Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 35

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson’s 2011 book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, was “the most important advance in selling for many years,” according to Neil Rackham the author Spin Selling, one of the most influential books ever written about selling, and the go‐to book for sales training until The Challenger Sale was published.⁹

Dixon and Adamson were Executive Directors of the Corporate Executive Board’s (CEB) Sales Executive Council (SEC), and in 2009 launched

What was to become one of the most important studies of sales rep productivity in decades. Tasked by our members – heads of sales for the world’s largest, best‐known companies – we set out to identify what exactly set this very special group of top‐performing sales reps apart. And having now studied that question intensively for the better part of four years, spanning dozens of companies and thousands of sales reps, we have discovered four core insights that have fundamentally rewritten the sales playbook and let B2B sales executives all over the world think differently about how they sell.¹⁰

Prior to the debilitating recession that hit America in 2008 as a result of the subprime mortgage meltdown, solution selling had been the preferred approach used by enterprise, or business‐to‐business (B2B), selling, which includes media selling. The fourth edition of Media Selling, published in 2009, espoused a solutions‐based approach. However, the research of Dixon and Adamson showed that several trends had reduced the effectiveness of solution selling:

1 The customer burden of solutions

2 The rise of the consensus‐based sale

3 Increased risk aversion

4 Greater demand for customization

These trends identified by authors of The Challenger Sale also broadly apply to selling media.