Open with a cost or risk the buyer has not counted, and only then your offer. The one experiment found the order is what matters, and the same researchers found it backfires with existing customers.
The buyer has already decided what the problem is, and is comparing you with two other vendors on it. On their terms you look like everyone else.
Open with a problem they have not counted: a cost, a risk or a missed chance inside their own business, with a number on it. Only then connect it to what you sell. You are changing what they think the problem is before they compare you on the problem they defined.
Corporate Visions calls this an unconsidered need. CEB, whose sales research later moved to Gartner, calls it commercial teaching, in The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.
The winning pitch in Corporate Visions' experiment. The research brief prints all four pitches it tested, so you can copy the winner. The banker opens with "Before we get started, though, I'd like to share this statistic with you." He says that 42% of companies that take on new money in hard times still fail, because of problems in their own process, operations, sales or marketing. He says his bank has people who check for those problems so the money lands well. Only then does he offer the 10 million dollar credit line at a competitive rate and mention the bank's 75 years in the community. Another pitch in the test used the same sentences in the opposite order.
The RFP meeting. Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nicholas Toman's 2012 article in Harvard Business Review tells of a top seller at a business services company who had 60 minutes to present against an RFP. He told the executives his written response was in front of them to read later, and that he would spend the hour on three things the RFP should have asked for and did not, and why they mattered. The customer sent the two other vendors home and started the process again.
Four openers from the same article. Grainger's reps start with the fact that 40% of what a company spends on maintenance, repair and operations supplies goes on unplanned purchases. Dentsply's reps talk to dentists about hygienists off work with carpal tunnel and similar injuries, before showing lighter cordless equipment. Cargill starts with the time farmers lose trying to predict grain price swings. Ciena starts with money wasted on unnecessary service calls, not with what the equipment does.
The shape of the story, from Challenger's own blog. Three beats. First the reframe: earn some credibility, then raise a problem the buyer has not considered. Then the impact: show comparable companies failing at it. Then the value reveal: keep the product back and talk about what changes when the work is done differently.
One experiment, run for the vendor. Corporate Visions put 400 people, average age 33, through an online test designed by Zakary Tormala of Stanford's business school, and published it as a research brief. Everyone imagined running a large company that needed a 10 million dollar credit line, and saw one of the four pitches. The pitch that opened with the unconsidered need scored about 11% higher on the quality of the presentation, and about 10% higher on attitude and choice, than the other three, which did not differ from each other. The result that matters is the order. The pitch with the same content and the unconsidered need at the end did no better than the plain pitch. The brief explains its result as surprise that grabs attention, and cites no study for that. Corporate Visions sells the messaging training this result recommends.
The rep study behind commercial teaching. CEB surveyed more than 6,000 reps at 83 companies and counted the top 20% by quota attainment as high performers. It sorted reps into five profiles and found Challengers made up nearly 40% of the high performers, and 54% where the sale was complex. The figures are in the same Harvard Business Review article. CEB sold the Challenger training built on them. The study says which reps sell well. It does not test what happens to a deal when you reframe the problem.
The one published rollout. Mathew Isaac, Ajay Abraham and Elaine Richards followed Cars.com, an online car marketplace with more than 500 reps and 633 million dollars of revenue in 2016, through its adoption of the model, in a case study in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. It rests on 15 interviews, from the chief executive, who led sales during the rollout, down to reps, and it reports no win rates. The tension was harder to create with existing customers than with prospects. Transactional, price-driven products resisted it. And it only worked once the whole company used the same language.
Where the same vendor found it backfires. In a second experiment with Tormala, on renewals, provocative messages left existing customers 10% more likely to switch or shop around than a message reminding them why they chose the supplier. The study, and the renewal message that won, are under At renewal, remind them why they chose you.
Why buyers stick with what they have. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser's 1988 paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, the paper that named status quo bias, put decision questions to 486 students at Boston University and Harvard's Kennedy School. In some versions one option was presented as the thing already chosen. In others it was one option among several. In 31 of 54 comparisons, the option drew significantly more takers when it was the existing choice. In one question, people would pay about 10% more rent to move to a better office, but wanted about 22% off to move the other way, from the better office to the worse one. By the authors' measure, staying put was worth about 38% of the value of the move. The paper shows the bias is real and costly. It does not test whether a fact the buyer had not considered breaks it.
The only controlled test is one online experiment with 400 people imagining a credit line, designed for and published by the company that sells the training. Nobody has assigned real deals at random to a reframe or no reframe. The rep study says who the top performers are, not what a reframe does to a deal. And the finding that limits the move comes from the same vendor as the finding that recommends it.
Put the fact they have not counted first, give it a number, and hold your offer until after it. In the one experiment that exists, the same content did no better than a plain pitch when it came last. Keep the move for prospects, because the same researchers found that provoking existing customers pushes them to shop around. The 40% Challenger figure tells you which reps sell well. It does not measure what the move does to a deal.