Friday May 7, 2016: The hardest thing was learning that the customer is always wrong. When business development software company SAP decided to retrain its 6,000 account executives and sales managers in the techniques of Challenger™ selling, it meant unlearning centuries of sales tradition based round agreeing with the customer.
The Challenger model starts from the premise that the most successful salespeople are those agile and responsive enough to teach their clients something new about their needs, and suggest unexpected solutions that add value to their business.
The model was developed by CEB, a research & technology company, based on a global study of B2B customers and sales professionals. It showed that the sales people who did best were those ready to disagree, to regain the initiative from clients who had spend some time researching what they wanted. It also showed that what customers really appreciated in a seller was not friendliness or compliance, but someone who used their experience and perspective to add value to their business, in a way that went far beyond mere low prices.
Disagree? This meant a new way of working. First, sales people had to research what a potential customer could be doing more effectively. When they approached the client, they must ask penetrating questions to expose areas of need that the client might have overlooked. Then they would steer talks towards a deal potentially some way from what the customer originally wanted.
The new method was not easy to master for a group of North American sales staff specialising in complex public sector deals who were the first to undergo SAP’s training programme.
Even though they had gone through two weeks of e-Learning and Ted talks to learn the theory, putting it into practice through role play took some getting used to.
“It was particularly important to practice the unfamiliar aspects of the Challenger concept, such as deliberately disagreeing with customers, even telling customers why their current business model would only offer very slight prospects for growth,” wrote Rainer Stern, SAP’s global vice president for sales acceleration and leadership programmes, in an article for Harvard Business Manager magazine.
“Learning to challenge customers was important, because many salespeople are inclined to create a particularly harmonious atmosphere when selling.”
In separate training sessions sales managers were taught to act as coaches, reminding their team to stick to the method by asking probing questions to make them to think like Challengers. “What creative idea did you use to surprise customers? What other customers do you know in the same sector, and what are the relevant KPIs?” they might ask.
For 90 days after the workshop, the sales staff and their managers cemented what they had learned by coaching and practising their new skills.
Having invested heavily in Challenger selling, SAP monitored its impact. Firstly, feedback from staff was good. Managers in particular were positive, with a 98 per cent approval rating. They realised that coaching saved them time, because salespeople who would previously have asked for instructions had learned to solve many problems themselves. Among sales staff, 95 per cent said they were changing the way they sold.
SAP compared performance and discovered that the proportion of deals closed (win rates) were up 26 per cent among trained staff compared to untrained colleagues. 26 per cent more sales opportunities (pipeline) were developed. Sales revenues were up 27 per cent among trained staff, while deal closing times were down by 25 per cent. Deal sizes increased by a factor of six.
SAP worked hard to promote the programme internally, and has now opened a sales university, headed by Stern, which continues to apply the latest developments in sales methodology.
“We are actually running our second big programme as a follow up to Challenger,” says Stern. “We consider all kinds of new trends and changes in the market, and above all, the feedback from our customers. I would say we are now moving a little way from the CEB textbook version of the programme, to a more SAP customer-centric version of the programme.”
SAP’s Challenger programmes have achieved international recognition with four major prizes, including a Brandon Hall Excellence award and a Chief Learning Officer Magazine award. Stern will collect an Association of Training Development award on May 23.
Read Rainer Stern’s full article for Harvard Business Manager about introducing Challenger selling
Ask Rainer Stern your own questions at the Association of Professional Sales annual conference at the Mermaid Theatre in London, where he will be appearing as a panellist on June 8. Click here to register for the APS annual conference.
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