From Challenger to JOLT: Reflections on Sales and Service 12 Years Later
From time to time The Kirkpatrick Agency will invite one of our speakers to write a guest blog. Today’s guest blogger is sales and customer service expert Matt Dixon!
I’m Matt Dixon and I’ve made a career out of researching, contemplating and ultimately discussing sales and the customer experience. As a founding member of DCM Insights, my partners and I have used data and researched-backed frameworks to help companies attract, retain and grow their customers. It’s a fun job that has afforded me the opportunity to meet and help thousands upon thousands of great people, and speak about my passion for these topics across the globe.
In addition to conducting my research and consulting, I’ve also been fortunate enough to co-author a handful of books on sales and the customer experience, including The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty (2013) and The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results (2015).
I’ve been feeling a little reflective lately and realized it’s been 12 years since my first book, #1 on Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation was released (2011), and about a year since my newest book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision (2022) came out. This reflectiveness got me thinking: What’s changed in the 11 years between The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect, and how has the research and learnings developed while writing the first book influenced the information provided in the newest one? Let’s figure this out together, shall we?
What Is “The Challenger Sale”?
Before we can delve too deep into the parallels between The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect, first we need to understand the concepts that inform them. Simply put, the “Challenger” methodology encourages salespeople to become high-performing problem solvers who take initiative. Since the dawn of the internet, customers tend to be awash in information and have already done their research upfront. The problem is that they’re overwhelmed by all the options available. Instead of focusing on relationship building, a “challenger” salesperson will lead prospects to a solution by challenging a prospect’s way of thinking. This approach tends to be more time efficient, as the salesperson can skip over discussing the features and benefits that the customer is already aware of, take control of the conversation, and open the prospect’s eyes to different solutions that are tailored toward their needs. A salesperson that follows this methodology tends to be the top performer at their company. In the end, the customer gets to a solution quickly, the salesperson makes the sale, and everybody is happy.
What Is “The JOLT Effect”?
Building upon the concepts first laid out in The Challenger Sale, The JOLT Effect directly addresses the problem salespeople face with customer indecision. The worst thing a salesperson can hear from a customer is, “I need to think about it.” When confronted with indecision, some experts say to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all of the different ways they might win if they choose you or your business. But those experts would be wrong. Customers aren’t necessarily concerned with succeeding; what they really care about is not failing. You’ve heard of the term FOMO (“fear of missing out”), right? Well here’s a new one: FOMU; the “fear of messing up”. Salespeople that follow the research and recommendations laid out in The JOLT Effect succeed because they directly address the customer’s fear of failure, turning an indecisive buyer into a confirmed sale.
What’s Changed Since 2011?
Since The Challenger Sale came out in 2011, we’ve seen a number of things change in the marketplace. For instance, when we wrote the book we said that the average B2B customer was 57% of the way through the buying process before they ever reached out to a salesperson. These days that number is much higher. It is reasonable to believe that today’s customer is even farther down their learning path before they ever fill out a form on a website to request a demo or have a call with a salesperson. This creates an increased feeling of being overwhelmed by options and informs customer indecision.
Another shift in the market is that there is now a lot of high quality information at the fingertips of the customer. Content marketing has grown in leaps and bounds since 2011, and companies are now investing time, money and resources into creating a framework for insight into their products and services via advertising channels like social media. This is something my partner and co-author of The Challenger Sale Brent Adamson calls “a smartness arms race” that companies are engaged in. This type of content doesn’t just touch on features and benefits of a product, but now focuses on hard hitting insights designed to lead customers to a solution. None of this is a bad marketing strategy, per se, but all of this additional content can be overwhelming to a customer, leaving them in a state of confusion about what they should be paying attention to and what they should be ignoring.
The current economic state of the marketplace has also changed since 2011, with a customer’s feeling a lot of uncertainty due to inflation, interest rates, and talk of a recession (which some experts will say we are currently in). This feeling was exacerbated by the pandemic, which has of course created some additional uncertainty, but has also influenced how customers make decisions. In the old days, there would typically be around 5 stakeholders connected to a buying decision. Now, with the integration of video conferencing, we’ve seen that number rise to somewhere in the teens. It’s very easy to invite anybody and everybody at a company to a video call; what becomes difficult is that the buying committee has ballooned to the point where somebody is bound to raise their hand and question the purchase decision. If you’ve ever heard the term “analysis paralysis”, this example is the definition of the behavior.
Finally, one of the most problematic changes since 2011 is the amount of options that are available to buyers. A lot of suppliers, especially in technology based industries, seem to be pushing a ridiculous number of options out to their customers; options like partner integrations, partner ecosystems, different ways to configure their solution, etc. This seemingly endless list of options can cause stress and fear of failure for a customer, pushing them further and further away from making a purchase and nearer to customer indecision no-man’s-land.
What Can Salespeople Do?
Now that I’ve laid out a few examples of how the marketplace has changed, if you’re a salesperson, you’re probably wondering what can be done to overcome all of these obstacles. For starters, the research that we discuss in The JOLT Effect claims that sellers need a broader solution set to contend with these challenges. A salesperson’s job isn’t to solely challenge the customer’s thinking, as we laid out in The Challenger Customer. Sure, it’s important for the salesperson to convince the customer that the pain of “same” is worse than the pain of change and that what the customer is doing today could lead to tremendous loss. However, salespeople can’t just stop there. What we found in our research is that while a customer may agree with the vision a salesperson has laid out, they still end up making no decision, stall out, and sometimes go radio silent. Why?
Our research tells us that the reason deals don’t move forward is not because a salesperson has failed to convince the customer that their status quo is unacceptable. And it’s not that customers don’t want to move forward; they can’t because they are struggling with indecision, motivated by fear of failure. Many buyers don’t move forward because they are afraid of getting stuck “holding the bag” (so to speak) if the purchase ends up not working out. Talk about a stressful situation.
So what can a salesperson do to help a customer overcome their fears? Truth be told, JOLT is an acronym that details a philosophy all sales people can adopt to stop dialing up the FOMO and instead address the FOMU. Here are the four steps we discuss in The JOLT Effect:
Judge the indecision
Salespeople must first acknowledge customer indecision, figure out what’s causing it, and let them know that they aren’t alone - and that it’s ok - in feeling overwhelmed by making a choice
Offer your recommendation
Shift the focus away from all available options and instead offer guidance based on what the salesperson knows about the customer, their needs, and how it will help them; this way the customer feels like they can blame the salesperson if the choice isn’t a good fit
Limit exploration
Salespeople shouldn’t indulge in the customer’s every request; instead the best salespeople position themselves as a trusted advisor that will help steer them away from unfit or expensive options
Take the risk off the table
Whether it be offering a customer consulting services, offering smaller solutions that can be scaled over time, or simply avoiding setting expectations too high, customers will appreciate a salesperson who is looking out for them
Final Thoughts
After many years of research, talking to salespeople, consulting and presenting on these topics, I realize that these concepts are a lot easier to talk about than they are to execute on. The one thing to keep in mind is that it requires a shift in a salesperson’s mentality, and a bucking against the idea that A) The customer is always right and B) The customer needs to be your best friend. At the end of the day, the customer is the one coming to you for a solution. It’s your job to clear the path, remove the fear, and start delivering a customer experience that truly plugs in to what they want all along: confidence that they are making the right choice.
Like what you’ve read and want to learn more? Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. To book me for an event, please fill out this form or email stephen@thekirkpatrickagency.com.
Read Matt Dixon’s original blog post here.