The challenger sale taking control the customer conversation portfolio

executive is saying, what the company is saying publicly, and what I know from our sales organization.’ . . . This is a bridge between our sales organization and marketing. In this case, what we did to sales is not, ‘Hey, check out this Google news story of what your account said.’ It’s significantly deeper than that, because it says,‘Check out what they said, and, look, this is supported by those executives on what they said, and, by the way, this seems to map very nicely to what you guys said you want to do with this account in the next six months.’”
This method of tracking accounts is part of how CSC puts the philosophy of the Challenger Sale into action. This methodology is based on the book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (Portfolio, 2011). This book argues that the best salespeople challenge conventional ways of thinking and bring their customers new ideas. They don’t simply ask customers what they want and then say their company delivers that solution. Any salesperson can do that. Dixon and Adamson write, “Customers have been demanding more depth and expertise. They expect salespeople to teach them things they don’t know. These are the core skills of Challengers. They are the skills of the future.”
At CSC, the marketing efforts support the sales team by finding commercial insights that can help position the company as a solution different from what others in the market are offering. In addition to the commercial insights, the marketing team steps in and uses data to build extremely targeted and customized com-munications plans for sales.

Technology Brings Harmony between Sales and Marketing at DocuSign

Meagen Eisenberg is vice president of customer marketing at DocuSign, which provides digital transaction management solu-tions. DocuSign is a great example of a company that is embracing digital marketing technology. The company has a robust market-ing technology stack, and has perhaps even more robust results to show for it. Eisenberg previously held marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard (HP), Cisco, and IBM. For her, the relationship between marketing and sales is critical. “I’ve gone to many companies where that relationship wasn’t there, and the first thing I worked on was building it,” Eisenberg said.