Customer Reviews

SPIN Selling

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was absolutely amazed by this book. I Learned an incredible amount and would recommend this book to ANYONE, not just those looking to sell - it is that good.

But keep in mind that this book won't instantly make you a star seller. It will give you all the tools and the guidelines, however you'll still need to work and practice your selling skills.

written in a textbook style, so not necessarily an easy read. however, a usefull source but takes some practice, so id deffinitelly recomend buying a handbook as well. please keep in mind that this book deals with large sales, although it can be easilly applied to smaller sale

As a professional salesperson, sales manager, and CEO with over 25 years of experience and previously one of the top 5% of salespeople in a Fortune 500 corporation, I have attended practically every sales seminar offered and read every book that I could get my hands on. This book is a classic. It is the best book written for salespeople that have to sell a concept that is more complex than an impulse item. I use it for training all our new sales people and highly recommend it.

Neil Rackham writes a book that summarizes the ground-shaking discoveries of his Company, Huthwaite. The Whole purpose of their research which lasted for a good Number of years was to discover what certain behaviors on the salesman's part helped In creating a successful purchase in the Major-Account sale, in which the item for Sale was usually expensive and requires a long after-sales relationship between buyer And seller.

Mr. Rackham turns the conventional sales knowledge upside-down and he does so very convincingly. He divides the sale into 4 phases; The Preliminaries, Investigating, Demonstrating Capability and Obtaining Commitment. He lays great emphasis in The Investigation phase, and it is in this phase that the SPIN Model comes into action.

SPIN is an acronym for the different types of questions that a seller must use in order to properly establish the last two phases of the sales call. Situation questions are simple straightforward questions about the buyer's company and current situation they are general questions that basically aim to establish context for the next questions. Problem questions are those which aim to pinpoint the exact problems of the buyer so that it becomes easier to uncover his implied needs. Implication questions take us a step further into examining the consequences of the buyers problem more closely and trying to make him more acutely aware of their ramifications so that we can start asking Need-Payoff questions which basically deal with the value and utility that the buyer perceives in a solution. The Need-Payoff questions lead to the development of Explicit need in which the buyer Has been led to clearly understand the context of his exact need to fix a particular Problem. Only after the SPIN questions have been successfully used to define Those explicit needs can a seller start demonstrating capability. With knowledge Of the needs of the buyer the seller can therefore more easily demonstrate solutions Which satisfy those explicit needs, i.e. the benefits of the product or service.

Mr. Rackham describes the different phase in the different chapters of his book and provides very useful information to discredit many misconceptions that have long Been held holy by salesmen, such as the importance of closing, the true meaning of Benefit as opposed to advantage and feature, the relative value of openings and first Impressions and most of all the value of the investigating phase.

An Essential book if you have anything to do with Sales.

This is a classic sales book going back about 20 years. In that time, customers really haven't changed, people still think of Sales as a bipolar relationship whereby you're meant to be 'friendly' whilst taking advantage of the customer. Whether it's a product to a business (eg. HP high-end servers) or to a consumer (eg. Kobe's latest basketball shoes), or it's actually a service (like a travel agent, or an airline), the mindset should be the same: offer tremendous value, and make sure the price comes well below that value.

Okay, before I get too deep in the marketing speak. Here Value is 'all the ways you can make the customers life easier/better by using your product.' This is awesome if you can put a dollar value amount on it.

So that's it, and the salesman's job is to rattle off enough features that turn into (in the customer's mind) 'value', right? Nope. Actually the popular approach of just listing features (or reading them to the customer!) doesn't really work. It's like you're speaking Swedish, and you're expecting your prospect to be able to do the translation himself. He doesn't want to, he wants to talk to someone who will do the translation for him'either you or.. one of your competitors.

It turns out that features are only really interesting on very simple, low-end products. Cheap products or commodities rely on features to differentiate themselves (or, shall we say, de-commoditize themselves?). Do you want the red pen or the blue one? Should it be re-fillable? Does it have a comfortable rubberized grip? Ok. Done. These are decisions that you can make in a few seconds, and don't need to consult anyone over.

But if you have any success at all in sales, you'll want to move on to bigger and better products, where the commissions are nice and fat. If you bring that 'feature' based approach with you, you won't last. All 'listing features' does is increase your customer's expectation of a higher and higher price, getting you away from the value-based approach. Turn the attention to the customer.

