Challenger Marketing

This week’s dispatch comes from Betsy Rowbottom, Director of Business Development.

Betsy here!

One of the things I like best about working at SRH is our book club. We regularly quote from Traction and great minds like Seth Godin and The Book of Gossage. Last year, as a team, we all read Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. After we read the book, we broke into smaller teams to have a competition for utilizing one of the principles from Made To Stick. It’s one thing to read a smart book, it’s another to adopt its smart ideas and apply them to our everyday problem-solving. Now MTS is part of the DNA at SRH.

Another smart business book we read earlier this year was The Challenger Sale. Maybe your company has adopted the Challenger Sale process? We have, and it’s been a game changer for us. Applying its primary ideas to “teach, tailor and take control of the sale”, to our sales process has helped us to rethink how we engage with prospects so we offer valuable insights about their business starting from the first conversation.

Because everything we do starts with the marketing lens we see the world through, we are using a lot of the same principles that the book applies to sales strategies and adopting them as marketing strategies. With so many of the tried and true sales tactics (face-to-face presentations, initial coffee dates to learn about a prospect’s needs from a partner), on hold for the indefinite future – there’s an evolution happening in 2020. With one-to-one sales tactics on hold, marketers are being called on for ‘challenger marketing’ strategies to reach new customers.

I’d love to learn how you are implementing The Challenger Sale at your organization. How has your sales outreach been affected by Covid over the last few months? And how are you using ‘Challenger Marketing’ tactics to compliment your sales strategies? Drop me an email at: [email protected].