I just finished reading The Challenger Sale, a book about consultative selling. I really appreciated its data driven approach. The book, written in 2011, outlines a new approach to selling that is fundamentally about bringing the seller’s business knowledge to bear to provide value to the seller. But not just value, value in a way that is both striking (something new the customer hasn’t thought of before) and that emphasizes the product the seller has to offer. An example they give is Grainger, who sells parts. Grainger did research and determined that a large amount of the dollar spend with them was for unplanned part purchases, which can be expensive in both purchase price and staff time. They worked with customers to take advantage of their sprawling inventory to better plan parts purchases.
They cover the different kinds of sales techniques that their research uncovered, as well as tactics to help people adopt “challenger” traits to become more successful. They also cover how to sell this methodology to front line sales managers.
Two things really stood out for me. The first is that every company needs to answer why their customers should purchase from them, as opposed to anyone else. This can be a hard conversation to have because once you strip away all the “innovation” and “customer centricity” sometimes you aren’t left with much. I know that when I was a contractor, I would have had a hard time with this–my best answer would probably have been “I’m trusted, available, knowledgable and local”, which kinda sounds like a copout.
The other great part of the book was at the very end when they talked about how these techniques could be used for the “selling” of internal services (IT, HR, market research, R&D). I found that really interesting in the context of larger corporations where some of the functions aren’t valued for strategic insight, but rather are order takers from the business. I have in fact myself been an order taker. It’s easy, but not as fun as being part of the strategic conversation.