Empower Your Life Sciences Business with the Challenger Sales Model for Life Sciences

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in 2011 matt dixon co-authored a book called the challenger sale most people know that that sent a seismic shock wave throughout the industry of sales which came up with some really interesting research and some fascinating learnings that sales people are using day to day across their processes and methodologies i was really fortunate to sit down with matt for 45 minutes and have a candid conversation around the history of the challenger cell where he feels that sales is going and also the reception of the book how salespeople reacted to this new finding and this new way of selling before we dive in remember to subscribe remember to like and share across your networks so let's dive in thank you for joining me i really appreciate it and as i mentioned before like i'm really excited about uh interviewing you and learning more about the challenger cell but more specifically about where it came from the reaction to it and obviously where it's going the obvious question to start with which i think is probably one that a lot of people be excited to learn about is talk to us about the history of the challenger cell because from my understanding that there's stuff in there that people have probably been doing for a long time but you managed to codify it and explain it and almost sort of put your finger on it so be good to understand where did it all come from and and and a bit bit of the history basically yeah of course um well it's great to be with you aaron and thanks for inviting me um so the i'll take you back to um uh it was 2008 i think when we uh really start digging into this uh research so i guess i was technically speaking the last time the world fell apart um until the until the most recent time the world fell apart but um you know for for those of us who are selling in that environment um i think we can all remember how difficult it was you know in the height of the financial crisis and we i was at the time um uh leading a research team at a company called ceb where cbs was acquired by gardner group in 2017 but um one of the the practice areas i ran was in business to business sales and so in this environment so our business model was we went out and uh we um provided subscription-based research to our clients at the time we worked with about 700 heads of sales around the world from you know mid-market um smaller enterprises all the way up to large enterprises globally um including many uh many companies in europe and at the time you can imagine that the the number one issue that heads of sales uh were really struggling with was survival you know they were looking at uh candidly a bloodbath across our organization uh their sales people missing uh missing their quotas missing their goals by a very wide margin and you know as we start to dig into so they were they were looking to us as a research team to help them with some data some insight that might provide some sort of path or window into how we get out of this as a sales community as we dug into it what we found was there was um this sort of uh paradox in almost every sales organization we we encountered the paradox was this that you know yes by and large the vast majority of sellers were missing their number by a very wide margin in that environment but there were a set of sellers in every single company we look we looked at as we started kind of poking around who are continuing to bring in um not just hit their numbers but exceed their numbers and bring in deals that those companies would have been excited to get in the best of times but they were doing it in the in the worst sales environment that any of them had ever encountered and so there's this question about what is it that they're doing that's different how are they still managing to find success in this really terrible economy and is there something we can learn from that and then export to the rest of the um the sales organization so you know it really started as a study of basically selling in a tough environment what it evolved into over time was um a and i think what we what we uncovered was a way to sell to information empowered customers really in some ways the the great recession i'd argue the current environment too it's a bit of a head so challenger wasn't a story about just succeeding in a tough sales environment in an economic downturn it was a story about how do you sell to customers who don't really need you anymore who can find out everything about you uh your company your products your solutions on your website or on linkedin right and they don't get the same value from sales interactions that they once did so it kind of what again was designed to be a study that was sort of a point in time thing let's help our clients get through this really tough environment took on a life of its own and ended up spinning off you know a sequel book in multiple years of research because as we you know found answers as we start to dig into the the way that customer buying has really changed uh what we found was and you put it really well that leading sales people much like the sort of lead steers in a herd of cattle they started pointing in a different direction they were not told to do that they were not told to sell differently they weren't taught or coached or trained to do this they figured it out on their own they figured out that the customer buying environment had changed in such a way that they needed to change the way they sold it ingly and uh and so in many respects they were charting the future of what great selling uh would become and we just as you said we found it with data we just gave a name to it they made it out of called what they were doing challenging or challenger selling but that was the name we gave to it but make no mistake we didn't invent it it was something invented by top sales people who had already figured this out on their own i