Transitioning a company to a new selling style is no small undertaking. But for Aerogen, a global medical device company headquartered in Galway, Ireland, the individual successes of its international selling team made this undertaking worthwhile.

As Aerogen rapidly expands its business — aerosol drug delivery in acute care — the company remains connected by tangibly investing in employees and supporting their integrity and career growth alongside the organization’s own.

“Salespeople are keen to become trusted partners to their customers,” explained Jacqueline Lüttjohann, Global Commercial Training and Education Manager at Aerogen. “Many of our sellers have a professional background in intensive care or, in our case, as respiratory therapists, so they have excellent knowledge of medical topics. We saw an amazing opportunity to lead our teams to even greater performance by combining this expertise with the Challenger approach.”

Over the course of their engagement with Challenger, People and Organizational Development Leader Laura Gilioli also described seeing improvements in individual seller performance and the development of a more empowered and connected workforce.

“I strongly believe that every investment in learning development is an investment in the future success of the organization,” Laura said. “It’s an investment in innovation, and it is an investment in our people engagement.”

“Challenger really enables our sales team and gives them the tools and the confidence to manage complex sales, which allows them to go to customers and change their conversation with them and bring back fantastic results,” Laura said.

But don’t take our word for it. We asked sellers from across Aerogen’s global selling network to share their experience learning and using Challenger in the field. Hear directly from them how training has changed their success rates and careers.

What’s been the best part about Challenger training?

“Both the Challenger book and the Challenger learning modules were fantastic references, and I found the way that Aerogen applied the Challenger method extremely helpful as I could see how it applied in my current day-to-day. Overall, Challenger was the best ‘sales method’ experience I have gone through in my career, and it is the method I truly believe works.” — Parker McArdle, Account Manager, Northern United States

“Implementing the Challenger approach has been a game-changer for me, particularly in working with customers with complex needs and operating in competitive markets. By challenging their assumptions and providing Tailored Insights, I’ve been able to engage more deeply with decision-makers and position myself as a trusted advisor. This approach has allowed me to build stronger, more meaningful relationships and achieve better outcomes, especially with clients who value strategic thinking and long-term value. The Challenger methodology has enhanced my sales performance and significantly boosted my confidence and effectiveness in navigating complex sales environments.” — Debora Pannocchia Serrano, Clinical Specialist & Territory Manager, Spain

“My experience of working with Challenger has most definitely helped me see what type of seller I was before and has now changed how I approach the selling situation. Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to practice many approaches, using the multiple sales courses I have attended, but this is the one that relates to me as a seller and one that I have truly adopted.” – Jonathan McAusland, Senior Clinical Account Manager, Northern Europe Clinical Education Lead

“First of all, I started off as the biggest skeptic, but then my mind changed. It started with the education program and its quality. I could directly recognize a completely different approach and loved the depth of the Insights and the science behind it. I overcame my inner skeptic and it was easy to adapt the learned content to the field meetings. I even reached one of my hardest to access accounts with a completely different strategy: working effectively with more stakeholders, overcoming issues, and getting to a new level of engagement with key stakeholder.” — Damian Sielmann, Business Development Manager, Germany

“The amount of data-driven information Challenger presented regarding current sales processes, customers, and buying experience was surprising and refreshing. It created a self-awareness that helped me adopt the Challenger methodology more consistently and abandon less successful behaviors.” — João Mendes Marques, Senior Territory Manager SEA + Commex Lead APAC

Before using Challenger, what was your experience selling?

“Selling has always been hard, and putting your story into words has been even harder. This can come through to the customer and can ultimately stop the selling journey in its path. The buying process was slow and less productive due to not identifying who the right people were and how they would aid the ultimate goal.” — Jonathan McAusland

“Before Challenger, I was a Hard Worker…[My] way of approaching customers was the same with all kinds of customers, regardless the type of customer. My sales were never that low, but I always thought I should be taking advantage of my market much more.” — Odai Al Sakran

“Prior to using Challenger, my sales approach was more conventional. I focused heavily on building relationships and addressing the specific needs customers shared with me. While this worked somewhat, I often found standing out in a competitive market, recognizing the customer profile, or implementing the curve difficult. My sales efforts felt more responsive than strategic.” — Debora Pannocchia Serrano

