Blog Archive
3 Ways First Sales Interactions Are Fundamentally Flawed
When we start the Challenger journey with organizations and spend time with their sales teams, we often observe salespeople conducting first sales…
Small Talk: Why your customers will thank you for speaking up
Think about what happens when a rep answers a phone call – the customer states their question or issue, the rep looks their information up, and…
Challengers Make Sense
Many of our clients have asked us to interpret the 2019 Gartner for Sales Leaders study of “Givers”, “Tellers”, and “Sense Makers”. These are…
First Contact Resolution: Necessary but Insufficient
About 20 years ago, an interesting shift took place in contact centers around the world: executives started to realize that efficiency was ruining…
Customer Always Right vs. Customer Comes First – Turns Out There’s a Big Difference
When attempting to get Challenger right, remembering the key principles on change management is important…you need to know where you want to go and…
Thought Leadership vs Commercial Insight: The Hard Truth
Today’s sales leaders and marketers spend a great deal of time discussing the changes in customer buying behavior. Customers are engaging later in…
The Death of Discovery: 4 Sales Questions You Need to be Asking
Whether you’re asking the classic discovery question of “What’s keeping you up at night?”, or the more updated Consultative Selling query of “How can…
Salespeople: Don’t Let Titles Fool You, That VP or CEO You’re Chasing Could be a Dud
In the sales profession, we've spent a long time training our people to find senior decision makers in the customer's organization. As we’ve…
A Commercial Teaching Message Should Be A Drama, Not A Horror Story
In his new book, This Is Marketing, Seth Godin draws a critical distinction between constructive tension and fear. Commercial teaching focused on…
Why Salespeople Need to Be Storytellers
If you've read The Challenger Sale, then you know you can't close a sale by simply sharing a business case and a jazzy pitch deck full of charts and…
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