The Challenger® Selling Model is based on the fact that Challenger™ sellers use disruptive insights to challenge customers’ assumptions and force them to think differently. They take back control of the purchase conversation in a way that leads customers back to the unique strengths of their organization.
This approach is critical in the increasingly complex buying landscape with more decision-makers and stakeholders involved than ever before. In this post, we will outline the three critical steps to bring challenger sales to life.
1. Relationship Maps to Visualize the Challenger Sales Model
Revegy provides a solution to identify and navigate the stakeholder landscape within the modern buyer landscape with relationship maps. These maps visualize the complex organizational and political structure of buying centers including who matters, who influences who, and what each individual cares about.
Relationship maps help reps engage mobilizers (the most important people to influence in the Challenger sale) and tailor their pitch to matters most to these individuals.
With a deeper understanding of how key personas are connected, as well as the routes to power, you can close the gaps on those all-important must-win deals and more easily reach your revenue targets.
2. Opportunity Planning to Inform Challenger Sales Strategy
Successfully executing the Challenger sales model relies on an opportunity plan. Opportunity plans provide a visual way to strategize and map out complex opportunity cycles by delivering a lens into the most critical areas impacting the sales cycle, including:
- Stakeholders/influencers
- Customer issues and value drivers
- Potential risks and barriers to close
By placing the increasingly complex buyers’ journey in a visual context, sales teams gain the clarity they need to identify critical knowledge gaps, potential risks, and common delay indicators so they can take the best next step to increase win ratios and reduce deal slippage.
The process of mapping out the most common factors in winning and losing a deal – relationships, buyer priorities, corporate goals, competitive threats and more – enables reps to think critically about how to approach each deal and how to focus their activities and energy to gain the highest return on effort.
Revegy’s opportunity planning solution is what Oracle used to coach 75% of their largest revenue deals last year, with their hybrid sales model that featured elements from the Challenger sale.
3. Execution Playbooks to Reinforce the Challenger Sale Model
The most critical facet of any enterprise-scale sales organization is a manageable, repeatable process and standardized toolkit with all of the resources sales needs to succeed. Revegy offers execution playbooks that bring the Challenger customer buying process to life.
You have a highly compensated and talented sales team — one that could crush the competition if they had the right materials at the right time to attack every opportunity. Execution Playbooks provide the necessary tools to drive real, sustainable revenue growth by providing a visual context that gives inside, field or channel sales teams the customer-focused clarity they need to identify gaps, correlations and hidden connections within complex sales cycles.
Revegy’s execution-focused playbooks guide and empower reps to stay focused on the buyer’s journey, not just their sales process, and allow reps to align their activities and strategies to how the customer evaluates and purchases. These playbooks are interactive and include links to content/videos/artifacts, etc. to reinforce training and the challenger methodology.
Revegy Brings Challenger to Life
Revegy brings Challenger to life and takes it from theory to an operational, measurable, repeatable and predictable framework for ongoing execution. A big challenge with companies that adopt sales methodologies is how to reinforce them over time. Reps often “unlearn” what they learn during kickoffs and training after a short time.
Revegy offers a set of purpose-built tools that are visual in nature designed to operationalize the challenger model so it becomes a part of reps’ daily enablement.
CHALLENGER® is a registered trademark of CEB, Inc. Revegy is not affiliated with or endorsed by CEB, Inc.
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Register for a brief, interactive demo where you’ll be introduced to a few of the visual maps and plans that world-class companies like Oracle, Infosys, and McAfee are using to navigate the relationships, priorities, risks and opportunities involved in key account management and complex sales deals.
