The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (Int'l edit.)

I read this while developing my skills at SAP. Almost all sales books are based on a set of unfalsifiable assumptions, so their real success lies in comforting the reader - making them believe they have more control over a situation than they actually do. They are pseudo-psychological science at best, and psychology is largely a pseudoscience in itself.

This book was released during a period of transition: from the 1990s boys'-club salesman, when client entertainment was still treated as an uncapped, tax-deductible expense, to the era of the £150-per-head limit. The book wants you to believe that sales became less about wining and dining and more about becoming a consultant: steering clients towards insights and challenging their existing beliefs.

Personally, I think this is nonsense. You just piss people off. Not once did I see a salesperson challenge a client and, in turn, have the whole room nod along. It goes against human nature.

Providing education about a technology does work, but if the client is only at that stage of the buying process, you still have a long way to go. A great deal of success is about managing people within your own company rather than selling externally. If you can carve out the right clients to pursue, in sufficient volume, then hard work can pay off.

Unfortunately, many companies use poor analytics to assign salespeople a specific set of clients to focus on, producing lists that could choke an elephant with two mouths. When it comes to selling externally, the rules for success are fairly simple: stay in the game longer than everyone else, remain top of mind, do not fuck things up by doing something stupid or turning up unprepared, and hope your product doesn't suck.

In my three and a half years across two companies - not including my own - I never saw a sales deal get "accelerated"; at best, you stopped it from slowing down. Nor did I see one leap ahead of projects that had already been planned and funded.*

*I was working with companies with more than 2,500 employees, so decisions involved multiple layers of approval and governance. The ultimate decision-maker was often heavily guarded, meaning quick deals did not happen unless someone had a long-standing, often personal, relationship with them.

The only time something happened quickly was when the client had already completed their research, understood their own internal buying process - which is rare, lol - and actively wanted to implement our solution. Essentially, it was a sitting duck.

I will caveat what I'm saying slightly, and to give credit where it is due. There were occasions when people made things happen through courage, initiative and boldness. For example, when salespeople had enough prospects to pursue, they could create sufficient opportunities through sheer hard work to outperform everyone else. That was what I did: I spoke to the most people and made sure I was prepared.

In a different example, a two-person sales team travelled more than 100 miles to turn up at a CFO's office and announce that they would not leave until the contract had been signed. (I should add that, although the contract would probably not have been signed without their intervention, it was already several weeks late, and they had a good working relationship with the client).

Ultimately, if the book's method worked, its authors would not have needed to publish a second approach that is somewhat combative towards the first.

Matthew Dixon has since co-written a third book, The JOLT Effect. I found this one more interesting and compelling. It focuses on customer indecision and uses real transcripts from sales conversations conducted over video calls during the pandemic.

The obvious elephant in the room is whether its findings apply outside video calls and beyond the particular mentality people had during the pandemic. We do not know. Even so, the conceptual leap is smaller, and the book is considerably more interesting.

In my opinion, focus on people, personalities and relationships.