Matt Dixon

The Jolt Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

From the bestselling co-author of The Challenger Sale, a paradigm-shattering approach to overcoming customer indecision and closing more sales.

In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing.

For years, sales expert Matthew Dixon has been busting longstanding business myths. Now in The JOLT Effect, he and co-author Ted McKenna turn their trademark analysis and latest research to the vital and growing problem of customer indecision — and offer a shocking new approach that turns conventional wisdom on its head. Drawing on a brand-new, first-of-its-kind study of more than two and a half million sales conversations from across industry, they reveal the surprising truth that high-performing sales reps grasp and their average-performing peers don’t: only by addressing the customer’s fear of failure can you get indecisive buyers to go from verbally committing to actually pulling the trigger.

Packed with robust data, counterintuitive insights, and practical guidance, The JOLT Effect is the playbook for any salesperson or sales leader who wants to close the gap between customer intent and action — and close more sales.

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong?

In their acclaimed international bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon, and his colleagues busted many longstanding myths about sales. In The Effortless Experience, Dixon and his team turn their research and analysis to a new, vital business subject — customer loyalty — and once again turn the conventional wisdom on its head, producing one of the most influential books ever to be published in the customer experience and customer service space.

The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet the careful research conducted by Dixon and his team over more than five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, the share of wallet, or positive word-of-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service.

The Effortless Experience takes its audience on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal — and disloyal. In this presentation, Dixon lays out the four key pillars of low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights, and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by the research, with great results.

One of the most influential customer experience and customer service books ever written, The Effortless Experience has been described as “a business detective story in which cherished truths are systematically investigated and frequently debunked” (Dan Heath, co-author of Switch and Made to Stick).

The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now more clearly marked than ever.

The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results

The best-selling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge.

Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale, and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need.

Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to the latest research from Matthew Dixon and his coauthors — based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world — the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be?

The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is.

It turns out that only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers.

The Challenger Customer unveils a research-based approach that will help sellers and managers to distinguish the “Talkers” from the “Mobilizers” in any customer organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.

The Challenger Sale:Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Matt Dixon’s first book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller that has been lauded as “the most important advance in selling for many years” (SPIN Selling author Neil Rackham) and “the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade” (Business Insider). 

Now, Matt takes audiences on a whirlwind tour through sales history—from product selling to solution selling to Insight Selling—and issues a stirring call-to-action for today’s sellers: adapt or become irrelevant. 

Drawing from dozens of studies and from his own extensive experience advising leadership teams around the world, Matt explains how customers today are learning on their own, engaging salespeople much later in the purchase journey than ever before, and explains why survival in this new world demands that we shift from a classic “solution-selling” posture (in which the seller seeks to diagnose what’s “keeping the customer up at night”) to an “Insight-Selling” posture (in which the seller seeks to show the customer what should be keeping them up at night)—from diagnosing needs to prescribing needs.  In a world in which customers can learn on their own, the value a seller must bring is to share with the customer those things they couldn’t learn on their own. 

This presentation covers the new behaviors, competencies, and activities required for sellers and marketers be successful in this new world and offers the unique opportunity to hear from one of the “founding fathers” of the Insight Selling movement.