Transcript

In this episode, Jason and Jeff take a look at the two opposing sales methodologies of Gartner (formerly CEB) in their book, The Challenger Sale and RAIN Group in their book, Insight Selling.

Full disclosure, we’re not in the business of sales training or business development consulting, so this is more from the lens of looking at the intellectual capital and the thought leadership agenda and at the point of view that these firms are putting in the market place.

Jason and Jeff start by discussing the approach to research that each firm took with their thought leadership.

“CEB really looked at serving sales managers to understand the behaviors of their most successful sales people, whereas RAIN looked more at it from a buyers’ perspective. What separated the winners from the second place finisher in their most recent purchase, and that governed about $3 billion in sales. So, CEB sort of looking at a longer period of time, RAIN’s looking at single point in time.”

“The thing that I think is really critical here is that it is research based. Well based research gives you a very strong credibility in the market, and it’s a great starting place.”

“There’s a basic structure here for both of these thought leadership pieces. [And that is] an understanding of the selling market and seller personalities or groupings of some kind that makes it easy for people to understand these people that are really complex. The thing I think both of them did, and maybe RAIN did a little bit better in my mind, is I have to be able to see myself in that research. Then, once I see myself, I want to be moved to action whether that’s to change myself, or to change my people, or move out of my current state into a new state. That’s the whole purpose of having a point of view challenging your prospect’s thinking.”

A deeper look at The Challenger Sale approach:

“Once you really dive in to the thinking underlying the research, you find that to some extent the wrap that was The Challenger Sale was a really compelling way to tell a story. Once you broke it down, the research was much more nuanced than it appeared on the surface. But that to some extent was part of the power of the point of view was that they were saying something that was controversial and different and stood in the face of what most people thought about selling, that selling was a highly relational activity and that really it turns out that the highly relational seller was perceived to be less effective than someone who had a different set of characteristics.”

Another piece of this that I always find interesting was that they categorized sellers into five groups, and on the surface you think these five groups are discrete independent things. But really the truth is that every person who’s in a selling environment has some of these different characteristics. I think that part of the power of The Challenger Sale was it simplified these complex ideas into ways that were really understandable.”

A deeper look at Insight Selling approach:

To some extent I think when RAIN came at the market and sort of challenged some of The Challenger Sale’s thinking, that was sort of what they were exploiting. They were saying, “Well, wait a minute. This notion that relationship selling is dead, that relationship solution selling is dead, is just false. It’s just not true,” and they sort of dove into that empty space that existed within the presentation of the research that CEB had done.

Next, Jason and Jeff talk about some of the findings in the two studies.

“The thing that resonated with me around the challenger selling archetypes, from a professional services perspective, is the majority would see themselves as the relationship builder. It almost was an affront to how they’ve been doing sales all along. That it’s been wrong or it’s been the reason that it’s ineffective.”

“And I think Insight Selling probably took a softer approach on that front because they got their start in helping consultants do solution selling and relationship building. But I thought that distinction was really important, and kind of reflects the challenger mindset of challenging your buyer and saying, “Hey, you’ve been doing this wrong, you think relationship is all you need, but really point of the fact is your clients don’t respect you for just your relationship.”

“Some of the things that resonated with me inside of CEB’s work was just some of the drivers of what they were saying was changing in the marketplace. One of them was this idea that we’re seeing a very big rise in consensus buying. I know we’ve certainly felt that. Even when you’ve got the partner of the firm, the principle, or the senior lead of the business, they are not comfortable pulling the trigger on investments without getting consensus among their leadership team or consensus among multiple people. That led to this notion of, well you need to do this idea for commercial teaching, so sort of educating those ancillary decision makers on things that they did not know. That was also a big piece of it for me that I found really interesting.”

“On the RAIN side, when I think about some of their work around Insight Selling, one of the things that always resonated with me was that relationship selling is shifting. Leading with personal connection, the relational selling model that consultants and accountants and attorneys have followed for years, build these personal relationships first and business will follow, has sort of been flipped upside down. Start with business value and then you’ll earn the relationship. I think that’s a really important insight that RAIN brought to market in this piece. Challenger did as well, but I think RAIN did a better job of capturing what’s really happening there.”

