The Challenger Sale

THE BESTSELLING SALES CLASSIC WITH 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships - and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not is what drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board, to investigate the skills, behaviours, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades. Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one - the Challenger - delivers consistently high performance. 'Read it, think about it, implement it. You, and your organization, will be glad you did' Professor Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling 'The Challenger Sale breaks the winning elements of this powerful approach into a set of teachable skills that can take even a top sales team to a new level of results delivery' Dan James, former chief sales officer, DuPont

BRENT ADAMSON is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Challenger Sale and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. MATTHEW DIXON is executive director of the Financial Services and Customer Contact Practices of CEB. He is a coauthor of both The Challenger Sale and The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. PAT SPENNER is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review. NICK TOMAN is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. CEB is the leading member-based advisory company. By combining the best practices of thousands of member companies with its advanced research methodologies and human capital analytics, CEB equips senior leaders, and their teams with insight and actionable solutions to transform operations.