“Before Challenger, I was a self-motivated salesperson. I loved listening to sales content podcasts; I’ve read many books and have always been interested in the science behind the sales process, social science, the insights of communications, and the procedure of objection handling. Even though I’ve done a lot of training and guided coaching, I always felt there was a tiny gap to reach best practice. There was the feeling that I was missing a leader who enables me to reach the next step.” — Damian Sielmann

“Having always worked in complex sales environments and with a strong clinical background, I focused on being a reliable expert for my customers and ensuring that all issues were always addressed. I consistently delivered good results, however, looking back, I wish I had been exposed to Challenger earlier in my career. I could have been even more successful by helping customers to act, guiding them through the buying process, and Taking Control.” — João Mendes Marques

How has Challenger training changed your sales behavior or career?  

“My experience working with Challenger changed how I start conversations with customers and allowed me to properly identify the correct stakeholders in the buying process. It allowed me to tell the Aerogen story, challenge the customers’ thought processes, and guide them in the right direction to benefit all parties. Our time together is more productive, which helps customers to be more engaged and invested.” – Jonathan McAusland 

Since integrating the Challenger methodology into my sales approach, I’ve experienced a significant shift in my career and sales techniques. I’ve learned how to lead conversations by offering new Insights, challenging my customers’ thinking, and taking them through the process, which has helped me bring more value to every interaction. This change has resulted in better client engagement, stronger relationships, and successful outcomes. The Challenger approach has given me the confidence to be more proactive and assertive in my sales role, leading to better outcomes for my clients and my career.” — Debora Pannocchia Serrano

“My mind and understanding opened to more strategic thinking, and I developed more self-confidence to handle and deal with wide, more complex sales situations. It is much easier to understand the ambiguity of the market, and I feel well-prepared for the next chapter. I got better tools for meeting preparation and overall, it feels like we all became a Challenger organization, which makes everything a little bit easier and gives me a feeling of working at a “best in class” company!” – Damien Sielmann 

“Some of the changes I would also highlight that have been helping me to Reframe thinking is the in-depth customer research I do on their current state and, when we finally meet, understanding them better. I have recently had an incredible career opportunity at Aerogen following consistently positive commercial results, so… thank you, Challenger!” — João Mendes Marques 

Ready to create a culture of change that inspires your sellers? Contact Challenger to find the best fit for your team. 

We’ve often focused on the importance of reinforcement after introducing Challenger, with guidance on gaining buy-in, coaching, and increasing adoption. But as any effective coach knows, theory isn’t practice. This truth is particularly acute for our sales enablement colleagues. They know firsthand that the gulf between rolling out a new sales training program and getting sellers to eat, sleep, and breathe a new methodology couldn’t be wider.

That’s why we sat down with Greg Turner, Global Sales Enablement Specialist at Nuix, to find out how he and Nuix helped their sellers embrace Challenger sales training – and grew business in the process.

Challenger: What did sales enablement look like at Nuix before Challenger?

Greg: Our product is so obviously best at what it does that it can basically sell itself. That’s not to say that there wasn’t value added by salespeople because there was, but it wasn’t necessarily in the persuasive, decision-making category of outcomes that you want salespeople to make a difference with.

At the time, enablement focused on creating content support that the sales team would use around more practical things like licensing, customer service, training on the product itself. It’s a technically oriented product, and if you’re going to sell it to someone, they need to learn how to use it. So “sales enablement” was very often used as a term to denote resources given to a client to help them learn the product.

Challenger: What shifted at Nuix that led to bringing Challenger on board?

Greg: We were making a monumental shift in our product service offering. We traditionally sold a standalone piece of software that was very discrete…but we’d integrated that into a whole bunch of other tools that create an end-to-end workflow in an integrated Enterprise platform. And we knew that we weren’t going to be able to sell that in the way that we sold licenses [for our discrete product] because we now had complex value, not simple value or discrete value. You now have complex decision-making processes rather than discrete decision-making processes.

So, they brought me in to help us make that transition from selling licenses to selling value and systems. When I got to the company, the first thing I did ostensibly after I got my feet under the table was to build a program that would enable people to sell complex value. It was based on the principles of overcoming status quo and it got some traction in some parts of the world but not in others.

One of the executive vice presidents, the one for North America was tasked by the CEO with leading the charge for new business. He said, “We need to bring a methodology in from the outside and we are therefore going to buy Challenger.” We needed the validation of someone coming in from the outside.”

