Unleash the power of the challenger sales model for customer support

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so the authors of the challenger's sale have come up with a new book called the Challenger customer and I've had several clients asked me to review this and tell me what tell them what I think well I gave it a chance I honestly did so let's start with the beginning if you haven't read the challenge or sale you can pretty much skip this book I'm sure you've heard of it it's kind of the most popular sales book in the B to B complex sales space and I think what happened here was that they figured out what they missed in the first book and you've gotta start at the beginning it was written by you know four guys who have never sold get on LinkedIn look at their profiles if you've been in sales one day you have more selling experience than these four guys combined given that okay who's sponsoring this their employer CEB corporate executive board sounds like a research firm it's not it's a consulting firm who works for basically you know suffering companies stale old school companies trying to regain market share so not exactly the best salespeople in the world so and what do they do so it's all based off of so-called research yet again they don't publish the research it's not independent research it's not verified research it's not scientific so it's basically Survey Monkey interpretive to sell their consulting and it's very naive clearly they learn from the first book that they did not understand the complex sail they thought all you had to do was go in and bring some insight which they define is something that the client doesn't know how do you know they don't know it before you bring it in it's just so amateurish and intellectual phone enos of people who have never sold trying to guess what selling is like and at least they're trying to understand that the complex sale is not a one sales call deal it's not as one presentation that's a simple sale the complex sale if you're not familiar with it has many people and four you have user buyers economic buyers legal purchasing security standards committees you have all these people and they've figured this out now after five years but what they did is they mislead everybody with the first book thinking all you have to do is bring an insight in you're the best salesperson because our survey says so oh great thanks a lot so basically everyone went out and bought challengers sale book and then the training and it they fell on their face and I told everybody look at my youtube videos on the challenge of sale I called this out five years ago I said it was a great skill going in and debating clients who want to be debated is a good skill but there's a inverse correlation here and that what causes great sales is people who have experience and skill to be able to debate their client that they get over years of experience not that they can simply debate solely that they understand when it fits and when it applies and a lot of cases it doesn't and it's disastrous so basically what this book is is an apology for the first book saying it hey we missed 80% of the problem or probably 90% of the problem and here's the real solution and of course the real solution is you got to find a better smarter customer which means I don't know how to sell but if you find a better smarter customer it'll be easier to sell which is a real cop-out so of course it's not based off a real-world experience people who have actually done it people who have been in the trenches people who have really tried and figured it out know it's based off of surveys and of course they don't publish the survey so how are we really to believe it are they misinterpreting the surveys and let's face it what sales person fills out a survey every great sales person I've ever met would rather go to the dentist than fill out a survey so if they did fill out the survey would be you know under the pressure of waterboarding and what the information that they give would be I would say in question at best so what came out of this Eureka they find out exactly five point four people are involved in a complex sale again the complex sale is high dollar amount disruptive change to the organization many people involved meaning if you're selling door-to-door and there's one person home that's a simple sale you're selling door-to-door there's two people home it's more complex you sell to a business it's even more complex and I agree with them that today selling has become much more complex because you've got bigger companies got more options you've got people who are not career and when I say career I mean lifetime oriented at the company they're there for a couple of years they move on so that they're typically not you know the twenty thirty year people anymore so I don't know what a point four person looks like but just imagine these five people are involved in your deal you know some people like you some people want to change some people don't care we've all seen this anybody who has sold business to business has seen this where you have people who will talk to you and be very friendly but have no power and this is not a new thing this has been talked about since the beginning of time since there has been a complex sale and many people have written about this in a much clearer more direct way and that is much more useful and I'll get to those books at the end books that I've used for thirty years that have been much clearer so now there's five point four people well in your cell how many people really get involved there's typically a person who is interested and what we've usually called them as the champion they didn't call different things by different methodologies the Fox I remember that was very popular find the Fox the person who knows how to figure things out within the company kind of a grey haired person who's been around for a while who's really runs the organization but has the informal power the formal power it's not based off of title or experience but of capade capacity the ability to persuade other people your internal salesperson and anybody who's sold b2b knows this person and knows that yes when you have this person