The Advantage of Creating Tension

The things that we see that the challenger does differently, again, are teaching, tailoring and taking control at the competency level. If I were to sum that up, what I’d say is that the challenger’s able to create tension and use tension to their advantage.

That’s so important today when we’re out there selling a disruptive solution, solutions that ask our customers, effectively, to undergo a large-scale change. When the customer hears a big change, the reaction is “That seems hard. It sounds difficult. The status quo feels okay, it’s not so bad. Sure things could be a little bit better, but why don’t we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them right now”.

Again, the challenger is able to be assertive and they’re able to create this tension in the conversation to show the customer why the pain of same is actually worse than the pain of change. So that change journey, while difficult, while disruptive and while challenging -no pun intended- is worth going down, and in fact, it’s urgent and critical that you go down that path.