THE MOBILIZER SALE

As the perennial business bestseller The Challenger Sale proved, challenging the customer is now the key to sales success. But it turns out that’s only half the story. It’s not just that you challenge, but who you challenge that really matters. To win today, you need a Challenger inside the customer organization—a Mobilizer.

Based on an exhaustive study of hundreds of sales reps and thousands of customers across multiple industries, the authors found that every potential customer contact falls into one of seven distinct profiles. While many are worth talking to, the highest performing reps concentrate their time on a specific few.

Most sales reps prefer to approach customers who are open and eager to meet with them, people with clearly articulated needs that make them easy to connect to solutions. The authors call these customers Talkers. High performing sales reps spend their time instead, however, with customers who are less eager to meet, generally skeptical and difficult to manage, and much more apt to be agnostic about one supplier over another. They call these customers Mobilizers.

High performers understand what their average-performing colleagues don’t: In a world in which complex deals require widespread consensus across a diverse—and typically dysfunctional—set of customer stakeholders, only Mobilizers have the skill and the will to fight for large-scale, disruptive change and, ultimately, help win the deal. Challenger sellers, in other words, target Mobilizer customers.

The authors unveil research that identifies Mobilizers and provide a roadmap for how sales and marketing teams can find them, engage them with disruptive insight, and leverage them to drive consensus across the customer organization. Once you have identified the Mobilizers among your customers, almost any rep, with the right coaching, tools, and marketing support, can start a chain reaction that leads to a whole organization getting on board with even the most provocative ideas.

Matthew Dixon is executive director of the Financial Services and Customer Contact Practices of CEB. He is a coauthor of both The Challenger Sale and The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
Brent Adamson is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Challenger Sale and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
Pat Spenner is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review.
Nick Toman is a managing director in the Sales and Marketing Practice of CEB. He is a coauthor of The Effortless Experience and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
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