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SPIN Selling (Hardcover)
by Neil Rackham
| Category:
Selling skills, Sales mastery, Persuasion |
| Market price: ¥ 308.00
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¥ 258.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Practical and internationally proven steps to selling success. A must-read for sales professionals. |
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Author: Neil Rackham
Publisher: McGraw Hill
Pub. in:
ISBN: 0070511136
Pages: 197
Measurements: 9.5 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00122
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- Awards & Credential -
SPIN has been one of the best known and most practised sales methodologies to sales community for years. |
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- MSL Picks -
Unlike most developers of sales training, Neil Rackham methodically backs up his claims with in-depth research. To build the flexible, adaptable SPIN model, Rackham has observed and analyzed a large number of high dollar value sales made around the world. Rackham convincingly demonstrates that successful salespeople marketing high dollar value products and services do not rely on the sales tactics geared towards low dollar value sales that are traditionally taught to salespeople. Successful salespeople typically go through four stages that Rackham has identified as:
Preliminaries, investigating, demonstrating capability, and obtaining commitment.
1. In analyzing 'Preliminaries', Rackham first warns salespeople that although first impressions count, they are less important that too many of them imagine. Furthermore, Rackham recommends that salespeople get down to business quickly and avoid talking about solutions too soon. Raising areas of personal interest with buyers can sound suspicious. Talking about the benefit of a solution before understanding buyer's needs and building value to satisfy these needs, can also be an invitation for trouble. Unfortunately, Rackham does not remind his audience enough that this approach to preliminaries, though perfectly appropriate in the American culture, can be perceived as offensive in others. Salespeople doing business abroad beware.
2. In looking at the critical 'Investigating', Rackham advises that salespeople not only use situation questions and problem questions but also implication questions and need-payoff questions. Salespeople usually ask the first two types of questions to uncover implied needs unless their customers or prospects tell them upfront that they have an explicit need for a specific solution to their problem(s). In high dollar value sales, salespeople must leverage the uncovered problems to make them bigger by exploring their implications. Buyers can indeed perceive an imbalance between the price of the solution and the severity of their problem(s). Because that type of questioning can sound negative or depressing to buyers, salespeople must follow with need-payoff solutions to make their customers or prospects feel good about the proposed solution to their problem(s).
To his credit, Rackham reminds his audience that the SPIN model is not a rigid formula. The type of questions to be used and their relative importance depend on the circumstances of the specific high dollar value sale at hand. 3. In examining 'Demonstrating Capability', Rackham makes the distinction among features, advantages, and benefits. Rackham convincingly shows that offering benefits is key to meet explicit needs expressed by customers or prospects. Selling only features can be a risky value proposition because that tactic potentially makes customers or prospects more price sensitive than they should be. Resisting that temptation can be particularly daunting in the high tech industry that sometimes suffers from 'feature creep.' Selling only advantages can also backfire against salespeople because that tactic is eventually an invitation to objections raised by customers or prospects. To his credit, Rackham emphasizes objection prevention and not objection resolution by bringing customers or prospects to the insight that the product or service being offered meets the needs expressed by them. 4. In investigating 'Obtaining Commitment', Rackham demonstrates with panache that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the number of closing techniques and the success of high dollar value sales. Traditional closing techniques such as assumptive closes, alternative closes, standing-room-only closes, last-chance closes, and order-blank closes can easily generate objections from customers or prospects who are not yet ready to act on their implied and expressed needs. Progress in high dollar value sales is measured in actions on which customers or prospects agree so that salespeople can eventually move on along the continuum stretching from lead to order. As long as customers or prospects do not commit to advancing in that process, salespeople are indeed condemned to stagnation at best, definitive loss of the order at worst down the road. In Appendix A of his book (which is really worth of his audience's attention), Rackham is humble enough to recognize that a jump in sales following one of his sales trainings based on the four-step approach described above can be totally or partially attributed to other factors such as changes in people, changes in products, changes in pricing or changes in competition. Finally, as a side note, a good strategic complement to the tactical SPIN Selling is The New Strategic Selling by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez, and Tad Tuleja. Like the former, the latter focuses on high dollar value sales.
(From quoting Serge Van Steenkiste, USA)
Target readers:
Sales managers, sales reps, marketing and business development professionals, entrepreneurs, MBAs, and anyone else looking for a sales career.
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Neil Rackham is the founder and CEO of Huthwaite, Inc., a leading sales consulting, training, and research firm, and author of several best-selling books, including SPIN Selling, The SPIN Selling Fieldbook, Major Account Sales Strategy, and Getting Partnering Right. Recognized as a pioneer in sales force effectiveness, Mr. Rackham is widely credited with bringing research and analytical methods to the field of sales force management.
