About Us
Challenger empowers sellers and drives sales growth around the globe through sales training, technology, and consulting.
The story behind Challenger
Since our inception, we’ve been dedicated to challenging conventional thinking in sales, marketing, and customer service teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Our sales transformation programs, including message creation, skill development, and implementation support, yield performance improvements and significant financial results for clients around the globe. Each program is supported by ongoing research and backed by our best-selling books The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, and The Effortless Experience.
Our team
Our leadership team guides our strategy and innovation to transform the way sales, marketing, and customer service organizations see the world while empowering our team members to achieve success.
Andee Harris
Maria Morales
Alli Manning
Dan Flood
Ines Tamaddon
Gina Slesar
Marinus Maris
Our values
Our consultants and leaders will join your leadership team on-site for a kickoff workshop to build a strategy, develop communication plans, and plot key initiatives and milestones on your Challenger implementation roadmap.
At Challenger, we worked together as a team to establish our values:
Authentic collaboration
We trust in our collective potential. We invite every voice and operate as one team. We are committed to promoting transparency.
Bold thinking
We see possibilities everywhere. We welcome the hard work of exploration. We lean into change and embrace ideas that spark growth.
Lifelong learning
With humility and respect, we listen, advise, and challenge. We are students of our past in order to be leaders of our future. Open minds keep us agile.
Uncompromised quality
We believe that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Our unwavering commitment to our colleagues and our clients means we deliver work.
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion
Challenger is a people organization founded on principles enabled by diverse thought and practice. We believe in the power of a diverse team. We strive to be a positive influence in the world, building a community where all people are valued and respected.
We do this by endeavoring to create a workforce whose diversity reflects the richness of the communities where we operate. We foster an inclusive workplace by ensuring that all of our insights and products reflect a diversity of thought and by championing the values that we wish to see in the world.
Ours is a community founded on trust and mutual respect that prizes authentic collaboration and bold ideas. We recognize that it takes the humility of lifelong learning to be an effective ally. Our dedication to uncompromised quality pushes us to continually look for opportunities to better ourselves and the companies we serve.
Challenger Advisors
70 Challenger Advisors globally
11 languages spoken
20+ years of business and functional experience
Our global Advisor team includes functional experts from sales, marketing, and customer service. Our Advisors have completed over 14,000 training days in 58 different countries and bring decades of experience leading, coaching, and training, both virtually and in the classroom.
Meet some of our Advisors
Doug Ferreira
Over 25 years of experience in sales leadership and sales transformation
Sri Seshadri
Highly experienced effectiveness coach with a background in sales, research, and finance
Casey Banta
Advises clients on M&A, change management and cultural transformations, operations, and market analysis
Ramsey Jay
Author and expert on leadership development, communications, and coaching
Christina Richter
Sales executive with 25+ years in BD, operations, training, and sales management
Ed Franowicz
Leadership development leader with experience coaching executives around the globe
Tony Anticole
Highly experienced coach with experience advising 100+ organizations on their Challenger Journey
Joe Quagliata
25+ years managing and mentoring sales teams in emerging growth & Fortune 500 companies
Ines Ochin
20 years of sales experience in training and coaching in complex sales and negotiation
Marcelo Morichi
20 years of experience in sales, project management, and operations
Tyrone Edwards
25+ years managing and mentoring sales teams in emerging growth & Fortune 500 companies
John Fowler
Decades of experience in sales, sales management, workforce development, training, and coaching
Jack Cheng
10+ years in professional coaching, specializing in leadership development and EQ in Asia
Blair Goulet
High performance leader with proven success in start up, rapid growth, and turnaround organizations
Olivia Lockwood
25+ years of sales and executive coaching with a focus on developing human potential
See what our clients have to say
“Despite the world being in lockdown and everyone having to rapidly adapt to a new way of working, the team both on the Challenger and ITRS side have been brilliant in flexing their approach and ensuring that we are able to bring together parts of the business to begin this commercial transformation… We have even had a few people comment that it is one of the best sales trainings they have ever attended. We continue to work closely with Challenger on embedding and sustaining the Challenger approach.”
– Elliot Howard, ITRS Group Ltd.
Key milestones in Challenger’s history
2008
Shifting the loyalty curve
A new stream of research from our marketing practice reveals a counterintuitive truth about what B2B customers value most when evaluating supplier purchases: the sales experience is the strongest predictor of customer engagement and loyalty.
2009
Introducing the Challenger profile and low effort/high performance
We debut “Replicating the New High Performer,” introducing sales leaders to the Challenger seller profile — the only one of five seller profiles that consistently delivers high performance. Meanwhile, engineering the low effort service experience makes waves in the customer service industry.
2010
Engaging the newly empowered customer
We discover a new trend in customer purchase behavior: delayed supplier engagement. Customers now wait until they are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process to engage with supplier sales reps.
2011
Publishing a book that changes professional selling forever
The Challenger Sale offers sales leaders a new playbook for delivering distinctive purchase experiences that drive customer loyalty and growth, hailed as “the most important advance in selling for many years” by Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling.
2012
Shifting away from solution sales
Harvard Business Review publishes “The End of Solution Sales,” a provocative article building on insights from The Challenger Sale. The article details the shift in strategy that organizations must execute to succeed in an increasingly complex selling environment.
2013
Releasing The Effortless Experience
We take our never-ending search for counterintuitive truth to the world of customer service and turn conventional wisdom on its head with The Effortless Experience, which explores the customer experience to reveal what makes customers loyal and disloyal.
2015
Delivering a reality check
The Challenger Customer reveals that simply being a Challenger seller isn’t enough: a seller’s success or failure also depends on who you challenge. The book introduces insights into how to Identify and Engage Your Mobilizer®, customer stakeholders adept at driving organizational action and forging consensus in buying groups.
2016
Becoming part of the world’s largest research and advisory company
CEB is acquired by Gartner. Integrating CEB’s sales and marketing practices allows Gartner to become the leading global research and advisory company for all major functions in an enterprise.
2018
Striking out on our own
Challenger becomes its own company owned by Marlin Equity. Driven by our mission to empower people and drive growth, and backed by continuous research, we are the global leader in training and consulting to win today’s complex sale, with a global network of offices serving clients in over 50 countries.
2020
Scaling Challenger methodology across organizations
Challenger launches Activation, a powerful combination of expert advice, online sales courses, consultative support, engaging content, and purpose-built tools that help businesses adopt and sustain Challenger methodology.
2022
Generating better sales outcomes
Challenger launches Loop, uncovering the reasons behind losses and no-decisions to improve seller training and coaching, win more business, and build stronger customer relationships.
2023
Jolting customers out of indecision
Challenger partners with the author of The Challenger Sale, Matt Dixon, to help sales organizations overcome customer indecision. Our new offering is based on the research from Matt’s latest book, The JOLT Effect, in which his team studied more than 2.5 million sales conversations to understand the true causes of “no decision” losses and what best sellers do differently to avoid them and close more deals.