Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is the most relevant in terms of sales because it addresses the most common sales problem.

This book is dense with information so we will break this summary into 6 parts:

• The process
• Obtaining Commitment: Four Successful Actions
• Implied and Explicit Needs
• Preventing Objections
• Conventional Openings
• Turning Theory into Practice

Traditional Model of the Sales call:

1. Opening the call
2. Investigating needs
3. Giving benefits
4. Objection handling
5. Closing techniques

According to the book SPIN Selling, the SPIN sequence questions lie in the following order-

Situation Questions

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?”.

Problem Questions

Once sufficient information has been established about the buyer’s situation. It is about how successful people tend to move to the second type of question.

They ask, for example, “Is this operation difficult to perform?” or “Are you worried about the quality you get from your old machine?”

Implication Questions

In smaller sales, sellers can be very successful if they just know how to ask good Situation and Problem Questions.

In larger sales this is not enough, successful people need to ask a third type of question. This third type is more complex and sophisticated.

It’s called an Implication Question, and typical examples would be “How will this problem affect your future! profitability?” or “What effect does this reject rate have on customer satisfaction?”

Need-payoff Questions

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 “Would it be useful to speed this operation by 10 per cent?” or “If we could improve the quality of this operation, how would that help you?”

Obtaining commitment via 4 successful actions

1. Giving attention to Investigating and Demonstrating Capability

Successful salespeople give their primary attention to the Investigating and Demonstrating Capability stages.

The first successful strategy for obtaining customer commitment is to concentrate your attention on the Investigating stage of the call. If you can convince buyers that they need what you are offering, then they will often close the sale for you.

2. Checking that key concerns are covered

In larger sales, both the product and the customer’s needs are likely to be relatively complex. As a result, there may be areas of confusion or doubt in the customer’s mind as the point of commitment nears.

The sellers must take the initiative and ask the buyer whether there are any further points or concerns that needed to be addressed.

3. Summarizing the Benefits

In a larger sales, the call may have taken several hours and covered a wide range of topics. It’s unlikely that the customer has a clear picture of everything that has been discussed.

Successful salespeople pull the threads together by summarizing key points of the discussion before moving to the commitment.

4. Proposing a commitment

Many books on selling point out that the simplest of all closing methods is just to ask for the order.

Consequently, the phrase “asking for the order” is a common one in sales training. But from our studies, “asking” is not what successful sellers do. But it’s here, at the point of commitment, that successful sellers don’t ask—they tell.

The most natural, and most effective, way to bring a call to a successful conclusion is to suggest an appropriate next step to the customer.

Implied and Explicit Needs

1. Implied Needs

Statements by the customer of problems, difficulties, and dissatisfactions. Typical examples would be:

• “Our present system can’t cope with the throughput”.
• “I’m unhappy about wastage rates”.
• “We’re not satisfied with the speed of our existing process.”

1. Explicit Needs

Specific customer statements of wants or desires.

Typical examples would include-

• “We need a faster system”
• “What we’re looking for is a more reliable machine,” or
• “I’d like to have a backup capability.”

In larger sales, the principal differences between very successful and less successful salespeople are-

• Less successful people don’t differentiate between Implied and Explicit Needs, so they treat them in the same way.
• Very successful people, often without realizing they’re doing so, treat Implied Needs in; a very different way than Explicit Needs.

Preventing Objections

The old objection-handling strategies, which encourage the seller to give Advantages, are much less successful in the larger sales than objection prevention strategies, where the seller first develops value using Implication and Need-payoff Questions before offering capabilities.

Rackham believes that the two sure signs that of getting unnecessary objections, that can be prevented by better questioning are-

Objections early in the call

Customers rarely object to questions— unless you’ve found a particularly offensive way to ask them. Most objections are to solutions that don’t fit needs.

Objections about value

If most of the objections you receive raise doubts about the value of what you offer, then there’s a good chance that you’re not developing needs strongly enough.

Conventional Openings

The main points while handling this stage of the call are-

i) Get down to business quickly

ii) Don’t dawdle. The Preliminaries stage is not the most productive part of the call for you or the customer.

iii) Don’t feel that you’ll offend customers by getting down to business quickly.

iv) Don’t talk about solutions too soon. One of the most common faults in selling is talking about your solutions and capabilities too early in the call.

v) Concentrate on questions. Never forget that the Preliminaries aren’t the most important part of the call. Often, when Neil has been travelling with salespeople, he has noticed that they waste time before a call worrying about how they should open it. They could be using that time far more effectively to plan some questions instead.

Turning Theory into Practice

Rule 1: Practice Only One Behavior at a Time – Start by picking one behaviour to practice. Don’t move on to the next until you’re confident you’ve got the first behaviour right.

Rule 2: Try the New Behaviour at least Three Times – Never judge whether a new behaviour is effective until you’ve tried it at least three times.

Rule 3: Quantity Before Quality – When you’re practising, concentrate on quantity: use a lot of the new behaviour