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.

It’s 1960 and the advertising gurus at the fictional SterlingCooper agency have been tasked with dreaming up a campaign for Kodak’s revolutionary slide projection system. The client is proud of its innovative work and urges Don to push this technological angle in whatever advertising campaign he comes up with. In the client’s mind, this is the best way to captivate consumers in the “jet age” of the early 1960s. What Don does instead leaves them mesmerized and causes one of his own colleagues to hurriedly leave the meeting in tears.

Following The Challenger Sale’s model (which emphasizes taking control of the customer conversation), Don starts the meeting with a personal story from his early days in advertising. This “Warmer” is step 1 of the commercial teaching pitch described by Dixon and Adamson. By recounting the advice he received from an “old pro”, Don builds credibility with his audience. The advice Don received from his mentor stressed the importance of emotional impact when selling a product to the public. And this is a real story, not some bland case study being robotically retold for the umpteenth time. Most importantly, Don’s story starts to shift the client’s thinking away from their product and to the “sentimental bond” that consumers could have with it. “Reframing” or confronting the client with an unrecognized problem, need or assumption is the integral second step in the commercial teaching process. By replacing technology with emotion as the main selling point for Kodak’s new slide projector, Don offers his client a BOLD (Big, Outperforming, Leading-Edge, Difficult - also from The Challenger Sale) idea. Nostalgia is “delicate, but potent” he explains before switching off the lights in the conference room and turning on the slide projector.

While working the projector, Don smoothly transitions into the next stage of his pitch. At this point, the methodology outlined in The Challenger Sale has two separate steps, Rational Drowning and Emotional Impact. Don combines the two into what I’m calling “Emotional Drowning”. Rather than reeling off any impressive stats and figures the representatives from Kodak have undoubtedly supplied him, he displays pictures from his wedding, the holidays, and of his children playing. Consumers won’t buy Kodak’s new slide projector simply because it’s the latest and greatest, he explains. They’ll buy it because it allows them to relive happier moments from the past. And Don doesn’t let up. As he is talking, he displays picture after picture from his own life, commemorating births, promotions, vacations, and more. This ultimately causes one of the other ad men present to well up with tears due to his own (self-inflicted) troubles at home. Emotional Drowning indeed.

Harkening back to Kodak’s desire to showcase the exciting new technology behind this product, Don challenges them to think of their product in “A New Way” (the next stage in the pitch, according to The Challenger Sale). He begins to build the client’s confidence in this new way of thinking by proclaiming, “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine”. Knowing that today’s innovations in slide capacity, brightness, efficiency, etc. are tomorrow’s table stakes, Don introduces a value proposition that will be unique to Kodak. In the final moments of the meeting, Don introduces his “solution” and even hints at how it might be implemented. He argues that Kodak’s new device should be called “The Carousel” and even teases some artwork. By doing so, he links the product back to his teaching point, reiterating that Kodak should be focused more on what consumers will get from its product and less on the “glittering lure” of technology. Technology and its innovations are ephemeral to some extent. Instead of latching on to that, Don successfully convinces the Kodak execs to shift their thinking from company-centric to consumer-centric. In fact, later in the episode, we hear that Kodak have canceled their other ad agency meetings and are proceeding with Don and SterlingCooper.

So was Don Draper the first Challenger sales rep? Ironically, Don isn’t even an “account man” (as Mad Men calls them), but rather a creative director. He is the one working behind the scenes to dream up a compelling story to sell his clients. He is often the one leading later stage meetings with clients and coordinating efforts between internal teams. Don and the creatives who work for him are the ones doing the research, brainstorming ideas, and putting in long hours before the “big meeting”. Those of us in software sales would probably call Don a (pre-)sales engineer.

This particular meeting stands out in other ways too. It’s short, not even 5 minutes long. You’ve doubtless been in plenty of meetings where introductions and small talk take much longer (“We’ll just give them a few more minutes to join…”). There’s no stated or formal agenda, everyone knows what they’re there for. There’s no rehashing of previous conversations, no “What’s keeping you up at night?”. Don doesn’t constantly pause and ask for consensus, he’s intentionally provocative and uses tension masterfully. In short, he is a Challenger, fifty years ahead of the curve.