bookings came from. When you run this on your own team, rank reps by the value of what they close, by tier, and find out who’s winning your A and B accounts. Then route the biggest, most complex accounts to those reps instead of round-robin, and pay on the value of what closes, not the number of deals or activities.
Next on the shelf Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling