The New Threesome: Why the Conversation Layer has Become so Important to Sales, Marketing & Your Bottom Line

I recently read an interesting book called The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. In 2009, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, researchers at the Corporate Executive Board, were tasked by the members of their Sales Executive Council to research why a handful of sales reps continued to sell well in a down economy while others did not. What the researchers concluded was not what they expected. The sales reps that succeeded in the down economy didn’t succeed because they mastered how to navigate selling in a poor economy. Instead, they succeeded because they mastered how to sell “irrespective” of the economy.

Dixon and Adamson set out to understand what this group of top performers did differently than their peers. They grouped all the sales reps in the study into 5 sales rep profiles: The Lone Wolf, The Relationship Builder, The Reactive Problem Solver, The “Hard Worker” and “The Challenger.” Out of the 6,000 sales reps studied, 39% of all top performers were “Challengers.” The remaining top performers represented the various other profiles.

What makes the Challenger so successful is the ability to share and discuss relevant, industry information.  Challengers provide valuable information to their prospects informing them of trends, ways to save money, lessons learned; in essence challenging their prospects’ knowledge. At the end of the day, it was the value of the challenger reps’ insights NOT necessarily the quality of their product that closed the sale.

Clearly there is a paradigm shift occurring in the art of the sale. As more sales reps are trained to be Challenger reps, marketers will need to provide Challenger sales teams with valuable sales tools. Tools that contain industry information that is of value to the target audience(s). In a large organization where sales teams target various sized organizations, verticals, geographies, etc. how will marketing support the Challenger sales reps whom rely heavily on specific industry information for ALL of these various target audiences? This is where the conversation layer of the web comes into play.

Marketers need to turn to the conversation layer, also known as the social layer, to inform, create and aggregate the content required for the Challenger rep. Every day I see relevant, timely, content being shared on social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, industry blogs and others social platforms. There is plenty of relevant, industry content being shared every day. Marketers need to look outside of their organization to the conversation layer of the web in order to find it.

If your organization relies on sales reps to reach revenue goals here is a threesome that together can impact your bottom line:
1. Challenger Sales Reps: Train your sales reps on the Challenger approach.
2. Marketing’s Support: Marketers being tasked with developing content for the Challenger rep, turn to the conversation layer of the web.
3. Conversation Layer: Listen and it will guide you to the industry content most important to your organization’s target audience(s).