Book summary “The challenger sale”: summary

Introduction

You live in a business world where selling has grown immensely complex. As a supplier, you no longer just offer standalone products because buyers demand complete solutions to escape commoditization. This shift places a heavy operational and financial burden on your customers. They struggle with implementation, integration costs, and rising risks. Your traditional sales approach fails because you listen to customer needs and try to build friendly relationships. When you do this, you commoditize your own offerings and lose pricing power.

A massive performance gap divides your average sales reps from your star performers. While average reps focus on building deep customer relationships, top performers do something entirely different. Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson set out to discover the exact behaviors that drive high performance in complex B2B sales. They analyze extensive data across industries to reveal why traditional methods fail and what actually drives commercial success in modern markets.

High-performing sales reps do not build relationships; they challenge customers with unique insights, tailor messages to specific stakeholders, and take control of the sales process.

You will discover how to transform your sales organization by shifting from relationship building to teaching, tailoring, and taking control. The book provides a practical roadmap for identifying high performers, executing powerful commercial teaching pitches, managing complex stakeholder dynamics, and coaching your team effectively.

You might wonder how to navigate these challenges:

• What specific behavioral profile defines a star sales rep in complex B2B environments?
• How do you teach customers something new without alienating them?
• What steps make up a winning commercial teaching pitch?
• How do you tailor your message to resonate with different stakeholders across an organization?
• What does it take to take control of the sale without becoming overly aggressive?
• How can frontline managers coach average reps to adopt the habits of top performers?

1. The Evolving Journey of Solution Selling

The history of sales features four major structural breakthroughs, transitioning from the hunter-farmer model to modern consultative and solution-oriented selling. Professor Neil Rackham details this historical progression: first, the hunter-farmer split in insurance; second, E.K. Strong's introduction of sales techniques in July 1925; third, the SPIN Selling consultative era in the 1970s; and fourth, the emerging Challenger methodology.

While the sales profession experienced little change for decades, the purchasing side underwent a major revolution into a strategic force. Procurement evolved from a low-level administrative function into a vibrant strategic force armed with powerful methodologies like supplier segmentation strategies and supply chain management models. Purchasing shifted from being a dead-end function in the 1980s where employees who failed in HR were sent.

As suppliers bundle products to escape commoditization, solution selling places a heavy operational and financial burden on customers, widening the performance gap between average and star sales reps.

The Solution Selling Burden

Three-quarters of sales leaders aspire to be solutions providers. As suppliers bundle products to escape commoditization, customers face massive demands on time and timing, leading to solutions fatigue.

You encounter four major behavioral trends in modern markets:

• consensus-based sale;
• increased risk aversion;
• greater demand for customization;
• third-party consultants.

The Widening Talent Gap

Rigorous large-scale research comparing core versus high performers is essential to identify true drivers of sales success. Researchers examined average versus star performers across a massive global sample, discovering surprising results that defied initial expectations.

The performance gap between average and star sales reps widens dramatically when companies move from transactional to solution selling. In transactional sales, star performers sell about 50 percent more than core performers, but in solution selling environments, stars outperform core reps by almost 200 percent, creating severe key-person dependency problems.

A business services sales head reported that out of 100 sales reps, only 2 were responsible for bringing in 80 percent of company revenue.

2. A New Model for High Performance

Statistical factor analysis of 44 different attributes across 700 reps in the initial analysis model reveals five distinct behavioral profiles. A subsequent expanded diagnostic survey of 6,000 reps confirmed these categories. You will find that every B2B sales representative falls into one of these behavioral groups:

• The Hard Worker
• The Relationship Builder
• The Lone Wolf
• The Reactive Problem Solver
• The Challenger

Five Behavioral Profiles

Hard Workers show up early and stay late. A CSO at a global logistics company noted how Hard Workers believe doing the right things will inevitably get results by the end of the quarter. Reactive Problem Savers ensure issues get resolved after the sale. Lone Wolves follow their own rules. Relationship Builders focus on creating harmonious customer connections.

Factor analysis of forty-four attributes reveals five distinct sales rep profiles, with Challengers dominating complex sales results while Relationship Builders fall to the bottom.

Challenger Dominance

Core performers are evenly distributed across all five profiles. Star performers, however, are heavily concentrated in the Challenger profile. Over 50 percent of star performers in complex sales are Challengers. Nearly 40 percent of all high performers are Challengers.

