Matt Dixon
Matt Dixon is one of the world’s foremost experts in sales and the author of The Challenger Sale, which sold over a million copies worldwide and was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His most recent book, The JOLT Effect, focuses on overcoming customer indecision—one of the biggest challenges to closing deals. Outside of writing, Matt co-founded DCM Insights, a boutique consultancy helping organizations understand customer behavior, and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, with more than 20 print and online articles to his credit.
Marketing Skills
Effective positioning involves reframing the customer's world by identifying risks or opportunities they haven't yet recognized.
"Most salespeople are trying to figure out what's keeping the customer up at night... The challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night. What's a risk that t..."
Successful messaging leads *to* your unique solution by first establishing a high-stakes business problem (like employee absenteeism) that the solution uniquely addresses.
"They came in and they revised their sales pitch... leading to it. They're starting with an insight and giving the customer a reason to care about solving this business problem, and it turns out the on..."
Sales & GTM Skills
A significant majority of qualified sales opportunities are lost not to competitors, but to customer indecision and the choice to do nothing.
"our analysis showed that anywhere between 40 and 60% of the average salesperson's qualified pipelines... will be ultimately marked as closed loss, no decision."
Customers suffer from omission bias, where the fear of being personally blamed for a bad decision (FOMU) outweighs the fear of missing out on benefits (FOMO).
"The omission bias is, if you get down to it, is the fact that people don't want to be blamed for making decisions that lead to a loss... people are okay with missing out. They are not okay with messin..."
The JOLT method provides a four-step framework to overcome customer indecision: Judge, Offer, Limit, and Take risk off the table.
"The first thing is we've got to judge their level of indecision... The second thing is we've got to offer a recommendation. The third thing is we've got to get them to start trusting us and we call it..."
High performers use 'pings'—probing statements about common customer concerns—to surface hidden indecision without embarrassing the buyer.
"We found a technique... called pings and echoes that high performers use... a salesperson will try to articulate but in a non, not to out the customer, but to get confirmation or refutation, if you wi..."
To overcome choice overload, salespeople must move from being order-takers to active recommenders, utilizing the 'delegation effect' to share the risk of the decision.
"you've got to shift your posture from asking the customer what they want and just diagnosing their needs, to actually recommending to them what they should do."
Building trust requires radical transparency about product limitations, which signals to the customer that you are an advocate for their success, not just a seller.
"The first one is you've got to establish some trust... they are brutally transparent with customers about like, 'Hey, I know you were interested in this capability. I got to be honest, we get mixed re..."
De-risking a deal involves resetting expectations to a 'safe' baseline to ensure the customer doesn't face internal backlash if results aren't perfect.
"What great salespeople do though is they know that while they'll stand by those claims... they try to kind of under-promise and over-deliver... 'What I'd rather we do is build your business case aroun..."