The Challenger Customer

Author: Brent Adamson
Publisher: Portfolio
ISBN: 1591848156
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Four years ago, the bestselling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge. Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be? The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is. It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers. The Challenger Customer unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.

The Challenger Sale

Author: Matthew Dixon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101545895
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades. Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance. Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale. The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.

The Effortless Experience

Author: Matthew Dixon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698137582
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.

The Challenger Customer

Author: Brent Adamson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698406184
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

The JOLT Effect

Author: Matthew Dixon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593538110
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
From the bestselling co-author of The Challenger Sale, a paradigm-shattering approach to overcoming customer indecision and closing more sales In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing. For years, sales expert Matthew Dixon has been busting longstanding business myths. Now in The JOLT Effect, he and co-author Ted McKenna turn their trademark analysis and latest research to the vital and growing problem of customer indecision—and offer a shocking new approach that turns conventional wisdom on its head. Drawing on a brand-new, first-of-its-kind study of more than two and a half million sales conversations from across industry, they reveal the surprising truth that high-performing sales reps grasp and their average-performing peers don’t: only by addressing the customer’s fear of failure can you get indecisive buyers to go from verbally committing to actually pulling the trigger. Packed with robust data, counterintuitive insights, and practical guidance, The JOLT Effect is the playbook for any salesperson or sales leader who wants to close the gap between customer intent and action—and close more sales.

Silver Linings

Author: June Scobee Rodgers
Publisher: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 9781573120340
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
June Scobee Rodgers, wife of Challenger Commander Dick Scobee, tells of her inspirational journey from victim of the Challenger tragedy to survivor committed to continuing the mission.

Eating the Big Fish

Author: Adam Morgan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470527757
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
EATING THE BIG FISH : How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded The second edition of the international bestseller, now revised and updated for 2009, just in time for the business challenges ahead. It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of the main chapters, a range of new exercises, supplies weblinks to view interviews online and offers supplementary downloadable information.

The Challenger

Author: Terri Farley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1665916486
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
The beloved sixth book in the middle grade Phantom Stallion series about a girl, her horse, and the beauty of the American West returns with a brand-new, stunning cover and bonus material! Perfect for fans of Canterwood Crest and classic horse stories like Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka. Cougars have been spotted nearby, but they haven’t hurt the ranch horses—yet. So Samantha is outraged when a neighboring rancher vows to kill the cats on sight. And her family’s horses may be safe, but out on the range, Sam spots a wild young stallion without a herd. Being alone puts this horse in danger. But can Sam protect the rebellious mustang and still save the cougars?

Digital Customer Service

Author: Rick DeLisi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119841909
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Digital Customer Service is the new standard for creating a 5-star customer experience As much as technology has improved our lives, for many people customer service experiences remain unnecessarily frustrating. But the advent of Digital Customer Service (DCS) promises to make these interactions seamless and effortless by creating experiences that occur entirely on a customer's own screen, even in situations where it is preferable to speak to an agent. Digital Customer Service: Transforming Customer Experience for an On-Screen World traces the evolution of customer service—as well as the evolution of customer expectations and the underlying psychology that drives customer behavior - from the days of the first call centers in the 1980s all the way to today's digital world. Written for Customer Service and Customer Experience leaders as well as C-suite executives (CEOs, CFOs, CIOs), Digital Customer Service helps business leaders balance three critical priorities: Creating an excellent experience for customers that increases customer loyalty and profitability Driving down the cost of Customer Service/Support interactions, while increasing revenue through Sales interactions Moving quickly toward the goal of "digital transformation" We have discovered—in our research and our first-hand experience—that when companies commit to achieving true Digital Customer Service, they can make significant progress toward all three of these goals at once. Digital Customer Service provides the roadmap for how your company can get there. And when you do, who wins? EVERYONE.

The Burning Blue

Author: Kevin Cook
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250755565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The untold story of a national trauma—NASA’s Challenger explosion—and what really happened to America’s Teacher in Space, illuminating the tragic cost of humanity setting its sight on the stars You’ve seen the pictures. You know what happened. Or do you? On January 28, 1986, NASA’s space shuttle Challenger exploded after blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Christa McAuliffe, America’s “Teacher in Space,” was instantly killed, along with the other six members of the mission. At least that's what most of us remember. Kevin Cook tells us what really happened on that ill-fated, unforgettable day. He traces the pressures—leading from NASA to the White House—that triggered the fatal order to launch on an ice-cold Florida morning. Cook takes readers inside the shuttle for the agonizing minutes after the explosion, which the astronauts did indeed survive. He uncovers the errors and corner-cutting that led an overconfident space agency to launch a crew that had no chance to escape. But this is more than a corrective to a now-dimming memory. Centering on McAuliffe, a charmingly down-to-earth civilian on the cusp of history, The Burning Blue animates a colorful cast of characters: a pair of red-hot flyers at the shuttle's controls, the second female and first Jewish astronaut, the second Black astronaut, and the first Asian American and Buddhist in space. Drawing vivid portraits of Christa and the astronauts, Cook makes readers forget the fate they're hurtling toward. With drama, immediacy, and shocking surprises, he reveals the human price the Challenger crew and America paid for politics, capital-P Progress, and the national dream of "reaching for the stars."