Matthew Dixon > Quotes

“what sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight—new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“the role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

“Put it all together and you get: “What’s currently costing our customers more money than they realize, that only we can help them fix?” The answer to that question is the heart and soul of your Commercial Teaching pitch.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“But what if customers truly don’t know what they need? What if customers’ single greatest need—ironically—is to figure out exactly what they need?”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“You need to give your customers fewer reasons to be disloyal, and the best way to make that happen is to reduce customer effort.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

“Just as you can’t be an effective teacher if you’re not going to push your students, you can’t be an effective Challenger if you’re not going to push your customers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“from a customer’s perspective, when something goes wrong, the overriding sentiment is: Help me fix it.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

“If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“customer loyalty survey—specifically, that 53 percent of B2B customer loyalty is a product of how you sell, not what you sell.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“customers aren’t looking for reps to anticipate, or “discover,” needs they already know they have, but rather to teach them about opportunities to make or save money that they didn’t even know were possible.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“We’ve worked with a number of companies similar to yours, and we’ve found that these three challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling. Is that what you’re seeing too, or would you add something else to the list?”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“customer service should be less about offense—bending over backwards to please customers—and more about defense, in the sense of preventing frustration and delay.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

“it’s also about helping member companies generate the sort of “social demand” they need in order to avoid the perception that the training is just another top-down mandate.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Challengers aren’t so much world-class investigators as they are world-class teachers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“you teach without tailoring, you come off as irrelevant. If you tailor but don’t teach, you risk sounding like every other supplier. If you take control but offer no value, you risk being simply annoying.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“One of our recent studies revealed that while all reps start their sales efforts by mapping out stakeholders within the customer organization, core performers then move to what would seem like the logical next step—understanding needs and mapping solutions against those needs. But high performers do something very different. They extend this part of the sales process by digging into these individual stakeholders’ varying goals and biases, as well as business and personal objectives.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The Key to Mitigating Disloyalty Is Reducing Customer Effort”
― Matthew Dixon, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

“In other words, the consensus sale isn’t something you should be fighting—it’s something you should be actively pursuing. You can’t just elevate the conversation and cut everyone else out because it’s exactly that team input that the decision maker values most when it comes to loyalty.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Identify your unique benefits. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’ thinking. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.” Equip reps to challenge customers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“One CEB member described the problem solver as “a customer service rep in sales rep clothing.” As she put it, “They come into the office in the morning with grand plans to generate new sales, but as soon as an existing customer calls with a problem, they dive right in rather than passing it to the people we actually pay to solve those problems. They find ways to make that customer happy, but at the expense of finding ways to generate more business.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Grainger has determined from its research that a full 40 percent of a typical company’s MRO spend is for unplanned purchases. When you add that up across all categories of MRO spend combined, unplanned purchase spend is bigger than any one individual product category, representing millions of dollars in last minute, one-off spending.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The first thing we did was to run a factor analysis on the data. Put simply, factor analysis is a statistical methodology for grouping a large number of variables into a smaller set of categories within which variables co-present and move together.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“If you stop and think about your best salespeople—the ones bringing in the biggest deals from the most complex customers, you can see them in this picture. Chances are they’re your best Challengers.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The word we like to use here is “reframe.” What data, information, or insight can you put in front of your customer that reframes the way they think about their business—how they operate or even how they compete? That’s what your customers are really looking for. Remember what we saw in our customer survey? Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Putting salespeople into five buckets. The research claimed that salespeople fell into one of five distinct profiles: The Hard Worker The Challenger The Relationship Builder The Lone Wolf The Reactive Problem Solver”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“Personally, I believe that a customer relationship is the result and not the cause of successful selling.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“The rep seemed to have done everything right. He’d taught the customer about an unseen opportunity that only the company’s solution could address. He’d helped them execute a successful proof of concept that won over the technical users in the organization. He’d managed to convince a skeptical buying committee—proving the ROI of the solution and defending the company’s unique differentiators and value proposition. His buyer told him that they were ready to move forward. But then, suddenly, the deal went cold.”
― Matthew Dixon, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

“The world of solution selling is almost definitionally about a disruptive sale. It’s not that you’re asking customers to buy your product and put it up on the shelf with all of the other products they’ve bought. Rather, you’re asking customers to change their behavior—to stop acting in one way and starting acting in another.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“A successful teaching pitch must do four things well. First, it must be big. Done well, it will be seen by the customer as more expansive and farther-reaching than an ordinary idea. Second, it must be innovative. It has to push the envelope with new, often untested and unique approaches. Third, it must be risky. Big ideas mean that we are asking our own companies and our customers to take a big risk in adopting our idea. And lastly, it must be difficult. The idea itself must be hard to do—either because of scale, uncertainty, or politics—otherwise, why would a customer hire you to fix it for them?”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation