About Us

Challenger empowers sellers and drives sales growth around the globe through sales training, technology, and consulting.

The story behind Challenger

Since our inception, we’ve been dedicated to challenging conventional thinking in sales, marketing, and customer service teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Our sales transformation programs, including message creation, skill development, and implementation support, yield performance improvements and significant financial results for clients around the globe. Each program is supported by ongoing research and backed by our best-selling books The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, and The Effortless Experience.

Our team

Our leadership team guides our strategy and innovation to transform the way sales, marketing, and customer service organizations see the world while empowering our team members to achieve success.

Our values

Our consultants and leaders will join your leadership team on-site for a kickoff workshop to build a strategy, develop communication plans, and plot key initiatives and milestones on your Challenger implementation roadmap.

At Challenger, we worked together as a team to establish our values:

Authentic collaboration

We trust in our collective potential. We invite every voice and operate as one team. We are committed to promoting transparency.

Bold thinking

We see possibilities everywhere. We welcome the hard work of exploration. We lean into change and embrace ideas that spark growth.

Lifelong learning

With humility and respect, we listen, advise, and challenge. We are students of our past in order to be leaders of our future. Open minds keep us agile.

Uncompromised quality

We believe that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Our unwavering commitment to our colleagues and our clients means we deliver work.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion

Challenger is a people organization founded on principles enabled by diverse thought and practice. We believe in the power of a diverse team. We strive to be a positive influence in the world, building a community where all people are valued and respected.

We do this by endeavoring to create a workforce whose diversity reflects the richness of the communities where we operate. We foster an inclusive workplace by ensuring that all of our insights and products reflect a diversity of thought and by championing the values that we wish to see in the world.

Ours is a community founded on trust and mutual respect that prizes authentic collaboration and bold ideas. We recognize that it takes the humility of lifelong learning to be an effective ally. Our dedication to uncompromised quality pushes us to continually look for opportunities to better ourselves and the companies we serve.

Challenger Advisors

  • 70 Challenger Advisors globally
  • 11 languages spoken
  • 20+ years of business and functional experience

Our global Advisor team includes functional experts from sales, marketing, and customer service. Our Advisors have completed over 14,000 training days in 58 different countries and bring decades of experience leading, coaching, and training, both virtually and in the classroom.

Meet some of our Advisors

See what our clients have to say

“Despite the world being in lockdown and everyone having to rapidly adapt to a new way of working, the team both on the Challenger and ITRS side have been brilliant in flexing their approach and ensuring that we are able to bring together parts of the business to begin this commercial transformation… We have even had a few people comment that it is one of the best sales trainings they have ever attended. We continue to work closely with Challenger on embedding and sustaining the Challenger approach.”

– Elliot Howard, ITRS Group Ltd.

Key milestones in Challenger’s history

2008

Shifting the loyalty curve

A new stream of research from our marketing practice reveals a counterintuitive truth about what B2B customers value most when evaluating supplier purchases: the sales experience is the strongest predictor of customer engagement and loyalty.

2009

Introducing the Challenger profile and low effort/high performance

We debut “Replicating the New High Performer,” introducing sales leaders to the Challenger seller profile — the only one of five seller profiles that consistently delivers high performance. Meanwhile, engineering the low effort service experience makes waves in the customer service industry.

2010

Engaging the newly empowered customer

We discover a new trend in customer purchase behavior: delayed supplier engagement. Customers now wait until they are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process to engage with supplier sales reps.

2011

Publishing a book that changes professional selling forever

The Challenger Sale offers sales leaders a new playbook for delivering distinctive purchase experiences that drive customer loyalty and growth, hailed as “the most important advance in selling for many years” by Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling.

2012

Shifting away from solution sales

Harvard Business Review publishes “The End of Solution Sales,” a provocative article building on insights from The Challenger Sale. The article details the shift in strategy that organizations must execute to succeed in an increasingly complex selling environment.

2013

Releasing The Effortless Experience

We take our never-ending search for counterintuitive truth to the world of customer service and turn conventional wisdom on its head with The Effortless Experience, which explores the customer experience to reveal what makes customers loyal and disloyal.

2015

Delivering a reality check

The Challenger Customer reveals that simply being a Challenger seller isn’t enough: a seller’s success or failure also depends on who you challenge. The book introduces insights into how to identify and engage Mobilizers, customer stakeholders adept at driving organizational action and forging consensus in buying groups.

2016

Becoming part of the world’s largest research and advisory company

CEB is acquired by Gartner. Integrating CEB’s sales and marketing practices allows Gartner to become the leading global research and advisory company for all major functions in an enterprise.

2018

Striking out on our own

Challenger becomes its own company owned by Marlin Equity. Driven by our mission to empower people and drive growth, and backed by continuous research, we are the global leader in training and consulting to win today’s complex sale, with a global network of offices serving clients in over 50 countries.

2020

Scaling Challenger methodology across organizations

Challenger launches Activation, a powerful combination of expert advice, online sales courses, consultative support, engaging content, and purpose-built tools that help businesses adopt and sustain Challenger methodology.

2022

Generating better sales outcomes

Challenger launches Loop, uncovering the reasons behind losses and no-decisions to improve seller training and coaching, win more business, and build stronger customer relationships.

2023

Jolting customers out of indecision

Challenger partners with author of The Challenger Sale, Matt Dixon, to analyze 2.5 million sales conversations and reveal how sellers can overcome customer apathy and close more deals in The JOLT Effect.

Ready to scale your Challenger journey?

Book a meeting now