Following up on The Five Profiles of Sales Reps, I promised to discuss the ramifications of these findings for B2B marketers. But first, let me offer some clarity around that work as there seems to be a fair amount of interest from across the membership…
The work previously summarized is 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 is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These 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, it’s 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).
Click Image to Enlarge | The Challenger profile is far more likely to be a high performer in a complex environment than any other profile.
Moreover, when we looked at the data through a different lens—the lens of deal complexity—we find something even more dramatic. We went back to the data and divided up the high performers according to the complexity of the deals they were doing. The bar on the left is the distribution of high performers selling relatively simple, stand-alone products (across a shorter sales cycle) and the bar on the right is the distribution of high performers selling complex bundles of products and solutions across a relatively longer sales cycle. And if we focus on the “distribution of high performers” across the 5 profiles (as you move from the left bar to right) the challengers (the bottom slice of each bar) absolutely dominate —at well over 50% of the population.
Meanwhile, look what happens to the relationship builders as we move to a more complex environment (top slice of each bar in the illustration). The likelihood that they achieve “star status” falls to nearly zero. Reflecting on this page, it’s the perfect snapshot for why so many of us struggle with the migration to solution-selling.
What this tells us: if we’re not buying or building challenger reps, chances are we’re going to come up short as our world becomes more complex. These are the high performers we’re going to need to sell the more complex solutions many of us currently (or will eventually) rely on to survive.
We’ll discuss what we should be doing as marketers to support this high performer profile in an upcoming post.