Challenger: What roadblocks did you encounter when rolling out Challenger?

Greg: So, what is Challenger about: changing people’s minds who have an entrenched position built around status quo? Well, what does that sound like?

“I’m a salesperson; I have an entrenched way of doing something. I’ve got 15 to 20 years’ sales experience behind me. I am going to do it the way that I have always done it. So, how do you overcome that? “Let me show you why it’s not working anymore. And then let me highlight the cost to you as an individual.”

I would do these sessions, and I would stand there, and I’d get resistance, and I’d say, guys, listen, it’s your target. It’s entirely up to you what you do with this but if I were in your shoes, I’d want to be making more money, and I’d also not want to have the fear of getting fired hanging over my head, which we all know is what will happen if we don’t turn business performance around a bit. It’s kind of the nuclear option, the last button you press, but it works.

Challenger: When did things really start to catch on with Challenger?

Greg: So, we introduced this term of becoming a Challenger company at the launch… it means that we are orchestrated as an organization around understanding the complex problems that our clients don’t understand as well as we do. And everyone has a part to play in contributing to that.

The salespeople’s job is to tell the story but everyone else has a role in deriving that story, so that we become an organization that says, “we help people solve complex problems around unstructured data. Oftentimes, the ones that they don’t even know about.” And that’s what being a Challenger company means.

It resonated. And so, from that point forward, everyone started to use this term “becoming a Challenger company” including the CEO and EVP. And that message has filtered through.

Challenger: What positive shifts did you see in your sales force after implementing Insight Design and Challenger overall?

Greg: Have you heard of the Johari Window?

The whole point of the Johari window is that you want to minimize the unconscious aspects and maximize the conscious aspects. So, the first step is to ask the salespeople to tell me about how they use Challenger, tell me about a win that you did, and tell me what you think made a difference. And so, in doing that I’m like, did you appreciate what you did there? What you’ve just told me is that you Reframed the thinking of a Mobilizer. Did you appreciate that? And they say, “Did I?” and I was like, yeah, you did. So, that’s that reduction, that’s the Johari Window closing out, that’s the unconscious competence becoming a conscious competence.

One good example of this is a deal that a salesperson landed with a national transportation company. I spent a lot of time with this salesperson because she struggled a bit with not owning this amazing thing she’d achieved in winning this deal. I asked her to tell me what she did. I said, well, let me show you how what you’ve done is a perfect example of Challenger selling. And that light went on. Not only did the light go on, but the confidence level just shot through the roof. She got it.

Now, she could own it. And by owning it, she can replicate it because she’s now consciously competent of that. It’s a $750,000 deal. If that goes to the course, it’s an $8 million deal.

Challenger What other success stories can you share?

Greg: We had a government sector client using our product for one purpose and spending $200,000 a year on it. The salesperson went in, and she did a whole Reframe: “You still think that your problem is about data warehousing. You’ve got a data warehousing need and you’re using [our discrete product] to solve your data warehousing need. The problem with that is that you still think that the ball game is data warehousing, and it’s really a breach. Yes, you need to warehouse all this data. But you’ve failed to appreciate that in warehousing all this data, you are making it a prime target for breach.”

“You’re so focused on making sure that you’ve got enough storage and enough protection around the storage, that you have no idea what’s inside that warehouse at all. And the number one rule of being able to successfully mitigate and manage a breach – and everyone gets breached at some point in their time – is the time with which you are able to respond. And the number one thing about that is knowing what was in there in the first place, and what’s being breached. And you’ve got no idea.”

And she went from $200,000 to $690,000 on that pitch.

Challenger: What’s your best advice for high-performing sales enablement leaders?

Greg: An important piece of Insight for any sales enablement person is that it’s the easiest thing in the world to say ‘that’s your job, not mine. You’re the sales guys. I’m not the sales guy. You’re supposed to be the experts in the product, not me.” But if you want a sales team to take you seriously, you need to be able to say, “I can do your job. I’m not going to do it, but I could.”

Next is that I think, fundamentally, we’re in the game of behavioral change. There’s so much Insight from the Challenger methodology, but I think you must win hearts before you win minds.

I think that’s at the heart of what the Challenger methodology is really about… people make decisions based on gut instinct. They don’t make them based on rational belief. And so, if you’re going to try and teach people to change the way that they function, you have to appeal to that emotional decision-making process, not the rational one.”