mean it's now perceived to be pretty revolutionary right um and i think that there's probably a couple of parts of this question number one is one of the reasons that it was so talked about is because it almost flouted the fact that it was different to everything else right so you had solution selling you had a few other different methodologies that are around right i don't know whether you were deliberately being a bit of a polemicist and saying like you know um this is this is completely different and i guess the question is when did you when you found out that you're onto something when you found out actually you know what this is this is unique and no one's talking about this at what point did you realize just how different it was but also how impactful it was on the world of sales yeah it's uh no it's a great question um i think that i think there were a few things that we were um in in some respects i think it's probably a story of better to be lucky than good and i think we you know we stumbled into some of this candidly um the the time was right um there was the occasion as i talked about before that that drew us to study um sales behaviors and what sales people were doing we might not have we are actually heading down a different path right before lehman brothers collapsed and the the financial crisis really started to take hold and so we we ditched the study we're planning on writing and we ended up writing this study the challenger study and um it really was uh that that was the sort of lucky part if you will i think the world though was ready for um something different and the reason i say that is you know the world that the world of sales had long since moved beyond you know neil rackham professor ackerman the forward to the book talks about the different eras of selling uh he talks about the evolution you know sales the evolution of the hunter farmer model and then product selling in the idea that um selling is a teachable skill and then uh you know eventually to his work in the those of all the the titans of solution selling and needs diagnosis which really um was the the if you will the the pinnacle of great selling for many many years you know at least until the 1970s um professor rackham and many others wrote did their research and wrote a ton of great books and this is what was practiced for a really long time and then i think what he saw happening was interesting in our conversations with him he was kind of waiting for somebody to write the next book the next chapter in selling now i think he would probably call it and i would agree with him more of an evolution than a revolution per se it is building on what great sales people have done that have gotten them to this point but it's in recognition the fact that buying has changed in some pretty fundamental ways you know the the amount of information available to customers today is like nothing we've ever seen the i could say the most there's a data point i always share when i present um challenger to an audience that's actually not in the book and we found it later after the book was published where we found this is one of those data points that's been talked about and debated quite a bit but we found that the average business customer is almost 60 percent of the way through the purchase journey before they ever pick up the phone and call a salesperson you know we didn't we didn't have the the benefit of doing this research back in the 70s or 80s but my suspicion is pre-internet era and before all this information was available before procurement really became a sophisticated function before linkedin existed and you could get reviews on suppliers and vendors from people like yourself in companies like yours before that there was no other way to learn about your solutions your products your services without sitting down and talking to a salesperson and so a professor rackham would call that the golden age of the talking brochure sales person you know and but the internet killed all that and and but what was interesting is that sales hadn't really changed we were still teaching sales people that the the way to sell is to go out and uh focus on needs diagnosis to to ask the customer what's keeping you up at night and then hope that the customer articulates something that you can attach your value proposition to what we found is that best sales people realize in a world where customers can learn on their own they don't want a sales person to come in and ask them what's keeping them up at night they want a sales person who will come in and show them what should be keeping them up at night in other words what's the insight that they have a better way to make money or save money or or avoid risk or steal market share or engage your customers or your employees in new and different ways that despite all of the research you've done despite all of the due diligence despite all of your experience as a buyer as a as a an executive as a manager you missed and that's the thing that is still um that's the new currency of value and i think you know what was interesting to us as we as we unpacked this and you know we didn't know it was because going to become uh as impactful as it ends up it ended up being and to really change the dialogue and i think your your question is a good one we've um you know there were other elements i think of challenger the fact that it was different i think the fact that it was databased was actually very different professor rackham's probably the last book um a great study quantitative in his case qualitative study where he actually participated in thousands of sales calls and did sort of an ethnographic but but rigorous qualitative study of what best sales people were doing in those sales calls you know and in the intervening years 30 years there hadn't really been a great quantitative study of sales performance and it's a shame i mean i think the there's so much quantitative research done in areas like marketing uh finance of course