Without Commercial Insight, Your Thought Leadership is Doomed to Fail. B2B buyers are learning on their own and delaying their contact with suppliers until late in the purchase. Most B2B marketers are fighting back with thought leadership—but this simply won't work. Don't Teach; Unteach Most thought leadership tries to teach customers something they don’t already know or believe about their business—often grounded in future trends or technology shifts. It’s about their future business. What their business could be. But thought leadership rarely changes the customer’s direction in the buying process. And that means the same old purchase criteria and the same old price-driven competition. The Challenger Marketing approach unteaches customers something they already know or believe about the way their business currently operates. Today. Only this kind of mental disruption—or Challenge—can reliably reset the customer’s choice of purchase criteria decisively in your favor. As a result, Challenger Marketing organizations employ 4 essential elements. Visit http://www.thechallengersale.com/marketing to learn more.

1. 1
Competing in Today’s B2B Battleground
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Introducing
Challenger™
Marketing

2. 2
B2B buying will never be the same.
Customers are cutting suppliers
out of their learning...
…and they’re getting more and
more of their information from
outside sources.
Define
Needs
Learn
Assess
Options
Make
Decisions
Today’s customers are typically 57% of the way
through their purchase process before they contact
suppliers. Marketing needs to be present where
customers are doing the bulk of their learning.
Suppliers today account for less than one-half of all
information that buyers use to aid in their purchase
decisions. This means that depending on how many
alternative suppliers are being considered, any given
supplier likely will receive no more than 10%–15%
“share of mind.”
Information from
Suppliers
Historical Historical
Information from
Non-Supplier Sources
Today Today
Customer Engages
Supplier

3. 3
The Challenger Sale has
disrupted the world of sales by
upending conventional wisdom
about what matters most for
high performance in selling.
The book showed that the best
sales reps are no longer the
relationship builders but rather
the Challengers™.
Challenger™ Reps push
customers’ thinking and disrupt
purchase cycles. Three things that Challengers do with
their customers:
§§ Teach them new insights about their business.
§§ Tailor messages for resonance across
prospective buyers.
§§ Take control of the sale using the credibility gained
with their insight.
The Challenger Sale revealed that the winning sales
reps lead with insight...
…so, how can marketers take the same approach?
Percentage of high-performing sales reps in complex
sales environments
The Challenger
The Lone Wolf
The Hard Worker
The Problem Solver
The Relationship Builder
25%
19%
7%
4%
54%

4. 4
Marketers often run to content marketing,
but it’s not fixing lead generation.
of B2B
marketers
are anchoring their lead
generation strategies
around content marketing.
But sales leaders rank lead
generation efforts dead last
in terms of effectiveness in
helping them do their job.
Marketers are trying to
position themselves as
thought leaders, but it isn’t
leading to commercial results.
Source: CEB Commercial Insight Diagnostic, CEB Research
Effectiveness of Marketing Efforts (Scale of 1–5)
Commercial Strategy 3.13
Brand Development 3.04
Sales Support 2.94
Customer Segmentation 2.92
Analytics and CRM 2.75
Lead Generation 2.53
90%

5. 5
Most content fails to generate leads because it’s
based on thought leadership, not insight.
Insight
Thought Leadership
Accepted Information
General Information
Commercial
Insight A compelling, defensible perspective
from a supplier that materially impacts
a customer’s performance and directly
leads back to their unique capabilities
Commercial Insight:
The Content Marketing Hierarchy Marketers create many flavors of content in
their aspiration to achieve thought leadership,
but only one type of content will produce the
desired commercial impact.

6. 6
Don’t Teach. Unteach.
Thought leadership teaches customers something
about what they could be doing in their business.
Content Focus: Benefits of alternate action
Commercial insight unteaches customers something
they are currently doing in their business.
Content Focus: Costs of current behavior
The key difference between thought leadership and commercial insight:
Marketers create too much mediocre content in the name of looking smart or being helpful.
It doesn’t move the commercial needle and only adds to the noise. Marketers creating content
that lacks the ability to disrupt customer priorities should stop it. Kill it. Never create it in the
first place. Period.
6

7. 77
Commercial Insight
Content challenging customers’ current
thinking—this will more reliably reset the
customer’s purchase criteria decisively in the
supplier’s favor.
!
Create content paths that lead to commercial insight and disrupt customer
purchase processes.
Personalize the Pain
Present the problem as it relates to the customer’s
specific business using benchmarking tools, pain
calculators, and diagnostics
3
1
Spark Concern
Build interest in an underappreciated business
problem with provocative infographics, data, and
factoids.
2
Scope the Problem
Present evidence, testimonials, and frameworks
illustrating the hidden dynamics of the problem.
How to cut through the noise

8. 8
Meet the Challenger™ marketer.
Challenger marketers disrupt purchase processes by generating commercial insight,
amplifying that insight in the market and through the sales force. These marketers
develop a deep understanding of customers, take an investigative approach to their
jobs, and possess savviness beyond marketing.
§§ Possesses experience
beyond Marketing
§§ Background in Consulting
or Strategy Planning
§§ Focused on business
objectives ahead of
marketing metrics.
§§ Understands customer
purchase motivators
and decisions
§§ Synthesizes action plans
from customer interactions,
observations, and data
§§ Tailors and contextualizes
information
Business
Savvy
Investigative
Customer Native
§§ Thrives in an ambiguous
environment
§§ Analyzes outliers
§§ Decisive, but not overly
confident.
Hallmarks of a Challenger Marketer

9. Marketing and sales roles:
from handoff to collaboration
Build Content to
Engage Prospects
Position Supplier
as Thought Leader
Generate and
Nurture Leads
Prove Superiority
of Supplier Value
Proposition
Navigate and Align
Buying Center
Stakeholders
Close Deals
Marketing Sales
Traditional Sales Funnels
Partner with Sales to
develop commercial
insight.
Create the conditions
and content that
enable Sales to build
prospect relationships
in the pre-funnel.
Co-design demand
generation and
content strategy
that disrupts how
customers think
of their own business.
Collaborate with Sales
to equip reps with
Challenger collateral.
3
3
3
4
1 1 1
2
2 2
Sales Funnels for Challenger™ Marketers
Marketing
Sales
9

10. 10
The Challenger Sale from CEB
@CEB_Challenger
Take the Next Steps
CEB Marketing Leadership Council®
Challenger Marketing Series
Getting Paid for Content
Marketing
Disrupting Customer Buying Criteria
This study may not be reproduced or redistributed without
the expressed permission of The Corporate Executive Board
Company.
Assess Your Challenger™ Readiness CEB Report: Getting Paid for Content Marketing
Roadmap to Building a
Challenger Commercial
Organization
Challenger Marketing Series
www.thechallengersale.com/marketing