Ch 5: Teaching for Differentiation (Part 2)

But before we get to the steps themselves, it’s important to note the very strong emotional component of a well-designed teaching pitch. Frankly, this isn’t so much about delivering a formal presentation as it’s about telling a compelling story. Along the way, there should be some real drama, perhaps a bit of suspense, and maybe even a surprise or two. Ultimately, the goal is to take customers on a roller-coaster ride, leading first to a rather dark place before showing them the light at the end of the tunnel. And that light, of course, is your solution.

Source: Sales Executive Council research Figure 5.1. Deconstruction of a Commercial Teaching Pitch

A PURPOSEFUL CHOREOGRAPHY If you’re going to successfully convince reluctant customers to not only think differently, but act differently—in what is almost definitionally going to be a disruptive manner—then it’s not enough for your teaching pitch to simply convey a “compelling business case” with data, charts, and graphs. No one ever sold anything off a spreadsheet alone. Done well, a teaching pitch makes customers feel sort of sick about all the money they’re wasting, or revenue they’re missing, or risk they’re unknowingly exposed to. But if your story fails to engage both sides of the brain simultaneously—the rational and the emotional —it’s too easy for your customer to make no decision even over a good decision, as logic alone is rarely enough to overcome the status quo. Disruptive change is as much about following your gut as it is about following your head. So with that in mind, let’s review the six steps of a world-class teaching pitch.

Step 1: The Warmer After initial formalities (e.g., introductions, time check, agenda setting), a well- designed teaching pitch starts off with your assessment of your customer’s key challenges. Rather than asking, “What’s keeping you up at night?” you lay out what you’re seeing and hearing as key challenges at similar companies. If you have it, this is a great place to provide benchmarking data. At the very least, this is where you share anecdotes from other companies that capture the challenges most likely of highest concern to your customer in ways that corroborate their own experience. (Never underestimate the value in being able to demonstrate to your customers that they’re not alone when it comes to their most pressing challenges.) You then conclude your review by asking for their reactions. When you put it all together, it should sound something like, “We’ve worked with a number of companies similar to yours, and we’ve found that these three challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling. Is that what you’re seeing too, or would you add something else to the list?” The whole point of step 1, of course, is to build credibility. Essentially, what you’re saying to your customer is, “I understand your world,” and “I’m not here to waste your time asking you to teach me about your business.” It’s an approach we’ve dubbed “Hypothesis-Based Selling.” Rather than leading with open-ended questions about customers’ needs, you lead with hypotheses of customers’ needs, informed by your own experience and research. Ultimately, customers suffering from “solutions fatigue” love it not only because it makes the entire sale both faster and easier for them, but because it feels much more like a “get” than a “give”—they get your informed perspective rather than having to educate you with information you should have been able to figure out on your own. A Commercial Teaching pitch cuts right to the chase. It feels efficient. It honors the customer’s time and shows that you’ve done your homework. In other words, you’ve just established yourself as someone worth talking to. Or, at the very least, for the especially resistant customers out there, you’ve just bought yourself another five minutes. So what next? What are you going to do with the goodwill you’ve just established? Present your solution? Lay out your “value proposition”? That’s the last thing you want to do now! Although it is the next step they’re probably

expecting, and it’s absolutely the next thing a core-performing rep would do— and without a doubt what your competitor’s sales rep did when he was sitting in the same customer’s office an hour earlier. Think about it. You just got your customer to warm up to you by talking about their business. Why in the world would you want to ruin all that goodwill by spouting off about your business? You haven’t yet given them a reason to care. Instead, now you go to a place your customer never saw coming: the Reframe.

Step 2: The Reframe This is the central moment of a Commercial Teaching pitch, as the entire conversation pivots off what you’re about to do next. Building off the challenges your customer just acknowledged in step 1, you now introduce a new perspective that connects those challenges to either a bigger problem or a bigger opportunity than they ever realized they had. Mind you, you’re not expected to actually come up with the insight in the moment. For reasons we addressed in the previous section, that kind of spontaneous flash of brilliance is not only too hard, it’s actually a bad idea. Rather, this is something you’ve come well prepared to discuss. (In fact, it may have been a brief mention of this insight that won you the visit in the first place.) That said, at this point, your goal isn’t to lay out the explanations and implications of the insight in any great detail—that will come in a few minutes. Rather, the Reframe is simply about the insight itself. It’s just the headline. And like any good headline, your goal is to catch your customer off guard with an unexpected viewpoint—to surprise them, make them curious, and get them wanting to hear more. Remember, the reaction you’re looking for here is definitively not, “Yes! I totally agree! That’s exactly what we’re working on!” but rather, “Huh, I never thought of it that way before.” If your customer’s first reaction to your insight is enthusiastic agreement, then you haven’t actually taught them anything. And that’s is a dangerous place to be. Sure, it always feels great when your customer says, “I agree!” But if you’ve just articulated a problem they’ve already thought of, chances are pretty good they’ve already thought of a solution too. At best, you’re now “teaching at the margins.” Doing this is actually bad for two reasons. First, if you fail to provide unique insight, then you fail to provide unique value. Second, if your customers have already begun to consider possible solutions, you’ve lost a significant opportunity to skew their thinking toward your solution. Practically speaking, it’s like failing to get ahead of the RFP. You’re responding to customers’ needs rather than defining them. And that’s a recipe for increased commoditization. If you’re going to reframe, then be sure you really reframe. This is not the place to be timid, as the entire approach rests on your ability to surprise your customer and make them curious for more information. You’ve just bought

yourself another five minutes. So what’s next? Well, you’ve shown your customer a different way to think about their business, now you’ve got to show them why it matters.

Step 3: Rational Drowning Rational Drowning is where you lay out the business case for why the Reframe in step 2 is worth your customer’s time and attention. So now it’s time for the data, graphs, tables, and charts you need to quantify for the customer the true, often hidden, cost of the problem or size of the opportunity they’d completely overlooked. Rational Drowning is the numbers- driven rationale for why your customer should think differently about their business, but presented specifically in a way designed to make them squirm a little bit—to feel like they’re drowning. Marketers often refer to this as the “FUD factor”—fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If your presentation is done well, the customer reaction in step 3 should be something like, “Wow, I had no idea we were wasting that kind of money!” or “I’d never thought of this as an opportunity before. We’ve got to get after this or we’re going to really miss out!” If you’re going to put an ROI calculator in front of your customer, this is where it goes. But just remember the ROI that you’re calculating. In a world- class teaching pitch a good ROI calculator calculates the ROI on solving the challenge you’ve just taught your customer they have, not the ROI on buying your solution. If your ROI calculator is explicitly about your products and services—as it almost inevitably is—then you’re talking about the wrong thing. Before you demonstrate how your solution can economically solve a key customer challenge, you’ve got to convince the customer that that challenge is worth solving in the first place. Putting steps 2 and 3 together, you’ve got to show them something new, and then show them why it matters. This is what good teaching is all about. Great teaching, however, requires something else: emotional impact.

