Research
As a research lab, we are focused on the biggest, most vexing and unresolved customer engagement problems facing organizations today. For more than 20 years, we’ve found—without fail—that the answers to these problems can be surfaced by putting the conventional wisdom aside and applying rigorous research and data science to better understand customer demands and what top performing companies and individuals do differently to meet those changing demands.
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The JOLT Effect
The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, written by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. Learn more at Jolt Effect.
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The Challenger Sale
The Challenger Sale offers sales leaders a new playbook for delivering distinctive purchase experiences that drive higher levels of customer loyalty and greater growth. Learn more at Penguin Random House.
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The Challenger Customer
The Challenger Customer is a reality check. Simply being a Challenger seller isn’t enough; your success or failure also depends on who you challenge. Readers will get insights on identifying and engaging customer stakeholders. Learn more at Penguin Random House.
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The Effortless Experience
Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? Learn more at Penguin Random House.
Published articles of research
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Stop losing sales to customer indecision
For decades, salespeople have been taught that there is only one possible reason for lost sales: that salespeople have failed to defeat the customer’s status quo. Perhaps the customer doesn’t fully appreciate the problem that their solution is designed to solve. Or maybe they don’t yet see enough daylight between their company’s solution and that of the competition.
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Teams craft more personal approaches
Particularly during the pandemic, when face-to-face visits with customers have been constrained, inbound selling in calls centers has become more important to company revenue. New research uses recordings of millions of such calls, analyzes the way salespeople drive the conversation, and record whether the call results in a sale.
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4 behaviors that boost inbound sales
As “doer-sellers,” professional services partners are responsible for not just delivering services but also the entire business-development process. In this article, the authors identify five statistically determined profiles that professional services partners fall into, only one of which is correlated with positive performance, and they lay out the three key behaviors of a successful business-development approach.
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The art of sales rebuttals
Particularly during the pandemic, when face-to-face visits with customers have been constrained, inbound selling in calls centers has become more important to company revenue. New research uses recordings of millions of such calls, analyzes the way salespeople drive the conversation, and record whether the call results in a sale.
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The limitations of using text analytics to analyze conversations
The art of sales rebuttals: How high performers respond to customer objections.
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The end of solution sales
In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers’ needs and selling them “solutions.” This worked because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems. But the world of B2B selling has changed: Companies today can readily define their own solutions and force suppliers into a price-driven bake-off.
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Stop trying to delight your customers
The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But a study of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using self-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make little difference: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem.
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If the customer is always right, you’re in trouble
Our article in the current issue of HBR, “The End of Solution Sales,” has created quite a stir among B2B sales professionals and pundits alike. While supporters see a fresh and accurate articulation of current challenges facing the profession — some even suggesting that we didn’t go far enough in declaring the end of the solution sales approach — detractors accuse us of everything from academic arrogance, to misrepresentation of current sales approaches, to cynical link baiting.
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Sales reps should avoid customers who are ready to buy
The phone rings at your desk — it’s a big potential customer and they want you to come in and make a presentation. They have budget approval and consensus, up to the highest levels of the organization, to move forward on a major purchase. Their specs line up perfectly with what your company can deliver. And, you’re on the customer’s shortlist — they’ve narrowed it down to you and two of your biggest competitors.
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When money doesn’t speak louder than words
Every leader knows that the compensation plan plays an important role in recruiting and retaining the best talent. But what these executives often don’t realize is that how they communicate about pay can be as important as the plan itself.
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The dirty secret of effective sales coaching
Most sales and service organizations have invested more time and effort in the past five years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous 50. This makes perfect sense: research by the Sales Executive Council shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving reps’ performance.ere
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What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently
As “doer-sellers,” professional services partners are responsible for not just delivering services but also the entire business-development process. As “rainmakers,” they must build awareness of their expertise in the market to generate demand, identify and close new client business, deliver the work to the client, and then renew and expand the relationship over time.
Areas of past + current exploration for our team:
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In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing. Our research shows that best sellers use a unique combination of behaviors—what we call the JOLT approach—to overcome indecision and close more sales.
Learn more:
The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision
JOLTEffect.com -
Today’s business customer is nearly 60% through their purchase journey before ever reaching out to a vendor to have a sales conversation. The ability of customers to learn on their own boxes salespeople out and forces them into a price-driven conversation. The best salespeople buck this trend by engaging customers with provocative, frame-breaking insights—the things the customer couldn’t learn on their own—and that best marketing organizations equip salespeople with commercial insight that reframes customer thinking and leads to what makes their company’s solutions unique.