A global head of sales in the hospitality industry realized his Relationship Builders were completely lost after the economy crashed. Only 7 percent of star performers fell into the Relationship Builder profile. Challengers dominate high-performance sales results by a landslide, while Relationship Builders fall to the bottom, especially in complex sales.

3. The Pillars of the Challenger Model

Challengers succeed by teaching customers for differentiation, tailoring messages for resonance, and taking control of the commercial conversation.

Teaching for Differentiation

Teaching customers new insights about how to compete effectively drives long-term customer loyalty. Challenger reps offer unique perspectives that apply to how you can cut operating expenses, enter new markets, or mitigate risk. These insights draw customers into a compelling conversation rather than a routine product pitch.

A new hire at an office furniture manufacturer met with the head of real estate for a prospective customer who had already selected a competitor to furnish a new headquarters. The rep taught the customer that data shows collaboration happens best in groups of twos and threes rather than eights. The rep then used product knowledge to suggest adding movable walls and specific collaborative products, completely changing the account direction.

Suppliers can also use teaching insights to help customers rewrite requests for proposals in their favor. By offering free consulting and framing what should be included in a bid, suppliers ensure the customer requests the exact capabilities the supplier uniquely provides. A global pharmaceutical company used a wealth of knowledge on disease management to build patient journeys. They taught doctors that patients with a certain illness experience an average of 2.5 exacerbations a year, helping physicians adjust treatments for emergencies that happen between regular visits.

Tailoring for Resonance

Tailoring the sales message to individual stakeholders and their specific economic drivers ensures the pitch sticks. Agility in tailoring requires understanding what different stakeholders care about and how their performance is measured.

Two business services reps worked an account for six months preparing a cost-savings pitch for a proposal to the CEO. After learning about tailoring, they investigated the CEO's personal motivations and discovered he was a technology junkie focused on poor customer satisfaction scores. They shifted their pitch to show how their outsourcing technology would improve issue resolution response times and give real-time visibility, winning the business over competitors.

Taking Control of the Sale

Challengers must assert and maintain control over pricing discussions and customer decision-making cycles. Assertiveness means standing ground when customers push back and pushing customers out of their comfort zones to overcome indecision inertia.

A chemical manufacturer sales rep faced a situation where raw material costs dictated a substantial price increase while no competitors were raising prices. The rep asked the customer to rank the offering's features and discovered that an expensive custom packaging requested years prior did not rank in the top three. They agreed on a smaller price increase combined with a shift to standard packaging, improving supplier profitability more than a price increase alone.

4. Why Insight Matters in Sales

Traditional sales leaders train reps to ask deep questions and uncover burning platforms. This approach relies on a flawed assumption that customer needs are already fully formed and waiting to be unlocked. Customers often do not actually know what they need. Their greatest need is figuring out what they actually require in the first place.

More than half of B2B customer loyalty is driven by the sales experience itself through the delivery of unique market insights rather than brand, product, or price.

CEB research involving over 5,000 individuals surveyed in customer organizations reveals surprising loyalty drivers. Brand, product, and service combined account for 38 percent of customer loyalty. The price-to-value ratio accounts for 9 percent. The remaining 53 percent of customer loyalty is entirely attributable to the sales experience and the quality of the sales conversations.

Traditional differentiators like brand and service no longer drive loyalty because competitors quickly match them. Only 35 percent of companies are able to establish themselves as truly preferred over competition. Customers perceive only 14 percent of companies' unique benefits as both unique and beneficial. These factors become merely the price of entry just to stay in business.

A global financial services firm increased customer satisfaction from 65 percent to 95 percent over three years through extensive service improvements. Despite this effort, the firm saw zero commercial benefit because competitors matched the effort and the entire industry reached 96 percent satisfaction.

The Sales Experience

World-class sales experiences are defined by your ability to provide unique market insights and educate customers on new issues. Customers heavily favor reps who offer unique market perspectives and help navigate alternatives. You must provide ongoing consultation and help customers avoid land mines. Customers want to learn something new rather than merely confirm what they already know.

Commercial Teaching

Teaching customers requires a strategic tie-back to avoid providing free consulting that benefits competitors. Commercial Teaching is a strategy that teaches customers something new and valuable while reliably leading them to commercial wins for your company. The insights you deliver must point directly back to your unique competitive advantages.