Step 4: Emotional Impact Emotional Impact is all about making absolutely sure that the customer sees themselves in the story you’re telling. There’s nothing more frustrating than laying out a compelling argument and hearing your customer say, “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, and I’m sure it makes a lot of sense for a lot of your customers. But I’m struggling to see how this applies to us. We’re different.” Ugh. This is the sales version of that awkward moment when your date looks at you and says, “It’s not you. It’s me.” Clearly, what they’re trying to say is, “I have absolutely zero interest in anything you have to offer.” So what do you do now? How do you counter the “we’re different” defense? For the core-performing rep, the response is predictable. If one chart wasn’t enough, try two. If the PowerPoint deck didn’t get you there, send the white paper. It’s more of the same. But simply repeating the business case in greater detail will never get you past the “we’re different” response. That’s because you’re solving for the wrong problem. The problem isn’t that you’ve failed to make a logical presentation, the problem is you’ve failed to make an emotional connection. It’s not that they don’t believe your story, it’s just that they don’t see it as their story. You need to get them to internalize what you’re telling them. So how do you do that? Now you’ve got to make it personal. And this is where a Challenger rep’s storytelling ability really comes into play. As the name implies, Emotional Impact isn’t about the numbers; it’s about the narrative. You’ve got to paint a picture of how other companies just like the customer’s went down a similarly painful path by engaging in behavior that the customer will immediately recognize as typical of their own company. The story, therefore, starts out with something like, “I understand you’re a little bit different, but let me give you a sense of how we’ve seen this play out at similar companies . . .” And for this to work, whatever you say next has to feel immediately familiar (which is another reason why a deep understanding of the customer must be acquired prior to the sales call, not just during it). The reactions you’re looking for are a rueful shake of the head, a wry smile, a thoughtful faraway look. Why? Because you’re looking for the customer to replay the same scenario in their head as it actually happened to them in their own company just last week. Ideally, the customer’s response to your story is

something like, “Wow, it’s like you work here or something. Yeah, we do that all the time. It just kills us.” And that is how you slay the dragon of “we’re just different”: by creating an emotional connection between the pain in the story you’re telling and the pain your customer feels every day inside their own organization. If your customer still thinks they’re different after step 4, you either have the wrong customer or the wrong story. But if you are successful, now you’ve got your customer bought in to the Reframe. They see the challenge or opportunity as their own, and now they’re looking for a solution.

Step 5: A New Way Coming into step 5 you’ve convinced the customer of the problem. Now you’ve got to convince them of the solution. This is a point-by-point review of the specific capabilities they would need to have in order to make good on whatever opportunity to make money, save money, or mitigate risk that you’ve just convinced them they’re facing. As tempting as it might be at this point to launch into a review of how you can help, step 5 is still about the solution, not about the supplier. Facing a customer who enthusiastically agrees that they’ve got the very challenge your solution directly addresses, it is deeply tempting to talk specifically about how you can help. For most reps it simply feels like the obvious thing to do. But step 5 isn’t a story about how much better customers’ lives would be if they bought your stuff (which is what most reps want to talk about), it’s about showing customers how much better their life would be if they just acted differently. It’s about behaving differently, not buying differently. Don’t rush this. Before they buy your solution, the customer has to buy the solution. You’re looking for your customer to say something like, “You’re right, that makes total sense. That’s what we need to do,” or “That’s the kind of company I want us to be.” Now they’re ready for step 6, Your Solution.

Step 6: Your Solution If step 5 is about getting customers bought in to acting differently, the goal of step 6 is to demonstrate how your solution is better able than anyone else’s to equip them to act differently. In many ways, of all six steps, this one is the most straightforward, as it’s what reps have been trained to do from the very beginning. This is where you lay out the specific ways you can deliver the solution they’ve just agreed to in step 5 better than anyone else. It’s also where all of the hard work around identifying your unique capabilities pays off, because they are front and center in step 6. After all, it would be absolutely crushing to get your customer all the way to step 6 and then have that deal go out to an RFP that you couldn’t easily win. If your competition is still in the running at this point, then you have either failed to identify capabilities that are truly unique or you have failed to lead to them as convincingly as you’d hoped. If, however, you’ve got this right, in steps 1–6 you’ve addressed both aspects of Commercial Teaching—the “commercial” and the “teaching”—in one conversation. You’ve taught the customer something new and valuable about their business (which is what they were looking for from the conversation), in a way that specifically leads them to value your capabilities over those of the competition (which is what you were looking for from the conversation). Now, when you look back at all six steps together, ask yourself the following question: Where does the supplier first enter the conversation? Notice it’s not until the very end in step 6. And for many reps, this is completely counterintuitive. After all, if I’m going to sell my solution to a customer, then the first thing I need to talk about is my solution—what it does, how it’s different, how it helps. Right? Wrong! That’s not the first thing you need to talk about, but the last, for a very simple reason: Your customer doesn’t care. That fact that your newly designed XZ-690 runs 15 percent faster, quieter, cooler, and cheaper than the competition just isn’t that interesting to most customers. If it is, then why bother with a sales call at all? Just send them a quote and take the order over the phone. Better yet, sell it through an e-store on the Internet and get rid of your sales force altogether. If, on the other hand, you’re going to take sixty minutes of your customer’s precious time for a face-to-face meeting, you’d better make sure that whatever

you do with that time is valuable to your customer. Listening to a review of how your XZ-690 is going to save them time and money isn’t. Talking about the customer’s business in ways that help them boost productivity is. Remember, in the Commercial Teaching world everything is built back from the finding that, in your customers’ eyes, your primary value as a supplier is your ability to teach them something, not to sell them something. In the teaching world, the pitch isn’t about the supplier at all. It’s about the customer. As a result, the best sales reps have found that you can’t win customers’ interest and loyalty if you lead with your differentiators—all your products, services, and solutions—no matter how good they are. Instead, the best sales conversations present the customer with a compelling story about their business first, teach them something new, and then lead to their differentiators. By placing your unique strengths in context at the end of a highly credible teaching pitch you completely change the customer’s disposition toward your offering. But to get there, there has to be a flow to the conversation, a purposeful choreography where your solution is the natural outgrowth of your teaching, rather than the subject of your teaching. And that’s a huge difference. Don’t lead with, lead to. Remember, the real value of the interaction isn’t what you sell; it’s the insight you provide as part of the sales interaction itself.

