Matthew Dixon
Bestselling Author, The Challenger Sale
& Executive Director at CEB
What’s brilliant about The Effortless Experience is its pragmatism, illustrated by the observation that we can easily make things worse for customers and often do more harm than good. Here is real, practical, implementable guidance to help avoid those pitfalls.
Matt Dixon, an executive director of strategic research at CEB, has an unrelenting drive to find the answers to questions senior executives often take for granted. For more than 15 years, Matt has worked to uncover the truth behind many pillars of conventional wisdom in sales and customer service, often overturning long-held assumptions that are costing companies dearly in terms of wasted money and lost market opportunity.
As a senior member of CEB’s global research team, Matt has overseen dozens of original quantitative and qualitative research studies on all aspects of customer service strategy and sales productivity. Matt has presented these compelling findings to hundreds of senior executives and management teams around the world, including those for many Fortune 500 companies.
In a landscape dominated by motivational speakers offering little more than personal anecdotes and reinforcement of conventional wisdom, Matt challenges leadership dialogue with presentations packed with counterintuitive insights and wrapped in a story-telling format that keeps his audiences scratching their heads and debating long-held assumptions.
The work of Matt and his research team has been featured in Harvard Business Review and most recently in his newly published book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. Matt is also one of the authors behind CEB’s recently released book, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, which was published in September 2013. He is also a frequent contributor on sales and customer services topics on Harvard Business Review’s blog as well as on CEB’s sales and customer service blogs.
Matt holds a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. with honors from Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. He resides with his wife and four children in Silver Spring, Md. In his free time, Matt is an avid triathlete, competing at the elite level for the past several years.
Books by Matthew Dixon
Videos featuring Matthew Dixon View All
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Bringing Insight to the Table
Matthew DixonIn terms of whether it’s critical in terms of sales success today, I think you’ve got to look at the data. When you look at the data you see that a challenger’s not a silver bullet. There are other ways to be a high performing salesperson.
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Safe Practicing Your Challenger Skills
Matthew DixonAs far as tips, one of the things we’re very careful not to give people the impression of is that a challenger is a book of tips and tricks, it’s a sort of silver bullet, or an easy fix that can be implemented.
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3 Attributes of a Challenger
Matthew DixonWe like to talk about a number of attributes that factor together statistically to describe the challenger profile. One of the things we’re very careful about is not to lay claim to having invented challengers, per se.
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Helping Customers to Rethink Their Assumptions
Matthew DixonThe biggest shift we’ve seen in customer buying behaviour, again, is the fact that with your customers today you’re biggest competitor is not your competition.
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The Advantage of Creating Tension
Matthew DixonThe things that we see that the challenger does differently, again, are teaching, tailoring and taking control at the competency level. If I were to sum that up, what I’d say is that the challenger’s able to create tension and use tension to their advantage.
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Challenge Customer Thinking
Matthew DixonFor us, it’s been about 5 years of research at CEB into the Challenger work, but the highest level we’ve been studying is the massive shift in the way customers are buying at a fundamental level.
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Articles by Matthew Dixon
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The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
Matthew DixonAsk any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers.
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Five Customer Service Myths Busted
Matthew DixonAsk any company today what their number one priority is and chances are the overwhelming majority would respond with, “Our customers, of course.” Most companies today are not only mindful of customers’ needs, they have put systems in place to ensure the customer is the focal p...
Have you seen Matthew Dixon speak? What did you think?