supply chain product and uh there's so much data available in sales yet there's so much personal opinion it tends to really permeate the world of sales and so i think the fact that we came out we we were not we didn't profess to be sales experts ourselves uh brent adamson and i and nobody on my sales team had ever been a sales person um i as i always tell sales people i have a great amount of respect for what they do it's much easier to write about it than it is to do it so um but i am a researcher by trade um i think we we came out we said we brought data to bear we took a different approach to study sales and what we found was that sales has changed and it's changed because customer buying has changed and a lot of what you're telling your sales people to go out and do may have worked you know 10 20 30 years ago but it doesn't work anymore and you need to adapt the way you're doing so we started to call that insight selling so if we went from the era of product selling to solution selling we think we're in this new era of inside selling uh today that's interesting and i'm keen to talk to you about the future of selling because yeah first of all you've got a lot of experience on on this from data points but also we're in a fascinating time at the moment but there was a question that jumped out to me and i think the reason it jumped out is because of my personal experience is that i'm a sales trainer right so one of the things that i do is i transact knowledge and i transact ideas and i transact methods onto people yeah but then there's a reliance on them to actually execute on that the right way or at least keep trying to execute on the right way until they perfect it so i guess what what were the detractors saying about this what the people who weren't getting it right what were they saying uh it was uh it's it's a bit like um i in i don't know if you've got this in the uk but in the in the u.s i've released there's uh the baskin robbins ice cream um store which is prides itself on having 31 flavors of ice cream it was sort of like 31 flavors of objection and i won't go through all of them but i sort of let me summarize into a few different categories so i think the first one was um you know we got quite a bit of flack actually uh because about about the fact that we weren't sales people we weren't sales leaders we never carried a bag we never actually done the job um and that we were researchers and so there was some criticism from that perspective there was criticism around the fact that you know it's as i said you know this was an evolution not a revolution i think you know we've we tried to do what we in our own book and in our own communications what we talk about in the research which is to get somebody to the future state you've got to so we always talk about the a to b you're always engaging the customer in their status quo and you've got to get them to the to the b state to the future state the problem is if the b state sounds pretty similar to the a state then it begs the question why change you know is it worth the energy is it worth the time and what we found great challengers do in sales conversations is they really break down the a before they build up the b they're able to show the customer why the pain of same the pain of the status quo is actually greater than the pain of change so you it's not just that you need to change you need to do it have done it yesterday you know this is time is of the essence you've got to move um don't fall victim to the status quo because that is much worse than going down this change journey and um you know we tried to do that in the book i remember sitting down with a an executive who was um he liked the research uh thought it painted a path for his team um uh to sell differently and to be more successful on the in the market but hated the term challenger and that i just don't like the message it sends and that i would tell you that's another source of criticism is that you know challenger taking control the sales conversation can come across as a bit rude and aggressive and obnoxious i always as you know there are five profiles that we found in the research um and i i always jokingly say that's the sixth profile the jerk we're not talking about that person we're you know challengers are quite empathetic they're quite professional they're they sell within the cultural context whether i'm selling in another country or to a company with a unique cultural context that's really important um and they're great at building relationships they just build it in a different way um but we we realized it so this this executive i remember sitting down with him and he said i love the research i just hate this word challenger why did you guys have to be so provocative why didn't you just call it the new relationship builder because if you get down to it that's really what you guys are talking about you're talking about how the currency of the relationship has changed it's not that we're not being great relationship builders we are but we're building a new kind of relationship found on business value and what i said was well if we called the book the new relationship builder you never would have opened it and he laughed and he said you know what you're right and i said that's all about breaking down the a and building up the b so we had to create that um that uh i would call it what's the word i'm looking for um sort of uh cognitive disconnect maybe or cognitive dissonance between the current state and the future state and i think that's true for sales people too if the sales if you go in and sell a solution the customer sees it as just slightly better than what they already do or what they've already got in their in their operation they're going to ask the question why change and if people had seen relationship builder 2.0 or the new relationship builder i don't think it would have had the impact just even if all the data was exactly the same i think it was creating that that