商品簡介
What’s the secret to executing complex sales today? As the bestseller The Challenger Sale proved, challenging the customer is the key to success. But it turns out that’s only half the story. It’s not justthat you challenge but who you challenge that really matters. To win today, you need a Challengerinside the customer organization.
Picture your ideal customer: collegial, eager to meet with you, and ready to champion your products across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you should be pitching.
The need to understand how customers make their decisions, especially when it comes to selling large-scale, business-to-business solutions, drove the author team behindThe Challenger Sale to investigate how sales reps won high-quality deals. What that team discovered may turn the common wisdom about customer behavior upside down.
Based on an exhaustive study of hundreds of sales reps and thousands of customers across multiple industries and geographies, this book argues that focusing on the person with the highest title or even the person who most needs your product is something only average performers do. The team’s study found that every potential customer contact falls into one of seven distinct profiles, and while many are worth talking to, the highest performing reps concentrated their time on a specific few. Most sales reps prefer to approach customers who are open and eager to meet with them, people with clearly articulated needs that make them easy to connect to solutions. The authors call these customers Talkers. The high performers spent their time, instead, with customers who were less eager to meet with reps, generally skeptical and difficult to manage, and much more apt to be agnostic about one supplier over another. They call these customers Mobilizers.
Why? Much of the commoditization pressure suppliers face today isn’t actually the result of customers’ willingness to settle for “good enough.” It’s due instead to their failure to agree on anything more. High performers understand what their average-performing colleagues don’t: in a world in which complex deals require widespread consensus across a diverse—and typically dysfunctional—set of customer stakeholders, only Mobilizers have the skill and the will to fight for large-scale, disruptive change and, ultimately, help win the deal. Challenger sellers, in other words, target Challenger customers.
The authors unveil research that identifies Mobilizers and provide a roadmap for how sales and marketing teams can find them, engage them with disruptive insight, and leverage them to drive consensus across the customer organization.
Once you have identified the Mobilizers among your customers, almost any rep, with the right coaching, tools, and marketing support can start a chain reaction that leads to a whole organization getting on board with even the most provocative ideas.
作者簡介
BRENT ADAMSON is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Challenger Sale and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
MATTHEW DIXON is executive director of the Financial Services and Customer Contact Practices of CEB. He is a coauthor of both The Challenger Sale and The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
PAT SPENNER is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review.
NICK TOMAN is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
CEB is the leading member-based advisory company. By combining the best practices of thousands of member companies with its advanced research methodologies and human capital analytics, CEB equips senior leaders and their teams with insight and actionable solutions to transform operations.
