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I'm joined by Matt Dixon author of The Challenger sale and executive director of the corporate executive board how do you challenge a customer thinking without challenging the customer if we had found that Challengers were obnoxious and um and aggressive we have called them the jerk not the Challenger the thing I like about stories is you don't force the conclusion on the buyer you simply present a scenario and then they draw their own conclusion which takes away the pressure and allows them to perhaps gain enough Insight that they tell themselves a new story where new choices make more sense what's your views on using stories as a way to challenge the buyer's thinking without challenging them one of the things we find that the most Progressive Challenger organizations or perhaps Insight selling organizations one of the things that they do uh Michael exactly to your point is through a Savvy combination of both data that appeals to the rational side of the customer but also stories that appeal to the emotional side of the customer as well Peter goober in his book tell the win I don't know if you read that book yeah sure I I thought it was quite good and and and one uh metaphor that he used was you know we're not talking about Kitty bedtime stories we're not talking about stories that you hear from your uncle at Thanksgiving we're talking about stories that deliver the factual data that you're talking about but then you wrap that up in many stories it's almost like putting that information in a trojan horse so that it gets beyond the buyer's established wall of thinking I I I like that metaphor yeah it's a it's a fantastic metaphor and you know when you look at the companies like Granger who do this who do this the best um they show data but the data only gets them so part of the way they that that accomplishes the task of rational drowning but then they have to go through the emotional drowning phase to really make it personal for the customer to make them feel the pain of this foregone opportunity or this unseen risk or cost and then they show them the way out if we had led with all those things our our our catalog our inventory our number of distribution centers the custo we haven't given the customer reason to care about that stuff but when we can tell them a story that leads them to your unique benefits rather than leading with your unique benefits wow that's a powerful thing when I've done this kind of stuff with companies one of the things they say is this is fantastic because we're creating something that's not going to end up as shelfware this is stuff that our people could go out and use tomorrow boy you you get some fantastic stories right off the bat of I tried this story I tried this approach in my latest sales meeting and it really worked it broke through with a customer who has been giving us you know the step arm for years and I finally broke through to them in a way I haven't before they want to get me in front of their senior management team to share that Insight you know and so you can get those quick wins customer that I was teaching a solution selling methodology came back to me and said you know I really like this methodology but we've been working quite a bit with the McKenzie consultants and we see them go in with hypothesis and I really like that because it just gets to it a lot quicker and the customers seem to like it a bit more can you talk to me a bit about hypothesis based selling because I really like that it doesn't mean that asking questions is is unimportant it's of course important and the best salesp people ask great questions but they don't lead with questions they lead with insights they save the questions for the point in the sale when I need to understand how to customize this solution for your business the ones who who get it uh uh most quickly are frankly from Professional Services it's the Consultants of the world and the reason is this is the way they've been selling for years is by Leading with Insight of in delivering Insight that changes the way the customer thinks about their business or their world and ties two unique capabilities that that consulting firm can offer um and so really in some respects it's it's almost taking what has been a and tested and um uh validated approach uh at the high end of Consulting and bringing it into many other parts of uh the B2B sales [Music] world