Notes on The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson

After reading the classic The Challenger Sale and Effortless Experience, I wanted to complete the trio of related books and recently finished reading The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. Having been involved now with dozens of complex enterprise sales processes, I appreciated and recognized many elements this book talked about, such as how modern sales processes involve on average 5.4 stakeholders and how hard it is to achieve consensus and a decision.

​I liked the idea of focusing on mobilizers and appreciated the research the authors conducted to figure out how to identify them and categorize them into different types to further tailor your approach. I also liked how it built upon the commercial insight/teaching concept from earlier books and further reinforced that. The case studies about the dental instruments company and Xerox were illustrative too.

This is a great book for anyone leading complex sales processes. My main notes and takeaways are below.

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​Intro
Hardest part of selling solutions
Number and diversity of internal stakeholders
Failure to agree internallly
Internal stakeholders who can be champions
Need a challenger inside the org then win them over
Mobilizers

1 dark side of customer consensus
Price competition
Customers not caring as much about value or differentiation even for favorite solution
Average 5.4 people in buying committee
Broader scope of solutions mean more buyers involved
Challenger approach: teach, tailor, take control
More access to decision makers led to more high quality deals but more personalized work with each decision maker led to less high quality deals 
Don’t just pitch 5.4 times
Selling to individuals not same as selling to group of individuals
The higher the stakeholder diversity the higher the stakeholder dysfunction
Climbing the me to we mountain
Define problem
Identify solution
Shop to different vendors
Group decisions twice as hard as individual ones
Customers are 57% through their process to reach out to suppliers
Prelim research already done
Group conflict peaks at 37% at solution identification
Gap between 37 to 57% means lots of opportunities lost before even talking to suppliers
Marketing needs to anticipate needs and reach
Mental model Venn diagrams across customer stakeholders
Very little overlap often
Individuals all say yes but group says no if each individual thinks it’s a big project personalized for them
From me to we
Awareness
Evaluate solution
Group consensus
Tailor for group consensus not individual buy in
Need right partner internally to do this

2 the mobilizer
Systematic thinking around who to target internally to drive internal consensus
Star performers build consensus not just find it
7 customer stakeholder types
Go getter
Skeptic
Friend 
Teacher
Guide
Climber
Blocker
Mobilizers key attributes 
Drive change
Build consensus
Best profiles called mobilizers are go getter, skeptic, teacher
Other profiles are talkers
Sell to mobilizers not talkers
Teach commercial insights
Tailor to mobilizer based on type
Take control
Commercial coaching

3 the art of unteaching
Selling solutions is selling change which orgs don’t want
Key is having commercial insight
Two drivers of content matter
Teaching them something new about their own business
Giving them a reason to take action and explain cost of inaction 
Not thought leadership
Teaching not just confirming
There needs to be a moment in the content where you tell customer they’re wrong
Teach customers pain of staying worse than pain of changing
Need to change customer’s mental model
Focus on the behavior change regardless of supplier and the current customer state 
4 steps to building commercial insight
What are our sustainable unique strengths
Of those which ones are currently under appreciated by customers 
What is it about a customer’s business that they fail to understand that leads them to under appreciate those parts of our unique strengths
What can we teach them about their business so they value it more
Find credible evidence

4 building commercial insight
You don’t find insight. You make it. 
First build customer mental model
Root cause diagram for customer goal
3 or 4 nodes
Breaking mental model
Unteaching
Explaining a hidden cost not appreciated before
Adding missing box or arrow of mental model or expanding one

5 commercial insight in action
List your differentiators
Create list of outcomes customers care about that start with verb
Test and verify with customers 
Prioritize and choose outcome based on importance
Hypothesize connections between outcomes and your differentiators
Find the external proof for insight

6 teaching mobilizers where they learn
Spark, introduce, confront - content strategy 
Content should tie to commercial insight
Create testimonials about the problem and about the current business not about the supplier
Content should be surprising
Confront can be ROI calculator

7 two types of tailoring
Figure out what content can appeal to mobilizers
Customer advisory panel to test insight ideas and content
Be skeptical of who you talk to and vet them to see if they’re a mobilizer
Qualify person is any of Go getter, teacher, skeptic
Do they engage with content and dig into it and ask questions? Customer skepticism good sign
How do they talk about greater needs and do they focus on greater org and other people or just themselves
Give them assignment and come back with point of view and see if they do it
Have them set up meeting and invite key others and see if they pull through 
Not just about seniority or title
Communication style tells us what type of mobilizer they are (stories or details)
Tailoring for group consensus
Build up shared vision of where need to go

8 taking control of consensus creation
Collective learning bonds stakeholders
Requires rep to do facilitation of customer debate 
Prompting and validating
Commercial Coaching not just listening to customers
Provide mobilizer with stories and proof points

9 making collective learning happen
Listen for how customers talk about what they care about in online conversations 
Equip mobilizers to bring stakeholders together
Turn sales collateral into marketing collateral from perspective of various stakeholders 
Workshop for stakeholders as qualifying mechanism to know if they’re serious

10 shifting to challenger commercial model
Demand generation 
Focus on how much teaching and how much prospect is confronted with new teaching 
Marketing talent
Sales process and opportunity planning
Want good verifiers where customer takes binary step forward in purchase
Actions and commitments
Use verifiers to judge pipeline status versus sales activities
Verifiers
Customer learning of content 
Willingness to take live call
Defined purchase criteria
Evaluation of options
Key stakeholders identified
Opportunity planning
Learn stage
Understand needs stage
Ask open ended questions to customer