A LOOK IN THE MIRROR This teaching choreography allows you to very concretely audit and improve the sales conversations you’re having with customers right now. How closely does your pitch follow this path? Does it lead with, or lead to? Here’s a short quiz to compare your current approach with what you see here. Think right now about whatever piece of collateral, or slide deck, or capability brochure you typically take into a customer meeting. Specifically, think about the first four or five pages. What are they about? Most of the time it’s something like this: • What you believe in as a company. (Top favorites include “a cleaner world,” “serving our customers,” “innovating for the future,” “our 150 years of experience,” “our team of experienced professionals dedicated to helping our customers achieve their goals.”) • A review of all of your capabilities. (After all, you took the time and money to build out a solutions capability, and you want to make sure your customers understand all of the great ways you can help. There’s nothing more frustrating than customers who don’t fully appreciate all the great things you can do for them.) • A list of your top partners and customers, preferably accompanied by as many of their full-color logos as possible. (Nothing conveys credibility better than a long list of well-known customers who have placed their trust in you, right?) • A map of all of your locations all over the world. (If your customers are going global, you want them to know you’re right there with them, wherever that might be.) Sound familiar? Are the first four pages of your sales materials all about you, or about the customer? Almost inevitably, it’s the former. Not only do most reps lead with, rather than lead to, but almost all of the sales tools at their disposal do the same thing. It’s a trend as predictable for organizations as it is for individuals. So if you’re going to build Challenger reps and ask them to teach your

customers, for many companies one of the first steps will inevitably have to be a pretty significant review of the materials you provide them with to do that.

DEVELOPING A PURPOSEFUL CHOREOGRAPHY So how do you build a Commercial Teaching message? The place to begin is actually at the end with step 6, your solution. You can’t build a compelling story unless you first know what it’s building to. You’ve got to have both clarity and agreement across your organization around the unique benefits that only you can offer your customers. That said, as you nail those benefits down, you’ll want to focus in particular on the ones your customers currently underappreciate. Now that might feel counterintuitive at first. Wouldn’t you do the opposite? Focus on the unique benefits that your customers truly value? After all, that’s Marketing 101, right? Exactly. But if you want to teach customers something new and not just reinforce what they already know, you’ll need to ensure that the “punch line” of that teaching contains an element of surprise as well—a new and unexpected way to think about how you can help. Alternatively, if your customers already place high value on your benefits over those of the competition, you likely don’t need to teach them anything at all. Just take their order. But beware: By focusing solely on the known value of your offering, you forgo an opportunity to challenge customers’ thinking, which they value even more than whatever you’re selling. You win their business in the short run, but potentially lose it over time. By helping customers think differently about their company, you ultimately want them to think differently about your company. Once you’ve established clarity around step 6—Your Solution—your next stop in building a powerful Commercial Teaching conversation is step 2—the Reframe. You need to identify the core insight, or ah-ha! moment, that will get your customer to say, “Wow, I never thought about it that way before.” To get there, start with the unique benefits you’ve identified for step 6 and then ask yourself, “Why don’t my customers value those benefits already?” What is it about how they view their world that precludes them from appreciating those benefits as much as we think they either could or should? That’s the view you need to change. And to change it, you’ll need to provide them with an alternate view (the Reframe), and then convince them that that alternate view—were they to pursue it—could either save or make them more

money than they realized (step 3). After that, it’s simply a matter of fleshing out the rest of the story to create a logical and compelling path from step 2 to step 6. Put it all together and you get: “What’s currently costing our customers more money than they realize, that only we can help them fix?” The answer to that question is the heart and soul of your Commercial Teaching pitch.

BUILDING THE INSIGHT GENERATION MACHINE When you step back and consider the scope of what we’re proposing here, you can begin to see how this approach reaches deep back into the organization. Yes, you need Challenger reps to deliver the teaching, but the actual construction of the conversation—the unique benefits, the surprising customer insights, the tightly packaged teaching choreography—require input from the entire commercial organization. Many companies choose to shield sales reps from the complexity of the six- step choreography altogether by simplifying the approach into three key elements: (1) Providing customers with game-changing insight, (2) specifying and personalizing the potential impact of that insight, and (3) introducing your capabilities as the best possible means of acting on that insight. It’s the same journey, but it’s simply easier to process for reps traditionally accustomed to “leading with” rather than “leading to.” It’s possible you’ve begun wondering: “Identifying unique benefits . . . segmenting customers by need . . . generating compelling customer insight . . . developing teaching-based collateral . . . For a book about individual sales performance, it seems like we’ve wandered a long way away from the individual rep.” But remember, this book is absolutely about individual sales reps and how they can perform significantly better, yet you wouldn’t want to leave any of these things in the hands of your individual reps. These are organizational capabilities, not individual skills. A critical lesson of the Challenger approach is the significant need for organizational involvement to make it truly sustainable and not just the result of incidental sales rep excellence. Few but the very best of your reps could pull off this kind of teaching on their own consistently over time. When sales leaders first see Commercial Teaching, they usually tell us something like, “I’m having a hard enough time getting my guys to sell, and now you want them to teach? Good luck!” But it doesn’t have to be that way. At least in terms of teaching, the most important steps you can take to migrate your sales force closer to the Challenger profile have less to do with the individual reps themselves and much more to do with the organization that supports them. In

