A Joosr Guide to… The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Taking a “tough love” approach helps customers see both the problems they’re facing and how you can solve them.

Explain how bad things got and how difficult it was for them—and back this up with data that shows just how much money they’re losing through their poor decisions.

After all, if you want them to accept your product or service, then you need to get them to recognize the scale and urgency of their problems, and your capacity to solve them.

Key takeaways
Don’t be afraid to make the customer uncomfortable: push them to confront hard truths and make tough decisions about their business.
Tailor your pitches to each key decision maker, and lead with original insights rather than details about your company and products.
Avoid compromising on price by highlighting the value of your services

When it comes to business-to-business sales, success is not so much about the products or service you’re selling as the approach you take to selling them. These days, this means challenging old ideas of what a salesperson should and shouldn’t do, and changing the way you approach the customer, the company, and the deal.
One of the most important changes you can make is to move away from the idea that you shouldn’t make customers uncomfortable: this can actually be a great thing, as it pushes clients to confront the difficult truths and daring decisions they need to make. Not being afraid to push clients also allows you to stand firm on the matter of price. By turning conversations toward value, you can refuse to compete on pricing while showing your customer why your services are well worth their money.
You can demonstrate you’re worth the money by ensuring you know more about the customer’s business than they do. By researching their company, you can offer original insights that add tangible value to your services. And it’s these original insights that should kick off your pitches; company and product details should be saved until the end, when you’ve already caught the customer’s attention. Your pitches should also be tailor-made for each decision maker so they target all of their biggest interests and concerns.
Learning a new approach to sales isn’t easy. But that’s where a good manager is vital: managers who put aside time and space specifically for mentoring help their teams develop new skills and keep experienced salespeople content within the company. So whether you’re a manager coaching your team or a rep developing a new method, by following these achievable, actionable techniques, you can learn a bold new approach to sales that will make you and your company truly stand out from the competition

prepare individual pitches for each person who has a say in the decision.

So, rather than trying to tell clients why your company is so good, show them. Start your pitch by demonstrating your detailed understanding of their industry, their business, and the obstacles they face

This is the value you truly bring to the exchange, teaching customers things they could not have learned without you challenging their ingrained ideas and practices.

the B2B world, one of the best ways to convince customers to buy from you is by demonstrating that you can offer useful information and support throughout the process

Of course, you must stay respectful and empathetic during this process, but the point is still to make the customer a little uneasy. You need to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they’ve misunderstood or overlooked something that is severely undermining their business. By showing them a problem they hadn’t previously known, you not only encourage them to acknowledge their issues, but also display your value and your ability to actually help.