“One of the more powerful insights that came out of the RAIN was this idea of shifting away from problems and pains to gains. So the idea of spending less time and energy really diagnosing the clients need and spending. The client sort of comes expecting you to know the need and what they really want your help on is helping think through what the missed opportunities are.”

“There are these little catch phrases and terms that give firms a nomenclature to share. CEB uses a framework they call teach, tailor, and take control, which is a methodology for what the sales lead should do in the sale. RAIN counters with one that they call connect, convince, and collaborate. It’s like the three levels of selling that helps the seller build some framework for how they’re going to approach their conversations. In a sense that’s a key part of successful thought leadership, is that you make difficult complex concepts, difficult complex research and you break it down to a place that people can understand and apply it and share it and act upon it.”

“I always felt one of the more powerful pieces of work that CEB actually did in The Challenger Sale was from deep in the book where they describe the emotional journey of a commercial teaching pitch. They have this framework of the commercial teaching pitch and essentially how the sales person should lead the client to the solution, versus lead with the solution. They map it against how you want your client to feel at various points of this journey on the pitch. I thought they were really really thoughtful about thinking about the emotional ride you want your clients to be on. What you want them to feel during the sale and how important that is to getting to the successful outcomes you have both for you as the seller firm and then of the client as the buyer. Getting you mutually together to a better place.”

“The thing that I take away from The Challenger Sale is, again, they create a dissonance from the traditional selling model that Insight Selling doesn’t. Insight Selling talks about providing insights whereas The Challenger Sale talks about teaching. I think they really nailed it with that word. The value that marketers can bring to research like this is the humanization of it. Of taking that pure consultant rational approach to solving a problem, and putting a human face and feel to it.”

To close, Jason and Jeff each share one thing they like about each methodology.

Jeff’s response:

The Challenger Sale

“What I liked about The Challenger Sale was the concept of how marketing allows the challenge at scale across the organization because that’s always been my perspective. Marketing sets the table and enables sales to actually challenge. That came through in The Challenger Sale.”

Insight Selling

“The thing that I love about Insight Selling and their positioning, I like their gravitas, I love their willingness to go right at it. But I cannot get that parallelogram or whatever they use in their methodology for how you carry the story arc in the conversation of Insight Selling out of my mind. I just love it. I think it’s brilliant.”

Jason’s response:

The Challenger Sale

The one thing we haven’t talked about from the challenger that I always really liked was they have a phrase that says, in that corporate teaching moment “When you’re bringing new insight to the client, the goal is not to resonate, the goal is to reframe.” So, you know you’ve done it well when the client says, “Hmm, I never thought about it that way before,” rather than the client says, “Oh, I totally agree.” When that happens you know as a seller that you really understand your client’s situation much better than they expected you to, and that’s what you live for as a consultant.”

Insight Selling

“On the RAIN side, if I think about one thing to me that jumps out, I already mentioned it but it’s just the shift from pains to gains. Just this notion of focusing on the potential, not on the problems.

Then they declare who is winning the battle for mindshare

Jeff – “I would say hands down who’s winning the mindshare, Challenge Sale. I don’t have any empirical evidence to support that, but I think if you asked people name three selling methodologies, Challenge Sale’s going to come up to the top. Is it the best methodology? I don’t necessarily agree because I don’t believe there is one, but for just sheer mindshare, Challenge Sale.”

Jason – “I’ll say Challenger Sale, CEB, definitely is winning, but the very fact that RAIN is sort of picking a fight with them tells you something.”

 

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Transcript

Jason Mlicki: Alright Jeff, so I’ve got to start us off since I was the one who came up with this crazy topic. As you know, this idea has been bouncing around my brain for about a year in the form of an article that was never written, so this is the article never written. The topic is battle for mindshare. It’s this idea that there’s sort of a war being waged, at least gentlemanly, between two sales training and consulting firms, CEB which is now owned by Gartner and RAIN Group. At least on one side of that kind of war if I’ll describe it that way, which is a little bit of an extreme comment. There’s definitely some direct attacks at some of the thinking inside of the other side’s.

So, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to talk about this battle of opposing view points, sort of the battle for your mind as it relates to sales methodologies, one put forth by The Challenger Sale which was originally CEB which is now Gartner, and of course the other side being RAIN Group and some of their recent work in the last 12 months or so.

Jeff McKay: Yes, and when we’re done here are listeners going to be great sales people?

