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Deconstructing The Art of Sales

Matthew Dixon  |   | 
 
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It has been a long debate. I think in sales research about whether sales is more of an art or science and this is a long debate which I am nervous I think to wade into, but I think when you look at The Challenger story one of the things that comes out of it on is this notion that people, that these challengers on have that knack they have created a fine art and going out in pushing customers thinking up creating tension tailoring and taking control in that it feels like more than an artful kind of approach to sales. 

One of the things we’ve done in the book and one of the things we’ve done the research is trying to figure out how do we actually take what is ostensibly an art which feels like something that only a select few have really practiced and honed as a craft and how do we take that actually turn into a science, something that is actually replicable for the average performing salesperson? How do we give them both the skills, the aptitude, arm them with the competencies and the content and tools such that they can play the role of the challenger when used for the customer when the situation demands it even if they’re not a natural-born challenger so you just in our own research what we find is often times we look at high performers we look at it - we wondered is what they do really in art, but the real question for sales leaders is how to actually turn that into science such be replicated and exported to the rest of my sales organization?

We can’t build an army of people who have honed the perfect art of selling as sales leaders, we’ve actually got to think about replicating key skills and key approaches and we know have demonstrated to work with our customers and in exporting them.

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