5. The Rules of Commercial Teaching

Commercial Teaching requires leading customers to your unique strengths, challenging their assumptions, catalyzing action, and scaling insights across shared customer needs.

Four Rules of Teaching

You must follow specific rules to ensure that your insights drive commercial success. Teaching customers without tying the insight back to your capabilities helps competitors.

The four rules govern the entire teaching process:

• lead customers to your unique strengths;
• challenge customer assumptions;
• catalyze action through financial urgency;
• scale insights across customer segments.

The first rule requires that the insight taught ties directly back to capabilities where you outperform competitors. You must avoid teaching your customer into the desert by leaving them with a problem they cannot solve. Organizations must clearly define and agree upon truly unique strengths rather than relying on generic claims like being innovative or customer-focused.

The second rule is to reframe the customer thinking rather than merely validating their existing beliefs. Relationship builders often fail by seeking eager agreement on what is already keeping the customer awake at night. Challengers succeed when the customer responds with thoughtful reflection, indicating their perspective has been successfully reframed.

The third rule is to build a business case that compels customers to act by calculating the costs of failing to address the newly revealed insight. Traditional ROI calculators focus on the return of buying a specific supplier solution. In Commercial Teaching, effective calculators help customers quantify the financial losses they incur by ignoring the newly discovered opportunity or problem.

Scaling Across Customers

Expecting individual sales reps to independently generate custom insights is unrealistic. Instead, you should develop a small number of scalable insights and diagnostic questions.

You must segment customers by shared behavioral needs rather than traditional categories like geography or industry. This approach allows you to deploy proven teaching materials across accounts without demanding custom research from every rep.

6. Executing the Teaching Pitch

A world-class teaching conversation moves through six discrete steps designed to engage both the rational and emotional sides of the customer's brain.

A world-class teaching conversation follows a six-step choreography moving from the warmer and reframe to rational drowning, emotional impact, a new way, and your solution.

Effective sales conversations must lead to the supplier's differentiators rather than leading with them. Most core-performing sales reps make the mistake of opening with company history, partner logos, and product features, which customers do not care about. Instead, you must make the supplier's solution the natural outgrowth of the teaching process rather than its primary subject.

The pitch follows a purposeful choreography:

• The Warmer establishes credibility based on what you know about the customer's world.
• The Reframe introduces a surprising perspective that shifts how the customer views their business.
• Rational Drowning presents data and cost to show the true magnitude of the problem.
• Emotional Impact makes the narrative personal by connecting data to human consequences.
• A New Way presents the solution requirements needed to address the uncovered issue.
• Your Solution showcases specific supplier capabilities only at the very end.

Successful teaching pitches must be bold, provocative, and unsettling rather than watered down by internal stakeholders. Neil Rackham and KPMG developed the SAFE-BOLD framework where client advisers grade their pitches internally to ensure they do not water down provocative messaging.

Commercial Teaching is an organizational capability and a team sport rather than an individual sales skill. Because individual reps struggle to invent insights on the fly, the organization must provide heavy lifting by prescoping needs, prescripting conversations, and prebuilding solutions so reps can easily guide the customer interaction. One company refers to prebuilt solutions as Happy Meals, representing off-the-shelf offerings tailored in advance to the most common customer needs.

W. W. Grainger, a $7 billion distributor of MRO equipment, used customer research to map out a pitch highlighting the Pain Chain of emergency part ordering. Grainger discovered that 40 percent of maintenance, repair, and operations purchases were unplanned and highly inefficient, costing millions in hidden process expenses. By building the Power of Planning the Unplanned pitch, they taught customers to avoid cautionary purchases and shifted customer perception from a transactional supplier to a strategic partner.

Kevin Hendrick and Theresa Russel at ADP Dealer Services ran seminars showing that dealerships worked with twelve different vendors, resulting in up to 40 percent redundant costs. Facing a declining automotive market and rising small competitors, ADP created Profit Clinics to teach auto dealers how disjointed software systems caused redundant costs. From 2007 to 2010, U.S. auto dealerships decreased from 21,200 to 18,460, representing a 15 percent decline of the total addressable market for ADP alongside a 40 percent reduction in new car sales in the U.S. During this period, ADP Dealer Services experienced only a 4 percent decline in revenue.