disconnect or that that chasm between the challenger and the relationship builder the fact that one did so well and one did so poorly and the one who did so poorly in fact was really the embodiment of the way that sales people have been taught to sell for many many years the the relationship builder was the needs diagnosis solution seller and they finished so far behind but i think it was that that dissonance that got people to pay attention the fact that it was database the fact that it was written by a couple guys who are not sales experts um you know i think in the fact that the time was right i think all those things fed into it but you know there was quite a bit of flack and there's no shortage but i'll tell you this in many respects you know the old um uh i'm a fan of uh escher's work and there's that famous drawing where it's one hand drawing the other yeah and so it's funny because um i'll present challenger oftentimes to audiences and um and they come up and they they ask questions about how do i train my salespeople to be challengers how do i hire challenger sales people how do we build challenge or insight based messages they're asking all these questions about how to do it and then they ask well how do you really know it works and i said it works because it just worked on you that we we pitched the story i created that disconnect i challenge the way you think about selling and now you're asking me how you can head down that path right and that wasn't that wasn't done for fun it was in retrospect it was like huh that's an interesting you know interesting the way it panned out but we tried to do that in our writing was really to create that that challenger feel to it which rubs some people the wrong way but but it also um it also got us in it opened a lot of doors and many of those people just wanted to tell us we're full of it but everyone wanted to have a conversation about it so i love that and there's a couple of reasons i love that is because i think you know it win sales an objection that someone gives you is often a reflection of themselves right and it's really interesting the people who turn around and go yeah but you can't really do that with a client because it tells you more about themselves than it does about their ability to sell yeah and one thing i i've always stood by even before your book was written is that challenging a customer in a way that gets them to see things differently is really positive and as a buyer i love that as well is that is is teaching me something in the process right but at the same time it's challenging my own perceptions of things doing that in the right way with the right delivery is really really powerful but more importantly credible and that's what i love about the book in general but also the methodology that's what it's designed to do right and you're here for example of the sales manager saying i've just done you know your point um is right it's uh the one of the the disconnects i think are the hardest things for sales people to get their heads around especially relationship builder sales people um is this question of do my customers really want me to challenge them do they really want me to teach them new ideas and bring new ideas to them i did a run of interviews recently for a um a global company that's in the medical device space and they sell equipment to hospitals to lab directors you know you name it i remember talking interviewed their customers and they knew when they sent me the list of customers interview that some of them were being sold to by their their challenger sales people and some of them weren't and what was really interesting was the the way that these customers talked about their relationships with these sales people so the sales people who um were being sold to by more relationship builder um uh salesforce sorry the customers are being sold to by relationship builders the way they would talk about their relationships with their sellers was something along the lines of you know uh he's he's very nice i he checks in with me quite a bit a lot nice guy you know i don't have any complaints you know um but it was it was like it felt like it was fine you know there's nothing wrong with the relationship but it was just fine but it wasn't adding value now those customers i interviewed who were who the company sent to me who they knew were being sold to by their channels or sellers the way those customers talked about their relationship in their sales person was night and day it was you know they would effusively they would say things like you know look this company sells great products but their products aren't actually that much better than any other suppliers the reason i buy from them is because of susan because my salesperson because she comes in and she is joined to the hip with me she is a trusted advisor she comes in with new ideas for my my uh department for my lab for my part of the hospital that changes the way we do things it's almost like she's not as interested in selling me things as she is in seeing me be successful and you know what we sometimes have some tense dialogues around what's right answer for our for our operation and uh but those are the things that when she shows me these ideas and we have that intellectual back and forth it makes me respect her even more and it really builds a moat around you know around my hospital my lab that's going to make it really hard for anybody else to come in and steal that business you know unless they hired susan away so yeah and for me this is this is fascinating it's also music it's my ears because the product or service they're buying is almost the by-product of the value they're getting in the sales process as well right like and what i love about the book and again i'm not just here gushing because i think it's great but this idea of um this being part of your value is the way you conduct yourself and i i'm i'm a believer that there's a a mis a complete misperception in in in selling