There are many different types of selling methodologies: the Challenger Sale, SPIN Selling, Conceptual Selling, SNAP Selling, Sandler Sales and Customer-Centric Selling—to name a few. While each has its benefits and challenges, each style has something to offer B2B sales reps to improve conversions and build customer loyalty.
It’s not possible to use all these selling styles and be successful. You have to choose one style and go with it. So it’s crucial to study the different types of selling and then decide which style is right for your company. You want a selling style that fits your company’s goals and culture.
Whether you’re new to the Challenger Selling methodology or are part of sales teams already using it, there are tools available that make this B2B sales model even more powerful.
Roderick Jefferson (a sales legend from Oracle) said that The Challenger Sale was hands down the best book he had ever read on selling.
With high praise from a top authority, we decided to give it a read. Here are some of the key takeaways and the tools we recommend to make this style work for your business.
What is the Challenger Sales method?
If you’re not already familiar with The Challenger Sale, we encourage you to buy and read the book. It’s full of valuable insights and advice. In the meantime, here is a high-level view of the Challenger Sales method.
- Challenge customers’ thinking. Develop a deep understanding of your customer, and learn to push their thinking.
- Know their market. Teach your customer something new about competing within their market.
- Re-frame your solution. Learn to re-frame the way a customer thinks about your category of solution.
- Control the conversation. Learn to stay in control of the sales conversation and when to gently apply pressure.
- Use it for products and/or services. The Challenger Sales Methodology will work for most industries, but it’s vital for the complex, large-scale business sale.
3 tools to clinch the Challenger Sale
Like most selling styles, success in Challenger Selling method requires reliable B2B data and top performers. Here are the tools that deliver the goods:
1. Rev
For most Challenger methodology reps, the first question that comes to mind with this method is: “Who do I approach?” You want to approach relevant contacts at companies that are the right fit for your products or services. Before you do the work as a relationship builder, you want to be clear about your potential customers.
Rev provides the best tool for Challenger Sales on the market. Rev finds the right targets by combining your customer data, high-quality B2B data sources, bot crawlers, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The result? Prospects that best fit your ideal customer profile. Rev provides leads that are more likely to convert to a sale.
You’ll have greater success with Challenger Selling if you know their market and can re-frame your solution if they’re already a good fit. As part of our service, we can also contact the businesses for you, so you only receive warm leads.
2. Detective
Understanding your customer is much easier when you have a better sense of who they are. Detective combs through 100s of data sources and automatically sends you a one-pager on all prospects before you meet with them. As a result, you’ll have much greater insight into their background and perspective and better prepare for Challenger Sales model conversations.
3. HubSpot
Challenging customers’ thinking is a vital facet of this sales methodology, so you have to be thinking deeply about the issues they’re facing and have thought leadership in this area. HubSpot allows you to create and syndicate content in an automated fashion. Establishing thought leadership helps you develop credibility with prospects and makes it much easier to push their thinking.
The last word on Challenger Selling: Keep at it
No selling style is effortless, and the Challenger Sales methodology isn’t either. It requires a lot of you, so this selling style isn’t for everyone. However, particularly for reps selling complex, large-scale products or services, being able to teach the customer something new about competing in their market can be almost invaluable to sales growth.
That said, if you’ve got Challenger reps who can master this style, it will dramatically boost your sales team’s performance and take your company to the next level.