Though sales trends may change, sales leaders’ goals remain fundamentally similar: grow pipeline, close deals, increase revenue. Perhaps that’s why sales methodology training remains important to so many organizations, even as the buying-selling landscape continues to change. According to Gong’s 2024 State of Revenue Leadership report, 79% of the highest-paid revenue leaders rolled out a new sales methodology in the previous year. Though we haven’t tracked those leaders down (yet), we can anticipate one challenge based on our long years of experience: reluctant sellers who refuse, for one reason or another, to embrace a new way of selling.

Rolling out a new methodology and ensuring adoption represent two completely different issues, but to meet their goals, sales leaders must bridge the gap. That means getting those recalcitrant sellers on board by overcoming their objections and making it easier for them to embrace change and learn.

Five Challenger Selling Profiles

To get sellers on board, you must know where they are now and where you want them to go. When you imagine a reluctant seller, a very specific personality type likely springs to mind. But what makes a successful seller – and what behaviors do they exhibit?

The original Challenger research, published in “The Challenger Sale,” began with a study from CEB (now Gartner) that revealed the sales experience as the biggest driver of customer loyalty. This unexpected finding led authors Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson to ask what makes a good seller. After asking thousands of sales managers to identify the top 20% of their sales force as measured by performance against goal, they used the results to sort reps into five profiles. Core performers came from every category, but star performers came from one dominant category: the Challenger.
Of all the high performers in the study, nearly 40% were Challengers. Meanwhile, Relationship Builders generated the fewest star performers.

The Problem Solver (14%)

This seller lives to solve customer problems, even after the deal closes. This is more important to them than finding new business, to the detriment of their own performance. The smallest number of reps, about 14%, fall into this category.

The Lone Wolf (18%)

This seller is self-assured and confident in their instincts. Sales managers know them well because they rarely update their CRM, typically skip trainings, and generally resist any guidance or coaching. They hit their quota, and in return, managers tolerate their behavior. About 18% of sellers fall into this category.

The Hard Worker (21%)

This seller always goes the extra mile. They’re the first to come into the office and the last to leave. The Hard Worker doesn’t give up easily, is self-motivated, and seeks out feedback for personal development. It’s easy to love Hard Workers — and that’s one reason their performance in complex sales is so disappointing. About one-fifth (21%) of sellers fall into this category.

The Relationship Builder (21%)

Customers ask for this seller by name. They build strong advocates in their customer’s organizations, give generously of their time, and get along well with everyone. Another 21% of sellers fall into this category.

The Challenger (27%)

Challengers stand out because they see the world differently. They understand their customer’s business and build growth opportunities around specific commercial insights. The Challenger relishes debate and isn’t afraid to push customers. 27% of sellers fall into this category.

Those results beg the question: are sellers stuck with their natural profile type?

Absolutely not. No matter where sellers fall, they CAN learn to augment their natural selling style with Challenger skills. But they must be willing to learn. If sellers are reluctant to change, they’re either missing the skill, lacking the will, or unwilling to summit the hill (meaning they haven’t bought into the concept yet).

Hear more of this concept from Alex Panou on our most recent Winning The Challenger Sale webinar, “How to Train the (Seemingly) Untrainable).”

Now, let’s dive into three types of reluctant sellers and how to get them on board.

Non-Sellers

This group of potential sellers hail from a host of different backgrounds and emphatically do not “do sales.” Perhaps they absorbed business development duties from a colleague and don’t know how to sell (i.e., they lack the skill). We also see this type of objections from those that transition into sales from different roles. Think of the engineer or analyst whose manager says “you’d be great at sales,” before they roll their eyes. This person lacks the will to sell. Or, maybe this type of potential seller simply isn’t bought into the value of challenging customers; consider the client success manager who focuses on customer satisfaction and fears that challenging customers during an upsell process may sacrifice the relationships they see as paramount.

For this group, we can aid adoption by overcoming objections. Use these approaches:

1. Challenger isn’t just for sales. Challenger, at its heart, means disrupting a customer’s status quo. There are applications beyond sales, including marketing, customer service, or even personal interactions.
2. Customers want to be challenged. Over a decade of research into B2B buying behavior shows that Buyers value sellers who introduce new ideas or approaches to solving business problems far more than they value friendly relationships.
3. Share examples. Engineers like evidence; show them examples of people like them succeeding.
4. Create a safe environment to practice. No one likes to get it wrong — so give them opportunities to fail and learn without risking any business.