fact, in many ways, Commercial Teaching is likely easier for individual reps than what we’re asking them to do right now. Much of the heavy lifting necessary to its success happens long before an individual rep ever gets in front of a customer. To understand why, think about the journey from transactional selling to solutions selling that just about every B2B sales organization has undertaken across the last five to fifteen years (see figure 1.1 on page 7). As part of that move, sales skill requirements have gone up dramatically. With transactional selling, reps sold largely on product features and benefits; in the new world of solution selling, reps probe for individual customer needs in the moment, allowing them to suggest specifically tailored solutions to whatever they hear in response. In its purest form, solution selling is customization in the moment. It’s an incredibly high bar for any sales rep. It’s no wonder, really, that sales organizations all over the world struggle mightily to help their teams make this transition. With Commercial Teaching, you can significantly back off on your expectations for individual customization ability, as the organization steps in to offer crucial support around the very thing that customers have told us they value most in supplier interactions, namely the sharing of commercial insight. The reps’ primary job shifts from discovering needs to guiding a conversation. That allows the organization to lay out the framework for that conversation in advance—to “chalk the field,” as one head of sales put it. There are a number of ways in which that conversation might still take an unexpected turn or go off the rails altogether, and individual skill is still hugely important in allowing the best reps to navigate those scenarios better than anyone else, but Commercial Teaching places significant guardrails around the sales interaction to provide real support for the rep. First, the customer’s needs are prescoped. Reps don’t start with a blank sheet of paper and diagnose each customer’s needs individually. Much of that work has been done inside the organization through better segmentation and customer analysis, significantly reducing the burden on the one skill reps probably struggle with the most. Second, the conversation is prescripted. A teaching rep still has to interact with the customer in a live setting, answering questions and adapting to unanticipated objections. However, the rep’s opening set of hypotheses is already laid out in detail, and every step along the way is clearly marked through the teaching choreography. Because the teaching pitch follows the same talking points again and again, reps will naturally improve as they learn from experience, becoming more compelling over time. In that respect, Commercial

Teaching supported by the organization is much more concrete than running an open-ended needs analysis. It’s easier for reps to learn, and easier for managers to coach. Finally, the solution the rep is working toward is predefined. The burden on the rep to determine the right solution for an individual customer is significantly reduced, as the solution is largely determined in advance through organizational identification of the supplier’s unique benefits and needs-based segmentation of customers. One company we work with refers to these prebuilt solutions as “Happy Meals,” based on McDonald’s famous “meal solution” for young children. They’re off-the-shelf solutions that feel customized to customers, because they’re well tailored in advance to those customers’ most common needs. Of course, this approach still requires greater skill than the simple world of transactional selling. But compare it with a world of classic solution selling or “consultative selling” where reps are expected to figure all of this out on their own. While your stars will get it right at least some of the time, your core reps will struggle mightily all of the time. But if you’ve done your homework inside the organization to build a solid teaching interaction to begin with, your reps are far better prepared to succeed when they’re in front of the customer. So who should do the work? Commercial Teaching is as much a team sport as an individual one. Just as you’ll need to align individual reps to the Challenger profile to make it work, you’ll need to align sales and marketing around the core capabilities implicit in the Commercial Teaching choreography:

Identify your unique benefits.
Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’ thinking.
Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.”
Equip reps to challenge customers. Commercial Teaching also provides a concrete and very actionable road map for addressing arguably one of the toughest challenges in all of B2B sales and marketing, namely getting the two functions to work together in the first place. Given the chance, any head of sales or marketing will be happy to regale you with examples of the historically poor—or nonexistent—collaboration between the two functions. At best in most organizations there’s a thinly veiled antipathy across the sales/marketing divide. At worst, it’s outright hostility. We’ve all seen the statistics. Eighty percent of marketing collateral winds up in the trash, while 30 percent of sales time is spent reproducing the very collateral they just threw away. The underlying cause of much of this discord typically goes unaddressed. Most companies fail to define an agreed-upon framework for what the two

functions should actually do together in the first place. Many commercial executives who lament the need for greater sales and marketing “integration” fail to consider the problem from the opposite perspective, which is: What shouldn’t they do together? Commercial Teaching provides a road map for integrating around a limited number of activities that truly matter. The approach defines a very specific framework for “what good looks like” for the entire commercial organization, allowing for the identification of concrete roles, tasks, goals, and responsibilities. For example, only marketing has the tools, the expertise, and the time to generate the insights necessary to challenge customers both scalably and repeatedly. As the head of marketing at a large telecommunications company put it, marketing must serve as the “insight generation machine” that keeps reps well equipped with quality teaching material that customers will find compelling. Sales, on the other hand, will have to ensure that reps have the knowledge, skills, and coaching necessary to go out and use that insight in a convincing manner to actually challenge customers. It’s a symbiotic relationship around a core principle. Either way, at the end of the day your message library, your collateral, and your pitch can’t be static. They must constantly evolve to stay current with the customer’s business environment and with a competitive, dynamic landscape. This is a big job—hundreds of products, dozens of customer segments, multiple channels, and a customer environment that evolves on a quarterly basis. Therefore, Commercial Teaching isn’t a one-time exercise, it’s an “always-on” capability. With input from the sales force—and at their behest—organizations must invest in training marketers to articulate differentiators and constantly source fresh and compelling teaching messages. MAKE SURE YOUR TEACHING PITCH IS “BOLD”

We see a lot of companies slip into “safe mode” as they develop their teaching pitches. They might start with something insightful and genuinely provocative, but as more and more people get their hands on it internally, it gets watered down to the point where it’s more of a suggestion than a provocation. A great tool we’ve seen to ensure that teaching pitches don’t lose their edge as they work their way through the organization is the “SAFE-BOLD Framework,” developed by Neil Rackham and KPMG. The framework functions as a grading exercise for evaluating the strength of a teaching pitch. To quote Neil and KPMG, “A successful teaching pitch must do four

things well. First, it must be big. Done well, it will be seen by the customer as more expansive and farther-reaching than an ordinary idea. Second, it must be innovative. It has to push the envelope with new, often untested and unique approaches. Third, it must be risky. Big ideas mean that we are asking our own companies and our customers to take a big risk in adopting our idea. And lastly, it must be difficult . The idea itself must be hard to do —either because of scale, uncertainty, or politics—otherwise, why would a customer hire you to fix it for them?” The framework is a simple tool that forces you to grade a potential teaching pitch along these four dimensions. The best ideas will score closer to the “BOLD” end of the continuum—they will be big, they will outperform (from a riskiness perspective), they will be leading-edge (in terms of innovation), and they will be difficult to implement for the customer. At the other end of the spectrum are the “SAFE” ideas, which, in contrast, are small, feel easily achievable (in terms of risk), are “follower” ideas (versus progressive, innovative ideas), and are seen as easy to implement. The way Neil and the KPMG team employed this tool was to ask a group of KPMG client advisers to brainstorm a Challenger pitch to a client and then present that pitch to an audience of internal peers, who in turn graded the pitch using the SAFE-BOLD framework. KPMG tells us that this has now become a part of the internal vernacular for the organization, with client advisers cautioning peers against watering down and “making too SAFE” their customer pitches.

