Brent Adamson has changed the selling methods of companies around the world as the co-author of The Challenger Sale. The book has appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Business Books list more than a dozen times and has sold more than 185,000 copies on Amazon.

Adamson is now applying the Challenger concept to marketing and will provide a comprehensive overview at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference being held May 7-8 in New York City.

We recently caught up with Adamson and he shared his perspective on what is Challenger Marketing.

In many ways, the list of core marketing competencies doesn’t change much in Challenger Marketing, Adamson noted. Things like customer segmentation, content and campaign creation, brand management and lead nurturing management are still important.

The key difference is less about what to do and more about how to do it, according to Adamson. Customers are now empowered with incredible amounts of information from multiple sources. In this world, many traditional marketing strategies now come up dramatically short.

Adamson points to long-standing efforts among marketers to “increase customer focus,” and build a world-class “customer centric organization.” Following this model, primary marketing activities aim to first identify customer needs and then meet or exceed those needs in unexpected ways designed to create “moments of customer delight.”

In today’s B2B world where customers can learn on their own, Adamson says those efforts to delight customers may indeed get customers to like you, but they won’t predictably get customers to pay you — at least not much more than the two other leading competitors whose arguably less delightful solutions were nonetheless perceived by the customer to be at least good enough.

For the complete interview, click here.

Follow Brent Adamson on Twitter: @BrentAdamson