that the sales rep is obsequious or subservient to the to the client right yeah and and what i love about the message you have is that actually you're kind of an equal but at the same time you're more knowledgeable than them right you know it's the difference between selling someone a fire engine as opposed to selling them fire retardant curtains right if you're selling the fire engine once their house is on fire it's like well it's too late now and what this guy did is they showed me that i didn't need it right you know this is actually what i needed and i love that i guess the the logical question next um is you know i'm i i use a lot of cooking analogies right and and sales is like cooking in the way that if you go back you know this is great aaron because i use a lot of eating analogies you're gonna be a wonderful but you know i believe that environment technology and lots of different things affect sales in the same way with food right you know we used to have more meat we didn't have fire then we got fire then we got raw meat and we were cooking meat and now it's the face where you can get like a sous-vide steak or like you know someone's gonna foam some potatoes because of the trends because of the technology because of the environment now obviously challenging you you articulated really well at the beginning of our conversation about how challenger was was perfect for the time because we have this unique environment and this unique effect on the market and i guess we're kind of going through that with a pandemic if not exactly but what do you see the next sort of seismic shift being in sales outside of research that you're just doing it'd be great to get it from your opinion or like a preference point of view really yeah it's a great question so um i don't have a crystal ball so this will be as good as anybody else's view but you know i i think that so a few things i would say i think that you know challenger or if you if you kind of lift up and you say well challenger is a an example of uh this sort of insight selling kind of movement um and i think since we've written the book there have been a couple of other books out there that are kind of in similar veins where those come those other sales researchers and consultants have gone and done their own research and found um similar similar findings but maybe it's different at the margins and so they're adding to the body work much like you know uh neil rackham and and mack cannon and all these you know legends of solution selling um codified that and then for 30 years people were adding to it you know adding at the edges and we got really good at it right um and i think that's what's going to happen so i think we're in the really early days is the first thing i would say i think i do i think that insight selling will be here with us for the next uh 30 or 40 years as long as solution selling maybe maybe not i don't know but the indicators uh suggest that it will be and i think one is uh there's two big two big problems we've talked about in um in the challenger research in the the original book as we talked about before it's this problem of customers learning on their own i mean i i'm a believer that you know your biggest competitor as a salesperson is not the company you think you're competing with it's your customers ability to make up their own mind without you there at the table to influence the way they think about not just not just your company and your value but how they think about their own opportunities they they cement their mental model and when they contact you really late you're forced into just they've decided i've already i've already decided what to do i've already decided who should be on my short list now all i care about is who's going to do it for the least amount of money possible who can i really put the screws to in terms of pricing or terms and conditions and that's a really tough place to be how do you back that up how do you earn the right to engage earlier with the customer to to form their view versus reacting to their view and um so i think you know look somebody asked me this the other day um what do i think how long do i think challenger will be around and i said well you know um as at least it'll be around at least as long as the internet exists and information is abundant um now i think the other challenge we've written about and this has gotten actually worse with the uh the pandemic well actually let me let's say there are two things i think have gotten worse with the pandemic the first is the bar for what is actually provocative insight as you know from the book insight is the tool of the challenger you know without something insightful to say that challenges the customers thinking you're you're just annoying you're not challenging and um and so it's always been incumbent upon the company to build those insights for salespeople it's not a fair ask of salespeople that say go out challenge and by the way come up with something to challenge with that's a job of sales leadership product marketing in the company to come up with that and yes sales people speak into that and they're a great source for raw material there because again your best sellers are probably already doing it but the company's job is to build those insights codified to put them into a talk track and a pitch deck and then train sellers and coach them on how to deliver those effectively and how to tailor them at the margins but i think what's happened over the the intervening years since we wrote the book and today is that the bar for what is provocative insight has really gone up and i think part of that is that there's so much noise out there you know if you um on the internet whether it's linkedin or really anywhere else i mean there's just so much thought leadership out there there's so much there are infographics there are factoids there are webinars or white papers or linkedin live events there's all kinds of content and it just the bar for what's going