#709: Is The Challenger Sale Still Effective In 2021? With Andee Harris | Salesman Podcast

In today’s episode of the Salesman Podcast, we speak with Andee Harris, the CEO of Challenger. She has more than two decades of experience in growing and scaling service and technology businesses.  Today, we discussed what Challenger is and how we can implement some of the Challenger methodologies into our own sales process. “It was a research-based book and it was giving leaders a new playbook, a way to think differently about how they train to develop their sales team.” – Andee Harris Challenger: More Than Just A Book Challenger as a learning tool that offers leaders an innovative way of thinking to improve how they train and develop their sales team. The three main core pieces of Challenger are: bringing commercial insight to the customer, giving salespeople a set of skills, and identifying and collaborating with the right customer stakeholders.  “The biggest thing we learned is: successful salespeople know if they have that contrast constructive tension. They take control of the sales process.” – Andee Harris Increase Influence Across the Buying Scale Customers, during the pandemic, are making decisions based on the influence of peers and colleagues rather than salespeople. Statistically, only 12% of this data comes from the seller. Due to this, Challenger can come and make the business’ content marketing consistent across all social media channels. “You need to be centralized and really being able to understand all those different stakeholders. This is crucial because influence is now coming from so many different parts of the organization.” – Andee Harris Know When To Stop Selling Most salespeople do not know when to stop selling. Salespeople logically need to stop selling and start negotiating as these are two different skills. Andee then discusses how Challenger can come and look at win-loss data and help business pinpoint their messaging, visions, and gains. “We think at a higher level. We come and ask how you can sell and make an impact. Those are two examples of ways that we’ve come in and really been able to change the trajectory of the success of the sales team.” – Andee Harris Bio: Andee Harris is the new CEO of Challenger. Andee has previously led multiple companies, both as CEO and Senior Vice President, through periods of rapid revenue growth, critical fundraising, and successful acquisition. Resources: * ChallengerINC.com* Andee on LinkedIN