The Unwilling

This second group of sellers may voice fears about not having the right to challenge customers, whether out of concern that it will change the dynamics of a longstanding relationship, a lack of confidence in their own materials or research, or something else. This group also includes those who are deeply devoted to their own selling styles and skeptical of the need to adopt something new.

For these sellers, embracing change means overcoming fear. There’s the fear of failing, letting clients down, or changing, perhaps late in a successful career. For these sellers, the pain of staying the same must be greater than the pain of change. It may take more time to convince them that challenging helps.

1. Everyone makes mistakes. Even experienced sellers and highly-successful clients don’t get it right 100% of the time. It’s okay if you don’t either, as long as you keep trying.
2. Buying and selling have changed. Buying has become more complex, with stakeholders, sales cycles, and other factors growing in complexity. If a Lone Wolf wants to be successful, they must change too — what they’ve always done won’t work anymore.
3. Be part of the Insight engine. Explain the importance of Reframing customers and helping them understand why they need to change. That type of exposure will get them even more comfortable not just with challenging, but understanding why change matters.

It may also help to give this group a simple way to test out the Challenger approach. The framework we refer to as “A Gap B” offers a simple, accessible formula to help customers move from their current state to a new way of doing business– essentially, challenging their thinking with an undiscovered problem.

Sellers with cultural concerns

Finally, some sellers may block adoption out of a conviction that Challenger methodology is a bad fit for their culture — or their clients. They worry they’ll upset clients by being too assertive, that relationships are too important for them to openly question customers, or that Challenger selling only works in America.

To help increase adoption among this group, try this approach:

1. Emphasize that Challenger works in every region. As Veronica Coli addressed in “Beyond Borders: Myths About Challenger in International Markets,” Challenger can be adapted to work in any region. In fact, of the organizations who partnered with us to implement Challenger methodology in their sales organizations, over 40% come from outside of the US.
2. The strongest relationships share trust. Building that trust sometimes means honestly delivering bad news or engaging in a debate.
3. Pay close attention to the dial of Constructive Tension. You need some tension to move any conversation forward. Make sure your use of Constructive Tension doesn’t go too far, particularly in certain cultures.
4. Reiterate why you challenge clients. Our research shows time and again that buyers want sellers who can be trusted advisors who help them think about their business problems in a new way, identify and minimize risk, and improve their business.

Challengers aren’t born — they’re made

Your sellers are smart and capable. And if they’re like most people, they don’t love change — which includes adopting a new methodology, especially if it feels unlike them. But Challenger isn’t a fad – it’s built on research that shows the sales experience is the biggest driver of customer loyalty. More than that, it relies on the demonstrated success of a particular type of seller. Sellers may have an inherent selling style, but their future isn’t set in stone if they’re willing to adapt and learn.

To get the most reluctant sellers over the hump, sales leaders must bust the myth that “the customer is always right.” Further, they must adopt a Challenger mindset themselves: driving growth among individual sellers – no matter their age or background – is possible if their coaches and managers are willing to make them uncomfortable. In short, there’s no such thing as an “untrainable” seller – just reluctant people in need of a mindset shift.

True learning is not a one-and-done endeavor. Gartner found that without reinforcement, learners lose 87% of what they learned after 30 days, and in a world built around remote and hybrid work, they need the ability to do this asynchronously. If you want to get the most from your sales training, you need to find the right learning management system (LMS). With so many in the market, it’s difficult to choose. While Challenger sales methodology training integrates with any SCORM-compliant LMS and provides a platform that can deliver reinforcement asynchronously, we’ve developed a few thoughts over the last decade regarding what matters most (and what to skip) when choosing a system to deliver your new training. In this article, we’ll offer our perspective on requirements and considerations revenue leaders should use when selecting an LMS vendor for their go-to-market teams.

What is an LMS?

A learning management System, or LMS, helps training, enablement, and development leaders deliver online courses. It typically involves an interface that allows learners– in this case, your go-to-market team – to interact with learning content through videos, guidebooks, quizzes, and other material. As a revenue leader, your specific needs can help you narrow the field.

