The Challenger Customer Review

The Challenger Customer provides some very interesting insight on the current state of commercial selling, as well as a detailed path to improve the effectiveness of those current methods. The book begins by explaining the tricky nature of convincing buyers to pay a premium price for a premium solution rather than choosing the cheapest option out of a group of “good enough” finalists. It explains the cause of this in the beginning chapter and throughout the book by pointing out that businesses must now win over an average of 5.4 stakeholders in any given sale. The rest of the beginning chapter describes the difficult nature of getting large groups of diverse professionals to agree on features of a purchase and points out one of the main themes of the rest of the book: Rather than seeking them all out and winning them all over, sellers should seek out one particular stakeholder with certain characteristics and use these mobilizers to complete win over the others. It goes on to tell the difference between mobilizers and talkers and gives the reader a check list of attributes of each type of person within each category. After a seller identifies their Mobilizer, they must then go on a journey of unteaching the mobilizer so that they are able to look at their business in a different way, build commercial insight with the mobilizer so that they begin to understand the cost of inaction and where that could leave their business, and finally tailoring their sales pitch to the other 4.4 stakeholders in a way that allows them to create consensus within the group towards the purchase of a solution that only the seller’s company can provide. By getting these mobilizers to participate in this journey with the seller, the commercial company is able to get an “inside man” of sorts that can help in nearly numerous ways; ultimately turning a collection of yeses into a collective yes.

Three things that most surprised me about the book were as follows:

1. On page 15, the writers indicate that positioning an offering on the merits of value to an individual stakeholder (that makes up one of the 5.4 decision-makers) actually decreases the likelihood of making a high-quality deal by 4%. This metric seemed counterintuitive at first but after reading the rest of the book it began to make more sense that making this many different sales pitches did not end well once they were likely combined by decision-makers to compare and make a final decision.

2. With this issue being brought to light, I was obviously curious about what could increase the likelihood of making a high quality sale. On page 161 the writers showed that collective learning, in which the seller teaches the customer about their own business, actually increases the likelihood of the high quality sale by 20%. This was also surprising to me because before seeing the evidence laid out in the book it would not seem reasonable to me that buyers would want a seller trying to tell