Rackham breaks down the research and the new method of Spin selling. Yes, you have to do a little research before sitting down with each customer, but it's worth it. Link the questions to value, get the customer to think about what might go wrong, and how much the solution is worth to them. Sales skills are important in every job. Persuasion is important to everybody. Value is important to everybody. This isn't really about money, it's about listening to people. Your task, whether you're selling a car, or persuading your friends to go to a particular nightclub is not to shoot down alternatives (competition, other nightclubs) but to ask the questions that will elicit values. You get people to declare their needs clearly, and then offer them the solution (eg. your product).

This isn't about tricking people into buying bad products. This isn't a fight, and it's not something to be nervous about. It's not about hypnosis, and it's something you should be ashamed of. Your job is not even about money, it's about communication. What you really want to do is analyse the customers situation and find multiple ways your product can benefit them. After having done that, hopefully the value is much higher than the ticket price. If it is, you shouldn't have trouble closing the sale.

Not only do you sell the product, you sell yourself in this way when you're looking for a raise, or applying for a new job. This is the core of decision making, and what value means to people. Showing others the tremendous value that is already right there in front of them.

More reviews like this on
21tiger,com
books. biz. asia.

As a sales trainer, I found this book to present a wonderful methodology for both salespeople new to the business as well as seasoned salespeople. The SPIN principle (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff) works in almost any sales environment whether you are selling big ticket items to large accounts or volumes of small ticket items.

Overall, I found "SPIN Selling" to be a great book for addressing the strategic and tactical aspects of selling. In addition to this book, I highly recommend the book "Cognitive Selling: Proven Fundamentals and Techniques of the World's Most Effective Salespeople" by Todd Bermont. "Cognitive Selling" is the perfect complement to "SPIN Selling" as it provides a methodology for maintaining a winning attitude and frame-of-mind which is essential to succeed in selling.

SPIN Selling was the first sales book I ever read, back in the days when I sold copiers. Ten years later, as the owner of a sales training company, I still utilize those very principals of questioning Rackham taught me way back when. The key to sales is to have a process, a process within a process. Rackham adheres to this very foundation. This book is guaranteed to make you money!

Todd Natenberg, Author of the book, "I just got a job in sales! Now what?" A Playbook for Skyrocketing Your Commissions (www.toddnatenberg.com) and President of TBN Sales Solutions

I love SPIN Selling, the book and workbook. Also Major Account Sales Strategy. When I bought the CD I was thinking I could add a tool to my audio library and have more constant exposure to the concepts. But no

This audio was worse than my grade school educational film series. The reader is dull, boring and almost put me to sleep in the car. This is GREAT material. Everyone that is considering any of the books I would heartily give them a 5 of 5 stars.

I fast forwarded through the entire first cd, hoping that I would start hearing the same "meat" I read about in SPIN. What Iheard was a lot of "pre-program" dialog.

If I could speak with Neil Rakham I would say, "Neil, this is an outstanding program. Please get a reader with more emotion".

This was one of the better sales books I have read. It brings up a new perspective of questioning the customer. Rackham shows the reader how to take a seemingly small customer problem and develop it into a situation that needs immediate attention by the customer (i.e. he needs to buy your product). It dispels a lot of the common myths about selling - don't use all of those stupid closes that only sometimes work with inexpensive commodity items, etc. He also hammers home how to advance each sale by obtaining commitment of some sort - not necessarily a sale, but some commitment of furthering the sales process.

The only possible drawbacks I noticed were that unless phrased carefully, the "rubbing salt into the wound" segment of the problem/implication questions can be taken the wrong way by some customers. Further, a lot of customers (at least in my industry) are probably already acutely aware of the problems they have and their implications. It is still a good read, though.

The book is definitely aimed at sellers of high-dollar, high value-add items and not at booksellers or used car salespeople. As the title of this review indicates, the book was great on the questioning tactics of a sales call, but it does not address the strategic aspects of which customers to target, how to get to know the players at each account, etc. For the other half of the sales picture, I would highly recommend "Strategic Selling" and perhaps even "Conceptual Selling" by Miller and Heiman. Those two books were the two best I have read on selling, but Spin Selling is definitely recommended as an addition to the complex product salesperson's library.

There are some interesting ideas and advice in SPIN Selling. However, the author spends too much time praising his own research and bashing other sales books. Negative selling does not get one anywhere. This applies to both major and minor sales.