The Challenger Sale applied to cold calls: teach, tailor, take control

How do you use the Challenger Sale on a cold call? Keep it small. Teach one short insight about the buyer's business, tailor it to their role, and take control by proposing a concrete next step. You do not deliver the full Challenger pitch in a call of a minute or two. You plant one idea that makes the buyer think, and you earn the meeting where the real teaching happens.

Below you find where the method comes from, how each of the three parts works on the phone, an example call, and the criticism you should know before you build your script around it.

What the Challenger Sale is

The Challenger Sale is a 2011 book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, then at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB, now part of Gartner). Before the book came out, they summed up the research in a series of HBR articles. Their Sales Executive Council studied more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies, and found that almost every B2B rep fits one of five profiles:

• Relationship Builders invest in personal relationships and try to resolve every tension.
• Hard Workers make more calls and visits than anyone.
• Lone Wolves are confident and do things their own way.
• Reactive Problem Solvers are reliable and focus on follow-up after the sale.
• Challengers use deep knowledge of the customer's business to push their thinking and take control of the conversation.

What the research found

Among average reps, the five profiles were spread fairly evenly. Among star performers, they were not.

The authors are careful to say relationships still matter. Their point is the kind of relationship. Challengers create constructive tension. Relationship Builders try to remove it.

A second CEB survey of more than 5,000 business customers, described in "The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask", found that the sales experience accounted for 53% of customer loyalty. That was more than brand, product and service quality, or price-to-value. Customers rewarded suppliers who brought new perspectives and taught them about new issues.

Teach: one insight, not a lecture

The Challenger idea of teaching is not a product demo. It is a perspective on the customer's business that they had not seen, and that leads back to something you do well. In the HBR series, the authors use distributor W.W. Grainger as an example. Its reps stopped opening with facts about the company and started by showing customers how much they likely waste on unplanned purchases of maintenance supplies.

On a cold call you have time for one such insight. A simple format:

1. What you see. A pattern among similar companies.
2. Why it matters. What it costs them in money, time or risk.
3. A question. Whether they recognise it.

Example wording (made up for illustration): "Many logistics companies your size plan their drivers in a spreadsheet. Where we see that, planners lose a large part of their day rearranging plans by phone. Is that something you recognise?" In a real script, replace "a large part" with a figure from your own customers, if you have one.

The figure in an insight must be true. Use numbers from your own customers or from a source you can name. If you have none, describe the pattern without a number. A made-up statistic on a cold call destroys exactly the credibility the method depends on.

The authors also warn against the question in the title of their article: "What's keeping you up at night?" It assumes the customer already knows what they need. Teaching starts from the idea that they may not.

Tailor: same insight, different angle

Challengers adapt the message to the person: their goals, what they are measured on and what they worry about. On a cold call you usually know two things before you dial: the company and the job title. That is enough for one sentence of tailoring.

Keep the core of the insight the same for everyone. Research on buying groups found that very different messages per person can split the group. More on that in how B2B buyers buy.

Take control: lead the next step

In "Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers", the authors argue that most reps are too passive, not too pushy. Challengers do not drop their point at the first objection, they guide the customer through the buying process, and they do not give in at once on price. The authors also stress that Challengers push back respectfully and in a way that suits the local culture.

On a cold call, taking control looks like this:

• Do not drop the insight at the first doubt. "That may be true for you. Most teams we speak to thought so too, until they counted. Would it be worth 20 minutes to check?"
• Propose, do not ask. Not "Would you be open to a chat sometime?" but "Shall we plan Tuesday at ten or Thursday at two?"
• Name who should join. "Would it make sense to invite your planner as well?"
• Accept a clear no. Control is not pressure. If someone says no twice, thank them and close the call.

For answers to the most common pushbacks, see our guide on handling sales objections.

Example: a Challenger cold call in five steps

The company and wording below are invented to show the structure.

1. Opening (10 seconds). "Hi Sarah, this is Tom from an IT services firm in Ghent. I'm calling because of something we keep seeing at accounting firms your size. Have you got a minute?"
2. Teach (20 seconds). "Many offices still run on a server in a cupboard. Where that is the case, a failure in tax season often costs days, not hours."
3. Tailor (10 seconds). "As a partner, you're the one who explains that delay to clients."
4. Check (open). "How is that set up at your office today?" Then listen.
5. Take control (20 seconds). "I'd suggest a 20-minute call where we go through three questions to see where your risk sits. Tuesday at ten or Thursday at two?"

Put these steps in your cold calling script as short blocks, not as a full text to read out.

Criticism and limits

The Challenger Sale is one of the most influential sales books of the past decades. That does not make it proven. Know the main objections:

• Who did the research. CEB ran the study and also sells Challenger training and advice. That does not make the findings wrong, but it is a reason for caution.
• Survey data. A consultant's critique by Kurlan & Associates points out that the data came from surveys of salespeople, and that the roughly 100 companies were large firms, unlike most small and mid-sized businesses. That is an opinion piece by a competing consultancy, but the point about the sample is fair.
• Relationship selling. A 2019 paper by Inks, Avila and Talbert in the Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science notes the controversy over the book's apparent conclusion that relationship selling works poorly, and compares the two approaches.
• Correlation, not cause. Challengers being common among star reps does not prove that turning everyone into a Challenger lifts results. Stars may also have better territories or more experience.
• It was built for complex sales. The strongest result, 54% of stars, came from complex solution sales. A cold call sells a meeting, not a solution. The teaching part works best when you have something true and useful to teach.
• Culture. The authors themselves say challenging looks different from country to country. What feels direct and fair to one buyer can feel rude to another, also within Belgium and the Netherlands. Adjust the tone to the person, not the substance.

The method also has a tension with question-based approaches. The Challenger authors warn against leading with open questions. But on a cold call, a single good question after your insight is what shows you whether it landed. Our article on SPIN questions on a cold call shows how the two can work together.

How to test it on your own calls

Do not roll it out on belief. Test it:

1. Write one insight per target group, with a source for every number.
2. Let half the team use it for three or four weeks, and the other half the current script.
3. Log one outcome per call and compare the conversation-to-meeting rate of both groups.
4. Keep what works, rewrite what does not.

In Ringlane, you can put the leads of each test group in a separate campaign and compare conversations and meetings per campaign and per caller in the reports.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Harvard Business Review: Selling Is Not About Relationships (Dixon and Adamson, 2011)
2. Harvard Business Review: The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask (Dixon and Adamson, 2011)
3. Harvard Business Review: Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers (Dixon and Adamson, 2011)
4. Harvard Business Review: The End of Solution Sales (Adamson, Dixon and Toman, 2012)
5. Inks, Avila and Talbert: The evolution of the sales process, relationship selling versus the Challenger Sale (2019)
6. Kurlan & Associates: The Challenger style and its impact on sales selection