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| | Product Details | | Author: | Neil Rackham | | Hardcover: | 197 pages | | Publisher: | McGraw-Hill | | Publication Date: | May 01, 1988 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0070511136 | | Package Length: | 9.1 inches | | Package Width: | 6.1 inches | | Package Height: | 1.0 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 117 reviews |
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 Comparing the book to the training - and value beyond Sales to Management, Project Management, more... Jul 27, 2010
There are many fine reviews of "SPIN Selling" that are accurate, informative, and helpful. My goal is not to duplicate their analyses -- I'll focus my observations on how the book has helped me to reconsider SPIN Selling from the context of having taking a formal training course on the topic in the past, while having just completed the book.
Several years ago the company I was with provided its sales force with a SPIN Selling sales training course. This course was developed by someone other than Neil's organization. I had come from a software engineering management position evolving to a consultative solution sales role. At the time, I found the material very interesting and looking back on the years since the course, I firmly believe that the SPIN Selling methodology has helped me to more successfully sell to large accounts.
I picked up the book, "SPIN Selling", by Neil Rackham, a couple of weeks ago with the thought that it would be a timely refresher for the formal multi-day training program and associated role play that I participated in within the course framework. Having the training behind me and having used SPIN Selling techniques in the real world as a foundation for reading this book was beneficial, however, I got a LOT more out of this book than I did from the training. I would advise sales managers and motivated sales people to choose the book first, if possible, then schedule targeted, focused role play training as a follow-on within a week of book completion.
It is intriguing to explore the evolution of Neil's thinking as he and his colleagues followed real sales people into real sales calls to document their approaches to both small and large account sales. For example, while reading about closing the sale, I thought back to the 1992 movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, and the famous scene on closing delivered by Alex Baldwin. If you haven't seen it, search for this scene on the web and contrast it to the empirical results that Neil documents in the book. This is a surprise that I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to discover. You'll enjoy it! The training I'd taken really didn't explore closing in any way and rightly spent the majority of its time on the "I" and "N" of SPIN -- Implication questions and Need-Payoff questions. It is helpful to have results of Neil's research on closing from the book to better appreciate the benefits of the SPIN method.
The book did a better job than my training on the following areas as well:
- Explaining the downside of focusing too much on the "S" and "P" of SPIN -- Situational and Problem questions.
- Providing a simple, memorable method to help a sales person to differentiate an Implication question from a Need-Payoff question. The distinction is VERY important yet, as Neil explained, even he and his experienced team had struggled with correctly labeling certain questions until someone in their midst crafted a simple rule to make it easy.
- In consultative sales where there can be a long sales cycle, it is often necessary to get to the next stage of the process, then the stage after that, then repeat. This is called advancing the sale. The book does a nice job of detailing the process, which again, the training didn't touch.
- Having a technical background in computer science, I'm often instinctively draw to the features, benefits, and capabilities of a solution. The book provided concrete examples of real sales dialogues where the seller went too deep on features to the detriment to the sale. Fortunately for me, the training I had led me correctly down the path of crafting implication questions to draw out explicit needs, so I haven't fallen into the "feature" trap. Thanks to the book, I know more of the background context on Neil's research that the training didn't provide.
In addition, the book introduced the concept of "Advantages" and split it off from "Benefits". The course hadn't mention this, and it was enlightening to read about Advantages verse Benefits and the impact on small and large sales. I didn't know that Advantages were not powerfully impactful on larger sales. Now I know why to sparingly sprinkle Advantages in with the concentration being on pure Benefits.
- Small verses large sales -- the book details why successfully selling in each domain is different.
There's more to the SPIN method than I've covered here. The good news is for me is that I was fortunate enough to pick this book up after a multi-year hiatus from the training. What I learned from the book can be applied not only to Sales but to any people-focused relationship role, such as management, project/program management, technical writing, et al. where it is essential to uncover the explicit needs of a client or stakeholder. Often, the client/stakeholder may not be able to articulate or even know all their explicit needs. SPIN brings true value to you in your role and will provide you with the tools and methods to better partner with the client or stakeholder to jointly discover their needs and how best to satisfy them.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Good process, little weak on application Jun 28, 2010
This was a great book explaining a process for selling successfully. It has general steps that provide insight and the common language for a sales effort that enables the expert/experienced salesman communicate with the trainee. I recommend it. I only give it four stars because I think it was a little weak on explaining how to develop particular skills in selling.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
The system does work very well Jun 23, 2010
This book was recommended to me by several highly successful people in the business world. These people emphasized that this book was the reason why they were so successful. It was with that in mind that I purchased this book.
There is no spin in spin selling. The title may imply some sort of deception, but that's very far from the truth. Spin is an acronym for the technique this book is teaching. I'm saying this because I've encountered a number of people who decided to judge this book on its title rather than giving it a fair reading.
Spin selling puts the reader in a position to understand what the customer is looking for and will be able to make recommendations in order to help them. The technique here is all about the customer rather than ripping the customer off. Spin selling, in that way, is about developing a relationship with the customer in order to guarantee more business with them in the future.
Give it a look and see for yourself.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Must reading for the real sales professional Feb 20, 2010
A breath of fresh air. The profession of Sales is plagued with all sorts of nonsense, most of it annecdotal at best. Little actual research has been done to identify good processes for sales professionals and consequently we get idiotic advice ranging from "Always Be Closing" and endless manipulative closing techniques for doing so, to recommendations on how to sell "anything to anybody." Such sales tactics are precisely the reason salespeople have been saddled with negative stereotypes.
SPIN Selling is the result of extensive observation and analysis of sales calls by behavioral researcher Neil Rackham. His findings are both practical and useful, and are well presented in this book. As sellers, we might give some thought to how we would like to be treated as customers - something that should not be a revelation, but is. We should understand the customer's goals and objectives and help them be successful if we want to be successful. Forget your scripted sales pitch, leave your brochures in your briefcase, ask questions and listen to your customers to understand their needs BEFORE presenting your product. Surprisingly, this will actually shorten the selling cycle and will result in better long-term customer relationships. Rackham's concept of an "Advance" as an objective way to measure the progress of a sales call is, alone, worth the price of this book.
As a sales professional with many years' experience, and now as sales training manager for a division of a Fortune 500 company, I highly recommend this book and the methodology Rackham describes. There are other good books for salespeople - but if I could only recommend one, this would be it.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
An Excellent Approach to Sales Feb 15, 2010
SPIN Selling in an excellent approach to sales.
It focuses on asking the right questions:
Situation Questions
Problem Questions
Implication Questions
Needs-Payoff Questions
In this way the four questions create the acronym SPIN.
The book offers details on which of these question styles are most important and which ones are over-emphasised and how that is dis-advantageous, particularly in the complex sale.
Highly beneficial!
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