Matthew Dixon has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 132 ratings. The most-rated is The Challenger Sale.
The Challenger Sale
Summary
What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships - and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades. Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one - the Challenger - delivers consistently high performance. Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale. The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.
©2011 Matthew Dixon (P)2019 Penguin Audio
The Challenger Customer
Summary
Based on an exhaustive study of hundreds of sales reps and thousands of customers across multiple industries, the authors found that every potential customer contact falls into one of seven distinct profiles. While many are worth talking to, the highest performing reps concentrated their time on a specific few. Most sales reps prefer to approach customers who are open and eager to meet with them, people with clearly articulated needs that make them easy to connect to solutions. The authors call these customers Talkers. The high performers spent their time, instead, with customers who were less eager to meet, generally skeptical and difficult to manage, and much more apt to be agnostic about one supplier over another. They call these customers Mobilizers. High performers understand what their average-performing colleagues don't: in a world in which complex deals require widespread consensus across a diverse - and typically dysfunctional - set of customer stakeholders, only Mobilizers have the skill and the will to fight for large-scale, disruptive change and, ultimately, help win the deal. Challenger sellers, in other words, target Challenger customers. The authors unveil research that identifies Mobilizers and provide a roadmap for how sales and marketing teams can find them, engage them with disruptive insight, and leverage them to drive consensus across the customer organization. Once you have identified the Mobilizers among your customers, almost any rep, with the right coaching, tools, and marketing support can start a chain reaction that leads to a whole organization getting on board with even the most provocative ideas.
©2015 Brent Adamson (P)2015 Penguin Audio
The Effortless Experience
Summary
Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? In their acclaimed best seller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB's careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the "dazzle factor" is wildly overrated - it simply doesn't predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don't want to be "wowed"; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank - do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes listeners on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal - and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB's research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the "dazzle factor" fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.
©2013 Matthew Dixon (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Summary
To really win customer's loyalty, forget the bells and whistles and just solve their problems. This article was first published in the July 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.
©2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, All Rights Reserved (P)2010 Audible Inc.
Dismantling the Sales Machine (Harvard Business Review)
Summary
Brent Adamson, managing director at CEB, Matthew Dixon, executive director at CEB, and Nicholas Toman, research director at CEB, report on how reps can’t sell to savvy customers by adhering to strict processes.This article was first published in the November 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review.
©2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, All Rights Reserved (P)2013 Audible Inc.