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The Challenger Sale gives advice to salespeople and business leaders on the most effective ways to talk with customers. It purports to have discovered the optimal type of sales pitch to help win customers. While The Challenger Sale imparts good advice on the reader, it honestly falls short by trying to proclaim that it is the only way to succeed in sales.

The book grew out of research performed by the Sales Executive Council, an organization created to help industry professionals. The research found that there were 5 main types of salespeople: The Hard Worker, The Lone Wolf, The Relationship Builder, The Reactive Problem Solver, and The Challenger. The central thesis is that the most successful reps are of the Challenger persona and the least successful are of the Relationship Builder Persona.

The book gives great insight into what makes the Challenger Persona successful. Rather than viewing a meeting as an opportunity to present on features or to even do discovery, the Challenger Salesperson tends to try to provide value to the prospect during the meeting and teach them something. Often this can take the form of reframing the user's problem and teaching them about a new way of thinking they had not been aware of before.

While I think this method is certainly effective and I plan to utilize its methods more in my sales meetings, I disagree with the assertion that this is the only way to go about things. The authors argue that accessing the decision maker is no longer important in a Challenger Sale. They argue that discovery becomes less important in a Challenger Sale. While I agree that overindexing on any one of these metrics can be dangerous, I am not convinced that the Challenger Sale magically overcomes the need for these parts of the selling process.

As a result, The Challenger Sale certainly provides critical insight into the best ways to perform sales meetings, but seems to overindex on their key findings rather than recognizing its key place in the holster of a dynamic salesperson.