WHAT IS SPIN?

SPIN Selling is a sales book written by Neil Rackham, first published in 1988. In this book,
Rackham establishes the SPIN selling methodology, a sales technique created to help anticipate
and navigate tough sales situations.

The Huthwaite organization, had been working for several years to develop a method called
behavior analysis, which allowed us to watch salespeople at work and to figure out which of the
sales behaviors they used were the ones most linked to success. I jumped at the chance to try
our new methods. Since that uncomfortable meeting, my colleagues and I have collected much
more compelling evidence. We've spent 10 years analyzing over 35,000 sales transactions.
We've studied 116 factors that might play some part in sales performance, and we've
researched effective selling in 27 countries. Our studies constitute the largest-ever investigation
into sales success. Neil noted that the quality of the salesperson’s questions was the key factor
in whether the sale was closed or not, and with that huge stack of data Neil and his team
analyzed the success map and named it SPIN. SPIN is an acronym that represents the key
factors that must be explored in a sale for it to be successful. They are:

S – Situation

P – Problem

I – Implication

N – Need-payoff

S-Situation

At the start of the call, successful people tend to ask data-gathering questions about facts and
background. Typical Situation Questions would be "How long have you had your present
equipment?" or "Could you tell me about your company's growth plans?". Situation questions
such as "Which tools do you currently use?" function as a way to gather information.

P-Problem

Once sufficient information has been established about the buyer's situation, successful people
tend to move to a second type of question. Problem questions such as "Does this process ever
fail?" function as a way to identify the pains and problems prospects experience.
I-Implication

In smaller sales, sellers can be very successful if they just know how to ask good Situation and
Problem Questions. Implication questions such as "What's the productivity cost when it does?"
help the sales rep underscore why those pains need to be solved.

N-Need Payoff

Finally, we found that very, successful salespeople ask a fourth type of question during the
Investigating stage. It's called a Need-payoff Question, and typical examples would be Need
Payoff questions such as "Wouldn't it be simpler if...?" lead the prospect to draw conclusions on
their own rather than leading into a pitch right away.

SUCCESS IN LARGE SCALE

Research has an inconvenient way of coming up with evidence that the researchers sometimes
wish they'd never found. I was perfectly content with traditional theories of how to sell. When
we started our investigations, our aim was to show that classic sales-training methods really
worked and had a positive impact on sales success. Sales call consists of some simple and
distinct steps:

1. Opening the call: The classic theories of selling teach that the most effective method for
opening sales calls is to find ways to relate to the buyer's personal interests and to make
initial benefit statements.
2. Investigating needs: Almost everybody who's been through sales training in the last 60
years has been taught about open and closed questions.
3. Giving benefits: Once you've uncovered needs, traditional sales training teaches you to
give benefits that show how the features of your product or service can be used or can
help the customer.
4. Objection handling: These objection handling skills are fine when you're making small
sales, but in major sales they contribute very little to your sales effectiveness.
5. Closing techniques: The closing techniques that can be effective in smaller accounts will
actually lose your business as the sales grow larger.

THE FOUR STAGES OF A SALES CALL

Major sales are significantly different from smaller sales in terms of customer psychology. As a
result, they require some very different selling skills. However, one of the simplest models of a
sales call does seem to be applicable to any size of sale; almost every sale call you can think of,
from the simplest to the most sophisticated, goes through four distinct stages.
1. Preliminaries:
 In the preliminaries stage, there’s no need for benefits statements. These are the
warming-up events that occur before the serious selling begins. Some people
believe that the Preliminaries are much more important than the word suggests.
The warming-up events at the start of the call.
 How important is the warming-up stage of the call? In our research on
Preliminaries we sought the answers to a number of questions, including these:
 Is it true that the first impressions made in a sales call are crucial to its success?
 Does one particular way work better than others to open a call?
2. Investigating:
 Almost every sale involves finding something out by asking questions.
 Finding out facts, information, and needs.
 You may be uncovering needs or getting a better understanding of your
customers and their organizations.
 Investigating is the most important of all selling skills, and it's particularly crucial
in larger sales.
 Ex: How much do you see your company growing next year?
3. Demonstrating Capability:
 In most calls you will need to demonstrate to customers that you've something
worthwhile to offer.
 Most of us in larger sales are selling solutions to customer problems.
 In the Demonstrating Capability stage of the call, you have to show customers
that you have a solution and that it makes a worthwhile contribution to helping
solve their problems.
 Sell Benefits rather than Features and Advantages.
 You must show customers that: You can solve their problem
4. Obtaining Commitment:
 Finally, a successful sales call will end with some sort of commitment from the
customer.
 In smaller sales the commitment is usually in the form of a purchase, but in
larger sales there may be a whole range of other commitments you have to
obtain before you reach the order stage.
 Getting an agreement to proceed to a further stage of the sale.
 First check that you've covered all of the prospect's key concerns, then
summarize your benefits. Finally, propose the next appropriate level of
commitment.
Which Stage Is Most Important?

