Selling Is Not About Relationships
Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organisation has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?
To understand what sets this special group of sales reps apart, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6 000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.
Identifying high impact sellers
We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights:
1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.
Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterised by a specific set of skills and behaviours that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers:
- Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organisation. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
- Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
- Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, rulebreaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
- Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
- Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.
2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.
When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.
What makes the Challenger approach different?
The data tells us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:
- Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn’t realised even existed.
- Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer. They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organisation.
- Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.
Each of these capabilities is discussed in more depth in the following articles, but readers may find that as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it’s almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.
Why is this ?
It’s certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales – that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tells us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matters. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer’s every demand.
Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organisation, being likeable and generous with their time.
The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.
This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organisations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.
Here’s how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: “You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it’s been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we’re in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can’t sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why.”
3. Challengers dominate the world of complex ‘solution-selling’
Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the downeconomy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggests that this is wishful thinking.
When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers.
At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments. Put differently, Challengers win because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy.
Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren’t just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.
The Worst Question a Sales Person Can Ask
“What’s keeping you up at night?”
This one question is probably asked by more sales people in a given day than any other. But while it seems innocuous — maybe even the right thing to ask a customer — it’s a question that simultaneously prevents sales while also destroying customer loyalty.
To understand what makes this question so destructive, we need to first understand where it comes from. For years, most sales training has focused on a single core principle: the shortest path to sales success is a deep understanding of your customers’ needs. If we can understand what’s keeping customers up at night, we can build tight linkages between their problems and our solutions, thereby improving our chances of selling something.
As a result, companies have poured money into teaching their reps to ask better questions. But while it sounds great on paper, this approach suffers from two major problems. First, improving reps’ ability to diagnose needs on the fly proves colossally difficult — especially among average performers. Second, and more to the point, this approach is based on a deeply flawed assumption: customers actually know what they need in the first place.
But what if customers don’t know what they need?
What if customers’ single greatest need, ironically, is to figure out exactly what they need? If this were true, the better sales technique might be to tell customers what they need. We have already described a type of rep we call a Challenger. These gifted, high-performing reps succeed by doing just this, revealing to customers problems — and solutions — that they don’t even see. This isn’t your standard solution-selling approach, focused on open-ended needs diagnosis. A sales conversation with a Challenger provides valuable insight to customers instead of extracting it.
What does this sound like in practice?
In our book, we present several case studies, but one of our favourites is from WW Grainger Inc, the distributor of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) supplies. In the past, Grainger reps led with facts and figures about their company — how old they are, how many items they stock, how many distribution centres they have, and so on, all leading to the inevitable “So, that’s who we are. Now tell me, what’s keeping you
up at night?”
Today, a conversation with a Grainger rep is very different. It focuses almost exclusively on a series of proprietary insights Grainger has developed about its customers that prompt them to think very differently about how to manage their MRO spending — in ways that could potentially save them millions.
Rather than trying to convince customers to go with Grainger as their supplier of choice for planned MRO purchasing (which inevitably leads to a price-focused discussion), Grainger reps start by showing them how much money they are likely to be wasting every year on unplanned purchases, which Grainger’s research shows can be up to 40% of the average company’s MRO spending.
No supplier wants to be in the business of free consulting — and Grainger is no different. The key is to teach in a way that leads customers to your unique benefits as opposed to leading with them. After reframing the way customers think about MRO spending, Grainger reps create an opportunity to talk about a set of capabilities they can offer to better manage that spend, ultimately leading to higher-level sales conversations and bigger deals.
These conversations aren’t happen-stance
There’s a specific art to getting them right. We’ve found that insight-led sales conversations like Grainger’s follow a distinct choreography that’s markedly different from your standard sales pitch. Importantly, this isn’t something to leave to your individual reps to figure out.
Marketing plays a critical role in identifying these teachable insights and equipping reps with the tools to deliver them to customers. Done well, this sort of sales approach creates a powerfully differentiated interaction for customers because it leads with insight, not tiresome questions. And, as it turns out, that difference really matters.
In a survey of more than 5 000 business customers, we found that of all of the possible factors that could drive customer loyalty — including brand, product and service quality, and price-to-value ratio — by far the biggest driver is something most companies don’t even think about: the sales experience, accounting for 53% of the overall total. Customer loyalty, it turns out, is more a function of how you sell than what you sell. Specifically, customers reward suppliers who ‘offer unique and valuable perspectives on the market’ and ‘educate them on new issues and outcomes.’
