“SPIN selling”, by Neil Rackham, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988 (first publication), 190 pages, 34 euros (hardcover edition, English)
Do you sell complex software or provide services related to software development and IT? Are you dealing with large budgets, a multi-participant decision-making process, and an extended sales cycle? If so, this classic sales guide from 1988 offers valuable methods and fundamental psychological insights that should be part of every salesperson’s toolkit. I recently came across SPIN Selling during a corporate development workshop, picked up the book for some light reading on the train, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from it.
The book dispels some common misconceptions about effective sales techniques, offering a clear distinction between tactics for “small sales” and “major sales.” It introduces the well-established SPIN-selling method, a question-based approach that helps transform implicit needs into explicit ones and enhances the way benefits are communicated. The acronym SPIN represents the key stages of the sales conversation: Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff.
A standout aspect of this book is the rigorous and consistent scientific foundation behind its sales methodology. Today, “evidence”-based decisions are often seen as the norm (though not universally, as seen with “fake news”), particularly in the Data Economy, where the effectiveness of eCommerce or advertising strategies can be measured with precision. However, even by today’s standards, the data backing this book is remarkable: over 35,000 sales conversations were analyzed over a span of more than 10 years, with more than 10,000 salespeople in 23 countries observed in their daily work. The method was tested for 7 years before the book was published.
A key takeaway from the book is: “The most effective people we observed were the ones who did an outstanding job of building needs during the Investigating stage. As a result of the questions they asked, their customers came to realize that they had an urgent need to buy.” (p. 49). The importance of the initial pitch is often overstated, and so are traditional “closing techniques”—which, in fact, tend to be counterproductive in “major sales.” For example, an assumptive close might sound like: “Should we deliver the machine before or after the summer break?” Or a standing-room-only close: “As mentioned, demand for the product is high. If you order now, we can offer a reasonable delivery time; if you wait until next week, delivery may be delayed by several months.”.
“Situation Questions” and “Problem Questions” alone are not enough to secure success in “major sales.” True sales success largely hinges on the use of “implication questions” and “need-payoff questions.” Implication questions help to “develop” the need or raise the buyer’s awareness of the problem. The book consistently illustrates this concept with concrete, practical examples. Here’s an excerpt:
SELLER: (Situation Question) Do you use Contormat machines in this division? BUYER: Yes, we’ve got three of them. SELLER: (Problem Question) And are they difficult for your operators to use? BUYER: (Implied Need) They are rather hard, but we’ve learned how to get them working. SELLER: (Implication Question) You say they’re hard to use. What effect does this have on your output? BUYER: (perceiving the problem as small) Very little, because we’ve specially trained three people who know how to use them. SELLER: (Implication Question) If you’ve only got three people who can use them, doesn’t that create work bottlenecks? BUYER: (still seeing the problem as unimportant) No, it’s only when a Contortomat operator leaves that we have trouble while we’re waiting for a replacement to be trained. SELLER: (Implication Question) It sounds like the difficulty of using these machines may be leading to a turnover problem with the operators you’ve trained. Is that right? BUYER: (recognizing a bigger problem) Yes, people certainly don’t like using the Contortomat machines, and operators generally don’t stay with us for long. SELLER: (Implication Question) What does this turnover mean in terms of training cost? BUYER: (seeing more) It takes a couple of months before an operator gets proficient, so that’s maybe $4000 in wages and benefits for each operator. On top of that we pay Contortomat $500 to put new operators through off-site training in their Southhampton plant. So add perhaps $1000 for travel costs. You know, that’s about $5000 for each operator we train – and I guess we must have trained at least five this year already. SELLER: So that’s more than $25,000 in training costs in less than 6 months. (Implication Question) If you’ve trained five people in 6 months, it sounds like you’ve never had three fully competent operators at any time: how much production loss has this led to? BUYER: Not much. Whenever there’s been a bottleneck, we’ve persuaded the other operators to work overtime, or we’ve sent work outside. SELLER: (Implication Question) Doesn’t the overtime add even more to your costs? Etcetera
The book is a very easy read, much like many popular US bestsellers in the field of professional literature. I can recommend it without hesitation, and the 80s-style graphics add a nostalgic charm to the overall experience. My only criticism—and for this, I’ll reference two reviews I found on Amazon (with a book from the 1980s, I wanted to ensure I wasn’t wasting my time or money, so I took a quick look at the reviews):
“(…) author focuses (in my opinion) too much time on proving that his methods are valid/true based on many studies (studies range from values such as 500 calls to thousands of sales engagements).” und: ”Interesting approach to sales and works a treat. I do feel, however, that this could have been done using less words, chapters, pages and paper.”
And finally, an amusing anecdote from the book. The author Rackham necessarily develops some clear definitions, success criteria, and the like to make his research on sales effectiveness quantifiable. In doing so, he finds that the self-assessment of salespeople for the success/failure of a sales pitch is a very poor basis for classification. Because the rating tends to be (too) positive. The author reports the following experience (p. 42):
“I’d been travelling with a sales rep in New York City. We made a disastrous call on a customer who became so irritated with the sales rep that we were asked to leave. Afterward, as we stood on the sidewalk recovering from the experience, I was filling in call details on my research form. In response to the question ‘Did the call meet its objectives?’ I wrote, ‘no’. This upset the sales rep mightily.”
”’But I DID meet my objectives,’ he protested. ‘I decided, part way through the call, that we didn’t want to do business with this guy because he sounded like a poor credit risk. So, rather than insult him by telling him this directly, I engineered things so he threw us out. In the way I way able to terminate the call without the embarrassment of explaining that I couldn’t do business with him because his credit was poor.’“
”Over and over again, in our early research, we had salespeople respond in this way, telling us that whatever happened in the call had been exactly what they had planned. ….”
