Product Description

True or false? In selling high-value products or services: "closing" increases your chance of success; it is essential to describe the benefits of your product or service to the customer; objection handling is an important skill; and open questions are more effective than closed questions. All false, says Neil Rackham. He and his team studied more than 35,000 sales calls made by 10,000 sales people in 23 countries over 12 years. Their findings revealed that many of the methods developed for selling low-value goods just don't work for major sales. Rackham went on to introduce his SPIN-selling method, where SPIN describes the whole selling process - Situation questions, Problem questions, Implication questions, Need-payoff questions. SPIN-selling provides you with a set of simple and practical techniques which have been tried in many of today's leading companies with dramatic improvements to their sales performance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9249 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

A strong but rather dated classic
Originally published at the end of the Eighties, SPIN Selling details a questioning technique that prompts prospects to identify and explore the severity of business problems, and then understand how your solution would resolve their issues.

In contrast to the aggressive and combatitive approaches before it, SPIN Selling turned the sales call into a constructive experience for the prospect and greatly lowered the number of objections received by sales people. It was so effective that it became widely recognised as the Grandfather of all modern sales techniques.

This book can genuinely claim to be a classic sales text, though it is fair to say that newer methodologies, based on SPIN, have been developed that augment and extend the core of the SPIN model. For example, some newer methodologies offer an end-to-end guide to selling (e.g. how to generate and manage opportunities, understanding the prospect company structure, precall planning, predicting successful close probability, etc), all of which are extremely useful, but absent in "SPIN Selling". Furthermore, the business environment has change significantly since the publication of this book and therefore, some of the techniques suggested in this title require "tweaking" in order to be useful today.

If you are already familiar with consultative/solution selling techniques, then you will find little helpful content in "SPIN Selling" (as what you have already read/been trained in, will probably have stemmed from SPIN in the first place!) If you do not currently employ a question-based, problem solving approach to selling, then this book will unquestionably up your sales. However, a title like "New Solution Selling" (by Keith M Eades) would provide you with a similar approach that is better suited to the temperament of today's buyers, plus you would benefit significantly from a more complete methodology to guide your sales activities.

Unique research into major sales success
What made this book unique for me, amongst dozens of other sales books in my collection, is that this is researched based - what Neil Rackham recommends has been proven to work by thousands of other salespeople.

For a psychologist, Rackham sounds like a pretty good salesperson himself, drawing on personal examples of how he has sold clients on research projects. However, the book presents the SPIN model as developed from observing thousands of sales calls in action. The results are convincing - success in major sales comes from following this model.

The SPIN techniques, which centre around a questioning model, go against a lot of coventional sales wisdom, but Rackham can demonstrate how and why his approach works. The book begins by differentiating large and small sales, which most other sales books and training programmes do not, then goes on to explain the research.

This leads to an explanation of the techniques and a great final chapter on 'Turning Theory into Practice'. In one sense, all you need to know from the research is that success largely depends on asking questions that uncover four areas: Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. But the book is worth so much more for everything else it contains.

For example, if you're in major sales, would you like to know the impact different methods of opening the call can have on the outcome? Or how about how your success rate will be affected by the number of times you ask for the order? What about how to sell benefits and overcome objections?

This all sounds like standard stuff, but the results the research came up with throw up surprising answers to all these questions. If you're in major sales and haven't read this book, there's a very good chance that you were trained in techniques that are actually HINDERING your ability to maximise your sales.

For that reason alone, buy this book and make sure you're not throwing away commission every time you make a call.

Are you a sales over-achiever??
I have attended numerous sales courses and read every book under the sun covering basic sales skills to more complex sales strategy. Rackham and co are the first, in my opinion, to approach the topic from the psychology of the buyer and not primarily the seller. What "pain" does the exec feel, not what product or features should I sell. I moved from selling basic individual life insurance products in SA to major IT solutions all over Europe, Middle East and Africa within 18months. Regardless of what you are selling, where and to whom - this book keeps you focused on what is important i.e. the business drivers of the individual/s and not the organisation alone.

If you are not an over-achiever YET, then buy this book. Simple!!