The four call stages are that the answer depends on the size of the sale. In small sales, there's
some evidence to suggest that the manager who wrote to me is correct. The people who are
good at obtaining commitment—the strong closers, as he would put it—are indeed very
successful in smaller sales.

Obtaining Commitment: Closing the Sale

The Huthwaite research shows that success in the major sale depends, more than anything
else, on how the Investigating stage of the call is handled. The closes I read about included the
good old standard techniques that every seller knows,

1. Assumptive closes: Assuming that the sale has already been made, one asks, for
example, "Where would you like it delivered?" before the customer has agreed to buy.
2. Alternative closes: Purchase decision of consumer, for example, "Would you prefer
delivery on Tuesday or Thursday?"
3. Standing-room-only closes: for example, "If you can't make a decision right now, I'll have
to offer it to another customer who's pressing to buy it."
4. Last-chance closes: "The price goes up next week, so unless you buy now..."
5. Order-blank closes: One fills within the customer's answers on a form, despite the fact
that the customer has not indicated a willingness to create a buying call.

Four possible outcomes of a sales call:

1. Orders: Where the customer makes a firm commitment to buy. "We're 99.9 percent
likely to buy"
2. Advances: Where an event takes place, either in the call or after it, that moves the sale
forward toward a decision. Typical Advances might include: An agreement to run a trial
or test of your product, a customer's agreement to attend an off-site demonstration.
3. Continuations: Where the sale will continue but where no specific action has been
agreed upon by the customer to move it forward. "Thank you for coming. Why don't you
visit us again the next time you're in the area."
4. No-sales: Where the customer actively refuses a commitment. the No-sale customer
makes it clear that there's no possibility of any business.

Obtaining Commitment: Four Successful Actions

1. Giving attention to Investigating and Demonstrating Capability.

2. Checking that key concerns are covered.
3. Summarizing the Benefits.
 4. Proposing a commitment.

Focus on Investigation stage

First Impressions

 There's evidence to suggest that people notice far less in the early stages of an
interaction than we may imagine.
 In the early stages of an interaction with another person, we're usually so
overloaded with information that we either don't notice, or we quickly forget,
some quite obvious things.

Conventional Openings:

Since the 1920s, salespeople have been taught that there are two successful ways to open a call:

SPIN VALUATION:

There are downsides to SPIN Selling. It takes time to adopt the methodology into a sales team,
and the process itself can’t be automated. But the latter is one of the reasons it works so well.
Just as every customer is different, so are the questions a sales rep should be asking.

Focusing primarily on the investigating stage, i.e., all the questions you will ask clients. If the
questioning skills got developed, the other stages of selling will usually come on their own. For

that, it is better not to ru the powerful implication and need-payoff questions but first to

comfortably master the simpler situation and problem questions.

An Evaluating plan:

1. Decide first if enough questions are asked of any type. If you are used to talking a

lot that is giving a lot of features and advantages- then start by asking more questions.
 Most of the questions asked will be situation questions. This should be done for

several weeks until you feel comfortable asking questions.

2. Next, plan to ask problem questions. Aim to ask the client questions about

problems, difficulties and dissatisfaction at least half a dozen times. Focus on the

amount of questions and do not worry whether each question is “good” or not.

3. If you feel that you are doing a good job of discovering client problems, it is time to

move on to implication questions. They are more difficult to ask and may require

several months of practice before you are comfortable with them.

4. Finally, when you are comfortable with situation, problem and implication

questions, turn on the attention to need-payoff questions. Instead of giving

benefits to clients, focus on getting the clients to tell you the benefits. Again the focus

should be on quantity, not quality.

Lastly, after planning and action, it is very important to review the actions you have put in place

and analyse them.

Final Thoughts on Evaluation:

There are even more tests and ideas unlike SPIN. Through patient investigation and experiment,
researchers will be able to carry out more of the problem out of the major sale and make it as clearly
understandable as any other business function.

SPIN improved the understanding of what makes practical good sense, measured by its contribution to
sales results, more people in the training business could be persuaded to take a similar approach and
those significantly improves the results.