The Challenger Sale opens with the premise that sales models have become increasingly complex. By the time the SEC conducted its 2009 study, the dominant approach in B2B sales was “solution selling,” an organic framework that grew progressively more complex as more disruptive players enter the market. This resonates deeply with a motif that sales guru Neil Rackham lays out in the Foreword: The business world is constantly seeing breakthroughs that reinvent the rules of business. The emergence of new issues and trends demands new tools and methods, which are precisely what The Challenger Sale sets out to provide.

Every breakthrough, the book contends, is preceded by issues that time-tested methods cannot resolve. Tellingly, Dixon and Adamson declare early on that one of the book’s most novel and significant insights—the five sales representative profiles—was not originally part of the SEC study’s scope. With the market failure resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, their original intent was to determine why certain sales representatives were outperforming expectations. Under the initial research paradigm, the SEC’s assumption was that certain key attributes could enable representatives to perform better and that organizations could simply highlight those attributes for skill training. The paradigm shift came from noticing common behavioral patterns that were observable in a solutions-dominated market.