Challengers Are Confident

"WE GET PAID FOR BRINGING VALUE TO THE MARKETPLACE" JIM ROHN

1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.
Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep's primary mode of interacting with customers:

• Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers' every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
• Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They'll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
• Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
• Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers' standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
• Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers' business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They're not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.
When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there's only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.

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In sales, what is the best approach, to accept our potential customers or to challenge them? The above study has found that sales reps who challenge their customers get  more sales. Challenging potential customers doesn't mean being rude or condescending  but rather involves making the customer think outside his or her "comfort zone" to see the importance of using the product or service being sold. Sales reps or online marketers that don't "beat around the bush" are those that make more sales or get more referrals. Challenging sales reps and marketers know their products, services and customers and are confident they have solutions to the customers needs and desires and they "make no bones about it". Challengers are confident.