Jason Mlicki: They’re going to be the best sales people ever on the face of the planet, probably crushing quotas by about seven million percent. No, I don’t think they are. I think you and I both agree that we’re certainly not in the business of sales training or business development consulting, so I view this more from the lens of looking at the intellectual capital and the thought leadership agenda and at the point of view that these firms are putting in the market place and what they’re about, and maybe, maybe the listener gets some insight into some of the key takeaways of those different sets of research. But maybe just more of this sense of the battle of opposing viewpoints, the battle for your mind really. Did I answer your question, or did I just give you a big convoluted answer?

Jeff McKay: It’s a great answer, but I want to be clear for the listeners so we can set their expectations.

Jason Mlicki: Agreed.

Jeff McKay: The reason we chose this subject is it’s very relatable because both of these firms sell into professional services. Our listeners could very well have bought or been trained in one of these methodologies. If they haven’t, they probably have been exposed to a lot of sales methodologies because partners tend to gravitate towards the tangible, make me a better seller, make me a rain maker, or at least the firms I’ve been in in my career. Probably because I’ve been outside in those big firms, unlike you Jason, is I have had a lot of exposure to sales, and I started out as a salesman in my career. So, I’ve been exposed to Xerox selling, solution selling, relationship selling, Miller Heiman’s strategic selling, spin selling-

Jason Mlicki: Spin selling, oh yeah spin sell.

Jeff McKay: Yeah, challenger selling, Ford Harding’s Rain Making, and I don’t know how many others of these methodologies I’ve been through. So, I am looking forward to parsing this out. It’s going to be fun.

Jason Mlicki: Alright Jeff, so before we get into this maybe the best place to start is the approach to research that each of these two firms took with their thought leadership. In the interest of time I’ll make it concise. CEB really looked at serving sales managers to understand the behaviors of their most successful sales people, whereas RAIN looked more at from a buyers’ perspective, what separated the winners from the second place finisher in their most recent purchase, and that governed about $3 billion in sales. So, CEB sort of looking at a longer period of time, RAIN’s looking at single point in time.

Jeff McKay: I like that they’re different, I think that to the point or conversation around how to go head to head with a competitor you have to take a different bent on the market and your point of view. You need to look at it from a different direction or a different dataset or what have you. I think it’s interesting how, while they came from different perspectives, in my mind they ended up largely in the same place, but we’ll talk about that shortly. But not being afraid to take a different look, find that white space is really important. But the thing that I think is really critical here particularly for this subject area is that it is research based. I think that has, if it’s well done research, let me put that caveat in there because there’s a lot of people that do research but it’s not well done, but well based research gives you a very strong credibility in the market, and it’s a great starting place.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, I mean as you know in our research on exceptional thought leadership marketing programs, truth seekers is one of the seven capabilities that we uncovered. Really truth seeking is all about basing your thinking on original primary research and bringing deep rigor to that research methodology. And you’re right, I would agree that on the surface both firms really brought deep rigor to the research process. What I loved about The Challenger Sale as a read, you know looking back on my … at least for me, my first exposure to The Challenger Sale was really right after it was published, 2011. It started getting bantered around in networking groups I’m in or people I know or sales people that I work with, and everybody kind of, at least for me, my sense was everybody kind of got the snippet version of it, the cliff notes version of it. You’ve got to challenge your customers in the sales experience, sales environment, but they never actually read the book.

Jeff McKay: Yes, it was just conversational.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, but then once you read the book you had a different take on it. You’re like, “Whoa, time out that’s not what this is really directly saying.” Once you really dive in to the thinking underlying the research, you find that to some extent the wrap that was the challenger sale, at least from my viewpoint, was a really compelling way to tell a story. Once you broke it down, the research was much more nuanced than it appeared on the surface. But that to some extent was part of the power of the point of view was that they were saying something that was controversial and different and stood in the face of what most people thought about selling, that selling was a highly relational activity and that really it turns out that the highly relational seller was perceived to be less effective than someone who had a different set of characteristics.

