Relationship Selling is Dead, Live Relationship Management

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in their book “Challenger Sale” make a convincing case that Relationship Builders are not top performers particular in complex sales, my primary focus of interest? Yet it is my firm belief, that challengers must be good relationship managers if they want to be successful.

How challengers Use Relationship Management

There are numerous hints throughout the text that Challengers need to build and maintain relationships to be the top performers. They actually need a better understanding how networks operate than Relationship Builders. Challengers are not satisfied with having relationships. They use the knowledge about their contacts to hold the right conversations, eventually, to get purchasing decisions from their customers.

The Challengers’ consider the knowledge about their contacts as working capital. They know that they continuously need to invest time and efforts to expand the knowledge about existing contacts and be curious to get to know the right things about new contacts to keep this relationship capital productive.

Mastering Relationship Management is what keeps this capital productive. This is such an important aspect of complex sales, that I gladly accepted Cate Farrall’s invitation to become a co-author of her new blog. You can follow this link to see what kind of discussions we intend to have there