Customers were painfully blunt on this point: They perceived very little difference between suppliers on things like brand, product or price. At the same time, the sales experiences they delivered were highly variable. Some reps, they said, would so thoroughly waste their time that at the end of the sales call they felt as though they’d just been robbed of an hour of their lives. On the other hand, those same customers told us that other reps would take the time to provide information so interesting and valuable that — to paraphrase sales author, Neil Rackham — the customer would have been willing to pay for the conversation
itself. ‘I love meeting with those folks,’ customers would tell us, ‘I always learn something when I spend time with them.’
When you think about the conversations your sales reps are having with your customers, how would you describe them? Are they asking your customers
what’s keeping them up at night — or telling them what should be keeping them up at night?
Why Your Sales People Are Pushovers
One of the age-old stereotypes in business is the pushy sales person. But what if we told you that the real issue in sales today isn’t that sales people tend to be too pushy, but that they’re not pushy enough? One of the defining attributes of that special type of high-performing sales rep called the Challenger is that they take control of the sale by being assertive.
Taking control
What does this look like in practice? Challengers take control in three important ways.
1. Telling customers what should keep them up at night
First, Challengers use proprietary insights to change the way customers think about their business and highlight the suppliers’ unique ability to create value. If customers respond, as they invariably do, that
the insights don’t apply in their situation, Challengers don’t back down. They know that if they want customers to buy differently, they’re first going to have to get them to think differently — and that they may have to get a little scuffed up in the process.
2. Guiding customers through to complete the sale
Second, knowing that today’s complex deals are often just as difficult to buy as they are to sell, Challengers actively guide customers through the purchase process. They maintain the momentum of the sale by pushing customers to engage the right internal stakeholders at the right time with the right message. Challengers don’t ask customers how the deal is going to get done, waiting for the customer to ‘coach’ them. They teach customers how to drive consensus for the purchase — as more often than not, customers themselves don’t really know how to do it.
3. Taking control at the negotiation table
Finally, Challengers take control in negotiating commercial details — especially at that crucial moment when the customer looks them in the eye and says, ‘If we could just get a 5% discount, I think we could get this done by the end of the week.’ Unlike most reps whose response to a discount request is either to ‘consult with a manager’ or to ‘meet the customer half way,’ Challengers table the discount request altogether and instead push the conversation back to the value they’re providing to the customer. They acknowledge the request for a price concession, but defer a decision and, if pressed, offer other less costly concessions.
The balance of power
Now, of course, in all of these situations Challengers push back respectfully, professionally, empathetically and in a manner consistent with local culture (the way you challenge in Japan is different from the way you do it in South Africa, for example). But, make no mistake, Challengers do push back.
When we present this research to sales leaders, we hear a common refrain: ‘If we tell our reps to sell like Challengers and be more assertive, they’ll go too far. They’ll take it as a licence to become aggressive.’ But more often than not, this concern is unwarranted. In reality, most reps are far more likely to be passive than aggressive with customers. Guided by years of training and a deeply seated but mistaken belief that they should always do what the customer wants, reps seek to resolve tension with customers quickly, rather than prolong it. But maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension is exactly what Challengers do.
Why do most reps fear tension? We see two reasons. First, they feel they have no choice — it’s either acquiesce or lose the deal. Yet, in a recent survey of sales reps and procurement officers, BayGroup International determined that while 75% of reps believe that procurement has the upper hand in the rep-customer relationship, 75% of procurement officers believe that reps have more power.
What does that tell us? At the very least, if reps give in simply because of a perceived power imbalance, they’re conceding way too easily. Second, most reps adopt a passive posture because senior management has told them to. How so? In ongoing efforts to differentiate their companies, virtually every leadership team has exhorted their team to ‘put the customer first,’ or ‘place the customer at the centre of everything we do.’ It’s not a bad strategy, mind you, but it backfires when leadership is vague about how this translates to specific behaviour.
Without clear guidance, most reps simply slip into ‘order taker’ mode, closing small, disaggregated, pricedriven deals at a discount all in the name of ‘giving customers what they want.’ How would you describe the best reps in your organisation? Do they acquiesce to customer demands and passively take business that’s given to them or do they push their customers and use tension to their advantage?