Jeff McKay: Yeah. I feel myself on that teeter totter between point of view and research conclusion and reality of everyday selling in professional services. That is a really nuanced distinction because if you don’t have trust born out of relationship, it’s hard to have the permission, if you will, to challenge. That to me is a very balanced approach. I mean that’s like theology or philosophy, you could parse that out for millennia, but you try to drive a wedge between your perspective and someone else’s and if people aren’t thinking critically about it, it sounds good on the surface.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, another piece of this, at least to me that I always find interesting once I really dove into their thinking was that they categorized sellers into five groups, and on the surface you think these five groups are discrete independent things, you know five different sellers that wholly embody the activities described of each individual. But really that’s really what is really the truth, the truth is that every person who’s in a selling environment has some of these different characteristics, they model certain behaviors more than others based on their personality or however they’ve got to the place of selling. I think that part of the power of The Challenger Sale was it simplified these complex ideas into ways that were really understandable while maybe sort of glossing over the details just a little bit at times, unless you really read it really closely.

To some extent I think when RAIN came at the market and sort of challenged some of The Challenger Sale’s thinking, that was sort of what they were exploiting. They were saying, “Well, wait a minute. This notion that relationship selling is dead, that relationship solution selling is dead, is just false. It’s just not true,” and they sort of dove into that empty space that existed within the presentation of the research that CEB had done. You want to talk about some of the findings in the studies? You know, what they mean?

Jeff McKay: Yes. Yes, because I think it’s important. If we take a step back, there’s a basic structure here for both of these thought leadership pieces, and you hit on an important part of it and that was an understanding of the selling market and seller personalities or groupings of some kind that makes it easy for people to understand these people that are really complex. But you’ve got to put it down so that it’s understandable. The thing I think both of them did, and maybe RAIN did a little bit better in my mind, is I have to be able to see myself in that research. Not only do you understand these groupings, but I have to see myself in the groupings. Then, once I see myself, I want to be moved to action whether that’s to change myself, or to change my people, or move out of my current state into a new state. That’s the whole purpose of having a point of view challenging-

Jason Mlicki: Our work keeps coming out in these findings.

Jeff McKay: You know, your prospect’s thinking. But demonstrating and understanding of them as human beings, helping them see themselves as human beings, and then showing them a path to action. I think they both do that well, but I think insight wins on that front.

Jason Mlicki: Interesting. That did not come through for me as much, but I can understand exactly what you’re saying. I think for me the way CEB had framed it, this notion that there’s these five types and then you could imagine, maybe I’m reinforcing your point, I could picture people that I’ve worked with, or I’ve known, or I’ve had on staff, that fit the characteristics they described every single time for every one of those five. Also, to be honest, when you look at say for instance they have the reactive problem solver and the relationship builder and the hard worker, and they give the activities that those types of sales people embody, I could imagine sales people I’ve worked with who fit right into those frameworks. I could also imagine my own personal journey as a seller at different points falling into one of those buckets. For me that really worked, that notion that there are these five distinct types of people, and it didn’t really come out for me in the RAIN work as much.

Jeff McKay: The other thing that resonated with me around the challenger selling kind of archetypes, if you will, from a professional services perspective, not necessarily a pure B to B perspective, but definitely in a professional services world, is the majority if not super majority would see themselves, consultants, accountants, lawyers, would see themselves as the relationship builder. It almost was an affront to how they’ve been doing sales all along. That it’s been wrong or it’s been the reason that it’s ineffective.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: And I think Insight Selling probably took a softer approach on that front because they got their start in helping consultants do solution selling and relationship building, but I thought that distinction was really important, and actually as I think about it, it kind of reflects the challenger mindset of challenging your buyer and saying, “Hey, you’ve been doing this wrong, you think relationship is all you need, but really point of the fact is your clients don’t respect you for just your relationship.”

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. Well it’s interesting, you make a really great point. It’s interesting to me in that some of the things that resonated with me inside of CEB’s work was just some of the drivers of what they were saying was changing in the marketplace. I remember one of them was just this idea that we’re seeing a very big rise in consensus buying. I know we’ve certainly felt that. Even when you’ve got the partner of the firm, the principle, or the senior lead of the business, they are not comfortable pulling the trigger on investments without getting consensus among their leadership team or consensus among multiple people. Of course then that led to this notion of, well you need to do this idea for commercial teaching, so sort of educating those ancillary decision makers on things that thy did not know. That was also a big piece of it for me that I found really interesting.

