Implementing Challenger™- Are you ready to place that Bet?

The Business case for Change: Lessons learned for the Sales Leader

When the Challenger™ insights are applied correctly, the upside impact on a company’s growth strategy can be significant.

Every company’s circumstances are different, but at some point a Sales leader needs to ‘place a bet’ on which brand and selling techniques they will use to develop their sales organization. In my view you should place that bet on the Challenger ™ thinking from The Corporate Executive Board (CEB). The purpose of this article is to provide some lessons I learned when placing that bet, to assist the sales leader who is preparing the business case for a Challenger ™ project.

Is there a Case for Change?

Yes. But implementing a Challenger™ project is a big bet, so the business reasons need to be compelling. I don’t doubt you have a lot of data which highlights your issues and identifies the case for change. But this is a strategic decision, and if you are accountable for the numbers then the CEO will rely on your knowledge, judgement and willingness to make a personal big bet on this project.

Business case and executive alignment

Execution is everything but there are some lessons I learned during the planning phase which on reflection made the execution a lot easier. And I’ve included some thoughts which after reflection I wish we had placed a higher priority on. You might conclude many of these are common sense. They are. And they are critical.

Business Case:

• The business case and any working capital investments need to be justified. If you believe the anticipated sales growth is clear, then a straight line revenue growth and a lower SG&A % over a defined period of time may be possible. My own view is a ‘Real Options’ financial model is more realistic because the quantified outcomes, tactics and how long it will take will change over time. You will learn as you implement, and new organizational ideas will surface so you need the support of the CEO and CFO when this occurs. As long as the financial baseline you are committing to is achievable, then it’s better to be honest and realistic when setting expectations. Define the actions and milestones in return for a committed budget for a committed period of time and a committed review cycle. And above all, focus on measures which demonstrate improvements in the average sales person’s results. This is where the biggest impact exists.

• You may need to convince the leadership team that a strategic change in the allocation of working capital is required. For most companies I know, the working capital for a sales organization is dedicated to the training and implementation of sales productivity systems (e.g. CRM, Forecasting, pipeline management). Given this, and the resistance of the broader leadership team you may need to use data about the changes in buyer behaviour to explain why you believe allocating working capital to help sales people to develop original and authentic ideas for their customers is now as important if not more so. Get ready for a debate.

Executive Alignment

• A Challenger ™ project will not just impact the sales organization. It will impact your entire organization so have the right executive sponsors in place to support the changes and drive cross team collaboration. It’s quite possible your organizational dynamics and culture will change. I’d have your brand strategy and HR leads involved to ensure you manage the changes and ensure everyone across the organization benefits from the project.

• As the executive sponsor, your messages and actions will be critical. Define the business priorities and your sales manager’s commitments, make these transparent to the organization. As input to defining these commitments, read and re-read the Manager and the Challenger ™ Sales model in “The Challenger ™ Sale”* book. Make sure your sales managers are ready and armed with the skills to implement the recommendations.

Implementation:

• If you are implementing Challenger ™ ‘mid-flight’, then start small, prove it, and accelerate to scale. Don’t be afraid to run multiple, sequential pilots across sales teams, deal types and customers if you have a large team.

• The Challenger ™ Sales Model can be applied to both complex and simple sales. The sales people should take the lead to generate the original and authentic ideas for key account customers and big deals. And the marketing team should take the lead to generate the customer insights and value statements for the sales teams involved in selling repeatable solutions to multiple customers.

• The biggest improvements are likely to occur with your average performing sales people. Your sales managers need to be armed with the right coaching tools and framework to encourage this change. The adoption by sales people to teach, tailor and take control will improve their capabilities during the sales cycle in 4 areas:

  1. The research, insights and planning by  the sales person should be focussed on developing an original and authentic ideas which they can proactively market to their customers;

  2. Presenting the idea proactively will encourage the sales person to prepare and think deeply about their customer’s environment and the competition;

  3. Being humble enough to realise they may not have all the answers, a sales person should be encouraged to brainstorm and further strengthen the idea with the client’s input. This creates a competitive advantage;

  4. You may uncover a new ‘last step’ in the sales cycle for sales people….to fully integrate this approach with the rest of the organization I believe the sales team should be accountable to document the lessons learned after the contract is  delivered. These insights can be harvested by the Product R&D and Marketing teams to provide a rich vein of insights for cross team collaboration. But you might find the greatest untapped potential is when these insights are used to strengthen the link between your company’s corporate strategy and real evidence on the market’s direction based on why and what your customers are buying. Just imagine what your world might be like if your product R&D organization had 10 buying and selling insights on every customer you sold to last year?

If teach, tailor and take control are selling capabilities you want all your sales people to adopt, then be ready to redefine the measures you use to define a sales person productivity.

Possible follow up actions:

• Make sure you have the full support of your executive leadership team and your front line sales managers have formal commitments in place to support the project.

• I would not hesitate to get CEB and the Sales Effectiveness Solutions team involved to help you with ideas and insights to build your business case. They have a lot of evidence as the number of adoptions increase, and potentially can assist with the implementation.

• Be ready for a strong response from your competitors.