A Step Beyond the Challenger Sale

Help your B2B customers make sense of all they’re learning without you.

Contact Information

All fields are required.

First Name Last Name Business Phone Job Title Person Type

Job Level Job Function Job Role

Step 2 of 3

By clicking the "Continue" button, you are agreeing to theGartner Terms of UseandPrivacy Policy.

What the Sense Making Approach does differently — and why it matters

The Challenger Sale is all about challenging customers and disrupting their current thinking to teach them something new. Sense Making is about building customers’ self-confidence by:

Connecting customersto carefully curated, helpful information
Clarifying informationby explaining, simplifying and clarifying apparent inconsistencies
Collaborating on customer learningthrough Socratic guidance

The response from B2B customers? More confidence and less skepticism, with sales reps seen as less pushy and self-serving.

The information challenge affects both suppliers and buyers

Today’s B2B customers are active online researchers

90% of B2B customers agree that the information they encounter as part of a B2B purchase is generally of high quality.
Only 17% of the total purchase process is spent talking to potential suppliers, because so much is available through independent research.
And yet, 44% of customers found supplier information to be trustworthy but simultaneously contradictory.

Today’s B2B sales reps are struggling for facetime

B2B buyers spend only 17% of the total purchase journey with sales reps.
A sales rep gets roughly 5% of a customer’s total purchase time because the average deal involves multiple suppliers.
44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction at all in a B2B setting.

Customers aren’t sure they know what to do — so many do nothing

Brent Adamson, Distinguished VP, Advisory, sums up the challenge for sellers by noting that B2B customers are more likely to make high-quality deals (premium-priced, large-scope solutions) — without second-guessing themselves later — when they’re confident their decision is rational and based on the right information.

But those who lack that confidence are likely paralyzed by the amount and range of information they’re trying to process.

That makes themless likely to commit to a high-quality deal:

Customers who encounter information that’s trustworthy but contradictory are 66% less likely to commit.
Customers who receive conflicting information on the trade-offs between vendors are 33% less likely to commit.
Customers who report encountering overwhelming amounts of information are 54% less likely to purchase — at least without regret.

The impact of these information challenges is cumulative when they occur simultaneously.

不仅丰富的高质量的信息presents a problem for sellers; it's also an issue for buyers. While suppliers struggle to differentiate themselves on ideas and insights alone, customers also struggle to process and synthesize the information available to confidently make decisions.

Brent Adamson

Distinguished VP, Advisory, Gartner, Gartner

Three critical questions about the Challenger Sale versus Sense Making approaches

Both research initiatives stemmed from the need to identify best practices in B2B sales in a complex environment. In particular, we sought to answer three main questions:

1.What sets the best sales reps apart in a complex sales environment?
2.How do you replicate winning sales behaviors?
3.How do you create a differentiated sales experience?

How does Sense Making differ from the Challenger Sale approach?

In practice, Challenger Sale and Sense Making operate independently:

Challenger Saleis based on a supplier-out view. It captures how the best sales reps explain what makes their offerings distinctive and powerfully share their capabilities with the customer.

Sense Makingis based on a market-in view from the customer’s perspective. With Sense Making, sellers essentially adopt the customer’s position so they can jointly look out at the market, noting the variety of good — if conflicting — information and possibilities, and admit the scenarios may seem like a mess.

Is the Challenger methodology still effective?

Challenger, while more than a decade old, is still highly effective. However, just as products and solutions face increasing commoditization, we are also seeing “good-enough” credible information crowd out even the best sales messages.

We advocate for having a sharp sales message — at best, a true commercial insight. But that’s increasingly necessary and not nearly as sufficient as it once was.

80%of the sellers who used the Sense Making approachclosed high-quality deals(premium-priced, large-scope solutions)that buyers didn’t later regret

When should I implement Sense Making versus Challenger Sale?

This depends on how mature your organization is in deploying Challenger. The less committed you already are to Challenger, the more opportunity there is for Sense Making to create an impact. Benchmark yourself — likely in one of three ways — to assess the opportunity:

"We haven’t yet implemented Challenger."

Sense Making presents a superior approach to making sure your message and insights are clearly rationalized and easily understood by the customer — even if they’re not presented as commercial insights. Our data shows customers are highly receptive to the Sense Making approach. Focus on a narrowly scoped training and enablement initiative to introduce this approach to your teams, and incorporate it into your sales process, account planning and opportunity management.

"We recently initiated our Challenger journey."

If you’re in your first or second year of a Challenger rollout, developing commercial insights is still your most critical priority. However, when the appropriate moment arises to help customers think differently about their business, deploy your team with sharp insights. Also consider factoring Sense Making into initial training, which helps reps better empathize with customers.

"We have been on the Challenger journey for some time."

You may have seen multiple rollouts, have strong commercial insights and watched the number of Challenger sellers within your sales ranks increase over time. It can be complex to introduce Sense Making, but many of our clients use Sense Making to improve the efficacy of Challenger without invoking extensive change management.