Why You Need an LMS for Sales Training

Many LMS options cater to the needs of human resources, broader learning and development teams, information technology training specifications, or industry-specific certifications (think HIPAA training). Each system offers its own advantages and quirks, but if you intend to use a system for your revenue team, ask whether the system supports sales training.

Sellers have a unique set of learning needs. Unlike that expense account tutorial, what they learn about sales methodology needs to infuse every one of their daily activities. It’s not an exaggeration to say your organization’s success rides on their ability to retain what they learned. Rather than trying to fit a square peg (sales training) into a round hole (a standard learning and development LMS), revenue leaders should look for functionality that fits their team’s unique needs.

Must-have LMS Features for Sales Training

Here are a few things we recommend you consider when choosing a LMS vendor. Prefer the TL;DR version without explanation? Scroll down for a complete bulleted list of considerations and questions.

Training and reinforcement tools

Your sellers don’t just need to learn new information, they need to retain it well enough to take it into the field. That requires an LMS that supports information delivery and reinforcement. The “forgetting curve” shows us why this matters. Without intentionally reinforcing what we learned, we lose new knowledge at an exponential rate.

To ensure your LMS is set up to educate your sellers and make it stick, ask yourself:

• What level of interaction do I want for my learners?
• Are there any compliance or visibility considerations to take into account?
•  Do my sellers need an LMS that delivers a verified certification?
• What resources does the LMS have for training reinforcement?
• Does the LMS support assessments or surveys?
• How involved do managers need to be in the sellers’ learning journey? What’s important for them to see from a reporting, approval, scoring, or activity standpoint?
• Can the LMS distribute sales playbooks and resources?
• Should AI augment the learning journey in any way? If so, how would it ideally help?
• Can my LMS support recorded role-playing to improve reinforcement?

SCORM Compliance

Shareable Content Object Reference Model, or SCORM, is the industry technical standard for eLearning software products. SCORM-compliant eLearning courses reliably track time, completion, pass/fail, and scoring for your learners, all of which increase knowledge retention. If you’re hoping to use your LMS for Challenger training, we require LMS SCORM 2004 or SCORM 1.2 compliance. For Challenger customers who only need the LMS for Challenger training delivery, we simplified your options: An Activation license contains access to our regularly updated, SCORM-compliant LMS.

Related: Learn more about bringing the Challenger experience to your organization

Positive User Experience

A clunky user experience often stands in the way of learning, which means you must approach your LMS evaluation with the sellers’ needs in mind. Ask about mobile delivery options for on-the-ground sellers or investigate customizations for specific teams. Perhaps most importantly, you need to use the system yourself to know whether it’s easy to find and access courses in the catalog, save and reopen lessons, view in a variety of browsers, and more.

Ask yourself:

• How important is it to customize the learner’s experience to my business?
• How important is an experience that features our branding?
• What is the ideal learner flow, and how should my learners know what to do next?
• Is it critical that my learners can access content via a mobile device? (Note that most LMS providers that rely on SCORM file sharing don’t offer mobile learning) .

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration

While you think about your LMS, your sellers think about the systems they already use every day. Whether they’re dialed into Salesforce, Slack, Gong, or another tech tool, your LMS will function the most seamlessly when it’s integrated with them. When you’ve confirmed these integrations exist, remember to ask about security compliance and login procedures, too.

Data and Reporting Functionality

Finally, you need to know that your LMS makes it easy to track participation, engagement, and ultimately, success. SCORM-compliant LMSs include these commonly requested features. By identifying your most important success metrics and comparing them against your LMS options, you can begin to grasp the tools you’ll use to judge the success of your methodology’s rollout. Consider whether you need to push that data to any external sources, such as Tableau, Snowflake, PowerBI, or another business analytics tool. An API in the LMS will make this external integration simpler.

Questions for LMS Evaluation

Here’s a comprehensive checklist for your LMS evaluation. Use this as you analyze capabilities and evaluate the best LMS for sales training for your revenue team.

Sales-specific functionality

• What level of interaction do I want my learners to take in the platform? What features are important in achieving this?
• Are there any compliance or visibility considerations I need to make?
• Do my sellers need any verified certification? How much of that process should take place in an LMS?
• What resources does the LMS offer for training reinforcement?
• Does the LMS support assessments or surveys?
• How involved do managers need to be in the sellers’ learning journey? What’s important for them to see from a reporting, approval, scoring, or activity standpoint?
• Can the LMS distribute sales playbooks and resources?

