Marketing Professional Development Courses
Your customers have changed. Why hasn’t your marketing?
Your customers have changed the way they think, decide, and buy. What they want from sellers has also changed.
But many organizations still think that more of the same will win buyers over: more content highlighting features and benefits, more rapport building, and more customer service. Yet our research and experience show that more of the same leads to less: less customer engagement, less loyalty, less pipeline movement, and less interest in discussing anything except price.
Challenger can help you reach customers
To earn customer attention, your marketing has to be different and better to break through the noise. You can’t just share more of the same thought leadership and product information and expect to disrupt your customer’s buying journey. You have to move your customers in a different direction that favors your unique capabilities.
To win in the market, you need marketing training fueled by Challenger strategy.
Challenger marketing courses train marketers to take a customer-centric approach
Based on aggregated research from around the industry, we know that sales-marketing alignment is critical. But that alignment is missing in most organizations.
90% of sales and marketing teams report misalignment in their organization’s strategy, process, culture, and content.
Misaligned sales and marketing is estimated to cost businesses more than $1 trillion per year.
Companies with highly aligned sales and marketing functions grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable than organizations without alignment.
Our marketing professional development courses — Challenger Marketing Foundations and Commercial Insights — connect the dots between every aspect of the Challenger journey, from coaching to selling and marketing, creating the highly sought-after sales-marketing-alignment in your organization.
Challenger Marketing Foundations
This marketing professional development program teaches how to apply a Challenger approach to marketing efforts in alignment with overall business goals. Participants:
- Explore the components of Commercial Insight
- Learn how to apply Commercial Insight to build a blueprint for content creation and campaigns: the content roadmap
- Create a learning journey that changes your customers’ perspective, aligns with sales efforts, and favors your solutions
Commercial Insights
This marketing course teaches how to lead with insights to get your customers to take action with you. Participants:
- Learn what a Commercial Insight is
- Find out how Commercial Insights differ from other, less compelling types of information
- Discover how to apply Challenger methodology to build the right Commercial Insights
- Master using the Commercial Insights Conversation Framework to shift a customer’s mindset
Why should marketers take a marketing training program from a sales company?
When sales and marketing teams work together, your organization is better positioned to win.
In today’s revenue funnel driven world, alignment between your sales and marketing teams has never been more important. Challenger’s marketing professional development programs complement Challenger sales training by aligning both departments around using Commercial Insights to change the buying narrative and grow revenue.
Alignment between all departments and functions is key not just for revenue but also for creating key market differentiations and more cohesive campaigns. Through Challenger’s marketing courses, sellers can build stronger, more robust, more accurate insights using marketing data, analytics, and research.
Challenger marketing training in action: A success story
Our client, a global industrial manufacturer providing commercial kitchen solutions to the largest foodservice chains around the globe, wanted to increase the sales of its newly launched ice decontaminating machines. The Challenger Marketing Foundations + Challenger Sales Skill helped the manufacturer achieve its growth objective.
Preventing foodborne illnesses was a priority in the foodservice industry after several high-profile food contaminations caused serious customer illnesses and hurt profits. Our client wanted to seize this opportunity to capitalize on a new product that solved a little-known problem in the industry: contaminated ice, which was causing food poisoning.
So, the client partnered with Challenger for marketing training. It learned how to build a Challenger message and develop seller skills to deliver it effectively. Through research, customer knowledge, and a marketing training working session on building Commercial Insights, the client built a message that:
- Highlighted an underappreciated cause of a well-known problem
- Shifted the sales conversation to identifying customer risks rather than product features and benefits
Targeting operators of fast food and fast casual restaurants and convenience stores, the client created campaign messaging, “It’s not cool to eat contaminated ice.” The client increased sales of its machines by teaching customers that ice is food and needs to be treated carefully to avoid contamination. Focusing its marketing efforts and sales conversations on commercial teaching helped the client unlock and close several large opportunities.
The company’s president said, “Challenger switched our approach, giving us the confidence to exit our comfort zone and deliver an edgy, memorable, and effective insight resulting in a saturation of market education, interest, and sales.”
Learn how to create the Commercial Insight you need to propel deals forward
Marketing works best when you don’t lead with your features and functions. Our marketing professional development courses show you how to differentiate your offering in the market by focusing on your customer’s business needs. For example:
Messaging before Challenger marketing training
Messaging before Challenger marketing training
We have an extensive range of high-quality products, ethically sourced and locally made. They are backed by strict quality assurance standards. We are experts in safety.
Messaging after Challenger marketing training
Messaging after Challenger marketing training
An independent lab found that 40% of products fail despite carrying the official government standard for safety. Simply trusting these markings and choosing these products increases your company’s liability and puts employees at serious risk.
The first message tells customers about product features and functions. But the new messaging leads with why an organization needs to question the safety of the products and the cost of being wrong.
Because they use data-backed Commercial Insights, the new messaging can be used not just by sales but also by marketers in a content strategy framework, including paid media, email marketing, online content, and sales materials. This coordinated omnichannel approach educates customers about unknown risks and consequences, disrupting their learning journey.