Sales Guide: Enterprise Grade Deals

SALES GUIDE
THE
To Always Win
ENTERPRISE GRADE DEALS
Content
Understanding The Challenger Sales

Signi cant Traits Of Chalenger Reps
The Five Pro les Of Sales Professionals
Selling In Complex Sales Environment
Why Challenger Reps Are Most Likely To Win
Chalenger Approach: Driving A Complex Purchase To
A Close
Understanding the Challenger
sale?
Dixon and Adamson in their book, the Challenger Sale propose ve types
of sales personality ranging from the classic “relationship builder” to the
usually successful “lone wolf” and on to the lesser known “challenger”.
Researching over 6000 salespeople across more than 90 different industries

and geographies, they discovered that the distinctive Challenger Sales
traits clearly demonstrates that classic relationship building is a losing
approach in today’s complex business-to-business sales.
Signiﬁcant Traits Of Challenger

Reps
Challenger Reps have six outstanding traits that distinguish them from
other sales reps.
• Offers a unique perspective to the customer

• Has strong 2-way communication skills
• Knows the individual customer’s value drivers
• Can identify economic drivers of customer’s business
• Is comfortable discussing money
• Can pressure the customer
The Five Proﬁles Of Sales
Professionals
HARD WORKER
• Always goes the extra mile
• Doesn’t give up easily
• Self-motivated
• Interested in feedback and development
CHALLENGER
• Always has a different view of the world
• Understands the customer’s business
• Loves to debate
• Pushes the customer
RELATIONSHIP BUILDER
• Builds strong customer advocates
• Generous in giving time to help others
• Gets along with everyone
LONE WOLF
• Follows own instincts
• Self-assured
• Independent
PROBLEM SOLVER
• Reliably responds
• Ensures that all problems are solved
• Detail oriented
Source: CEB analysis

Selling In Complex Sales
Environment
The truth is that, the traditional approach to selling doesn’t work, deals
are now increasingly complex and the traditional approach to sale is no
longer effective because most customers now have access to more infor-
mation, even at the initial stage in the sale. What this means is that, if you
are not well prepared with the necessary information you need to enlight-
en a customer, it will affect the deal closure.
Due to the sales environment of enterprise grade sales, it’s no longer just
about what you sell, but rather how you interact with the decision makers
in the sales cycle.
See The Percentage of Contribution to Customer Loyalty

Why Challenger Reps Are
Most Likely To Win
Challenger reps outperform all other pro les. In fact, more than 50% of all
star performers in complex sales environments are Challengers.
Why Challenger Reps Are
Most Likely To Win
The reason is because
Challengers teach, offering a unique perspective and maintaining

two-way communication.
They tailor their approach according to customer value drivers and
economic drivers.
And they take control of the money discussion with the customer.
Challengers lead with insight and relies on delivering insight about an
unknown problem or opportunity in the customer’s business that the
supplier is uniquely positioned to solve.
Challengers capture the customer’s current belief or assumption,

expose the aws or misinformation in that thinking and present a better
course of action. The better course of action helps customers learn
something new about their business, usually how to save money, make
money or mitigate risk.
Challenger Approach:
Driving A Complex Purchase To A Close
Knowledge
Take Charge
Change Of Mindset
Knowledge is a must:
They say knowledge is power, and the challenger sale is no exception;
where most salespeople validate the opinions of their prospects, chal-
lengers question it, and aim to prove other better options.
As part of the challenger pro le, knowledge is a must, especially for the
speci c business and industry in question. To fully engage in discussions
with the ability to challenge the norm, you need to ensure knowledge
of more than just the basics, you need facts, stats, differing opinions,
in uencers, the lot!
Your team can work together in generating knowledge and collating

research, especially for broad topics like industry trends and predictions,
but they’ll need to pull some individual weight when it comes to specif-
ic business knowledge. The knowledge part of challenge selling isn’t the
tricky bit; utilizing that knowledge in a relevant and exciting discussion
without becoming a lecturing dictator- that’s the art of being a chal-
lenger salesperson.
Take charge
Control of the buyer journey is ultimately in the hands of the buyer,
almost always. You can’t force someone to part with their money, so in
the past, you’ve had to work your hardest to convince them parting
with their money will be worth it, and bring them return on their invest-
ment. The challenger sale model ips this on its head, giving the control
back to your sales team. You still can’t prize the money out of your
prospect’s hands, but if you’ve been a true challenger, you won’t need
to anyway.
Challengers remain in control of sales communications by being unpre-

dictable. The prospect has little to no idea what the challenger will
bring up on a call, and as they don’t ask the same questions about time
frame, decision makers and budget as other salespeople, the prospect
is left without answers to churn out. This relinquishes control from the
prospect and awards it to the salesperson, whilst also allowing the chal-
lenger to truly prove their product to the point of not needing to force
sales leads to spend money, because now they want to invest it.
Change of mind-set
Whilst we know the challenger sales method can bene t sale teams
and help them gain more high-quality customers, it’s not the easiest
thing to master. Taking on a challenger sales approach, especially
across a whole team will require a large shift in the way we look at sales.
A huge part of the relationship building approach, and something
many sales teams currently do, is aim to understand the prospect’s
current processes, slotting their solution in seamlessly to improve it. In
challenger sales, you’re not selling a product/solution, you’re selling
change. Challengers aim to change the lead’s current processes, using
their solution or product as the hinge point of that change. It doesn’t
just improve their results, it changes them (for the better of course).
This can be a dif cult concept to grasp, but with enough of that vital
knowledge, it starts to become clear how to build on those challenging
discussions and propose a change in the system, instead of an addition
to it. It’s OK to tell prospects they’re doing it wrong, and there’s a better
way- especially if you have the facts to back it up. We all have respect
for those who have a new idea, stand by it and prove it (even if we
don’t agree with them at the beginning). All great inventors, scientists
and philosophers across history had the courage to stand up and
promote a change instead of an addition; use their challenger mind-set
in your sales approach.
Bespoke Training
S ALES
L EADERSHIP
C ONFERENCE
Ruby
Sequentia Sales Tech Solutions
09070047684, 09070047686
www.salesruby.com
academy.salesruby.com
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SALES GUIDE

Understanding The Challenger Sales

Researching over 6000 salespeople across more than 90 different industries

Signiﬁcant Traits Of Challenger

• Offers a unique perspective to the customer

Source: CEB analysis

See The Percentage of Contribution to Customer Loyalty

Challengers teach, offering a unique perspective and maintaining

Challengers capture the customer’s current belief or assumption,

Your team can work together in generating knowledge and collating

Challengers remain in control of sales communications by being unpre-

SalesRuby @SalesRubyNG @SalesRubyNG SalesRuby

09 0704 96 90, 0 90700 47 681

www. sale s r u by.c om

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