Administrative functionality

• What is the course creation experience like?
• How will I author content, and in what format?
• How easy is it to edit courses after publishing?
• How easy is it to make edits to published courses?
• Does the LMS support the creation of learning paths or sequenced courses?
• Does the LMS allow me to target specific groups of users to assign new content?
• How easy is it to create, update, or offboard new users? Will the LMS need to integrate with another system such as Salesforce or an HRIS for user management?
• Can this LMS support partner sales channels?
• Will users need to register for instructor-led training via the LMS? If so, what does administration look like?
• Does the LMS support role-based access?

User experience

• How important is it to customize the learner’s experience to my business?
• Where is it important to create my own branded experience vs. using an off-the-shelf experience?
• How easy is it to locate a course a learner has been assigned?
• How easy is it to locate a course in the catalog? Does the LMS have search functionality?
• Is it critical that my learners access content via a mobile device? Is it more important than SCORM integration?

Integrations & security

• Does this LMS integrate with the systems (Salesforce, Slack, Gong, etc.) my sellers use every day?
• Does the LMS support single sign-on (SSO) or the authentication method my organization requires?
• My company requires specific security compliance procedures or certifications. Does this LMS support them?

Data & reporting

• What data is important for me to track to ensure my learners are successful and engaged? How frequently?
• Do I need to push any data to an external source (Tableau, Snowflake, PowerBI, etc.)? Does this product have an API we can use?

Bonus: For Challenger Customers:

• Is the LMS SCORM 2004 (recommended) or SCORM 1.2 compliant? If you are looking to add Challenger content to your LMS, this is the most important question!

The Right LMS to Meet Your Needs

Your LMS plays a critical role in the delivery of whatever sales training you choose, so it’s important to carefully evaluate its features. With the considerations in this article and the checklist, you’ll know exactly how to identify an LMS vendor that prioritizes the seller experience and positions you to win.

In today’s economic climate, sales leaders face a unique set of challenges, and the landscape continues to change rapidly. With market conditions constantly shifting, it can be difficult  for revenue teams to know what to prioritize to keep your organization thriving and your team on track. However, with the right tools and strategies, sales leaders can learn to use the uncertain economic times as an opportunity to take stock of their current processes and improving operations to increase output.

1. Engage Your Highest Sales Performers

 

Never is the Pareto Principle – that 80% of the incremental output comes from 20% of the team – more acute than in times of crisis. In previous downturns we’ve observed that the gap between top and core performance widened as sales become more difficult to achieve. To this end, engaging top performers can mean the difference between an organization floundering or succeeding in the face of major headwinds. Sales leaders must make their best sellers feel rewarded, appreciated, and amply prepared to continue doing their best, every day. And, lest we forget, top performers always have somewhere else to go if you don’t treat them well. During the Great Recession, while millions of people were being laid off, there were still a few million people each year who quit their jobs and went elsewhere to work despite the dire economic climate. These are disproportionately people with highly valued skills, such as “rainmaking” salespeople.

 

Good treatment starts with resetting to realistic expectations. If your business is struggling, you will want to consider signaling adjustments to quota expectations and commission plans as soon as you can. Uncertainty of expectations, together with shrinking pipelines, lower conversion rates and longer sales cycles may send high performers a signal that their current gig has run its course and they should start looking for the next.

 

Do not lapse in providing more regular coaching to show you are invested in the deals your team is working and the skills and strategies they will need to close them. Even top performing sellers will encounter customer issues and selling situations in the coming weeks they have never encountered previously. You can’t expect them to navigate these new situations without real-time support. Virtual training and coaching are necessary modes of engagement now, and if you’re not already, you need to be prepared to offer these solutions ASAP.

 

2. Rethink Your Account Plans

 

This social and economic crisis is affecting every business differently. In some industries (travel, retail, etc.) activity is at a standstill. But other industries (CPG, Healthcare) can’t keep up with demand. Your sellers and your marketers need to understand and tailor messages/solutions account by account. Presenting the wrong message or the wrong solution in this emotionally charged environment could damage credibility and make repairing that relationship nearly impossible.

