The Challenger Sale

We are headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, but have offices around the globe, also in the UK, serving our EMEA population.

We are based on the research of the bestselling book, The Challenger Sale, which came out in 2010.

So it's funny because it was actually released during the recession, during some crazy uncertain times.

And look where we are now.

They lean too much on passion and enthusiasm and trying to befriend somebody into hiring them.

And the whole book, "The Challenger Sale," kind of speaks, speaks to this point.

Um, it was the, in the study that underpinned that book.

So the study showed that this profile that's known as the challenger is the most likely to be a, a top performer in any B2B sale, and the most likely to be a, a bottom performer or the least likely to be a top performer is the relationship builder, somebody who has a high affi- affinity need.

So what you're saying in this episode is that people are starting to use the tool for the research and then the selection process where it starts to spit out sort of recommended service providers or experts or whatever else.

Yeah, so here's a good clip from my conversation with Jeff where he talked about the challenger sale and how AI search is really replacing the first 63% of that buying journey.

So here comes Jeff.

In your opinion, how has AI search impacted the buying journey?

So I am going to quote a book that I think everyone probably who's listening to this podcast has read at some point in time.

But it is The Challenger Sale, which is probably one of my favorite books of all time.

And I think that AI has turned organic search into The Challenger Sale, which if you need a quick synopsis.

The entire concept of the challenger sale is trying to interrupt the user's buying journey before they get to that 63% of their buying journey path, which is the idea of, all right, cool, I'm ready to buy.

And, and they didn't come up with it.

They hired this consulting group called the Corporate Executive Board, very famous for writing a book called The Challenger Sale.

Mm.

And they had written a big binder that was kind of like, how do you, how does an IBM sales rep manage a first call? But in there, there was a very high-level structure, and it was specific to IBM.

Now, Zach Gropper did not end up in Hollywood.

He ended up stuck in Lithuania waiting on a visa, and he took a job with a company called CEB, which is Corporate Executive Board, almost by accident, and then spent the next 15 years on the team that built the Challenger sale model.

He'll tell you to this day he still thinks about directing actors when he watches sales calls.

We get into a ton of stuff on this conversation, including where the industry got Challenger badly wrong, including all the companies that just mailed out the book to their reps and called it transformation.

Yeah, thanks for coming on.

This is gonna be an interesting conversation.

I mean, the, the Corporate Executive Board angle with Challenger Sale and what- what's going on right now, I have a lot of curiosity around that as it relates to your background and then what you're doing today.

But as we always do here on the Make It Happen Monday podcast, we go back a little bit before, uh, before the LinkedIn days, talking a little bit about your origin story.

Like you said, it is another product and it, has chapters and records.

And the way that I talk about it is what if you don't have to do a mad dash scramble? Maybe, you know, someone at your client is retiring or maybe at your agency, someone is handing over a book of business.

You're going to sit there and go through all the emails and the PDFs and your AMS and your CRM.

What if it's already there? It's already there.

Say that again.

So in GenPro, the challenger sales method is built from

the book, the challenger sales.

OK.