Drawing on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world, the CEB research team has discovered that is the skeptical and agnostic customer that the highest-performing sellers leverage to make quality sales. These customers have the credibility and will to effectively challenge the status quo and get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first.
Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson's inability to connect to any one individual stakeholder. Rather, it's more often their inability to effectively connect customer stakeholders to one another. Reaching consensus requires a new approach—one where Sales and Marketing work together to identify Challenger customers and equip them to win over the rest of the buying group.