There has been a lot of talk about Challenger selling, with repeated points made that The Challenger Sale has equally as much to do with Marketing as it does with Sales.

Following is an example from Group after trying the Challenger approach in its marketing messaging on a direct mail piece.

Challenging the Status Quo

In interviewing the marketing team, they shared that the aim was to disrupt the status quo for women’s ministry directors doing retreats the same old way that they have done for years. To be more specific the status quo for directors was to hire an inspirational keynote speaker for the weekend in order to help enable more women to connect with one another and carry on in weekly women’s bible studies and groups. The problem was that women would come away from the retreats inspired, but still not connected to a larger body of women in their church.

Group Publishing recognized that while their customer’s (Women’s Ministry Directors) chief aim was to create connections between multi-generational women, the churches current method of doing a ‘speaker-based’ retreat actually created the problem, instead of solving the problem of women connecting.

Why? Consider the room setup when you go to hear a keynote speaker. Which way are the chairs facing? They are all facing forward, of course…towards the speaker, not towards each other. Therefore, at best, one could hope to relate to what the speaker was talking about, but no real connections were formed with one another.

Women’s Ministry Directors continued to see lack of connections between the attendees and subsequently felt that they needed to hire a more expensive, ‘inspirational speaker’ next year in order to get women to connect with one another. But that wasn’t their problem. The true problem is they are using the wrong format to make that happen.

Group’s solution was to provide a retreat kit that not only saved the expense of a costly speaker, but more importantly was designed to create intentional interactions between women by focusing on the dialogue between women, not on the speaker. Group understood that even a perfect product would not do anything unless they started ‘unteaching’ what women had learned and thought for years about how retreats should be done.

Group Reframes the Problem

Following is one of the initial marketing pieces designed to get women thinking differently about the retreats they have been doing for years.

The Results

Not only did the marketing team see a 94% improvement in response rates, but the Group Sales Consultants were inundated with immediate responses and repeated references to the marketing pieces themselves. This led to a 91% sales increase over prior year.

One of the sales consultants commented…

“Thanks to the marketing team, they have provoked customer’s thinking about what is wrong with the way women have been doing retreats. This allows sales to get deeper in conversations with customers more quickly to teach them a different way of thinking about the problem they are trying to solve.”

In fact, Women’s Ministry Directors were even calling Group to get more copies of the direct mail piece to use as invitations after they purchased the Group Retreat Kit.

The campaign was followed up by matching the website to the style and messaging of the direct mail piece. Is it a perfect Challenger marketing piece? Probably not, but it challenged the status quo in a way that women in ministry could relate to, so I would call that a success.

Jeff Michaels is a Sales & Marketing Executive that has worked with executives, leaders, & teams for 25 years to create repeatable success regardless of industry, economy or circumstance.