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From Publisher
Developed from 12 years of research into 35,000 sales calls, SPIN -Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff - is already in use by many of the world's top sales forces. Now these revolutionary, easy-to-apply methods are available here. With wit and authority, Neil Rackham explains the SPIN strategy, using real-world examples and informative cases.
The Huthwaite corporation's 12-year, $1 million research into effective sales performance - published here for the first time in the United States - is the best- documented account of sales success ever collected. It has resulted in the unique sales strategy, SPIN Situation, Problem, Implication, Need- payoff. The SPIN strategy is already used by many of the world's top sales forces. Now, with the publication of this new book, these revolutionary, easy-to-apply methods can be yours.
The author explains with wit and authority why traditional sales models, which were developed for small consumer sales, just don't work for large sales. He shows how conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. But most important of all, he unfolds with supreme clarity the enormously successful SPIN strategy.
No other method is so completely backed by hard research data. You may find the techniques controversial. They will often go against the grain of conventional sales training. But in the end, the powerful evidence presented here will convince and convert you.
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Chapter 6: Preventing Objections
During a visit to the training center of a leading multinational company, I was invited to watch some sales training in progress. Instead of choosing the Advanced Systems Selling class, as my hosts had perhaps expected, I asked instead if I could sit in on a typical basic-skills program for new salespeople. Entering quietly at the back of the room, I looked around. The students all had that unnatural attentive cleanliness that goes with being new to sales. Their instructor, recently promoted from the field, was launching with great vigor into his favorite topic - objection handling. You couldn't have imagined a more typical scene. It could have been Day 2 of any basic sales-training program in any large corporation.
"The professional salesperson," the instructor began, "welcomes objections because they are a sign of customer interest. In fact, the more objections you get, the easier it will be for you to sell." The class, duly impressed, wrote this down. Meanwhile I groaned behind my mandatory visitor's smile.
Here was yet another new generation of salespeople at the receiving end of one of the most misleading myths in selling. Still, as a visitor it would have been improper for me to comment, so I continued to smile through an hour of objection-handling techniques until the coffee break.
During the break, I talked with the instructor. "Did you believe what you were saying in there," I asked, "that stuff about the more objections, the easier to sell?"
"Yes," he replied. "If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't be teaching it."
I hesitated. Clearly theinstructor and I had opposite views about objection handling. It would have been easier to drop the subject, but he'd been kind enough to let me into his class, so I felt I owed him something in return. I asked, "You've been a successful sales performer for several years, haven't you?"
"Yes," he replied with some pride. "I've been with the company five years and I've made President's Club for the last three."
"Look back at your own sales experience," I urged him. "Five years ago, when you were new, did you receive more or fewer objections from your customers than you're getting now?"
He thought for a moment. "More, I guess." Then, as he remembered back, he added, "You know, in the two years when I was new, I seemed to get objections all the time."
"So in those first two years when you were facing all those objections, did you have good sales figures?"
"No," he said uncomfortably. "In fact, my sales weren't too good until my third year with the company."
Pressing the point, I asked him, "Then you did a lot better in that third year?"
"Yes, that was the year I first made President's Club."
"And how about objections? It sounds as if you had more objections in your unsuccessful years. How does that tie in with what you said in class about the more objections, the more successful the call will be?"
He considered the point for a while and said, "You're right. When I look back, I faced many more objections when I was unsuccessful. Perhaps I'm teaching the wrong message."
I had to admire him. Most people - given the astonishing human capacity for dismissing unwanted evidence - would have dodged the issue and held to their initial position. But the class was reconvening and I had to finish my tour of the facility, so I didn't have time to talk more with the instructor about objection handling. If we'd had more time, I would have told him:
- Objection handling is a much less important skill than most training makes it out to be.
- Objections, contrary to common belief, are more often created by the seller than the customer.
- In the average sales team, there's usually one salesperson who receives 10 times as many objections per selling hour as another person in the same team.
- Skilled people receive fewer objections because they have learned objection prevention, not objection handling.
To explain these findings, I'll have to go back to the discussion of Features, Advantages, and Benefits in Chapter 5. You'll remember the definitions of these three behaviors and their links to success in sales of different sizes. One of my colleagues, Linda Marsh, carried out some correlation studies to check whether there are statistically significant links between each of these behaviors and the most probable responses they produce from customers. For example, when sellers use a lot of Features in calls, do customers respond in a different way than in calls where fewer Features are used? She discovered that Features, Advantages, and Benefits each produce a different behavioral response from customers.
Features and Price Concerns
Customers are most likely to raise price concerns in calls where the seller gives lots of Features. Why is this? It seems that the effect of Features is to increase the customer's sensitivity to price. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if you happen to be selling low-cost products that are relatively rich in Features.