7. Tailoring for Resonance Across Stakeholders

Traditional sales strategies focus on bypassing everyone to reach the executive suite. High-performing reps recognize that internal stakeholders possess a much stronger influence over the final decision maker.

Senior decision makers prioritize widespread organizational support while influencers and end users value individual professionalism and unique insights.

The CEB Customer Loyalty Survey showed that decision makers rank widespread support across the organization as the number one driver of customer loyalty. Decision makers operate from a place of risk aversion and refuse to go out on a limb alone. They value an accessible supplier that is easy to do business with and backed by a unified internal team.

Unlike senior decision makers who view purchases through an organizational lens, end users buy from people. They reward reps who teach them new perspectives and help them recognize unappreciated needs rather than asking what keeps them up at night.

The New Physics of Sales

The emerging model of complex sales flows indirectly through internal stakeholders who build consensus rather than directly to the executive suite. These internal champions will advocate for solutions if equipped with valuable supplier-generated insights. 53 percent of B2B customer loyalty is a product of how you sell rather than what you sell.

Scaling Tailoring

Instead of expecting core reps to instinctively know how to tailor messages, marketing and sales operations should provide cheat sheets. These resources detail what specific stakeholders care about, their key concerns, and the business outcomes they want to achieve.

Solae mapped solution offerings and desired outcomes to functional roles such as manufacturing heads and procurement officers. They used a value planning tool to document stakeholder agreement before closing deals.

8. Taking Control of the Sale

Taking control of a sale is not synonymous with aggressive negotiation at the end of the deal, but rather involves assertive behavior exercised throughout the entire sales process.

Challenger reps take control from the very beginning by establishing momentum, setting boundaries, and challenging customer ideas, avoiding the passive traps typical of Relationship Builders.

Assertiveness in Sales

You might view taking control as an intimidating tactic. Yet customers often use formal processes to stall decisions.

• 20 percent of sales opportunities are veiled verification efforts where customers use RFPs merely as due diligence.
• 75 percent of reps believe procurement has more power while 75 percent of procurement officers believe reps have more power.

Constructive tension helps you rebalance this dynamic. You must avoid giving in to demands for price concessions too early.

Controlled Negotiation

Pre-call planning and structured negotiation frameworks prevent sales reps from caving prematurely on price and other concessions.

Reps can maintain constructive tension by utilizing a four-step framework: acknowledging and deferring demands, deepening and broadening the conversation, exploring and comparing trade-offs, and conceding according to plan.

DuPont trained its sales force using BayGroup International's Situational Sales Negotiation methodology and pre-negotiation templates to successfully stand their ground against purchasing managers demanding price cuts.

You can apply these exact stages during your customer discussions:

• Acknowledge and Defer.
• Deepen and Broaden.
• Explore and Compare.
• Concede According to Plan.

9. The Role of the Frontline Sales Manager

Frontline sales managers are the fundamental link between sales strategy and execution, meaning that any sales transformation will fail if the management layer is broken.

Data shows that 63 percent of managers do not have the necessary skills as the sales model evolves, and 9 percent of managers lack the skills required for their current role. Management fundamentals like integrity and reliability are inherent traits rather than developable skills. Failing them is an immediate disqualifier for managers. These fundamentals account for about one-fourth of manager success and tend to be binary traits. Roughly 4 percent of managers fail on at least one management fundamental. Companies should screen for them during hiring rather than trying to train them later.

Manager Excellence

Manager excellence beyond fundamentals relies on selling, coaching, business ownership, and resource allocation. Sales innovation and coaching form the largest impacts. The sales side of management is split into selling skills, coaching, and owning the business through territory leadership. Resource allocation is surprisingly the least important part of a manager's job.

• Selling skills
• Coaching
• Owning the business
• Resource allocation

Excellence breaks down across distinct percentages:

• 28 percent of effectiveness comes from coaching.
• 29 percent comes from sales innovation.
• just over 16 percent comes from resource allocation.

Coaching and Innovation

Effective coaching has the highest impact on core performers rather than low performers or stars, significantly boosting median sales productivity.

Improving coaching quality shifts the performance curve for core reps while leaving low performers and star players largely unaffected. Bad fits cannot be coached away and stars only need marginal gains. You get a 19 percent performance boost for median performers given significant coaching improvement. Alternatively, you see a 6 to 8 percent performance gain by moving from the bottom third to top third of coaching effectiveness.