At the same time on the RAIN side, when I think about some of their work around Insight Selling, to your point, one of the things that always resonated with me inside of what they were saying was that relationship selling is shifting. I think, to me, that was in an essence what I always thought challenger was trying to convey, was that leading with personal connection, so to your point the relational selling model that consultants and accountants and attorneys have followed for years, build these personal relationships first and business will follow, has sort of been flipped upside down. You know, start with business value and then you’ll earn the relationship. I think that’s a really important insight that RAIN brought to market in this piece. Challenger did as well, but to your point, I think RAIN did a better job of capturing what’s really happening there.

Jeff McKay: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki: I have an example there too, a former agency owner here in town that was a good friend of mine, in fact he’s a good reason I’m in the agency business in general. I don’t remember how many years ago he told me his most successful sales activity had been for years he would basically just mail forks to prospects. So, he would mail them a fork with a note that said, “Hey, let’s just have lunch,” and that’s how he opened the doors into a lot of his relationships and it worked exceptionally well. This was, you know, 15, 20 years ago.

I can’t imagine that strategy working right now, personally. Certainly not for me, you know, this notion that I’m going to start a dialogue over lunch. I’m much more likely to start a dialogue with a perspective client over insight, right? Over, “Hey, here’s this new thinking on this topic and you might find this interesting and useful.”

Jeff McKay: I think you’re right. That is the fruit of effective marketing. We’ve heard all these statistics from the content marketing world about prospects going out and doing all this investigative work before they even call. They really are primed in ready to go much deeper, much more personalized, and they really want to understand what it is like to work with the people of your firm. I’ve said this before on some of our other podcasts, and I live by this mantra with my clients, is that how you sell me is how you serve me. There was clear research out of CEB on that front, that the majority of the great client experience comes from the sales experience.

Jason Mlicki: I think their research basically says that that’s the key point of differentiation at this point, that you can’t differentiate on product, you can’t differentiate on service, that was at least the argument they were making, and that the sales experience was everything. It was your best chance to differentiate in general.

Jeff McKay: Yeah, and Miller Heiman and CSO say something very similar. We have an upcoming podcast with David Ryan of Gray Matters, says a very similar thing that how you sell me is how you serve me. That is so important and that’s why moving from the silos to integrated clients experience is so important.

Jeff McKay: Let’s jump back into the two studies and how they position their thought leadership.

Jason Mlicki: At least to me, one of the more powerful insights that came out of the RAIN was this idea of shifting away from problems and pains to gains. So the idea of spending less time and energy really diagnosing the clients need and spending, to your point, the client sort of comes expecting you to know the need and what they really want your help on is helping think through what the missed opportunities are. Where could they unlock the future wants that they really have in ways that they hadn’t thought of previously? So if I were to dial back all of RAIN’s work, that to me was probably the single most powerful insight in their research. Not necessarily new information, but I thought it was presented really in a compelling and accessible way.

Jeff McKay: So, there’s two things that are really strong about that in my mind. The first one is it challenged, again, conventional thinking because the mantra in B2B in professional services world up to that point was asking the idiotic question, what keeps you up at night?

Jason Mlicki: Yep.

Jeff McKay: Everybody was asking that question. Oh, I hated when agencies came in and asked that question, because to me it demonstrated, one, it was technique it wasn’t sincere, it was faddish, it told me that they didn’t do their homework. There was nothing in it. So, I think that was a positive positioning of this point of view in that it challenged that trite approach that sales was using. The second thing, and I think this is peppered throughout both of these, and although I hate it, I really do hate it, is there are these little catch phrases and terms that give firms a nomenclature to share so that the points of view can become more viral around the water cooler and partner meetings or sales meetings. We can go through both of these and probably pull out 25 or more uses of language.

Some of it may be proprietary, some of it may not. Some of it will go viral, some of it will not. But it peppers throughout each of these studies and again, it goes back to being understandable. I would add the next attribute of being shareable, which is one of the actions we want people to take with our point of views.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Just to call them out for our listeners, CEB uses a framework they call teach, tailor, and take control which is sort of just a methodology for what the sales lead should do in the sale. RAIN sort of counters with one that they call connect, convince, and collaborate and it’s sort of, again, same thing. It’s sort of like the three levels of selling that helps the seller sort of, I guess, build some framework for how they’re going to approach their conversations. I agree with everything you said, which is that they always do feel a little trite when it gets sort of broken down into these very simple things, especially when you’re talking about highly complex, usually very high ticket sales activities that firms are endeavoring upon. But they do make it easier for, like you said, for people to understand the concepts, share them, talk about them, and collaborate on them. Not to use that word again.

