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Challenge your customer!
This is the latest trend in sales. I have been talking about Insight Selling since Structsales started almost five years ago and to be honest, most of the successful sellers have done this for years. To challenge the customer is however still one of the best approaches you can have if you want do differentiate from the competition, if you are positioned in a way that allows you to be a challenger...
What does it mean to challenge your customer?
To question the customer to get him to change direction is extremely important. What Adamson and Dixon are missing out on throughout their book The Challenger Sales is the digital journey. I would like to say that the Challenger Sales is something that marketers should take more advantage of than we do today. Maybe this is even more a marketing methodology than a sales methodology?
Content and Inbound Marketing is something that works very well using a challenging approach. A challenging sales approach done by the right person at the right time with the right audience correctly is unbeatable. Why I even mention the marketing side in all of this is for the simple reason that marketing allows us to continue our communication with the client even when the seller is not sitting face to face with the customer. But back to the core question: what is The Challenger Sales all about in my opinion?
A challenger provides the customer with new insights and ideas to perceived truths. Moreover, it is absolutely key to stand on a foundation of trust to even be able to help the customer make the right decisions during the buying journey. We need to take the customer on a journey from an undefined problem to a level where he understands how bad the situation actually is. Furthermore, we send the customer in the abyss and then back up again. This all sounds pretty bad but it is really only when we succeed to paint a picture of how bad everything is that we get the commitment to move on in our partnership. One of the best sales bloggers out there Anthony Iannarino always mentions the level of dissatisfaction as pretty much the same thing.
Can you fail with the challenging approach?
Yes, you can! It happens more often now that teams implementing the Challenger Sales end up with dissatisfied customers. The biggest problem is that many sellers who try to take a challenging approach are lacking both the skills and experience to succeed as challengers. To appear arrogant is not what we want as sellers but this is exactly what happens when we are using the methodology in the wrong way. It is because of this extremely important that we have the right people in the right place before going all-in challenging our clients.
Can I apply a challenging approach to all customers?
So here it is: all people are different. The older I get, the clearer it becomes that it is all about the person behind the title, some call it the H2H and not B2B or B2C. Again it's all about doing business with people, absolutely, but it is still a big difference between B2C and B2B, just as it is in transactional sales and complex sales.
We could also assume that not everyone will be receptive to a challenging approach because they have an excessive ego, or because they do not want to absorb change. This also goes back to the fact that we shouldn't try to do business with everyone all the time.