A major player in the insurance industry saw a 10 percent improvement in rep performance for those participating in a new coaching program versus those who did not.

Structured, hypothesis-based coaching utilizing the PAUSE framework helps managers move away from ad-hoc spreadsheet coaching and focus on behavioral development. The PAUSE framework guides managers through:

• Preparation
• Affirming the relationship
• Understanding expected behavior
• Specifying behavior change
• Embedding new behaviors

Many companies mistakenly prioritize process efficiency over deal effectiveness, creating a corporate culture that hinders the flexibility needed for sales innovation. An effectiveness focus has nearly twice the impact on manager performance compared to an efficiency approach. Managers must overcome common cognitive biases and shift from narrowing thinking to opening thinking in order to foster deal-level innovation. Inherent human biases like practicality, confirmation, exportability, legacy, first conclusion, and personal bias cause managers to quickly narrow down options. Frameworks like the SCAMMPERR framework provide structured prompting questions that act as a forcing mechanism to expand thinking and generate alternative deal strategies.

10. Implementation Lessons for Leaders

Successful organizational transformations require diagnosing rep profiles, avoiding Lone Wolves, ensuring training retention, and shifting marketing from customer-centric to insight-centric.

CEB data shows that roughly 40 percent of high performers get there by teaching, tailoring, and taking control. Executives often make the mistake of identifying high performers based purely on quota achievement and documenting the wrong behaviors. Only a fraction of high-performing sales reps are true Challengers, meaning companies must carefully diagnose reps instead of assuming every top seller uses the model.

Diagnostics and Training

Lone Wolves represent 18 percent of reps and make up 25 percent of all high performers. However, because they follow no rules or processes, their behavior cannot be modeled across the organization, and they struggle in team-based solution selling environments. While Lone Wolves frequently achieve high performance individually, they resist process standardization and make collaborative team selling impossible.

Research by Neil Rackham indicates that 87 percent of sales training content is forgotten within a month. Most sales training content is forgotten within thirty days unless organizations engineer strong pre-training buzz, experiential safe practice, and post-training coaching reinforcement. To ensure behavior change sticks, companies must build social demand before training, use experiential learning with former industry sales leaders, and implement structured coaching and behavioral certification afterward.

CEB's Solutions group utilizes former sales leaders from companies like DuPont, Merck, Nike, IBM, Bank of New York Mellon, and Procter and Gamble to lead classroom experiential learning.

Marketing and Leadership

True customer-centricity requires moving away from order-taking and profit-undermining discounts to become an insight-centric organization that teaches customers how to improve their business. The term customer-centricity has been overused and watered down. Rather than asking customers what they want or offering custom solutions that sound identical to competitors, suppliers must generate new-to-the-world insights that reframe the customer's worldview. Using generic marketing buzzwords in pitch decks and press releases makes a company sound identical to all of its competitors.

An analysis of company communications by PR expert Adam Sherk found that thousands of companies frequently use terms like leader, best, unique, and solution, which immediately triggers skepticism in procurement executives and makes products sound entirely commoditized. Adam Sherk's analysis showed 161,000 press release mentions for Leader, 44,900 for Leading, 43,000 for Best, 32,500 for Top, 30,400 for Unique, 28,600 for Great, 22,600 for Solution, 21,900 for Largest, 21,800 for Innovative, and 21,400 for Innovator.

Sales transformations should target an 80 percent adoption rate rather than forcing absolute compliance, allowing quota-beating holdouts to adapt at their own pace. Pushing for the final 20 percent adoption of a new process or model is exceptionally painful and unnecessary if dissenting reps continue to hit their goals. However, if their performance slips later, they must adopt the new standard or leave. Piloting sales model rollouts helps organizations understand adoption curves, identify early adopters, and break through plateaus across different rep segments. W. W. Grainger, Inc. pilots tools and teaching collateral to determine the size of early adopter groups, isolate differences between adopters and non-adopters, track predictive metrics, and overcome adoption resistance across time-based segments.

Deb Oler, vice president and general manager of the Grainger Brand, pioneered early sales approaches that contributed to the development of the Challenger Selling Model. The core principles of the Challenger model apply globally, but execution and terminology must be tailored to fit local cultural norms. In regions like Asia-Pacific, terms like teaching and challenging can initially be perceived as aggressive or arrogant. Sales leaders can successfully overcome this pushback by introducing slight semantic modifications, such as adding the word respectfully before challenging customer thinking.

