Which sales methodology is best?

What CEB did

Between 2008 and 2009, CEB's Sales Executive Council, now part of Gartner, asked managers at about 90 companies to rate their salespeople on dozens of attributes ⁵. The data on more than 6,000 salespeople were grouped into five profiles: the hard worker, the Challenger, the relationship builder, the lone wolf and the reactive problem solver.

The Challenger has three traits. They teach the customer something new about the customer's own business, tailor the message to each person and do not shy away from tension when money or decisions need to be discussed.

CEB then looked at the salespeople rated as top performers. 40% were Challengers. In complex sales, 54%. The relationship-builder profile was 7% of the top group, and 4% in complex sales.

The number says there are many Challengers among the best. It does not say that a Challenger sells 40% more than the others.

How to read the study

There are three caveats. First, the profiles and the performance come from managers' ratings, and a manager may see as "top" the people who resemble what they value. Second, the study is a snapshot, not an experiment: nobody trained one group in Challenger and compared it with another. Third, the sample is described in different ways. In a 2014 interview, the initial study appears with about 1,000 salespeople, later extended to many more ⁷.

Noel Capon, a professor at Columbia University, published a critique in 2015 titled "a breakthrough built on shaky foundations" ⁸. Adam Rapp and colleagues wrote a critical review of the model, which won best article of the year in the leading academic sales journal ⁹. No academic study has tested the five profiles.

The relationship is not dead

Many companies read the book as "the relationship no longer counts". Independent research says something else. Robert Palmatier and colleagues pooled 94 studies in a meta-analysis on commercial relationships ¹⁰. Investment in the relationship had a large direct effect on the salesperson's objective performance, and a larger one in business-to-business markets.

Christian Homburg and colleagues matched responses from 56 managers, 195 salespeople and 538 customers ¹¹. Customer orientation increased sales up to a point and then reduced them. The customer always liked it more, but the salesperson who only pleased stopped selling. The useful reading is not to teach instead of relate. It is to relate while still bringing ideas and discussing the decision.

Insight Selling

RAIN Group asked the question from the other side ⁶. It surveyed buyers in more than 700 business-to-business purchases, with $3.1 billion in buying power, on 42 factors. It compared what the chosen supplier did with what the runner-up did. The first factor was "brought me new ideas and perspectives". The second was "collaborated with me". The new idea opens the door, and collaboration keeps the customer inside.

What Rackham did

In the seventies Neil Rackham began observing salespeople on real calls, in projects sponsored by companies such as Xerox, IBM and Motorola ¹³. Trained observers recorded the behaviours in each call and what happened next. According to the publisher, the base reached 35,000 calls and 10,000 salespeople ¹².

The main finding was that large sales work differently. Four beliefs from classic training were not confirmed in them: that closing techniques increase success, that describing benefits is essential, that handling objections is a core skill and that open questions are better than closed ones.

What set apart the calls that moved forward was the sequence of questions. First about the situation, then about the problems, then about the implications of those problems, and finally about the value of solving them. The customer reached the conclusion on their own that they needed to change.

In SPIN, a good salesperson gets the customer to state the problem out loud, instead of presenting it to them.

What explains the 17%

SPIN's most quoted number is a 17% increase in sales. In an interview published by Huthwaite in 2026, Rackham recalls that critics pointed this figure out to him: the first thousand trained sold 17% more than the control groups ¹³. Rackham does not dispute the number. He credits the gain to the coaching process that came with the training, not to the four questions.

A summary of the book describes an experiment at Motorola Canada, with two teams of 42 people ¹⁵. The trained team had 17% more orders and 5.3% more sales value. The control team fell 22.1% over the same period. We only found these figures through a secondary source.

A useful contradiction

In 1983, Xerox Learning Systems published a study of more than 500 observed calls ¹⁴. Successful calls had almost 50% more objections than failed ones. The authors read objections as a sign of a frank conversation.

This seems to contradict Rackham, who saw objections as created by the salesperson. Both things can be true. An engaged customer raises more objections. A salesperson who presents solutions too early also provokes them. What counts is where they come from.

