Leading Matters #23 Brent Adamson The Challenger Sale

Leading Matters #23 features Brent Adamson, the co-author of the New York Times bestselling Challenger Sale, and its follow up the Challenger Customer. Brent provocatively suggests that solution selling may make your offering more of a commodity and also make it harder for your customers to buy. 

This interview with Brent Adamson is something that you don’t want to miss.  It will challenge you to think differently about how you are going to market.  It will make you re-evaluate your content strategy to determine if it is too ‘us’ centric.  A content strategy that is to ‘us’ centric, Adamson suggests, could mean that you are missing the chance to create opportunities with prospects before the would-be customer is even aware that a need exists.

Sound ridiculous?  It isn’t.  In fact, if you are not taking steps to understand the idea of the challenger sale, and now the challenger customer, you do so at the risk of falling behind competitors in your space that are investing in better understand the idea of becoming a challenger. 

Consider these questions: When was the last time you wrote a piece of content that was intended to convince the audience how wrong they are?  How about the last time you stopped surveying your customers about how they think about you in favor of asking them what they think about themselves and their business?  Or when was the last time that you told your prospect what they need before they could tell you what they are looking for.

Should you start adopting a challenger mentality?  Probably, but to better understand what it is and the impact it will have on literally every area of your business give the 40 or so minutes with Brent a listen. 

HIGHLIGHTS

The five questions the challenger organization must ask.

Brent offers a quick yet thorough assessment that any company can use to adopt a challenger sales approach.

Solution selling costs too much and delivers too little.

Adamson offers up a simple example.  Fed-Ex is a global logistics leader.  They have invested much in becoming so, and they execute incredibly.  The major competitors in their space made the same investments over the same period.  The result is that what uniquely differentiates Fed-Ex isn’t differentiation at all.  Lots of costs to get there, and little margin growth to show for it. 

Consumption of Disruption

Content marketing must serve up disruption of the prevailing thought that most in your marketplace has about their businesses.   

Do we know our customer’s business better than they do?

Your customers know how to make money, how to save it, and how to mitigate risk.  We have to help them consider undiscovered new ways to make, save and mitigate.  More importantly, we must find where in our customers’ business model there exists a blind spot that is causing them problems today.  Problems that will be far worse tomorrow if the problem goes unaddressed.

Why too much information makes it harder for your customers to buy.

We must understand that our service and product providers in the marketplace inundate customers with information, options, and alternatives to help them address their ‘pains.’  The amount of information can become overwhelming.

And the proverbial much much more. 

Do yourself a favor and add this one to the list.  In fact, pick a date and time that you will commit to listening to it in its entirety.   

Let us know what you think.