hey what's up this is a duel Anna from Elena Digital and today I'm going to review the Challenger sail it's a book about sails so you are probably wondering why me a digital marketer is reading sails books I'll tell you why this book particularly is about how to sell to businesses so especially if you are selling a digital marketing service any kind of business solution a software this book is an absolute must I would have to admit that I was really interested in reading it I had experienced before in sales and business development so this book has kind of opened my eyes about certain things that I was doing right and certain things that I was not doing so alright so here is my top inside from the Challenger sale so first of all it's a study about salespeople so they start with kind of four or five types of salespeople that they have found out across different companies so one of the biggest group is the relationship builders so these are the people who are nice they are likable they spend a lot of time with the client and you know in many jobs descriptions as well you will hear that you want someone who's building relationships and he's really able to show that they can they can be a friend and kind of have a nice relationship with a client well surprise in this book actually according to their study relationship builders although they are a very big part of the core of sales force they are not typically the top performance the top performers almost 40% of them are the challengers or what they call the challenger a challenger is someone who is selling in a unique way and they are basically detecting this technique which they believe is absolutely teachable it's not something that you're born with it's something that can be actually really easily dissected into into actions and the actions can be followed and learned then there are the other types which is a really high performance the lone wolf so thinking about my past when I started in sales I was a typical lone wolf I was doing my thing nobody knew what exactly I was saying what I was doing I was doing really great results but typically the lone wolf is high high performer it's very small percentage of them and it's very difficult to actually learn and transfer their skills because they are unique and they're related to their personality so I've seen such sales people who if you actually try to repeat what they're saying you will not be able to make a single sale but it just is something which is part of their personality it's very difficult to be learned they're typically very difficult to work in a team and right now in business environment especially with complex sales it's usually a deal is taken by a team so the lone wolf is not a good solution to have it might work very well in transactional b2c sales environment but if you're working with big deals in a team of sales people you actually would have to rely on the challenger's so what are the characteristics of a challenger so first of all they have they teach the customer so when it comes to teaching they usually come up with a different view of a problem to what the client has stopped so far they come up with some insight with a different prospect of the of the situation one example is a lady who was a sales representative for a furniture company so they were losing a major contract with an office and she came with the client had to look at the proposal of their competitor their competitor had made a major mistake and they have designed the rooms way too big because their service shows that smaller teams of three to five are much more effective than larger teams and she came up with a solution on how to reorganize the building in order to make the room smaller in order to have smaller teams so this is an example of how the Challenger comes with new information and the reaction they're looking at from the customer is not oh wow this is exactly what I thought about its well I've never heard of this this is something new to me today I learned something I've never thought about that this is the reaction way you kind of provoke their thinking you you challenge them in the way they thought about the problem and you come up with a solution so not only just teaching them teaching them something which is leading to your solution why your solution is going to work better than anything else so this is kind of the first part then the second part is tailoring so usually challengers are very well aware of the motivations of the decision maker of the person who is taking charge of this project they are very aware of all the needs of this industry so they have kind of a local and a global view of the problem so they can easily put this in the context and the last one is very important they are very good with taking control so they are comfortable talking about money they are comfortable on pressurizing the client so a lot of salespeople would disagree here like why why would you pressurize this is not good especially the relationship builders yeah you have to pressurize the client in order to be able to actually come up with a deal or no deal the way it now breaks it is happening there is deal or no deal because nobody is actually taking the taking the pressure to make a decision so usually relationship builders are really bad in pressurizing and talking about money they try to avoid this part of the question until the end where as challengers are very comfortable they put this very open and they discuss and negotiate very very easily with a client so this is why I did no wonder that they are the top performance another trait of them is that they are very well focused on educating even junior stakeholders in order to influence the main this maker whereas traditionally sales representatives would try to focus on getting as much information as possible from the junior stakeholders of the of the company and then present these solutions to the decision maker trying to pitch them trying to sell them whereas the Challenger would actually take an approach why influencing someone who could influence the decision maker so anyway it's a really interesting read it's a bit dry there are a lot of examples and a lot of stuff that I would like to photocopy for myself like there is a negotiation plan there are a few other techniques and and white papers which you can get and actually utilize there is a whole presentation which you can copy it's a really interesting one and they both offer challengers they'll type of training and coaching for companies I would absolutely recommend the book but as I said the main part of it is what I mentioned already the rest is just kind of adding on the same concept if you liked this video like it if you want some of your friends to learn about it share it subscribe to my channel I'll be reviewing more books about marketing sales and especially digital sales digital marketing this is where i'm specialised in if you want check my other reviews which I've done recently gary vaynerchuck rush it and several online courses and subscribe to my channel and I'll be back with a new video very very soon thank you