As an experienced professional advisor, you may be re-examining your approach to selling, to ensure your message still resonates with prospective business owners. There is a simple technique, used by a small cohort of salespeople, that can dramatically improve your success rate when selling your advisory service, called the Challenger Sale.
The Value Builder Challenger Sale Presentation template available in Content Library > Presentation Templates is based on the principles outlined in The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. They've done extensive research and found that the most successful salespeople exhibit the following characteristics:
- Offers a unique perspective to the customer
- Understands the customer's business
- Loves to debate
- Pushes the customer
- Has strong 2-way communication skills
- Can identify economic drivers of customer’s business
There are six components to the challenger framework as described by the authors:
The Warmer: Build credibility and show your prospect you understand their challenges. This serves as the
introduction for the pitch.
The Reframe: Connect those challenges to a bigger problem or opportunity they hadn’t previously
considered. Build credibility and show your prospect you understand their challenges. This
serves as the introduction for the pitch.
Rational Drowning: Next, show prospects the numbers behind why they should think differently.
Emotional Impact: Then, create an emotional connection between the pain in the story you’re telling and the pain they feel every day in their business.
A New Way: It’s time to convince them of the solution. Show them the new way they should be thinking
about their business.
Your Solution: Finally, demonstrate how your solution is the best one out there to equip them to act differently, and how it fits with the new way a prospect should be thinking about their business.
Your primary value to the customer is your ability to teach them something not sell them something.