Tactful Audacity & The Challenger Sale

CHALLENGER Mindset Tactful Audacity TM vision

PARADIGM SHIFT

reflect

Simple

Creative

Insight Proactive

win SEC

Constructive Tension

Research

Provocative Selling

RIsk aversion

New Thinking

CHANGE Observed Behaviour

bold

Consalia

Values

sales perceptions

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

A

NEW RESEARCH STUDY and subsequent book, ‘The Challenger Sale’ has made a significant step in suggesting a major shift in perceptions is required for what good likes like in terms of selling effectiveness. The findings of the Sales Excellence Council (SEC) are very similar to those Consalia have found through our doctoral research study – the fact we have reached our conclusions from different angles supports the conclusions reached by both parties. This paper extrapolates the key findings of both pieces of research and suggests that ‘we’, the profession of sales, is at an inflexion point. The implications of the research

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

By Dr Philip Squire, CEO Consalia Ltd

are profound in that it will dramatically effect how companies go about the recruitment and education of their sales teams.

Our Research Findings During the period between 2004 and 2008 Consalia conducted a doctoral research project on how customers want to be sold to. This project has been continued since the doctorate was completed. The research used a mainly qualitative research approach to ascertain what customers liked and disliked about the way in which vendors approached

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them. The research was global and initially involved senior decision makers within the B2B market. Since then the research has extended to the B2C market. Our research included interviewing over 100 customers and working with hundreds of sales representatives and account teams in multiple geographies.

have seen dramatic improvements in their sales performance; so much so, that we have subsequently taken this to many other sectors.

A paper on our ‘Values’ approach and the HP story, was published in SAMA’s Velocity magazine in October 2008 shortly before SEC embarked on its research programme.

One of the dramatic findings of the research was that 80% of the interviewees said that less than 10% of sales people sell to them in a way that meet or exceeded their expectations.

The conclusions of the research were that customers looked for certain critical values in sales people. The values they looked for were Authenticity, Client Centricity, Proactive Creativity™ and Tactful Audacity™. Only Top Performing sales people were seen to live the values of Proactive Creativity™ and Tactful Audacity™. By contrast the values customer frequently observed were Manipulation, Supplier Centricity, Complacency and Arrogance.

SEC’s Research Findings Since 2009 the Sales Excellence Council conducted a widespread and mainly quantitative research programme analysing core performing sales people and then top performing sales people. Their initial research was through first analysing the performance of 700 ‘reps’ (then expanded to 6000) as well as talking to sales managers. Their conclusions were that sales people fall into 5 types: The Hard Worker, The Challenger, The Relationship Builder, The Lone Wolf, and The Reactive Problem Solver.

Their dramatic finding was that 39% of the star performers fell into the Challenger Type where as only 7% of the star performers fell into the Relationship Builder Type. They came to the conclusion that traditional approaches to the sales development do not work. They claim that Solution Selling is dead and the traditional focus on techniques such as Spin selling is less relevant today. SEC has come to the same conclusion that we have, that focusing on needs based selling ‘no longer warrants the massive training investments poured into improving reps discovery skills’. Like us they conclude that few of a company’s sales teams actually fall into the Challenger Mode – in one extreme case they cite one sales director saying that of the hundred or so sales people in the team, 2 of them account for 80% of turnover.

Given the poor % performance of sales people, we have challenged some of the preconditioned thinking in the sales development industry, as the SEC has also done. The industry has traditionally focussed on addressing productivity of sales forces through a competency and process based perspective – many companies investing millions of dollars in training and development and process initiatives that seem to have little or no effect on customers perspectives of how good or poor sales people are at selling.

Our logic for framing observations around values and mindset is that unless you address the underpinning values that support behavioural change then attempts at making the change through just focussing on behaviour and related competency will become at best short term at worst a waste of time. Furthermore, from 2005 – 2009 Consalia worked with Hewlett Packard’s large deal pursuit team to operationaiise this approach on live deals and we

Where we overlap and differ We examine in more depth where our respective research findings concur and differ. Remember our research approach is from the

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customer perspective and the SEC approach is driven mainly from the sales organisation perspective.

Consalia explains the Tactful Audacity™ and Proactive Creativity™ values as follows:

First consider the terminology and descriptors being used. Here we need to compare SECs Challenger Type and our Tactful Audacity™ and Proactive Creativity™ values. SEC refer what they call ‘observed behaviours’ and used these to cluster behaviours around a construct they call type. Our observations are based on the fact that customers look beyond behaviour and seek a certain set of values from sales people. Observed behaviour is part, but only part, of how they compute a sales person’s value to them. We all have complex personal algorithms and intuition to make judgement on those we meet, a view also endorsed through Malcolm Gladwell in his book, ‘Blink’. We make the case that if organisations are looking for sustainable change; organisations have to approach this from a values perspective as values build culture. If the values are in place, behaviours follow.

Sales People seek to leverage con structive tension to their advantage across all dimensions of the sale.

Challenger reps openly pursue goals in a direct but non-aggressive way to overcome increased customer risk aversion.

Challenger reps deliver insight that reframes the ways customers think about their business and their needs.

Challenger reps communicate sales

The art of knowing how far to go too far (attributed to Jean Cocteau)

Drives behaviour that is daring, bold, challenging, aware of limits, diplomatic, unconventional, enthusiastic

Strategic forward thinking, innovative,

creative, reflective, above and beyond

Here we see some striking similarities in what both organisations have concluded are pre-requisites for top performing sales people.