Source: KPMG, Neil Rackham. Figure 5.2. The SAFE-BOLD Framework Remember, Relationship Builders are everywhere, not just in sales, and chances are pretty good that somewhere along the line, a senior-level Relationship Builder—maybe somebody in marketing or corporate communications, maybe a senior line executive—will temper the message of the pitch, fearful that it will come across as confrontational or unsettling to the customer. One of the classic Relationship Builder modifications to a great teaching pitch is to pull the “who we are and what we do” slides from the back of the pitch deck (where they belong in a proper teaching pitch) and put them in the front of the deck. Relationship Builders feel the need to establish credibility up front by throwing around company size and factoids and engaging in some high-profile customer name-dropping. They are uncomfortable leading with insight and letting their insights establish credibility for them. As soon as you’re not looking, Relationship Builders will take out their belt sanders and smooth out the edges of your sharp pitch. They’ll soften it until you barely recognize it, pushing it to the SAFE end of the continuum. But being a little unsettling is the point of a Challenger approach: to be provocative, to challenge, and therefore to be seen as differentiated by the customer. Without an edge, you sound just like everybody else. Remember, while Relationship Builders seek to reduce or defuse tension, Challengers constructively use tension to their advantage. So what does Commercial Teaching look like and feel like in reality? Now that we’ve laid out the theory of the approach, we can see it in action at two real companies: W. W. Grainger, Inc., and ADP Dealer Services.

COMMERCIAL TEACHING CASE STUDY #1: W. W. GRAINGER, INC., AND THE POWER OF PLANNING THE UNPLANNED W. W. Grainger, Inc., based in Lake Forest, Illinois, is a $7 billion distributor of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) equipment and supplies, serving nearly two million companies primarily across the United States and Canada. Grainger provides one-stop shopping for the wide range of equipment companies need to keep their facilities, plants, and offices running safely, smoothly, and efficiently. All told, the company stocks several hundred thousand different products—from tools, pumps, and safety supplies to electrical equipment and janitorial supplies—which they deliver through branches, a heavily trafficked e- store, and of course the famous Grainger product catalog. Much of its sales volume is driven by both inside and field-based sales reps working with customers to establish long-term customer purchase agreements. As powerful as Grainger’s broad product portfolio can be in serving customers’ many and diverse needs, the company’s impressive scope can be overwhelming. Faced with such a daunting array of choices, over the years, some customers have slipped into buying individual products reactively, based simply on past purchase patterns and opportunistic need, rather than taking the time to sit down with Grainger and consider how to manage their overall MRO spend more wisely, despite the fact that many companies’ total MRO spend can easily reach into the tens of millions of dollars. In the view of many customers, it’s just a bunch of hammers, gloves, light bulbs, pumps, and generators. “We’ve got more important things to do,” the thinking goes, “than spend our time worrying about that stuff.” The result for Grainger? Over time, many customers had come to think of Grainger merely as a transactional supplier rather than a strategic partner. Need a hammer? Go to Grainger. Need a pump? Go to Grainger. Need business advice on competing more effectively? Not so much. It simply never occurred to many customers that Grainger might be able to help with anything beyond great products at great prices. So when it came time for those customers to renew their contracts, that’s what they wanted to talk about: price.

Now, you could argue that there are certainly worse problems to have than customers who think about you primarily as the company with great products at great prices. But if your primary goal as a business is to drive deeper customer relationships through broader, more strategic “solutions,” it’s actually a pretty tough place to be. It’s hard to drive organic growth and deepen customer relationships when your customers think of you by and large as a transactional supplier of relatively unimportant products. In the end, you become relegated to the customer’s facilities management team, or worse, procurement, where you wind up haggling over short-term pricing rather than long-term value creation. So Grainger had a problem. As Debra Oler, Grainger’s vice president and general manager of Grainger Brand, put it, if the company was going to establish itself as a true solutions provider in the minds of its customers, it had to change the way those customers thought about the company. They needed to build a convincing story, not about how Grainger can sell you more hammers, but about how it can help you improve your bottom line by saving you money. To do that, Grainger first had to solve an even bigger challenge. The real problem wasn’t so much that customers failed to think about Grainger strategically, but that they failed to think of their own MRO spend strategically. It’s hard to be perceived as an important partner when your customers think of you as only touching an unimportant part of the business. So long before Grainger could change customers’ minds about how they thought about it, they first had to change customers’ minds about how they thought about themselves. They had to show them that the millions of dollars they spend every year in MRO purchases is not only a sizable investment, but more important, one that, if managed properly, could save them millions of dollars. Indeed, in tracking customers’ purchase habits for several years, Grainger had discovered that most companies were purchasing MRO products extremely inefficiently, and those habits were costing them millions of dollars that they had no idea they could be saving. In other words, Grainger had discovered an opportunity to teach customers something new about their business—a way to rethink MRO spend—that could free up huge amounts of cash they could then use on much more important things than hammers. In terms of insight, they had a slam dunk. In terms of Commercial Teaching, however, Grainger needed the other crucial piece of the story. Before teaching customers how to save millions of dollars by thinking differently about their MRO spend, Grainger had to make sure that this insight naturally led customers to prefer Grainger over the wide range of alternative MRO suppliers. To do that, Deb and the team first had to answer the single question, “Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?” As

it turned out, that question wasn’t nearly as easy to answer as they’d anticipated. As Deb tells it, one colleague suggested, for example, that they tout their massive product line as truly differentiating. Whereupon Deb asked, “Do none of our competitors offer a wide range of products?” “No,” the answer came back, “there are a few guys out there that have a pretty wide range of products as well—at least for some of the categories we serve.” “That won’t work, then. What else is there?” asked Deb. “Well, we’ve got stores all over the country. Wherever you are, you can find a Grainger branch.” “So customers can’t meet their MRO needs through other retail outlets?” Deb asked. “No, there are other companies out there with stores . . .” “That’s not it either, then. What else?” And around they went, looking for the set of capabilities that truly set Grainger apart. And frankly, it proved to be much harder than most on the team would have thought. As Deb put it, “For a while, it really took us to a dark place. After all, what were we better at than anyone else? Were we really any different?” It’s a difficult question for most companies. When you sit down to really define the specific set of capabilities that sets you apart, once you cross off “innovative,” “customer-focused,” “solutions-oriented,” “market leader,” “great people,” “trusted,” and “rich history” from your list, many executives land in the same dark place Grainger did. And now you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and set about the hard work of identifying real capabilities that only you can offer. For Grainger, that kind of clarity came only after a large number of leader-led customer interviews, a great deal of market research, some robust data analysis of customer spending tendencies, and a number of cross-functional brainstorming sessions designed to capture as complete a picture of market perceptions as possible. In the end, all of that work led Grainger to two important conclusions. First, most companies were spending far too much on purchasing MRO products every year, because they failed to appreciate how certain buying behaviors were costing them huge amounts of money. Second, while other suppliers might carry a wide range of products or maintain a convenient network of retail outlets, only Grainger did it all, and on a scale that allowed customers partnered with Grainger to eliminate those costs by avoiding unnecessary or “cautionary” MRO purchases. Whatever you needed, wherever you needed it, whenever you needed it, Grainger could provide it, so you didn’t have to buy it “just in case.” In other words, Grainger’s distinctive combination of capabilities put the company in a