Publicly available research:
The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (Penguin, 2011)
“Selling is Not About Relationships” (Harvard Business Review, September 2011)
“The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask” (Harvard Business Review, October 2011)
“Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers” (Harvard Business Review, October 2011)
“The End of Solution Sales” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2012)
Challenger skill development and message creation are services offered by our partner, Challenger Inc. Challenger Selling is a trademark of Challenger, Inc.
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Selling complex solutions is increasingly a game of herding cats. The average customer buying committee has been growing in size and role diversity for several years and shows no sign of slowing down. Unfortunately, left to their own devices, buying committees struggle to overcome their own dysfunction, resulting in little more than “lowest common denominator” decisions (e.g., stay the course, avoid risk. minimize disruption, etc.). To forge consensus for big, disruptive purchases, best sellers don’t target economic buyers or “coaches,” they look engage customer Mobilizers with disruptive insight and then equip these stakeholders to get others on board for the change journey.
Learn more:
“The End of Solution Sales” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2012)
“If the Customer is Always Right, You’re in Trouble”. (Harvard Business Review, August 2012)
“The Best Sales Reps Avoid ‘Talkers’” (Harvard Business Review, July 2012)
“Sales Reps Should Avoid Customers Who Are Ready to Buy” (Harvard Business Review, July 2012)
Training on identifying and leveraging customer Mobilizers is provided by our partner, Challenger Inc. Challenger Customer and Mobilizer are trademarks of Challenger, Inc.
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The most important lever at the disposal of managers and leaders to drive change is an effective coaching program. Unfortunately, most organizations confuse coaching to behaviors with deal or activity inspection. Best coaches understand not just how to coach, but whom to coach and what to coach to. In doing so, they forge lasting bonds with their teams that boost performance and discretionary effort while also boosting employee engagement and intent to stay.
Learn more:
“The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching” (Harvard Business Review, January 2011)
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Despite offering compelling, sticky and differentiated products, the majority of organizations continue to struggle with higher churn, lower account growth and more negative word-of-mouth than they can afford. The conventional wisdom holds that to increase customer loyalty, organizations must strive for delivering surprising, delightful experiences—especially in moments of truth, such as when customers reach out for help resolving problems. Instead of focusing on delivering delightful experiences, organizations should focus on delivering frictionless, low-effort experiences. The data shows that when customers receive low-effort experiences, they are far more likely to repurchase and spend more—and far less likely to spread negative word of mouth. What’s more, low-effort experiences are nearly 40% cheaper for organizations to deliver. The research further points to a set of unique practices that set low-effort companies apart from their peers.
Learn more:
The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty (Penguin, 2013)
“Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” (Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2010)
"Top Effort Drivers to Avoid in 2021," On-Demand Webinar with Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna
Our partner, Challenger Inc, helps teach frontline staff the skills necessary to deliver a low-effort experience and helps organizations overhaul key processes, like quality assurance, to reinforce low-effort behaviors. Effortless Experience is a trademark of Challenger, Inc.
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Despite the vast majority of organizations professing to be focused on “customer centricity,” their results and widespread negative customer feedback often suggest otherwise. Our research shows that while most companies push internally-generated assumptions to their customer-facing teams about what they think customers will value, truly customer-centric organizations allow their frontline teams to exercise their individual judgment, collaborate with peers and operate as business owners. Best organizations also use more than just episodic loyalty or post-transaction surveys to assess the quality of the experience they’re delivering. Instead, they mine large quantities of unstructured data (e.g., call recordings, email exchanges, chat interactions, case management data, etc.) to obtain a richer and more contextualized understanding of the experience and spot the opportunities for improvement that will deliver the most benefit to customers and the most leverage to the organization.
Learn more:
“Dismantling the Sales Machine” (Harvard Business Review, November 2013)
“Kick-Ass Customer Service” (Harvard Business Review, January-February 2017)
“Call Length is the Worst Way to Measure Customer Service” (Harvard Business Review, February 2017)
“Customer Service Reps Work Best When They Work Together” (Harvard Business Review, April 2017)
“Reinventing Customer Service” (Harvard Business Review, November-December 2018)
“Supporting Customer Service Through the Coronavirus Crisis” (Harvard Business Review, April 2020)
"Examining the Silent Killer of Customer-Centric Strategies," Matt Dixon, Tethr blog, October 2018