So in a sense that’s a key part of successful thought leadership is that you make difficult complex concepts, difficult complex research and you break it down to a place that people can understand and apply it and share it and act upon it. I guess they both succeeded in that regard.

Jeff McKay: Yeah, I think so. Although, I think I’d give it to challenger maybe a little more on that front. They created those kind of sales personas.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: Say, “Hey, I’m a challenger sale or I’m a relationship sale.” I don’t know that insight created that kind of view, maybe they did but I don’t recall them. So, it tells me even if they did, they didn’t do as good a job because it’s not as memorable. I think they both did a good job. I really believe in the rule of threes, and you know they’re three c’s, they’re three t’s set up brand, architectures, there’s always a three pyramid schema for those because that’s the way the human mind consumes and remembers information. I found with Insight Selling I really like their detail of attributes, and the attributes were kind of hard hitting in terms of, “Hey, you just may not be a salesman,” right? You need to have some gravitas and you have to have some certain personality characteristics, and if you don’t then don’t bother. Sales training isn’t going to help you. So, there was an honesty to it, as well. I’m left with a net impression, but maybe not a memorable sharable moniker for it.

Jason Mlicki: I always felt one of the more powerful pieces of work that CEB actually did in The Challenger Sale was from deep in the book where they describe the emotional journey of a commercial teaching pitch. So, they have this framework of the commercial teaching pitch and essentially how the sales person should lead the client to the solution, versus lead with the solution. That’s a big part of their thinking. But they map it against how you want your client to feel, how you want your customer to feel at various points of this journey on the pitch. I don’t know that it ever gets really collapsed down to a pitch in the way they do it, at least for most professional services firms, but I thought they were really really thoughtful about thinking about the emotional ride you want your clients to be on. What you want them to feel during the sale and how important that is to getting to the successful outcomes you have both for you as the seller firm and then of the client as the buyer. Getting you mutually together to a better place.

If I had to dial it back, I would say there’s some really powerful thinking in that, that we’ve applied multiple times either in client engagements or in various ways in the work just in our selling philosophy.

Jeff McKay: You hit on a great subject, or a great point. The thing that I take away from The Challenger Sale is, again, they create a dissonance from the traditional selling model that Insight Selling doesn’t. Insight Selling talks about providing insights whereas The Challenger Sale talks about teaching. We as human beings can relate to teachers and our good teachers and our bad teachers from our grade school, high school, college lives. And we immediately have an emotional and visible reaction to a word like, teach. I think they really nailed it with that word, again, going back to, and this is speaking to marketers who are working with consultants. The value that marketers can bring to research like this is the humanization of it. Of taking that pure consultant rational approach to solving a problem, and putting a human face and feel to it.

Challenger took all of that research and really broke it down to be a teacher. Who knows, they might have looked at the title of the book The Teacher Sale. I mean Challenger Sale sounds more manly, I guess, but it really is the teacher sale.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because that’s one of the things that RAIN goes right after in their research. They try to say the challenger is too antagonistic, that you’re essentially picking a fight with your customer and that’s not what you should be doing, you should be collaborating with them. Which I think is a little bit of hyperbole in the sense that that’s not really what CEB was trying to say, they just happened to use the moniker of the challenger to get you to, like you said, to wrap your head around the concept.

It’s funny you say that because I think about an experience I’m having right now, we just stood up a new retirement program for our employees that went through the process of interviewing and selecting someone to work with. I would say that the people we hired, that’s probably the number one reason I hired them was that I thought that in the sale the managing partner of this firm was the best teacher I’d ever experienced in the arena of financial services. He was so clear and coherent, and he did such a good job of educating me on things I wasn’t aware of and made it so understandable that my comfort level with his firm went up rapidly in the process. That notion of teaching, I think, is a big one because it never felt like he was lecturing me or taring me down for mistakes I’d made or whatever, it was let me build you up and teach you where you’re misunderstanding things or where you’re getting things wrong.

Jeff McKay: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki: We’re about out of time so I’m going to make a suggestion, here’s my suggestion is I want you to pick off one thing you like about each methodology and then tell me who you think won. And I’ll do the same thing. You want yo go first? Do you want me to go first.