Solution Selling and Gap Selling

Mike Bosworth created Solution Selling in 1983, drawing on his experience at Xerox and a pilot with Huthwaite ¹⁶. The method diagnoses the pain, builds a vision of the solution with the customer and manages the buying process. Keith Eades updated it in 2003. We found no published research base.

Academic research has a warning for anyone selling solutions. Kapil Tuli, Ajay Kohli and Sundar Bharadwaj interviewed 49 customer managers and 55 supplier managers ¹⁷. For the customer, a solution is not a bundle of products. It is four processes: defining the requirements, customising and integrating, deploying, and supporting afterwards. Solution selling methods cover the first one well. The other three are often left out of the sales conversation.

Keenan published Gap Selling in 2018 ¹⁸. It measures the distance between the customer's current state and the state they want, and sells that distance. It is a clear statement of the same idea, with no research base.

On listening, there is some independent evidence. A survey of 162 business-to-business buyers showed that the salesperson's perceived listening increased trust and satisfaction ¹⁹.

The story of MEDDIC

According to the website that sells the training today, Dick Dunkel created MEDDIC in 1996 at PTC, an American engineering software company, with the help of Jack Napoli ²⁰. The letters are a checklist: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain and internal champion. The more recent versions add competition and the paper process.

The story that comes with the method says it took PTC from about $300 million to $1 billion in four years. The revenue figures check out ^{23 21}. PTC's revenue was $244 million in 1994, $394 million in 1995, $600 million in 1996, $809 million in 1997 and $1,018 million in 1998.

The problem is the cause. The company was already growing 61% a year before 1996. Nothing in the public data separates the effect of the method from the effect of the market, the products and the acquisitions. The story may be true in the experience of those who lived it. It is not evidence.

MEDDICC does not make people sell. It makes them stop counting on deals that were never going to close.

What qualification gives you

The value of these methodologies lies elsewhere: they make the pipeline honest. A team that can answer every letter for every deal forecasts better, spends less time on dead opportunities and has a common language for coaching.

There is some evidence that discipline counts. Jason Jordan and Robert Kelly surveyed 62 business-to-business companies ²². Those with a formal sales process grew revenue 18% more. Those that mastered three pipeline management practices grew 28% more. The sample is small and growth was self-reported on a scale of 1 to 7.

Nikolaos Panagopoulos and George Avlonitis studied 170 companies ²⁴. Sales strategy, which includes segmenting and prioritising customers, was associated with better performance, more strongly when leadership was strong.

Strategic Selling and Sandler

Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman published Strategic Selling in 1985. The method maps the people who influence the purchase: the economic buyer, the users, the technical buyers and the person who coaches the salesperson from inside. Today it belongs to Korn Ferry, which claims that those who sell with "perspective" have a 22% higher win rate ²⁵. The survey does not publish its sample size.

David Sandler created his system in 1967 ²⁶. It qualifies pain, budget and decision hard, refuses to give free consulting and looks for an early "no". The network today has about two hundred franchised centres. The number in circulation, 50% more salespeople hitting quota, has no method described.

Value Selling and Command of the Message

ValueSelling Associates was founded in 1991 and says it has worked with more than a thousand companies ³⁰. The method organises the conversation around the business problem, the value of solving it and the power to decide. Force Management's Command of the Message organises the message around the business outcomes the customer wants and the capabilities needed to get there ³¹. We found no published studies on the effect of either.

What research says about selling value

Harri Terho, Alexander Haas, Andreas Eggert and Wolfgang Ulaga began by interviewing sales directors to understand what they mean by "selling value" ³². They arrived at three dimensions: understanding the customer's business model, building the value proposition and communicating value in terms the customer recognises.

Then they measured it ²⁷. They surveyed 816 salespeople and directors in 30 companies and linked sales strategy to performance. Segmenting customers well had a direct effect. Prioritising customers and defining selling models only had an effect through two things: the salesperson's customer orientation and value-based selling. Strategy reaches the result through what the salesperson does in the conversation.

The value the customer recognises is measured in their business, not in the product's features.

The value nobody writes into the proposal

Bain surveyed more than 2,300 purchase decision-makers ²⁸. When asked what mattered most, cost reduction came first. When researchers measured what actually made them promoters of a supplier, cost reduction came 27th. "Hope", an emotional element, came 4th.