In addition, our research showed sales people have to earn the right to enter that space where the real value of the relationship can be developed i.e. through challenging or tactfully audacious conversations, by satisfying the customer they are both ‘authentic’ and ‘client centric’.

This draws us to another interesting point. SEC argues that in today’s environment, particularly with more complex selling scenarios, customers are making more ‘consensus’ driven decisions. Therefore it is more difficult for sales people to develop relationships - they conclude that the Relationship Builder Type is irrelevant ... ‘the likelihood relationship builders will achieve star status is almost zero’.

SEC explain the Challenger type as follows:

Lets now compare the SEC’s Challenger descriptors for top performers with Consalia’s Tactful Audacity™ and Proactive Creativity™ descriptors for top performers.

messages in the context of the cus tomer.

Our research suggests that relationships are important – as Trust is a key element of a customer’s decision-making process. A customer is often naturally sceptical of sales people as a consequence of years of being over sold to and under serviced. A sales person therefore has to earn the right to be ‘Proactively Creative “and “Tactfully Audacious’. They earn this by ticking the boxes of “Authenticity” and ‘Cli-

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ent Centricity’. If they don’t tick these boxes they will be seen as arrogant.

ure of Scientific Revolutions’. Kuhn talks about ‘major turning points’ in scientific history associated with Copernicus, Newton, LaVoisier and Einstein and said that ‘each necessitated the community’s rejection of one-time honoured scientific theory in favour of another incompatible with it.’

We conclude that customers want ‘relationships’ with suppliers, and seek to have those with people who live the values of Proactive Creativity™ and Tactful Audacity™. Indeed we have seen many examples where great sales people have been chosen by the board because of these qualities – they appreciate the insight and challenge. These are rare. As SEC also reflects, customers want insights and ideas; we concur although highlight trust as the underpinning factor. Indeed one could argue that it is all about relationships, whether it is a ‘business to business’ relationship or a ‘board with a sales person or with an account team’, or a ‘sales person with a consumer’. It is not one or the other as suggested by SEC.

Reading further in Kuhn’s book, he says that ‘paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognise as acute.’

(Perhaps this explains the, sometimes vitriolic, responses from those that can be described as ‘traditionalists’ of the sales training world commenting negatively on the recently published Challenger Sale book).

Conclusions

We question whether the word ‘Challenger’ really nails it. There is much debate about the word ‘challenge’ and indeed its precursor, ‘provocative’ selling. Both can have a negative context and if misinterpreted and used wrongly, will not produce intended results with customers. SEC however, are careful to position the explanation of the word (and write with great eloquence on this topic), but even so, these words could stick in corporate lexicon and potentially be misused by misinformed and poorly educated sales people. So why use a word that can be misinterpreted?

But putting all in perspective, whilst there are some differences, our respective underlying findings and conclusions are extremely close.

To conclude, both our research, conducted from 2004-8 and now the SECs research conducted from 2009, state too few sales people meet expectations of customers and both organisations. We need to accept there is an acute problem in the way that sales people sell to customers. It is clear that there is an inflexion point happening in the world of sales - as the Harvard Business Review’s recent Nietzsche’s inspired title, ‘Solution Selling is Dead’ infers. Both organisations reached very similar conclusions on the why? Those involved in sales and in the education of sales professionals should accept a new paradigm is now emerging. The evidence is all too clear.

What we really appreciate about this important piece of research is that it has stimulated a debate about what works and does not work in the area of sales performance improvement. How significant a change is this?

Lets consider the writings of Thomas Kuhn the great American physicist, historian and philosopher who was the person who coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’. In his book ‘The Struct-

As said at the outset, the research findings of both organisations have big implications for the sales, sales education and recruitment industry.

How can we raise the bar of professional selling and make it a profession we are all proud to be part of? According to the findings we are certainly along way from that point today.

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Time will tell whether these converging research initiatives have indeed created a paradigm shift.

Dr Phil Squire CEO Consalia Copyright Š 2012 Consalia Ltd

Get in Touch For more information on the aforementioned, award winning WVPÂŽ programmes, as well as our newly launched and pioneering in-house Masters programmes for Sales, please contact: UK Head Office:

Tel: +44 (0)208 977 6944

email: psquire@consalia.com

For the Masters:

email: masters@consalia.com

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

or visit: www.consalia.com

15.10.2012

About Consalia Consalia is a global sales performance improvement company. We help international organisations transform their sales effectiveness through consultancy and customised training & development solutions.

Our mission is to bring the greatest value to our customers by using our global network of wholly-owned offices and international partners.

We do this by aligning our approach to the specific business drivers of each customer’s business. We tailor solutions to suit different cultural environments and show our customers how to apply their sales strategy effectively.

We invite you to explore how our proven mindset approach to sales has transformed the sales performance of some of the world’s foremost organisations, and generated validated sales improvement of over $6.75 billion in 6 years, and growing!

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

15.10.2012

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

15.10.2012

CHALLENGER Mindset Tactful Audacity TM vision

PARADIGM SHIFT

reflect

Simple

Creative

Insight Proactive

win SEC

Constructive Tension

Research

RIsk aversion

Provocative Selling

New Thinking

CHANGE Observed Behaviour

bold

Consalia

Values

sales perceptions

Tactful AudacityTM & The Challenger Sale

15.10.2012