Matt was great! We are hoping to bring him back for a follow-up event. Thanks for a great experience!!
Matt Dixon
Chief Product and Research Officer of Tethr, Sales and Leadership Expert, Best-Selling Author and Keynote Speaker
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Matt Dixon
Biography
Matthew Dixon is an executive director with CEB's sales and marketing practice. In this capacity, he has management responsibility for CEB Sales Leadership Council and CEB Customer Contact Council, which together serve more than 1,000 sales and customer service organizations globally.
During his time at CEB, Matt has overseen dozens of original quantitative and qualitative research studies of customer service and sales and has presented to hundreds of senior executives and management teams around the world, including those of many Fortune 500 companies, on issues ranging from customer service strategy to sales productivity. In addition to The Challenger Sale, his work has been published in the Harvard Business Review ("Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," July-August 2010 and "The End of Solution Sales", July-August 2012). He is also a frequent contributor on sales and customer service topics in a variety of publications, including the Harvard Business Review's blog.
Matt holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh where he did research on multinational sourcing and technology transfer in the aerospace industry. As part of his research, Matt conducted field research in Japan, China and South Korea. Matt completed his undergraduate work at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he graduated summa cum laude. He currently resides outside Washington, DC in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife and four children. In his spare time, he enjoys training for and competing in triathlons.
Matt Dixon
Featured Video
Current: What Customers Truly Want
Time 04:21
Matt Dixon
Featured Keynote Programs
Selling in Uncertain Times
Acclaimed international bestseller Matt Dixon brings key findings and proven methods for how to sell during uncertain times. Based on his research of thousands of sales professionals, Matt can answer the question of why some sales professionals continue to make sales even in an uncertain economy. In this session, Matt will also tackle subjects like:
• Why is now different than in 2008
• What are the key things that you should be thinking about today to ensure you can get up and running again fast?
• What are the things that customers are looking for right now?
• What are the best ways to build consensus for new solutions with dysfunctional buying groups?
Matt’s work is based upon exhaustive research of sales reps over multiple industries and geographies and will give you the tools you need to help you today.
Insight Selling
Driving Growth in the Age of Customer Empowerment
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.
The Ease Imperative
What Easy-to-do-Business-With Companies Can Teach the Rest of Us
Matt Dixon’s groundbreaking book, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, 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). It’s a book that turned the world of customer experience on its ear by arguing that delight doesn’t pay and that what customers really want is a “low effort” experience.
Now, drawing on more than a decade spent studying easy-to-do-business-with companies and the latest social science research into human psychology and behavioral economics, he presents a compelling argument for simplicity in the customer experience. While the conventional wisdom is that customers reward companies that delight and surprise them, the reality is that customers prefer experiences that fit seamlessly into their lives and make otherwise painful experiences easy. In a world of complexity, simplicity has become the new coin of the realm.
This presentation presents a (simple) roadmap for dramatically altering the way companies engage with their customers and offers concrete, practical guidance that audiences can immediately put into action to drive loyalty and profitable growth.
Matt Dixon
Featured Books
The Effortless Experience
by Matt Dixon
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 bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject--customer loyalty--with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head.
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 CEB's careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the "dazzle factor" is wildly overrated--it simply doesn't predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality:
If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank--do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees?
The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal--and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB's research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the "dazzle factor" fails to deliver.
The Challenger Sale
by Matt Dixon
What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.
The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.
Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.
The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.