Consider the psychology of the advertisement shown in Figure 6.3. This features-rich product is being sold in a way that works well with cheaper goods. You can imagine a television commercial: "We give you multiplication, division, subtraction... and what do you think that's worth? Well, don't answer yet because you also get mark-up and mark-down percentages - which is something you don't usually find on watches 10 times the price. And we also give you..." Throughout history, using Features this way has helped sell lower-priced goods. Why? Because Features increase price sensitivity. By listing all the Features, the customer comes to expect a higher price. When the product turns out to be much cheaper than its competition, the increased price sensitivity causes the buyer to feel extra positive about the lower price tag.
I chose a watch example, rather than an industrial product, because there's something unique about watches. In no other market that I can think of is there such an enormous price difference between competitors.
Now consider the advertisement shown in Figure 6.4. This watch is almost 100 times as expensive as the one in Figure 6.3. Do you think you'd be more likely to buy this expensive watch if there was a list of Features down the side of the advertisement to help persuade you? Not on your life! With top-of-the-market products, the price concern created by Features will make people less likely to buy. A list of Features would probably make you ask yourself questions about whether the expensive watch was worth it.
Too Many Features: A Case Study
The relationship between Features and price concerns isn't just a theoretical point that applies only to advertisers. It has clear implications for sales strategy. A major U.S.-based multinational corporation once called us in to help it with a problem. The corporation had been facing tough Japanese competition in its primary marketplace, particularly at the lower end of its product range. The Japanese products were richly featured and, as you might expect, somewhat less expensive than its own machines. As market share began to erode, the corporation looked for alternatives to price cutting. One attractive possibility was to introduce a new product with more Features that could compete directly with the Japanese machines. Such a machine would still be a little more expensive, but because of its added Features, it would provide a much stronger marketplace offering.
But who would sell this new product? The corporation decided to recruit part of the sales force from the competition. After all, nobody knew as much about how to sell these richly featured machines as the people who'd been successful sellers for the Japanese competitor. It seemed, on the face of it, a plausible strategy - recruiting experienced sellers while simultaneously weakening the competition by raiding its best people. The corporation's agents approached those salespeople who'd been very successful selling the cheaper Japanese machines and succeeded in recruiting some of the competitor's top people.
Unfortunately, these new people's sales results were deeply disappointing. The competition's superstars performed no better than the existing sales force. While trying to discover what was going wrong, I talked with several of the people recruited from the competition and found them puzzled and dejected at their sudden fall from success. "It's price," they explained. "The product's too expensive; we get price objections all the time." And they were right. When we traveled with them on calls, we found that the number of price objections they received from customers was 30 percent higher than for the rest of the sales force who were selling the same product. Why? We couldn't write it off as pure coincidence when two sections of a sales force selling an identical product received different levels of price objections from their customers.
The answer lay in their use of Features. While selling for the cheaper competitor, these salespeople had developed a selling style very high in Features. This was very successful because, as we've seen, Features increase customers' price concerns. But because their product was cheaper, the price concern worked to their advantage. Now that they were selling for a more expensive competitor, the high level of Features they were giving worked against them. Their Features increased price concern and, because their product was more expensive, this turned customers toward the cheaper competitor. I presented our findings to the V.P. of Sales for the division. As he wryly remarked, "Right now, they seem to be doing a better job of selling for our competition than when our competition employed them." How could we help? Not, I suggested, by teaching them how to handle price objections. That was just a symptom. It would be more effective to treat the cause and help these new people adopt a selling style more appropriate to a top-of-the-market product. So we retrained them in SPIN questioning techniques so that they could use a high-Benefits style. As a result, their sales increased, price objections dropped, and the price issues were soon forgotten. ...
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Darren Fox (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
This book was an optional textbook in my college's 'Personal Professional Selling' course. The material is based on years of research by Huthwaite and all of it documented. This blows the lid off the traditional nonsense about 'closing techniques', 'warming up clients' and 'digging for objections'. I sell bulk delivered foods direct to consumers in-home. Spin Selling and it's companion volume Spin Selling Fieldbook have helped me understand the value of questioning correctly and in what particular order. This has helped me make better use of my time with consumers and show them that I do care about them by focusing on their issues and what my Need-Payoff benefits are. |
Henry Lanouette (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Neil Rackham has put together an invaluable tool for sales professionals. Any sales manager or trainer who has not read this book is very likely teaching outdated, and probably damaging techniques to their team. I especially appreciated the research proving, and at times disproving effectiveness of the various actions sales people take. I will be practicing these skills and developing some new training for the sales people I work with right away! |
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