to cut through the noise in a world where there's so much noise much more than there was 10 years ago has really gone up and so i think that's one of the things i wouldn't call it a new way of selling but i would say we've got to even up our game in terms of producing really hard-hitting impactful provocative frame-breaking insight i think the other thing that's gotten worse is uh consensus buying so that was a the challenge if you will that we wrote about in the sequel the challenger customer um this is something that we've been tracking for the past few years we wrote when we wrote the book we found the average number of stakeholders in a complex uh purchase was 5.4 as soon as we wrote the book we ran the data and we found the number was 6.8 so the book was like already out of date my colleagues at gartner who are continuing to track this found that the the numbers uh north of 20 now so and if you think about the pandemic environment i think what really happens if there was a period last spring i think and it still exists for certain companies certain industries especially like travel and leisure you know hospitality and the restaurant industry very hard hit we're there in survival mode they don't they're not making any long-term decisions or investments right now um but for the most part i think companies have moved beyond them they've started to buy again they started to make capital uh investments higher um for professional services etc but the issue is there are twice as many people who are going to weigh in on the decision because companies are so risk-averse right now and as we know as sales people the likelihood that you know the next person who shows up at the buying committee um that they're going to go along with whatever we've sold and we've gotten buy-in from everyone else there's a great likelihood that that person might raise their hand and say i object i don't think we should do this i think we should stay with our current provider i think we should keep doing this ourselves instead of outsourcing it to this company whatever the the solution is and that's a really tough environment for a salesperson to sell into so it's really place a premium on how do we make sure we find the right stakeholder to attach ourselves to we equip them in the right way because they're really our proxy within their organization they're they're the salesperson they're grabbing the baton from us and they're now their job is to now sell their colleagues on going with us and they're going to be meetings and discussions that as a salesperson i'll never be invited to obviously we aspire to be on the customer side of the table but let's be honest those those conversations often happen behind closed doors and we're not there and so how do we know we've harnessed the right person on the customer side to forge that consensus so that was what the second book was about i i will say what i'm excited about in terms of selling is and i know you said from a research standpoint um maybe maybe not so much talk about it from a research standpoint but i would tell you i'm excited about the future of being able to study sales in new and different ways so let me explain what i mean by that we've um so for a long time if you go back to spin selling and professor rackham's groundbreaking work he literally personally listened to um or attended thousands of sales meetings and took notes right he had a he had a an interview guide and he was scoring the abilities and taking notes and trying to roll up all this qualitative insight from thousands of sales conversations then if you fast forward to when we wrote the challenger sale of what we did we based that research on a broad base survey so we deployed surveys we asked sales managers to evaluate their sellers we surveyed customers as well especially when we wrote the second book but it was a survey-based research approach fast forward to today i think we've gotten out certainly gotten out of the world of manual listening to calls we've gotten out of the world of surveying um and doing research based on that now with advances in uh natural language processing machine learning we can take actual sales conversations and other unstructured data so imagine uh being able to tap into all of the data sitting in our inbox or in crm or in our calendar uh imagine being tap being able to tap into data from our content management platform you know what what resources are sellers using uh what what's leading to uh success in terms of opening the door or closing a deal with a customer how are they navigating the purchase process there is a mountain of data just sitting there waiting to be harnessed to study you know what are best sales people doing and we wrote a piece um just a few weeks ago in hbr where we really focused on inbound sales so this is b2b and b2c but where customers are calling into place orders and what is it that the best sellers do to convert those into uh transactions in the moment and these folks literally have minutes to get that done before the customer you know is let off the phone um and so we study what they're doing and it was really eye-opening some of the behaviors that we found things that we never could have found without those old research techniques so i think ai machine learning natural language processing is really going to revolutionize how we understand what best sales people do and here's the other thing and i think especially for folks like yourself aaron in the sales training business you know there's always been this question and you i'm sure have uh encountered this from clients did the sales training work or not yeah you know right and and so that and then you can look at sales results and you could say well the results got better but then the customer says well sure but our biggest competitor went out of business and we launched this new product and we lowered our price and we all these other things happen so how do we know it was the sales training and the best we've