CEB, Google and Motista surveyed more than 3,000 buyers about 36 brands ²⁹. Only 14% saw enough difference between suppliers to pay more. Personal value, such as career progression, confidence and pride in the decision, had about twice the impact of business value.

Value selling methodologies handle the first floor well, the business case. Research says the decision also goes through the second: what the purchase does for the person who champions it.

What Dixon and McKenna did

Matt Dixon, co-author of Challenger, and Ted McKenna analysed about 2.5 million recorded sales conversations from several dozen companies ³³. They used machine learning to code behaviours and link them to the outcome of each deal.

They concluded that 40 to 60% of qualified deals ended with no decision. And that most of those losses came not from a preference for the status quo, but from the fear of choosing badly.

The gap between salespeople was largest exactly there ³. With a decisive customer, the average salesperson won 39% of the time and the top salesperson about 70%. With a highly indecisive customer, 6% against 31%.

The four letters

The name sums up what the best performers did. Judge the customer's level of indecision. Offer a clear recommendation, instead of presenting every option. Limit exploration, so the customer does not get lost in more information. Take the risk off the table, with guarantees, phases or exit clauses.

According to the authors, using the fear of what is lost by not buying made results worse with indecisive customers ³⁵. Increasing the fear does not help a customer who is afraid of getting it wrong.

Faced with indecision, the top salesperson does not push. They recommend, limit and reassure.

What Gartner adds

Gartner reached a similar conclusion by another route. Buyers who receive useful information from the supplier are 2.8 times more likely to find the purchase easy and 3 times more likely to buy the larger option, with less regret ³⁴.

In 2019 it presented an approach it called "sense making": helping the customer reconcile conflicting information ³⁶. Those who used it closed quality deals without regret in 80% of cases. Gartner itself describes this number in two ways in different press releases, and does not publish the sample of salespeople.

The largest synthesis there is

Willem Verbeke, Bart Dietz and Ernst Verwaal pooled 268 studies published between 1982 and 2008, covering 79,747 salespeople ¹. They calculated the weight of each factor in sales performance. Sales knowledge and the ability to adapt came out ahead. Ambiguity about the salesperson's role had a negative effect. Personality hardly counted.

Sales knowledge includes knowing about the product, but above all about customers, types of buying situation and the strategies that work in each one. Adaptation is using that knowledge to change approach from customer to customer. Barton Weitz and colleagues had already proposed this in 1986: adaptation depends on knowledge ³⁸.

A sales methodology is a way of organising knowledge. It is worth what the team knows and manages to adapt.

Adapt, yes. Pleasing the customer, up to a point.

George Franke and Jeong-Eun Park brought together 155 samples covering more than 31,000 salespeople ³⁹. Adaptive selling increased performance as measured by the salespeople themselves, by their managers and by objective figures. Customer orientation only increased the performance that salespeople reported about themselves.

Fernando Jaramillo and colleagues found a correlation of 0.14 between customer orientation and performance, across 16 studies ³⁷. It was the same in business and consumer markets, and in subjective and objective measures. Add Homburg's result from the first chapter: beyond a certain point, pleasing the customer more reduces sales.

A 2025 review of 188 articles on adaptive selling found positive relationships with performance in about two thirds of cases, no effect in more than 30% and negative ones in about 3% ⁴⁰. Adapting almost always helps. It is not a formula.

What this says about the methodologies

Each sales methodology is a package of knowledge about one job in the sale. SPIN organises what is known about uncovering needs. MEDDICC organises what is known about qualifying. A salesperson who masters several has more room to adapt. A salesperson who applies only one to every customer loses adaptation, which is what research says counts most.

Having a methodology is not using it

Julián Villanueva and Cosimo Chiesa, of IESE, surveyed company directors in Spain and received more than 600 responses ². 54% had a sales methodology that was defined and internalised by the team. Another 28% had one, but the team did not apply it. In the United Kingdom, a Huthwaite survey with YouGov found only 22% of companies with a single methodology ⁴³.

A survey of 400 software companies in the US asked which methodology they used and how effective it was ⁴⁴. There was little difference in effectiveness between types of methodology. 52% of executives thought theirs was very effective. Among salespeople, 39%.

