Does Challenger Confuse Marketing with Sales?

Does Challenger Confuse Marketing with Sales?:from The Sales Challenger™ by Research Staff
By Matt Dixon and Nick Toman
Some of the sharper criticism we’ve seen of the Challenger approach stems from observations that the guidance we offer confuses marketing with sales.
The job of marketing, the logic goes, is to focus on upstream demand generation and nurturing of leads. Marketing channels offer scalable ways to inform prospects and customers alike of new capabilities and benefits, and ultimately earn a supplier a shot at consideration.  The job of sales is to drive those leads through to conversion.  From this perspective, a Challenger approach (one based on leading with insights designed to teach customers about new opportunities), sounds more like the job of marketing than sales.
While we would argue that the data presented in the Challenger research provides ample evidence that high-performing salespeople are indeed engaging in (and emphasize) insight delivery as a core part of the sale, here’s some new evidence to add to the debate:
Earlier this year, we conducted a study of several thousand salespeople with the aim of better understanding how top performers engage customers in the market—put simply, what do they do specifically to “get in early.”  When we look specifically at how average performers engage customers in the market, here’s are the variables that popped in the analysis:

• Rep believes lead generation is the company’s responsibility
• Rep assesses opportunities based on the clarity of customer needs
• Rep undiscerningly uses social media (i.e., “spams” their network)

High performer behaviors couldn’t be more different.  Here’s are the variables that described the star rep’s engagement approach:

• Rep conducts non-traditional due diligence
• Rep personally owns lead generation
• Rep leads with insight
• Rep uses social media specifically as a channel to deliver insight

Put differently, the average rep fills orders by reacting to existing demand; stars sell where customers learn (not just where they buy), shaping demand and teaching customers into the sales funnel.  The best sales reps, it turns out, are just as good at marketing as they are at selling.
But here’s the catch: In order to activate this sort of behavior across the sales organization, the insights reps share and the way in which they challenge customer thinking must elevate above the noise, not add to it. Insights must be disruptive. They must clearly contrast with customer assumptions.  This goes well beyond “thought leadership,” which simply introduces new ideas, and instead seeks to break down and upend the “mental model” with which the customers currently see their world. To depend on salespeople alone to arrive at such insights is a fool’s errand.  The organization—namely, marketing– must arm sellers with such disruptive insights.
In what we think is probably the best review of The Challenger Sale that we have seen since its publication, noted blogger and sales expert Dave Brock writes
“Challenger Selling is really not a sales initiative, though the title will be misunderstood…It’s not Solution Selling 3.0.  Challenger Selling is really about Challenger Business Strategy…Before an organization can be successful in implementing Challenger Selling, it has to re-examine fundamental business strategies, product, marketing, service, customer experience and positioning issues. Without this, you run the risk of sending your sales people into customers naked!  They’re prepared to be Challengers, they’ve been trained and developed the skills, but they don’t know what to challenge on, and how to tie that back to the distinctive value of your products and solutions.  It’s not sales job to figure these out, it’s the task of the organizations outlined above.”
We couldn’t agree more.  While we’re encouraged to see many sales training vendors and consultants now speaking the language of Insight Selling and Challenger, we’re concerned about some of the solutions we’ve seen for helping sales organizations down this path.  Getting this right requires much, much more than a new sales training module.  This goes well beyond telling reps to go out there and deliver insight.  It’s about the hard work of sales and marketing integration, value proposition definition, disruptive insight generation, content marketing and sales messaging.
Companies that have taken the next step into Insight Selling will tell you that these are not things that can be taught in the classroom.  As we’ve said many times, the Challenger story is only partly about individual sales rep skills.  It is as much a story of new organizational capabilities. For our part, we would tell every head of sales to ask their training vendor or sales consultant how they plan to support their organization (not just their salespeople) on what is undeniably a long and difficult journey of commercial transformation. (SEC Members, assess your organizational capability for demand shaping with our 10 minute assessment.)
In this new commercial model, sales reps are indeed marketers. They are shaping customer demand well ahead of customer needs being identified. They are driving awareness – not of new products and services – but of new ways for the customer to manage their business.   And, most importantly, the capability to do this effectively stems not from the sales training classroom, but from the supplier organization.
We look forward to the continued dialogue and certainly welcome any comments!