A member presenting Challenger concepts in China found sales teams unenthusiastic until her direct report suggested modifying terms to respectfully challenge or respectfully teach, which immediately engaged local managers.

11. Challenging Beyond Sales

Internal business functions can adopt the Challenger mindset to improve results. You can apply these principles outside traditional sales organizations.

Internal business functions like HR, IT, marketing, procurement, and R&D achieve significantly better results when they shift from order-taking to delivering strategic insights.

Internal partners expect corporate functions to challenge their assumptions. They want ideas that save or make money rather than tactical requests.

Corporate Functions

Tactical deafness occurs when internal groups focus entirely on fulfilling orders. You must move beyond this reactive posture to add real value.

Data from 2009 showed that only 26 percent of business leaders rated IT as effective at applying capabilities to business needs, down from 31 percent in 2007. A 2009 survey revealed that 76 percent of end users disagreed that job performance improved from new IT systems.

Strategic Influence

Strategic influence transforms ordinary support departments into vital business drivers. You can measure this impact across different corporate domains.

• A recruiter's ability to act as a strategic adviser accounts for 52 percent of effectiveness.
• Pipeline management accounts for 33 percent of effectiveness.
• Process management accounts for 15 percent of effectiveness.

Seventy percent of R&D heads reported their teams lacked strategic influence. When R&D overcomes this gap, strategic influence drives transformational innovations that generate double the new product sales. A market research department achieved a 65 percent budget increase after delivering strategic insights using structured criteria.

Conclusion

The core ideas of teaching, tailoring, and taking control fit together to form a unified commercial engine.

You cannot succeed by simply building relationships or responding to customer requests. Instead, you must lead customers to see their problems in an entirely new way through structured insight and commercial tension. Teaching creates the constructive disruption required to break customer inertia. Tailoring ensures the message resonates with the specific priorities of every decision maker across the organization. Taking control protects the deal and guides the customer toward a profitable conclusion.

To implement this model effectively in your organization, follow these practical rules.

1. Shift your recruitment and training focus away from relationship building and toward Challenger attributes such as assertiveness and insight delivery.
2. Build commercial teaching pitches that start with warm-up engagement, reframe the customer's current worldview, and drive emotional urgency before presenting your solution.
3. Map every stakeholder within the customer organization and tailor your messages to address their specific functional priorities and operational pressures.
4. Take control of the sales conversation by managing constructive tension, addressing price discussions early, and pushing back against customer demands with confidence.
5. Transform your frontline sales managers from administrative order-checkers into active coaches who use hypothesis-based frameworks to develop Challenger skills.
6. Realign your marketing department to produce disruptive insights that challenge customer assumptions rather than generic product literature that merely confirms them.
7. Expand the Challenger approach beyond your sales force into internal business functions such as marketing, procurement, and human resources to drive broader commercial impact.

10 Key Ideas

1. As suppliers bundle products to escape commoditization, solution selling places a heavy operational and financial burden on customers, widening the performance gap between average and star sales reps.
2. Factor analysis of forty-four attributes reveals five distinct sales rep profiles, with Challengers dominating complex sales results while Relationship Builders fall to the bottom.
3. Over fifty percent of star performers in complex sales are Challengers, making them the dominant profile for driving commercial success.
4. More than half of B2B customer loyalty is driven by the sales experience itself through the delivery of unique market insights rather than brand, product, or price.
5. Commercial Teaching requires leading customers to your unique strengths, challenging their assumptions, catalyzing action, and scaling insights across shared customer needs.
6. A world-class teaching conversation follows a six-step choreography moving from the warmer and reframe to rational drowning, emotional impact, a new way, and your solution.
7. Senior decision makers prioritize widespread organizational support while influencers and end users value individual professionalism and unique insights.
8. Taking control of a sale is not synonymous with aggressive negotiation at the end of the deal, but rather involves assertive behavior exercised throughout the entire sales process.
9. Effective coaching has the highest impact on core performers rather than low performers or stars, significantly boosting median sales productivity.
10. Internal business functions like HR, IT, marketing, procurement, and R&D achieve significantly better results when they shift from order-taking to delivering strategic insights.