Sales Compendium

Earlier this month, Neil Rackham was interviewed by one-time colleague, Greg Moore.

Amongst a wide-ranging interview is this brief nugget on the need for a firm’s best performers to be given the latitude to blend art and science in their sales approach.

“To some degree, CRM systems and their successors have really not helped the higher level of selling. The whole idea of process-driven sales, which we see happening just about everywhere, sort-of suggests that if you follow the process, you will be more successful. Well, for those people who are having difficulty, a track to run on is enormously valuable. It means that people who would otherwise fail can do a job moderately successfully. But the fact is, at higher-level selling, this is where you need the art as well as the science. It’s a very different thing, and the more you try to proceduralise it, the more you try to tie it down into a classic funnel, for example, the more you restrict your very best performers. So, one of the things I don’t like is I’m seeing a rather heavy-handed approach in many companies today, when I think it would be much, much more effective to give great latitude to the top ten per cent of performers in any sales force.”  From 17’ 49” to 19’ 05”

Yesterday, Huthwaite published an article, plus a supporting video, to help answer the question: Is SPIN Selling Still Relevant? This is a lightly edited version of the more interesting passages from Neil Rackham.

“The SPIN Model is about understanding… it’s about really understanding them [customers], and their needs, so you can do a good job of creating value. That hasn’t changed.”

[These days, as products become more homogenised, the differentiator can often become the salesperson. So, how do they differentiate themselves…] “they differentiate by really understanding the customer much more deeply than the competition…”

“…we are in the twenty first century, and the SPIN Model has got to change. Way back, when we did the original SPIN research, we found that Situation Questions – questions about fact – were slightly negatively correlated with success. You could ask too many of them. Today, they are actively, positively, negatively correlated. That is, if you ask a lot of Situation Questions… the customer will become really impatient. They’ll say, you should have done your homework…”

“One of things which we found [during the research] was, if you ask customers about problems, you find out their needs, you find out information which helps you sell, which helps them understand their own problems… But, in those days, it was enough to ask Problem [Questions] about how things are now.

But another change is this… and it’s a curious one. Research [undertaken] in the last three or four years, shows that customers rate the added-value of sales people as highest when sales people ask about future problems, not just about present problems…”

“Implication Questions are even more important now than they were when [we first carried out our research]. Implication Questions proved to be most powerful, in the original research, when people were selling complex solutions… It’s even more important to ask Implication Questions [now].”

“And finally, Need Payoff Questions. Questions about value. We live in a world driven by value. Almost the definition of selling today is creating customer value. And how can you create it, if you don’t ask about it? So, Need Payoff Questions are as powerful, or more powerful today, in the twenty first century, than they were back in the twentieth century, when we discovered the SPIN Model.”