SPIN® -Selling Paperback – Import, January 1, 1995

I just received the book in the mail, but I was aware of it before. It matches perfectly some selling techniques I am seeking to master.

product as described. And fast shipping.

The book makes sense and is easy to follow. It is aimed at those selling long term services or making larger sales. It is not the book for someone whose bread and butter is high volume small sales such as retail sales. It is excellent if you are selling or would like to begin to sell legal, accounting, or similiar services.

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.

SPIN Selling was based on research done by Neil Rackham on thousands of salespeople in several countries over an extensive period of time. The results of the research provided an insight into how the best salespeople operate. Like the discovery of NLP in the 1970's then SPIN techniques were already being used in the field, they just hadn't been broken down and named so they weren't being taught as such.Even before SPIN most salespeople knew that they ought to ask questions and listen more ("Two ears, one mouth"!) but many perhaps did not know where to go with their questions to get the most effective results. Rackham for example explains how after speaking with many decision makers he discovered that simple Situation based questions can turn a decision maker off as they feel that they are educating the salesperson. Previously most salespeople may well have believed that these were building rapport!In the SPIN methodology Rackham outlines how the salesperson should progress from Situation questions to Problem questions to Implication questions to Needs questions. This method is well explained and easily executable by someone with reasonable intelligence and a commitment to practising the techniques. The material will need tailoring for the individual and the industry however this would be expected with any methodology aimed at salespeople in general. Purchasing the SPIN Selling Fieldbook at the same time is worthwhile and will certainly help you to do this as it gets you to create your own questions and is full of tests and checks to ensure that you really have understoood the concepts and can apply them.SPIN Selling is in my opinion a MUST READ for salespeople as the vast majority of sales systems in the marketplace today span off from SPIN (despite what some of them might say!). If you haven't got your own copy of SPIN then you should get one and read it.Footnote: Some peoople deride SPIN saying that it is now outdated and has been improved upon. I disagree. True there are other options out there including my own "Ingham Sales System" and these systems are all slightly different with different structuring and key points however... I would still recommend all salespeople to read SPIN. If there were "must-read" texts for salespeople this book would still be in my top 10.