The Challenger Sale

It’s Good Research
The research is solid, and believe me, I don’t say this lightly. Much of the
so-called research in selling has methodological holes so big that you could
fly a jumbo jet through them. We live in an age when every consultant and
every author claims “research” to prove the effectiveness of what they are
selling. Once research was a sure way to gain credibility; now it’s fast
becoming a sure way to lose it. Customers are rightly cynical about
unsupportable claims that masquerade under the name of research, such as,
“Our research proves that sales more than doubled after taking our training
program,” or “We found in our research that when salespeople used our
seven customer buying styles model, it caused customer satisfaction to
increase by 72 percent.” Claims like these are unprovable assertions that
erode the credibility of genuine research.
I was at a conference in Australia when I first heard that CEB had some
startling new research on sales effectiveness. I must admit that, while I
respected CEB and its good track record of solid methodology, I had been
bitten enough by poor research to think to myself, “This will probably be
yet another disappointment.” When I got back to my office in Virginia, I
invited the research team to spend a day with me and we went through their
methodology with a fine-tooth comb. I admit that I confidently expected to
expose serious flaws in what they had done. In particular, I had two
concerns:
1. 
Putting salespeople into five buckets.
The research claimed that
salespeople fell into one of five distinct profiles:
The Hard Worker
The Challenger
The Relationship Builder

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The Lone Wolf
The Reactive Problem Solver
This sounded naïve and arbitrary to me. What, I asked the team, was the
rationale for these five buckets? Why not seven? Or ten? They were able to
show me that these were not invented categories but ones that emerged out
of a massive and sophisticated statistical analysis. And they understood, in a
way that many researchers don’t, that their five buckets were behavioral
clusters, not rigid personality types. I was satisfied that they had passed my
first test.
2. 
The high- versus low-performer trap
. A large percentage of the
research into effective selling compares high performers with low
performers. In the early years of my own research I did the same thing. As a
result I learned a lot about low performers. When you ask people to
compare their rock stars with their losers, you find that they can dissect the
losers with surgical precision but find it hard, if not impossible, to put their
finger on exactly what makes their rock stars rock. I soon learned that I
ended up with a detailed understanding of poor performance and not much
else. If my research was to have any meaning I had to compare top
performers with average, or core, performers. It was reassuring to find that
CEB research had adopted exactly that approach.