Did Don Draper Invent the Challenger Sale? No, but in episode 13 of the first season of AMC’s Mad Men, he delivers an engaging pitch and product demonstration that follows the “purposeful choreography” outlined in Dixon and Adamson’s seminal work, The Challenger Sale. It may seem ironic that those of us in software pre-sales should draw inspiration not from the slick materials produced by today’s SaaS companies, but from something that predates the cloud, the dot-com boom, the personal computer, and even the business world’s adoption of mainframe computing.