unique position to help customers free up surprising amounts of operating expense, and provided a powerful opportunity to shift customers’ view of Grainger from transactional supplier to strategic partner. Grainger then took those insights and built them into a conversation titled “The Power of Planning the Unplanned,” a world-class example of a Commercial Teaching conversation. This is the kind of content organizations need to provide the frontline sales force in order to make Commercial Teaching work beyond the star-performing Challenger reps. In fact, Grainger reps bring the “Power of Planning the Unplanned” deck into almost every sales call because it absolutely hits the heart of the company’s differentiated value proposition. For Grainger, the goal of this conversation is to change the way that customers think about the company. But to get them there, the Grainger rep first needs to get customers to change the way they think about their own MRO spend. That’s how the conversation is set up from the very beginning—as a conversation about the customer’s MRO spend, not about Grainger’s capabilities. So as you might imagine, the Grainger sales rep requests the meeting in the first place in order to share some important insights Grainger has learned about how most companies could save a lot of money simply by thinking differently about how they manage their MRO spend. In fact, take a look at the agenda for the sales call:

From the very start of the conversation, everything is squarely focused on the customer. Remember, customers want to talk about their business, not your solution, and that’s exactly how Grainger positions the meeting. First and foremost, the agenda is laid out as a “get” for the customer, not a “give.” It’s Grainger saying, “We’re here to help you think smarter about a part of your business where we have deep expertise.” That’s the positioning; now we’re ready to go. First stop, step 1, the Warmer:

The Warmer starts with the customer’s challenges. So the opening is, “We know you face a host of challenges every day, such as production line issues, workers’ comp costs, maintenance and safety issues. Especially those challenges that are critical to keeping your business open and running every single day.” After reviewing a couple issues and providing some general color from other companies, the rep then asks the customer to select for discussion one or two that are particularly pressing in their organization. The idea is to get the customer pulled into the conversation right away and talking about their challenges relative to what Grainger has already seen at other companies. Grainger has found that this one page can lead to an incredibly robust and valuable conversation—all because the rep led with a hypothesis of customer need rather than an open-ended question to “discover” customer need. Done well, at this point the conversation feels less like a sales presentation and more like two colleagues commiserating about common challenges. It’s a

connection born of shared experience and a great way to start a conversation. Yet while the Grainger rep may have built a connection at this point, he or she hasn’t actually taught the customer anything new. That happens in step 2, the Reframe. To change the way customers think about their MRO spend, Grainger starts by breaking that spend into its typical categories: tools, safety, lighting, janitorial, and so on. For many companies the total spend in any one of these categories can easily represent hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, depending on the company’s size. This will all look very familiar to the customer. However, what’s not familiar to customers is a completely different way to think about this spend. Using a relatively straightforward graphic, the rep shifts the customer’s perspective from vertical product categories to horizontal purchase tendencies: from what they buy to how they buy. They do that by introducing the idea of “planned” versus “unplanned” purchases. The rep explains, “Planned purchases are products and parts that you buy very frequently, usually on a regular cycle and budgeted for in advance. Unplanned purchases, on the other hand, are products and repair parts that you buy at the last minute, usually in response to some unforeseen need or problem.” The distinction’s important, because what companies don’t realize is how the unplanned part of MRO spend—the seemingly one-off, innocuous purchases of

an extra hammer here, or a replacement pump there—can add up to a huge amount in any given year and actually have strategic consequences for a company. Grainger has determined from its research that a full 40 percent of a typical company’s MRO spend is for unplanned purchases. When you add that up across all categories of MRO spend combined, unplanned purchase spend is bigger than any one individual product category, representing millions of dollars in last minute, one-off spending. Notice, the rep hasn’t yet built the full business case for why the distinction matters—that’s still coming—but at this point he or she has at least piqued the customer’s interest. They’re curious to hear more. After all, you’ve just told them that their second biggest category of MRO spend—unplanned purchases— is one they’ve never even thought to track before. Now they’re wondering what that might mean for their business. Remember, the litmus test for the Reframe is simply to get your customer to say, “Huh, I’d never really thought about it that way before,” and this shift in perspective from what they buy to how they buy is a great example of how to do that well. Now the rep is ready to build a solid business case for why it matters. On to step 3, Rational Drowning. Using data from its own analysis of several years’ worth of customer spend data, Grainger uses the next several slides to build out the story of the often overlooked, but very real cost of unplanned purchases. “In fact,” the Grainger

rep continues, “it’s probably worse than you think. A huge number of the purchases you make aren’t just unplanned—they’re infrequent. Most you make only once. Yet each one requires additional time, effort, people, and money to complete.” This is Grainger using their expertise to teach the customer something about their business. For the customer, it’s valuable insight. For Grainger, it’s an effective means to turn interest into action by building a rational business case that makes the customer feel real discomfort around a problem they’d never realized they had. If Grainger has a long-standing relationship with a particular customer, the rep will often review their purchase history with the company to ensure the story is as compelling as possible. It’s hard to say you’re different when you’re looking at your very own data. So what’s the impact of all of these unplanned purchases? Well, it’s pretty dramatic. While most companies work with a small number of suppliers for planned purchases, they often have hundreds of suppliers for unplanned purchases, because every item is purchased from whichever supplier can get it to you right away. And the cost of spreading 40 percent of your MRO spend across that many different suppliers can be huge, as there’s no leverage there. Every item is purchased at the last minute at full retail. Even worse than the additional direct costs of unplanned purchases, however,

are the unseen but dramatically high indirect costs. The real cost of unplanned purchases comes from all of the necessary but typically overlooked process costs associated with buying something you hadn’t planned for. You’ve got to take the time to find the part, generate an invoice, call the supplier, place the order, inventory whatever you bought, and then run paperwork and payment on the purchase. All told, any single unplanned purchase can involve five to ten different people across your company and incur huge amounts of unseen cost when you add up all the time, effort, paperwork, and people necessary to buy it. More often than not the very act of buying an unplanned item is vastly more expensive than the item itself. At this point, the customer is likely beginning to feel a little sick about all these unplanned purchases. This is happening every day in their organization, and they’ve never really thought of it this way before. They’re thinking, “Great, that hammer I bought last week for $17 actually cost me $117! If I multiply that by 40 percent of my total MRO spend, how am I even staying in business?” It’s meant to be a real gut punch—a rational argument designed to evoke an emotional reaction. But just in case the customer is still skeptical of the problem at this point, Grainger turns the dial one more time. The conversation now moves to step 4, Emotional Impact. Now they make it personal.