Jeff McKay: Well, this was your subject so I’m going to get you go last and close the thing. I’m looking forward to what you have to say. I like so much about both of these. My sales and consulting and marketing approach is shaped by both of them along with many others, so it’s really hard to put a stake I the ground, but I’ll say these two things. For The Challenger Sale, outside of that being challenging in teaching which is an obvious one, what I liked about The Challenger Sale was the concept of how marketing allows the challenge at scale across the organization because that’s always been my perspective. Marketing sets the table and enables sales to actually challenge. That came through in The Challenger Sale, and when I read that the first time may years ago, I could have written this book, I wish I had written this book. I wish I would have read this book so I didn’t have to learn all this stuff the hard way. So, that’s my favorite thing, that’s my love hate relationship with The Challenger Sale.

The thing that I love about Insight Selling and their positioning, I like their gravitas, I love their willingness to go right at it, but I cannot get that parallelogram or whatever they use in their methodology for how you carry the story arc in the conversation of Insight Selling out of my mind. I just love it. I think it’s brilliant. It makes perfect sense to me from my own experience, but they reinforce it with their research and validate it in my mind. So, it ties to that Seth Godin, “People like us do things like this,” mantra. That, “Yeah! I can work with that,” because that’s kind of who I am and how I think anyway. So I love the parallelogram or whatever that shape is.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: It works for me.

Jason Mlicki: Don’t declare a winner yet, let me give my single thoughts and then we’ll declare winners, if there is one. The one thing we haven’t talked about from the challenger that I always really liked was they have a phrase that says, in that corporate teaching moment “When you’re bringing new insight to the client, the goal is not to resonate, the goal is to reframe.” So, you know you’ve done it well when the client says, “Hmm, I never thought about it that way before,” rather than the client says, “Oh, I totally agree.”

Jeff McKay: I love that. I live for those moments.

Jason Mlicki: Exactly. When that happens you know as a seller that you really understand your client’s situation much better than they expected you to, and that’s what you live for as a consultant.

Jeff McKay: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And a human being.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. On the RAIN side, if I think about one thing to me that jumps out, I already mentioned it but it’s just the shift from pains to gains. Just this notion of focusing on the potential, not on the problems. Not the what keeps you up at night thing. You know, we’re embraced that long before I ever read the Insight Selling stuff, but I love that they really narrowed in on that as a really critical issue in the sale.

Jeff McKay: Yeah, let’s do FUD because FUD is the IBM-

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. Alright, so who won who lost? Let’s declare winners. Who’s winning the battle for mindshare? I’ll let you go first.

Jeff McKay: I would say hands down who’s winning the mindshare, Challenge Sale. I don’t have any empirical evidence to support that, but I think if you asked people name three selling methodologies, Challenge Sale’s going to come up to the top. Is it the best methodology? I don’t necessarily agree because I don’t believe there is one, but for just sheer mindshare, Challenge Sale. For who’s producing the most ROI after a training and which one’s adopted better? I’d like to know the answer to that.

Jason Mlicki: I was going to say, I have no idea on that one.

Jeff McKay: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s the right question, not the one that people know the most of, but what one’s actually producing. That is a very important question to reinforce, because you need both. You need the mindshare, and you need the proof points.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah. Well, I’ll say Challenger Sale, CEB, definitely is winning, but the very fact that RAIN is sort of picking a fight with them tells you something. And I never saw CEB ever respond to that, at least I didn’t. They certainly have unbelievable proof points on their website for some amazing work they’ve done with some very high profile clients and the gains they’ve gotten. And then of course just, you know, because they were a publicly traded company at one time, you can literally point to double revenue growth, the exit to Gartner at a $2.6 billion valuation. I mean, it created a ton of value for CEB over the seven years between the time they published that book and the time they exited to Gartner. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t create a ton of value for clients with that type of rapid growth as well, but like you said, you don’t really know.

Jeff McKay: Hey, that’s a surprising conclusion coming from somebody that runs just an agency.

Jason Mlicki: I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed by agencies have created. But agencies probably create the most value of any form of professional services firm ever. Okay, with that we’re going to cut to close.

Jeff McKay: See you, buddy.

Jason Mlicki: Alright man, I’ll see yeah.