had to go on for many years was well if you look at the evaluations the sellers gave from the sales training look at all these smiley faces and like you know positive reviews like they loved it right so clearly it had some bearing but it was always hard to connect the dots i think today we're in a brave new world where imagine going in as a trainer training sellers on a set of skills uh techniques that they can use being able to record their zoom calls their you know microsoft teams interactions what have you even their phone interactions depending on the contacts and then mine that data to find out who's using the behaviors and skills that have been trained on um where are their gaps in the organization because we all know some people are going to grab onto it right away and some people are it's going to go in one ear and out the other and they're going to go back to what they were doing before and what impact is it having so that we can spot the folks who aren't doing it and provide some you know refresher training or some remedial coaching if you will but more to the point we can really quantify for the client here is what's happening when your sellers use these techniques it leads to bigger deals better deals faster cycle times all the outcomes we care about and then as somebody whose job is you know driving sales transformation like yourself it lays bare whether what we're doing is having the commercial impact we want uh in a way that we could never get visibility into it before yeah i mean it's a really interesting point and it's something i speak about a lot because with conversational intelligence tools and again this is just my theory and it'd be interesting to get your perspective on it is that i think the sales training world is right for disruption but also right for being eaten up because i think um conversation intelligence tools can literally model out eventually model our best behavior and model out prescriptions on what to do next in real time based on millions upon millions of data points yeah i think at that stage um sales training becomes really clear where the value is because you've got a machine telling you what to do i i think that's the next big shift in sales i really do i think that if you take a gong as an example we're talking about billions of data points yeah all of a sudden they know what works and what doesn't work what tone to use when the customer says this you should say this on average you've got a higher chance of converting because of this yeah i think that's the big technological shift in in sales training and you'll love that as a researcher right i can see oh for sure it's a gold it's a it's like i'm like a kid in a candy shop with uh with all this data so you know our company at um at tether we do similar work we're we've been focused historically more on b2c uh but we're starting to get into the b2b space and my one what i found is is interesting is that um you know a lot of the conversational so the conversational intelligence um as being deployed out there right now in most companies is really for um it's a sort of a frontline salesperson or sales manager kind of uh tooling or platform and a lot of the insights i think unfortunately in its early days right but a lot of the insights have been limited to like you said kind of basic tonal uh recommendations or um you're talking too long right you you're you need to be talking less than the customer so what we found is that when you actually and and you know there's always this question of um correlation versus causality and but when when we go to we've gone and we studied some of these conversations what we found is that there's a wealth of insight in there about the best behavior sales people are using in uh in conversations that actually are in many respects contrary to what a lot of the conversational analytics companies are out there saying and i think it's in part because they've been selling a tool that is great for a sales person to go back and listen to a call and understand did i talk the same percentage of the time as a high performer did i use the right tone at key points those are all important things but now you've got this really rich data set and you've got the dependent variable about whether the deal closed or not that you can regress it against and so i think there's a a lot more insight we can provide then the other thing i would say about it is you know those insights are valuable for sales people but let's think about all the insights that are valuable to product marketing to sales leadership right or is our product value proposition resonating if you're a challenger shop and your sellers are using insights are those insights resonating how is the customer responding to those how do i get the feedback back to marketing whose job is to create those insights so that they can uh get them sharper create more resonance um or really just overhaul those insights entirely so those are the kinds of opportunities i think that are more at a leadership level or strategic level that are waiting to be unearthed with conversational analytics but i but again it's early days and it's um it's it is exciting the potential so yeah fascinating stuff it's really interesting to get your take on it actually i have one more question for you and it's it's probably half question half accusation actually no not a bad way well i'm being challenging right um so i i did a video which which i know you saw and you liked which was around um the history of selling and it kind of it kind of got me thinking about something which is is it because it's different why it works right so if you look at um spin selling or let's go back to value selling or solution selling it came out everyone adopted it everyone started using it customer gets bombarded with the same stuff yeah yeah and there's a new iteration customer gets bombarded but it's different right yeah how much do you feel the success of challenger was down to the fact or the success