 

Sellers must take time to listen closely to their accounts as part of restructuring the plan. What, of a host of potential problems, are they prioritizing? How are they taking delivery of what they buy? How are they operating and serving customers? What is their market or customer base experiencing? You’ll be significantly better positioned to succeed if you understand clearly where opportunities are possible and where they are not.

 

3. Review Territory Coverage/Segmentation

 

This step may require a longer-term implementation, but it’s worth planning for now. After evaluating your account plans, you may find it necessary to pursue new markets and new customers to generate as much revenue as possible. Consider the following questions: Have you focused enough attention and limited distractions in the territories containing your key accounts? Do you have your best hunters focused as heavily as possible on generating new business in the customer segments that offer the greatest promise in the current market environment? Have you positioned relevant product expertise appropriately in territories with the best cross sell / upsell potential?

 

One more important thing to consider: Sparking the attention of new customers and moving them through a complex decision cycle in this economy will be a challenge. You’ll need skilled sellers who approach customers with powerful insight and build a compelling case for action. These individuals may not be the same “volume hunter” profile that worked in a market with high demand and customers flush with cash.

 

4. Align Your Insights to the Current Situation

 

Now, more than ever, your ability to offer meaningful, actionable commercial insight to your customers will be central to your success. But it’s likely your commercial insight needs a refresh. Just a few months ago, in a healthy economy, the most common challenge with commercial insight was finding a hidden problem significant enough to motivate customers to act. Now, the same customers are overwhelmed by problems affecting the core of their business. The challenge will be prioritizing the right one. Once you do, make sure you’ve done your homework to tailor it properly, deliver the facts with empathy and make sure the path to business improvement, using your differentiated solution, is crystal clear.

 

The good news is that tough times favor commercial insight. We know from years of researching decision-making that buyers are uniquely open to new ideas during crisis and will seize on new perspectives offered. But marketing and sales must act fast. Customers open to new ideas are also open to considering new sources for those ideas, including your competitors. Your ability to bring commercial insight that leads to customer improvement is the only way to truly protect these relationships.

 

Also, consider the full path for these fresh commercial insights. Have you mapped them into the buying journey, providing the necessary content to your customer Mobilizers to support building consensus and taking the opportunity to close? Has marketing incorporated them into the digital content ecosystem (website, email, social, webinar, etc.)? As both selling and buying become more virtual, the need for powerful digital content to spark attention, introduce insight and confront to motivate action is greater than ever.

 

5. Remove Sales Process Friction

 

Nearly all B2B sales organizations now find themselves needing to manage complex deals exclusively in a virtual environment. The same is true of the buying process executed by your prospective customers. This new operating environment, together with rapid policy changes on both sides, will introduce a lot of friction into the mix. An ounce of understanding/flexibility/ patience goes a long way to creating momentum and maintaining positive relationships with prospects.

 

More specifically, it is our belief that buying behaviors will likely not revert to the status quo ante. As companies find new ways to conduct business, purchase behaviors are bound to shift. In this environment, it may be necessary to temporarily relax your expectations of how business “should” be done. As you think of your current sales process, we think it is reasonable that the following pieces will need to adapt:

 

1. Demand creation activities will need to become digital native accelerating a trend that has been observable for a while. One hypothesis is that sellers will not fully regain access unless they double-down on insight delivery as opposed to being focused on solutions delivery. It is reasonable to assume that channel structures will change.
2. In times of stress, buying decisions always move up in seniority. In this environment, it becomes ever more important to identify the right mobilizer with the motive, and budget, to be able to rally behind a purchase.
3. Negotiation practices will likely change. Buyers may respond to increased risk by looking for more rigorous contracts. On the seller side, speed to respond will of utmost importance given that buyers may change their minds.
4. There will be a period where both sellers and buyers will have questions about each other’s financial viability. Sales will need to work closely with finance to address these issues.
5. As delivery and fulfillment requirements change, companies will look to protect their supply chains. Companies whose businesses have accelerated, will likely be looking to diversify supply and will want increased transparency.

 

 

To stay competitive, you need to be prepared. Being prepared is taking the right steps before you are forced to do so.

 

Sales and marketing teams now face the extremely difficult task of re-examining almost every assumption they made at the beginning of the year. In a matter of just a month, contexts have changed dramatically, and competitive positioning and business health mean something very different than they did in February. Maintaining business continuity in such a volatile environment is going to mean asking hard questions and taking decisive