By now, my assumption is that most readers of this blog have had at least some exposure to the work the Sales Executive Council has done this past year on the profile of the winning sales rep. If not, it’s probably worth a minute of your time to read Karen Freeman’s summary of this work in her previous post: Why Sales Challenger?. Across the past year we’ve been on the road sharing this work with members and I’d like to provide some insight into how those conversations have played out.
This work was specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?
Adding to what we can glean from Karen’s post, this quantitative effort uncovered five profiles of sales reps: The Challenger™, The Relationship Builder, The Hard Worker, The Lone Wolf and The Problem Solver. And our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist.
Now, as we dig into these profiles across different industries, The Relationship Builders that we found (the clear underperformers) are, in a sense, a “one trick pony” – squarely focused on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likeable and generous with their time. This is very much a service mentality.
And it was usually at this point in member conversation around this work that we would get some potential pushback – typically in the form of “but relationships are important to our success”.
Well, regarding the winning rep—The Challenger—the SEC’s work does not suggest that these reps don’t/can’t build strong relationships. In fact, the high-performer challengers found in the sample were above average on all of the “relationship building” attributes. They just don’t hang their hat on those attributes like a relationship builder would. Put another way, it’s not their major.
Instead, the Challenger rep uses those relationships as a starting point to achieve a specific end. This rep wins by creating and maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. They offer the customer unique perspectives – and communicate those perspectives with passion and precision in a way that draws the customer into a conversation. It’s customer value (Challenger approach) versus customer convenience (Relationship Builder).
Now, the other question that we often heard: “is this Challenger profile right for my company/industry?”
Let me provide some guidance on how we think about that…
The data tells us that The Challenger is far more likely to be a high performer in a complex environment than any other profile. Moreover, when we looked at the data through a different lens—the lens of deal complexity—we find something even more dramatic.
Click Image to Enlarge
Referencing the graphic to the right, we went back to the data and divided up the high performers according to the complexity of the deals they were doing. The bar on the left is the distribution of high performers selling relatively simple, stand-alone products (across a shorter sales cycle) and the bar on the right is the distribution of high performers selling complex bundles of products and solutions across a relatively longer sales cycle. And if we focus on the “distribution of high performers” across the 5 profiles (as you move from the left bar to right) the Challengers (the bottom slice of each bar) absolutely dominate —at well over 50% of the population.
Meanwhile, look what happens to the Relationship Builders as we move to a more complex environment (top slice of each bar in the illustration). The likelihood that they achieve “star status” falls to nearly zero. If we reflect on this, it’s the perfect snapshot for why so many of us struggle with the migration to solution-selling.
What this tells us: if we’re not buying or building Challenger reps, chances are we’re going to come up short as our world becomes more complex. These are the high performers we’re going to need to sell the more complex solutions many of us currently (or will eventually) rely on to survive.
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