that people have with challenger yeah the fact that it is completely different yeah what a customer is expecting when they get a call from a sales person for sure there is uh there is some truth to that so i think you know one of the things that um early early companies uh who again figured this out long before we wrote the book like companies like granger that we profile in the challenger sale um what they realized is that it creates a different feel in the sales meeting if rather than going in and like a solution seller asking the customer so tell me what's keeping you up at night what are your objectives what are you trying to get done this year and then asking the customer to educate you about their priorities and their needs um they they chose specifically not to do that because they felt like that's what everyone does and customers it's exhausting to the customer the other thing they don't want to do is they don't want to start the sales conversation talking about themselves and if we look at most sales collateral you know the the first few slides are exactly the same the first one is your mission and values the second one is your your branded products names and logos the third one is the logos of your best known customers and the fourth one is like a map of the world with a lot of dots to show how many offices you have right so by the way you know it's it's you know fine but the customer probably already learned all those things on the website before they met with you or even before they agreed to give you an hour of their time so don't don't start a conversation talking about yourself start a conversation talking about the customer but don't do it by asking open-ended questions so the way they do it as you know from the book is um they they push their reps to create a warmer which was to sit down with the customer put pen to paper before you meet with them and take a stab at what do you think the answer to the question what's keeping you up at night would be but without the customer there to tell you what the answer is so just take an educated guess based on your read of their press releases and their earnings reports based on your read of the competitive landscape based on your knowledge of other customers like that customer that you've met with in the past what would they say what have they said in the past and take a stab at it the goal is not to be 100 right that would be presumptuous to think we could all totally understand what's going on in the customer's business without ever having met them but the goal is to create a to get their shoulders to relax and to get them to feel like oh this is a different kind of sales conversation than all the ones i've had in the past so i think there is some truth to that there is a lot of differentiation that happens when you engage a customer in more of a challenger way and i will say you know despite um uh the number of people read it and talk about it i still think it's pretty rare out there in the in the world of sales it's not practiced um uh very often um the the other thing i would say though is that if you contrast it with solution selling as an approach where it really is predicated on needs assessment and needs needs diagnosis and open-ended questioning that can sound the same supplier to supplier to supplier just it can sound exactly identical and it can be exhausting to the customer right i jokingly tell a story about a a a customer i interviewed who said you know the thing that's really keeping me up at night is the thought of the next sales person who comes in and asks me what's keeping me up at night you know that's really what bugs me um and what has me worried but if you think about challenger remember the there's challenger is a set of salesperson skills but it's also an organizational capability so you've got to have that insight with which to challenge by definition that insight as we talked about it leads to what makes your company unique so then by definition if it makes your company unique and the insight is the thing that that reframes the customers thinking about their business in a way that gets them to want to pay for what makes you unique then that insight is different for every single company out there and so it while some of those behaviors and those skills those challenger behaviors and skills could start to feel more like oh i i sense what you're doing right because i saw it from the sales person i know with last week but the inside itself has to be different because it's it's only specific to your company at least if you do it the right way and so there'll always be a an element that is different on uh you know company the company even if they're all practicing challenge or seller awesome well if people want to get in touch with you or people want to see your work or if people want to buy any of your books what's the best place yeah so i'm happy to i think the best place is linkedin honestly uh let me know you heard me on the on this interview and uh send me a note and love to be connected with you and and otherwise uh you can connect uh with me at my company which is a tether again we're in the conversational analytics space uh it's tether.com because we're a startup we don't spell it the right way so it's t-e-thr.com and you'll learn a little bit more about our research i mentioned that um uh that recent hbr study we put out uh about we're looking we're looking at inbound selling behavior so happy to shoot you a copy of that and um we've got a whole five-part kind of podcast series where we unpack that research in more detail that that your listeners might be interested in so cool i'll make sure i put all the links in the video on youtube so just finish by saying look it's been a really enjoyable conversation like it's uh it's great to have you here and obviously learn about the history but more importantly get some of that great insight around where things are moving so thanks so much for joining me thank you i appreciate the invite