the 25 most important tenets of the challenger sale approach

Applying the Challenger Sale

ApproachMatt Heinz

President, Heinz Marketing Incmatt@heinzmarketing.com

@heinzmarketing

Three objectives today• How to tell better, customer-centric stories that

drive volume, velocity and conversion among your prospects

• Apply teach, tailor and take control to the Smart Tuition sales (and marketing) process

• Begin getting comfortable with how to operationalize the Challenger approach in your daily activity

Based in CEB research

The 25 Most Important Tenets of

the Challenger Approach

1. How you sell is more important than what you sell

2. You win by generating demand in a reluctant, risk-adverse customer

environment

3. Challengers push their customer’s thinking & help

them compete more effectively

4. Challengers teach, tailor & take control

5. Solution selling is, by definition, a disruptive sale

6. Reps who win tailor their message to a wide range of customer stakeholders

7. You’re not as different from your competitors as

you think

8. Build a network of advocacy

9. The value of your insights trumps the quality of your

product

10. Don’t discover what they know, teach them a

new way of thinking altogether

11. Rapport and reframe are not the same thing

12. Logic alone is rarely enough to challenge the

status quo

13. Lead with a hypotheses of the customer’s needs

14. Paint a picture of the negative future based on

their current path

Source: Jeff Thull

15. Marketing is your “insight generation machine”

16. Does the decision maker have the strong backing of her team?

17. It is often faster to sell through stakeholders than

to go directly to the decision maker

18. Know individual stakeholder value drivers & the economic drivers of

their business

19. If it’s not urgent, it’s not worth solving

20. Translate & enable customer centricity to sales (at a tangible, operational level)

21. Invest in planning time

22. Sales leadership requires an innovation

mindset

23. “If we had religiously followed our sales process,

our three biggest deals would have never gotten

done.”

24. Design your team (and your time) for

effectiveness, not efficiency

25. Be memorable, not agreeable

Questions?

Thank You!Matt HeinzPresident, Heinz Marketing@heinzmarketingmatt@heinzmarketing.com