This type of philosophy is similar to cusotmer segmentation. As marketers,we use demographics and behavioral attitudes and ethnographics to drive our marketing. Why wouldn’t we do the same to allocate training and recruiting dollars to the right mix of employees.

I for one will be looking at our staff to make sure we aren’t over-indexed in certain areas. thanks for the article!

This work was specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck.

Our guidance to members is to think about these profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These five profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist.

Now, as we dig into these profiles, the relationship builders that we found are, in a sense, a “one trick pony” – squarely focused on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likeable and generous with their time. This is very much a service mentality.

Regarding the challengers, the SEC’s work does not suggest that these reps don’t build strong relationships. In fact, the high-performer challengers found in the sample were above average on all of the “relationship building” attributes. They just don’t hang their hat on those attributes like a relationship builder would…put another way, its not their major.

Instead, the challenger rep uses those relationships as a starting point to achieve a specific end. This rep wins by creating and maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. They offer the customer unique perspectives – and communicate those perspectives with passion and precision in a way that draws the customer into a conversation.

It’s customer value (challenger approach) versus customer convenience (relationship builder).