To ensure that the customer truly sees themselves in the story Grainger is telling, Grainger uses a slide they like to call the “Pain Chain” to illustrate how nearly every company acts when something important breaks down that they need to replace in a hurry. Let’s say that a hard-to-find coil on the twenty-year-old air-conditioning system in your CEO’s office goes out in midsummer. Well, it’s hot, and it’s your CEO, so clearly you’ve got to get the thing fixed as soon as possible. So what do you do? The first thing you likely do is call one of your go-to suppliers for planned purchases. Surely they can help. But after twenty minutes on hold, you learn that they’ve just sold out of the part and won’t have any more for at least two weeks. So you try another supplier you’ve worked with once or twice in the past, but they don’t carry the part at all. After twenty minutes on hold, a third supplier tells you that according to their inventory system they should have two in stock, but they can’t find them on the shelf back in the warehouse. Now you’re getting frustrated. Two hours on the phone—mostly listening to really bad adult contemporary music—and you’ve got nothing but bad news to report to your increasingly impatient—and sweaty—CEO. Feeling a little desperate, you call the fourth and final supplier in the greater metropolitan area. They’re all the way across town, but that ceased to matter about ninety minutes ago. Great! They’ve got the part! So you pull two guys off the production line, put the hastily generated paperwork in their hands, and send

them across town in rush-hour traffic to pick up the part. An hour and a half later, when they get there, they call you up and say, “Hey, boss, they’ve actually got three of these things. You want that we should buy another one, just to be safe?” Well, you never want to go through this again, so you tell them, “Just buy all three and get back here as fast as you can!” You use one part to repair the air conditioner, and you put the other two in the back corner of the warehouse on a shelf Grainger likes to call the “Parts Orphanage” where they just sit and gather dust. You probably won’t need them next year. Or the year after that. And when you finally do, the whole system is likely obsolete and needs to be replaced anyway. But if you think about it, not only are those parts that you’ll never use, but more important, that’s valuable cash you’ve just tied up in inventory that you don’t actually need, simply because you never want to have to go through the pain of having to buy that part again. And that’s cash you could be using for far more important things that you actually do need. Dramatic? Yes. But Grainger’s story is completely believable and credible. That’s because it’s based on real customer behavior (this is where all those customer interviews really pay off ). More important, however, it’s dramatic for a reason. The story is intentionally designed to generate an emotional response from customers. They need to see themselves in the picture you’re painting. They should feel the pain as if it were their story you were telling. As one customer put it when they saw the Pain Chain, “Wow, you know us too well! We play a starring role in that movie every single day!” And that’s the point. To get the customer to “own” the story, ensure that they see unplanned purchases as a problem that absolutely applies to them. Now the transition into step 5, where Grainger can paint the picture of a New Way.

To get to the actual solution, Grainger transitions from the personal to the organizational: “Now, that’s the problem with just one unplanned purchase in one category. The kicker is, you do that again and again across every category of MRO spend. So even if you were able to get your hands around unplanned purchases in one category, the larger problem is still there. And no company is structured to effectively manage this spend across every category. “But imagine if you could. The problem represents a huge opportunity if you can get your hands around it. Unplanned purchases represent a huge amount of unnecessary spend and unnecessary inventory costs. It’s money you could be spending on more important things. And that’s a problem that Grainger—given its specific capability set—is uniquely positioned to solve for you.” At this point, the conversation turns to how Grainger can help. Finally, we’re ready to start talking about Grainger’s solution. If you’re an existing customer, they’ve got your actual data and can start mapping out a plan. If they don’t work with you much, they use this conversation to suggest a diagnostic of your unplanned purchases. Either way, all of the hard work that Deb and the team did earlier to map out Grainger’s unique benefits is now laid out, specifically in terms of how they help customers solve the unplanned purchase challenge that Grainger has just taught them they have. It’s an absolutely fantastic example of Commercial Teaching because the heart and soul of the conversation is a set of insights designed to help customers operate more profitably. That said, did you see where Grainger and its capabilities first come up in the conversation? Not until the very end. There’s no

mention of Grainger’s capabilities, stores, Web sites, history, size, product catalog, etc., anywhere across the first two-thirds of this conversation. That’s because this isn’t a story about Grainger; it’s a story about the customer and how they can put money back into their operating budget that they didn’t even realize they were wasting. From the customer’s perspective, the fact that Grainger has a solution to the problem is more a happy coincidence. For them, the real value of the interaction is the quality of Grainger’s insight. Customers come away from this conversation thinking very differently not only about their MRO spend, but also about the role Grainger can play in significantly reducing that spend over time. Grainger is no longer the place to buy $17 hammers, but rather the partner to work with in order to avoid buying $117 hammers. By placing Grainger’s unique strengths in context—at the end of a highly credible teaching pitch—the company completely changes customers’ disposition toward their offering. But to get there, there has to be a flow to the pitch, a specific “choreography.” And that’s really the fundamental shift of Commercial Teaching. It’s a move from leading with your unique strengths to one where carefully constructed teaching interactions very deliberately lead the customer to your unique strengths. Your solution isn’t the subject of your teaching but the natural outgrowth of your teaching. Remember, from the customer’s perspective, the real value of the interaction isn’t what you sell, it’s the quality of the insight you provide as part of the sales interaction itself.

