Years ago, before CEB became part of Gartner, FATFREE helped them launch The Challenger Sale, a book that would become a seminal text for adding value to the sales process. The model remains at the center of many sales organizations—including several of our clients.

While the book is focused on sales, the core idea can apply to any vendor, supplier or partner relationship. The concept is, at its core, that prospects and customers aren’t interested in order takers. Rather, they want to work with an expert who understands their issue and can add real expertise and insight, making the result even better than what they could achieve on their own.

Prospects and customers aren’t interested in order takers. Rather, they want to work with an expert who understands their issue and can add real expertise and insight.

The book delves deeply into sales personalities, specifically calling out those who merely focus on solving the problem defined by the client or trying to make everyone happy as more akin to customer service reps than expert partners. Ultimately, they found that 40% of the high-performers they reviewed were challengers—they took the client’s input and built upon it with their own industry- and product-specific expertise and insight.

Now Gartner has taken the challenger idea a step further, suggesting that good partners should be focused on what they call, “sense making.” After all, it’s likely that a prospect or client has already done some research and legwork themselves, but that can leave them confused about the right way to go. They appreciate working with an expert who can tie what they’ve learned together and help guide them toward a decision.

What it all boils down to is embracing your role as an expert—explaining why you think something should or shouldn’t be done a certain way, or why you opted for the recommendations you did. A marketing director at a startup, for example, can’t be as read in on the many domains and channels in which they’ll need to operate. If they did, they wouldn’t need you.

So give freely of your time answering questions, present your work with a strong rationale and share ideas beyond the brief. Go back to what you know about their audience, their objectives, their offering, and demonstrate why you feel the way you do. Offer up an alternate that gets them to the solution they have in mind.

Keep the approach positive and you can build immense trust.

Just don’t assume that pushing back might be a deal breaker. Turns out, the opposite may be true. Do you value a true partner who shares expertise freely across roles and channels? Reach out to FATFREE today.