the deal is much easier and if you have a false Fock somebody who pretends that they know what they're doing will talk to you will take up all your time but really has no formal power or informal power it's a waste of time this is news to the authors okay this is a Eureka moment to them but anybody's been in complex sale for more than a couple years we know this by heart so what do they do they come up with these profiles again which are you know I think they're actually more helpful on the customer side than they are on the sales side because you you do get these kinds of people and all kinds of companies but nobody fits into any one of these exactly nor do you find that that champion and they try and poopoo the champion because they can't use that word otherwise the book has nothing original in it but we've we've used the word champion before and and everyone has a different word for it you know I've called it the maverick within the the account the person who is going to help you make change because this is not natural a complex sale is not a natural thing to happen this is not somebody ordering the next thousand pounds of concrete this is the person who's making a change and how the company does business and to do that the old-school way and what they were originally teaching was going in talking to the decision maker which they figured out there is no single decision maker it depends on what decision you're trying to make so you would go in and talk to that person who doesn't exist you would challenge them within sight commercial insight now not just inside commercial insight okay let's pretend that existed and you know what it was and you they didn't know what it was and pretend that you bought you bought into their horseshit you go in and you talk to them and now they're admitting you go on the LinkedIn YouTube channel and you can watch the author present this and it basically falls on his sword for fifteen minutes about the failings of his first book because he's never sold you know he pulled this shit out of his ass and now he thinks he's a sales rep and now he can teach everybody how to sell without any single experience so you would go in and talk to this high level person and you get him excited and let's say it worked and what would they say and he admits this he goes I gotta go talk to my people well guess what the people are like well I don't know about this how's this gonna affect me and this is and they clearly don't understand this and the second book that they think that everybody in the company except for the go-getter the climber here is out for themselves everyone else is completely out to the company and we've always seen that you know you see your co-workers are all out for the company right they're not out for themselves yeah they all pretend to be out for the company and not out for themselves so what they do here is identify and label the people within the company a blocker yeah you want to sell to them the teacher I'm not really sure I've ever met a teacher you find the go-getters skeptics you find a lot of them you find the friend somebody who will talk to you and entry-level sales people love the friend where they'll meet with you they'll talk with you they love going to lunch and dinner and coffee with you and because they're lonely not because they're gonna buy anything and the guy who knows the organization will give up information the climber this is the person out for themselves so these are somewhat useful they are and you'll meet these type of people within the account and what you really you do want to find and I agree with this the champion but they call it called immobilizer or they what they call the Challenger customer you know it's this is like oh we got it all wrong you don't want to be the challengers salesperson you want to find the Challenger customer because selling is so hard it's much easier to find a simpler smarter customer somebody and I can't tell you how many managers I've had can't you find a smarter customer somebody who's dying to buy tons of our product well yes yes I'd like to find that but those people tend to find you you don't tend to find them and this is kind of what I really don't like about the book and this whole approach of trying to base bullshit or backup bullshit with bullshit research that's unvalidated unscientific which is basically marketing you know do you even know if they did it and what form that they do you know one author says a hundred and thirty two questions who would fill that out I think this is ridiculous so they break down the customer into these mobilizers and stalkers now it's goes from the seven or six profiles to two two major ones mobilizers and stalkers of course stalkers are waste of time and mobilizers are the ones that you want to work with well I think we know this you know because you have like foxes and real foxes people who can get things done and people who can't what a lot of managers call juice there's a person have the balls to get this deal done now this this is good but the premise of the book is all wrong they're sending you in the wrong direction they're telling you that don't go talk to all the players in the company and assume this immobilizer knows how to get something done within the company do they hump deals die because the sales rep doesn't know how to get something done to the company and the customer doesn't know how to get anything done the customer okay so if in my experience it's a lot like two virgins trying to have sex for the first where the mobilizer wants to get the deal done well I'll say you suck as a salesperson they want to get the deal done they want the benefit the outcome of your product and they think they know how to do it does they go talk to their boss that go talk to procurement legal standards IT everybody who's involved and the premise of the book is they think that everyone gets together in a room and votes on the deal and this is stupid and wrong and you should never do that in my book I talk a lot about divided and concur well you never want to get of group together and ask a question because what do you get you get lowest common denominator which I agree with and avoid risk by as little