COMMERCIAL TEACHING CASE STUDY #2: ADP DEALER SERVICES’ PROFIT CLINIC SEMINARS ADP Dealer Services, a division of Automatic Data Processing, is a leading provider of enterprise software to car, truck, and other kinds of vehicle dealerships around the world. When Kevin Hendrick, then the head of sales for ADP, first saw our work on Commercial Teaching in 2008, the company was facing a real problem. While the economy was still in relatively strong shape, the team at Dealer Services was already tracking a number of early warning signs in the automotive industry that didn’t bode well for the near future. Not only had retail car sales declined steadily for the last three years, but more troubling, the U.S. car industry was facing a significant overpopulation of dealerships, the number of which, in response to shrinking demand, was now dramatically declining. Ultimately, across the three years from 2007 to 2010 the number of new and used auto dealerships in the U.S. decreased from 21,200 to 18,460. Now, if you’re a provider of enterprise software solutions to auto dealerships, think for a minute about what those numbers mean. In the course of just a few short years, the company was facing a 15 percent decline of its total addressable market in a key market segment as potential customers simply vanished. Tougher still, as part of a publicly traded company, ADP Dealer Services was naturally looking to post strong organic growth over that same period. But how in the world do you grow a company in a declining market? That’s incredibly difficult. Really, you have only one choice: Aggressively increase market share while vigorously preventing customer defection. In this world, if you’re going to win new business, you’re going to have to take it away from someone else. But that wasn’t going to be easy. While dislodging an incumbent supplier is always a challenge, the company was simultaneously battling a rise in small competitors, each competing aggressively against only a specific piece of Dealer Services’ broader capability set. As an industry-leading supplier, ADP offered a unique value proposition encompassing technology solutions for every aspect of an automotive dealership, including digital marketing, vehicle sales, service sales, and even parts solutions. Small competitors, on the other hand, focused on only one piece of that puzzle, such as software designed to run just the service

center, or just the sales office. These vendors approached customers with a very different kind of message, emphasizing vast potential savings by buying “only the software you most urgently need.” And as you might imagine, in a world of concerned customers looking to survive, that message was resonating strongly. Put it all together and ADP Dealer Services was looking at a potentially painful year. On the one hand, they were losing margin to customers increasingly focused on cost containment as their industry imploded around them. On the other, they were losing sales to upstart competitors aggressively playing on those fears to drive customers into price-based, transactional sales of stripped-down, stand-alone products. Yet the true irony of the situation was the fact that the very heart and soul of Dealer Services’ value proposition was their unique ability to help dealers reduce cost. And if there was ever a time when this message should resonate, one would think that this would have been it. But that didn’t happen. Customers simply couldn’t see past the total price tag. Dealer Services reps would go into a sales call leading with all of ADP’s unique and powerful capabilities to save customers money, and the dealers would respond, “That’s great, but I’ve got another guy that says he can do just the part I need right now for a lot less. I’d like to work with you guys, but only if you throw all this other stuff out and knock 30 percent off the price of what’s left.” Painful. It’s no wonder, then, that when Kevin saw the work on Commercial Teaching he had a bit of a “lightbulb moment.” He realized that a large part of the problem was that ADP Dealer Services reps were “leading with,” not “leading to.” If Dealer Services was going to get customers to think differently about its broader solution, the company first had to get dealers to think differently about the costs associated with their software choices. Because ADP knew something about the implications of those choices that customers themselves didn’t yet realize: In their efforts to save money, all of their investments in one-off software systems for individual parts of the business were causing them huge operational inefficiency and redundancy that was ultimately costing them money, not saving it. With that insight in mind, Dealer Services set out to build a comprehensive Commercial Teaching capability, spanning two key initiatives. The first was to build a better story. While the company had a clear understanding of the unique benefits that set their solution apart, they needed messaging leading to those benefits, rather than with them. So the company’s sales operations and marketing teams designed a powerful story called “Total Dealer Spend,” featuring a data-based analysis of the surprisingly costly but hidden impact of inefficient IT systems on overall dealership profitability. On average, they found, dealerships work with twelve different vendors, resulting in

up to 40 percent redundant costs—costs ADP Dealer Services could eliminate through their single-supplier solution. Not surprisingly, like the Grainger story, the central goal of Dealer Services’ approach was to evoke an emotional as well as a rational response. Dealers were surprised—and often deeply troubled—to learn that they were unnecessarily spending huge amounts of money at a time when they could least afford to do so. ADP’s second key initiative was to build a series of customer seminars— called Profit Clinics—designed to provide dealers with in-person insights into how to run their companies more profitably. The clinics are exactly what they sound like—free seminars offered by Dealer Services specifically designed to help customers assess the costs of inefficient and duplicative work created by overlapping IT systems. The focus is squarely on the insight. Of course, as you might imagine, the seminars are also constructed to follow a Commercial Teaching choreography. The one thing ADP Dealer Services does not talk about for the first two-thirds of the seminar is ADP Dealer Services. It’s not about the supplier, it’s about the customer. Just like Grainger, after a Warmer, there’s the Reframe (i.e., “The software decisions you’re making in order to save money are actually costing you money”), then the Rational Drowning and Emotional Impact as the company lays out how disjointed systems create all sorts of hidden costs dealers never realized they had. Ultimately this leads to a portrait of a world-class solution and a review of how Dealer Services’ unique capabilities can provide that solution better than anyone else. It’s a classic case of leading to, not with. Dealers love the seminars because they deliver exactly what’s advertised: actionable, valuable insight that they can immediately employ to save money, including a set of specific signs to watch out for to tell when money is being wasted in their organization. From the customer’s perspective, the fact that ADP Dealer Services happens to have a solution available to help make good on the promise of that insight is almost more of a happy coincidence. This kind of support is not only hugely valuable to customers, it’s hugely appreciated. It makes the seminar memorable and significantly sets ADP Dealer Services apart from the competition in the minds of its customers. And the results of that kind of differentiation through Commercial Teaching have been staggering. In a year when new car sales in the U.S. were down 40 percent, ADP Dealer Services’ revenue was down only 4 percent. Did they hit their growth goals? Well, in a way, yes, given what happened to the auto industry across those three years. But more important, at a time when the only possible path to growth was to increase one’s piece of the ever-shrinking pie, Dealer Services did that and then some.

But just as important, they won the battle not only of market share but of “mind share,” significantly reinforcing their role in the industry as the best source for quality, market-leading insight. All because they shifted from talking to customers about ADP Dealer Services’ business to talking to customers about their business. More recently, Theresa Russel, head of Dealer Services’ sales operations, told us, “Even with the improvement in sales throughout the automotive retail industry of late, the information we provide in these seminars continues to resonate. Whether dealers need to survive or—better still—grow their business, they are still looking for interesting ways to better manage their businesses, and that’s exactly what the seminars provide.” It’s a fantastic example of Commercial Teaching: The single biggest incremental opportunity to drive growth isn’t in the products and services you sell, but in the quality of the insight you deliver as part of the sale itself.

6 TAILORING FOR RESONANCE WHY DOES THIS idea of tailoring show up in the data as one of the defining attributes of the Challenger rep? We believe this has to do with the increase in consensus buying (i.e., the need to have the broader organization on board before moving ahead with a purchase) that’s arisen as a reaction to the push to sell more complex solutions to customers. The data bears this out and suggests that this isn’t just reps complaining, it’s the new reality of solution selling. Yes,