An industry built on evidence. Trained on a model that has none.

“This is good. But our KAMs are using Challenger. How do we fit your model inside that?”

If you’ve been working in pharma for a while you will be very familiar with Challenger. It has been the most popular conversation or sales model for more than a decade.

But what is it really? And what is it built on?

The dossier behind the model

Pharma is an industry built on evidence. Phase I, Phase II, Phase III. Peer review. Independent replication. Regulatory dossiers thick enough to hold up a bank vault. We will not move a single statement on a label without statistical significance behind it.

Do you think we would sign off on off-label messaging supported by a single non-peer-reviewed survey?

The conversation model now deployed across thousands of customer-facing colleagues, commercial and medical, does exactly that.

The Challenger Sale (Dixon and Adamson, 2011) was built on a single proprietary CEB survey of around 6,000 sales reps. Never published in a peer-reviewed journal. Methodology never released. Never independently replicated. Sample taken in 2009, at the bottom of one of the biggest financial meltdowns ever.

The cohort included no pharma sales reps, KAMs or MSLs. The outcome variable was not customer behaviour or relationship quality, it was manager rankings of their own reps.

If that study landed on a Medical Director’s desk attached to a clinical claim, the conversation would be over in two seconds.

Why Challenger?

Challenger was the answer to a real problem in 2011. After 2008, B2B procurement officers had P&L authority, shrinking budgets and a built-in distrust of relationship-builder reps. Dixon and Adamson put a name on what the most successful reps in that environment were doing. They were not building rapport, they were reframing the buyer’s understanding of their own business problem.

One reason pharma adopted it is because of the language used: Insight. Disruption. Commercial teaching. It sounded modern and it gave leaders a reason to retire the detail aid-rep model that everyone already knew was finished.

Then, somewhere around 2015, Medical Affairs got handed the same playbook with the word “scientific” pasted in front of “insight”. MSLs and Medical Advisors started receiving conversation training built on the same take-control architecture, repackaged as scientific challenge or insight-led medical engagement.

Same verbs, different badge.

Real world evidence

Set aside the original study for a moment. Fifteen years of pharma-wide deployment should be enough to tell us how effective the model is in a pharma context.

If Challenger worked, the model would have moved the needle on the thing it was deployed to fix: Engaging the HCP.

Instead.

HCP engagement with pharma has fallen to 53%. Nearly 90% of HCP interactions last less than two minutes. Two-thirds of HCPs say they are burnt out by pharma content. 88% say they would be twice as likely to meet with a rep if the interaction mirrored their best professional relationship.

These are not the numbers of a model that works. They are the numbers of a model that has been training a generation of KAMs and MSLs to walk into rooms in a way the audience has been quietly closing the door on.

What the modern research actually says

The science that has built up since 2011 points the other way for clinical audiences, whether the person opposite us carries a sales target or a medical badge.

Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan, thousands of studies) keeps showing the same thing. Autonomy is the strongest predictor of sustained behaviour change in professionals. Take Control is the move the data tells us NOT to make.

Brehm’s reactance theory, replicated for sixty years, says the same thing more bluntly. Pressure on a position produces defence of that position. The Challenger close is built on pressure.

Across more than a hundred randomised trials of Motivational Interviewing, autonomy-supportive questioning outperforms argumentation by roughly twenty-five percentage points in the clinical settings where it has been measured.

This is published, peer-reviewed and replicated research pointing to something that is far from what Challenger recommends KAMs or MSLs to do.

The category error

Challenger optimises for a buyer who has authority over a budget and a quarter to spend it. The HCP has neither. They have a patient in front of them, a guideline behind them and a regulator looking over their shoulder.

The category error gets worse when Challenger is handed to the medical function.

An MSL or Medical Advisor sits opposite the same HCP, but the rules of engagement are different. The conversation is meant to be peer-to-peer, scientific, non-promotional and protected by a different regulatory framework.

The take-control reflex, the commercial-teaching mechanic, the disruptive insight delivered to provoke action, is exactly the move the medical conversation is structurally designed to avoid.

When “scientific challenge” reads as Challenger-with-scientific-vocabulary, the medical role loses the one thing that makes if effective.

What this means for the meeting

A KAM or MSL trained on Challenger walks in with an insight designed to disrupt.

And in pharma that means an insight closely connected to the product. It’s a self-serving insight designed to produce a response that gives us something we want.

The HCP, the most sophisticated audience in the universe, sees the move coming. Friestad and Wright’s persuasion knowledge model predicts what happens next. The content gets flagged as technique and the rest of the conversation is discounted along with it.

We have trained the whole stakeholder-facing organisation on a meeting that is structurally wrong for the audience they meet.

A different kind of preparation

Imagine walking into the next stakeholder meeting, whether you’re commercial or medical, with no disruptive insight to deliver.

Three things prepared instead.

Account intelligence structured the right way, so the team stops guessing about the priorities and challenges that are top of mind for the stakeholder.

A knowledge asset, built on validated account intelligence, that will give the stakeholder new ideas and perspectives about their work and on their organisation.

And one simple question designed to let you know what’s really going on inside the stakeholder’s head: What’s your perspective?

This is not a sales technique. It is a research-backed approach that the medical function can use without sacrificing the science, and that the commercial function can use without losing sight of why they were hired in the first place.

Back to the BU head’s office

So what did I tell her?

I did not argue Challenger. The argument was not going to be won across her desk in an hour.

I told her: keep the model your teams know and lets focus on equipping the commercial and the medical teams with three new capabilities: How to conduct account intelligence analysis, how to generate insights based on that intelligence and how to use that insight to build knowledge assets and get access to stakeholders. Then watch what happens when your teams have something the stakeholder actually wanted to talk about.

The permission

Retiring an established conversation model is not a small move. Reps have built muscle memory around it. Trainers have built careers around it. Vendors have built revenue around it. The political cost of saying out loud that the model is wrong is real, and the leader who says it first wears that cost alone for a while.

But the leader who moves first is not exposed, the science will back them up.
Self-Determination Theory has thousands of studies behind it. Reactance theory has sixty years of replication. Motivational Interviewing has more than a hundred randomised trials.

The next meeting does not need to be challenged. It needs to provide equal value to you and the stakeholder.