How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps
It’s no secret that sales and marketing executives don’t always see eye to eye.
In a recent Corporate Executive Board survey, sales executives’ top terms for their marketing colleagues included ‘paper pushers,’ ‘academic,’ and perhaps worst of all, ‘irrelevant.’ On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as ‘simple minded,’ ‘cowboys,’ and flat out ‘incompetent.’
Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative. Management has long called for sales and marketing to bury the hatchet, but the requests often lack urgency and are generally met with indifference.
That must change. In today’s historically difficult selling environment, the rift between sales and marketing seriously undermines even the bestperforming reps.
Challengers excel by creating constructive tension with customers through unique and surprising competitive insights. However, all but the very best Challengers will struggle to source and package those insights unless they have organisational support — especially from marketing. Yet much of the sales support marketing provides falls short because it’s focused on teaching customers about the supplier’s business, not the customer’s.
Worse, the function responsible more than any other for differentiating your solution in the marketplace often churns out collateral and sales tools that look and sound exactly like everyone else’s. Where’s the teaching in that? Don’t take our word for it. In a recent study, public relations expert Adam Sherk analysed the most frequent terms in company communications, and the results were eye opening. Here are the top ten: Leader, leading, best, top, unique, great, solution, largest, innovative, and innovator.
Sound familiar?
Most companies’ marketing materials make generic claims like ‘an industry leader with decades of experience helping global customers achieve business objectives through unique solutions and uncompromised
value.’
Blah, blah, blah. When customers hear such commoditised messages often enough, they stop hearing them altogether. So, you say to your customers, ‘Our solution is unique,’ and your customers don’t believe you. Why should they? Your message sure isn’t. Their reply? ‘That’s fantastic. Can I get a discount?’ After all, why should your customer pay more for your solution when it sounds exactly like everyone else’s? So what’s the alternative? In our book, we share case studies of companies whose marketing organisations have got it right.
Four rules Challenger marketing organisations live by:
1. Identify your unique capabilities, not all your capabilities
In their excitement to tell the world about their broader ‘solution,’ most marketing organisations fail to identify the handful of capabilities that truly set them apart. Sure, your products are ‘faster,’ ‘newer,’ ‘smaller,’ ‘bigger,’ or ‘greener,’ but why does it matter?
If customers see no difference between you and the competition, anything you teach them will simply wind up in an RFP headed for a price-driven bake-off. Bottom line, if you can’t identify the unique capabilities customers should be willing to pay you for, they’re sure not going to do it for you.
Answer the question, ‘Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?’ It’s a simple question, but often proves surprisingly hard to answer. It’s shocking how many companies are unable to identify what truly sets their solution apart.
2. Focus on the unique capabilities your customers currently under-value
Most marketing organisations naturally focus on capabilities customers value disproportionately. The thinking goes: customers want it, we’re best at it, so that’s the core of our value proposition. The best marketing
organisations, however, are far more interested in promoting capabilities customers under-value.
Why? Because their primary goal is to teach customers new perspectives, not reinforce existing ones. The best teaching opportunities often spring from the question, ‘What is it that customers fail to appreciate about their business that leads them to under-value our capability?’ The answer provides a strong foundation for insights that challenge customers’ thinking.
3. Design messages that lead to those capabilities, not with them
Virtually all marketing collateral suffers from the same flaw. If the first five pages — and the first ten slides — of your collateral or sales pitch deck are about you (and they almost invariably are), you’ve got it wrong. Build messages that lead to your unique capabilities. In a teaching conversation, the supplier enters the conversation at the end, not the beginning.
4. Calculate the ROI of changing behaviour, not of buying a solution
Finally, equip reps with an ROI calculator that shows customers the value of behaviour change. Surprisingly, the best ROI calculators are supplier agnostic. They’re built to convince customers to do something, not to buy something — to take action on whatever new perspective you’ve just taught them.
Of course, when customers ask, ‘Wow, who can help us do this?’ the rep must be able to legitimately say, ‘Let me show you how we’re uniquely able to help make this happen.’ Successfully challenging customers’ thinking is a team sport. Does your company set up Challengers to succeed? Pull out the latest piece of collateral produced by your marketing organisation. Does it equip your sales people to teach customers about their company or about yours?