The living process and coaching

CSO Insights, part of Miller Heiman, spent years classifying companies into four levels of process and of coaching: random, informal, formal and dynamic ⁴¹. Dynamic is the process that is measured and adjusted regularly.

In the sales process, only the dynamic level stood out, with 13.5% more quota attainment and a 10.1% higher win rate. In coaching, the win rate rose at each level: 43.6% random, 50.9% informal, 58.8% formal and 66.1% dynamic.

The data on execution repeat what Rackham said about SPIN: the gain lies in the follow-up.

Training works, if it reaches the field

Winfred Arthur and colleagues pooled 162 studies on training in organisations ⁴⁵. The average effect was moderate to strong, with similar values for learning, behaviour and results. Within the same studies, the effect shrank from the classroom to the field.

The cleanest experiment on sales training was carried out in South Africa ⁴². Stephen Anderson, Rajesh Chandy and Bilal Zia randomly assigned 852 small firms to three groups: marketing and sales training, finance training and none. A year later, the firms trained in sales had 64% more sales and 61% more profit. Those trained in finance increased profit by cutting costs.

There is a warning. David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff reviewed 16 evaluations of business training and concluded that most did not have a large enough sample to detect reasonable effects ⁴⁶. Many training "results", for better and for worse, are noise.

A study at a retailer with more than 200 stores compared training everyone, training only some and training nobody ⁴⁷. Training only part of the team worked when the salespeople had similar performance. Choosing people with different lengths of service helped pass what they learned on to colleagues.

What it is

PTD (Processo de Tomada de Decisão, the decision-making process) starts from one idea: sell at the pace of the customer's decision, not at the pace of the salesperson ⁴⁸. Every buying decision is a journey with distinct phases that influence each other. In each phase, the customer has a different purpose, and the salesperson needs different strategies and initiatives.

The eight phases fall into four zones. In the comfort zone, the customer moves from ignorance to awareness of the problem. In the decision zone, they decide to change and define the criteria. In the search zone, they research and compare. In the choice zone, they select and reassess.

Where it comes close to the published models

The structure is similar to models of buying that come from other sources. Gartner describes six buying tasks, from identifying the problem to building consensus ⁴. Everett Rogers described the adoption of innovations in organisations in five stages, from agenda-setting to routine ⁴⁹.

PTD adds two things. It starts before the customer knows they have a problem, in the ignorance phase, which is where Challenger and Insight Selling work. And it ends after the purchase, in reassessment. None of the eleven branded methodologies in this analysis covers this last phase. Analysis No. 2 showed why it matters: buying is not adopting, and a customer who regrets the purchase does not buy again.

PTD does not compete with SPIN or MEDDICC. It says at which moment of the decision each one is useful.

What is not proven

PTD rests on more than twenty years of client projects. There is no published study measuring its effect on sales, just as there is none for most of the methodologies in this analysis. The structure is consistent with research on the buying process. The gain from applying it has not been measured.

The honest test is simple to design. Record which phase of the decision each deal is in, measure how long it stays in each phase and at what rate it moves to the next, and compare teams that use the map with teams that do not.

Three rules

Diagnose before you choose. Look at where deals stall. If they die before the proposal, the problem is in creating or uncovering. If they die after it, the problem is in proving the value or getting to a decision. If the forecast is never right, the problem is in qualifying.

One methodology per job, with a common language. Mixing three discovery methods confuses the team. Combining one for discovery, one for qualification and one for the decision gives it tools for different jobs. Research on adaptation says this is what the best performers do.

Spend more on follow-up than on the choice. The data on coaching and on a living process show the largest differences in the whole analysis. Training without weekly coaching afterwards achieves little, whatever the methodology.

By the profiles from Analysis No. 2

• Settled: create the need. Challenger or Insight Selling, with patience and presence.
• Urgent: short discovery and a quick decision. SPIN focused on implication, and JOLT for the fear of getting it wrong.
• Transformer: qualify a large group and prove the value to each person. MEDDICC or Strategic Selling, with Value Selling.
• Explorer: prove the value in a pilot with a success criterion, and get to a decision when scaling up.