as possible or delay and that's why because it's safe nobody wants to stick their neck out because they're out for themselves they're not out for the company now if you don't understand how to get a deal done and the mobilizer doesn't understand how to get the deal done the deal doesn't get done it doesn't matter how great the mobilizer is how much firepower they have in the account if they don't understand how to get funding allocated which you have to understand if they don't understand the legal issues if they don't understand the procurement requirements if you have to understand this and this takes time and experience you're not gonna learn it from a survey or reading a book written by a guy who's never sold you're not gonna read it there you can have to learn from people who have sold people have done deals before people who understand the questions to ask and ask them to the people who understand the answers to them it's not going to be an academic exercise you have to learn from people who have actually done it so this strategy is basically fine the smarter more motivated customer who didn't know that you don't need a book to do this and then this is their strategy and basically it is like one step the on their first book they thought they finally figured out going in and challenging somebody is not enough you build interest what do they do with that interest that interest typically dies because they don't know what to do with that interest so here they they say oh what you got to do is keep finding the right person and then giving them insight more insight and it's kind of crazy that you're there they're trying to take what's in your head and put it into their head and that that's good but what happens is you end up playing telephone basically they have to take what's now in their head and put it into someone else's head as opposed to you guiding them through the process of what exactly is going to happen okay who are you who has to get the funding they don't understand that the complex sale is broken into two major pieces there's the technical side the side that determines does your product fit does your product add value does how does it fit compared to everything else what is their management management couldn't recall wire as far as technical due diligence to verify that your product is the right fit then the business side how do you get it financially justified the money allocated the money moved into the right bin the right documents in place the right legal requirements in place the standards approved the purchasing process identified and starred us and understand that everything has been vetted and the due diligence has been done this is why the complex deals die and everyone's scared to death of it because they don't know they view it as a black box and just black magic more because they haven't done it and so few people are good at it that that so few people try to do it in some ways it is like medicine we're here the people are trying to do bloodletting simply because they think by letting the blood that they're curing something they're caring the patient this book doesn't really give you the insight how companies really buy it's just one step forward is finding the smarter customer what they call the mobilizer and we've already known this for 30-40 years already so there's nothing new then they come up with the idea of get marketing involved that's what every sales rep knows how great it is when you get marketing involved in a deal have more content that brings more insights well if those insights don't imply to their business and you have to figure that out you think marketing is gonna figure it out you think this guy's gonna figure out what they need yeah yeah put put your money on this guy he's really gonna figure it out he cares about the broad that the global space he doesn't care about your deal now that these problems have been solved much better by much smarter people with much better experience this book was originally written I think in the late 80s power-based selling they talked about the Fox and they do a much better job of understanding how to win a complex deal based off of the person with informal power within the company and it doesn't bog you down with having to deal with their methodology they understand that this getting to the right person is critical finding the right person and what I've done is I've written a book an e-book on this and I've sold for 25 years and my method is that you either find this person you can read this person you create this person out of somebody who could become this person or you become this person and that is possible they're all possible the easiest of course is to find them the next hardest is to create them and it is very hard for you to do it unless you have great selling skills and understanding of how companies buy because the motto is you may know how to sell but they don't know how to buy nobody has a class on how to change the organization the organization is the way it is and it's it's very sensitive it doesn't like change it doesn't like spending money it doesn't like people becoming successful within it it is the way it is it likes to be the machine that it is no matter how broken and corrupt it is it doesn't like to change it requires a unique skill and understanding and it's a lot more than bringing a new idea in you have to understand the complex sail you have to understand the different components of it you have to understand how to guide the people through it and you cannot rely on a single person no matter how great they are and you can't rely on you know boneheads research that's been unvetted unvalidated unscientific and then cobbled together and put into a book and then you know passed out and and as gospel by people who have never really done it so if you want to learn more about the complex sail check out my podcast the brutal truth about sails and selling it's on iTunes and stitcher radio where I talk about what really works today in the complex sail not horse shit the truth my experience and the experience of others that I have on the podcast thanks for listening if this fits what you'd like please put a like in a comment thank you