SPIN Selling and Traction
If you ever need to sell something to an organization (or even to an individual), and I’m sure you have at some point, Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling and Steve Browne’s Traction offer excellent advice.
Traction provides a powerful acid test to evaluate your chances of selling your likeness of succeeding in your sales, “Closing your sale”. The test boils down to three questions to which you must be able to provide answers. If you can, you will probably land the sale. If you cannot, you probably won’t.
The questions are: Why but at all? Why buy from you? Why buy now?
As a salesperson (even temporary), it is your job to lead your prospect to the answers. If you cannot find an answer for the client to Why buy at all?, then he doesn’t have any use for your product and you are wasting his and your own time. If you cannot find an answer to Why buy from you?, then you can blame your marketing department for not having created a differentiator from your competition – and if you don’t lose the sale to the competition, you’ll lose much of the profit. And if you cannot find an answer to Why buy now?, then the prospect has no reason to go forward with the sale and will stall the order indefinitely in favor of other other tasks.
SPIN Selling provides a powerful persuasive framework, built from scientific experimentation. It is a series of techniques that uncover implied needs, develop them into explicit needs, then lead the prospect to imagine to consequences of not satisfying those needs. SPIN is an acronym for each of the steps.
Situation questions come first. You uncover the facts about the prospect’s situation that you couldn’t get by doing our homework ahead of time.
Problem questions come second. You ask about the prospect’s difficulties, dissatisfactions, or problems with the current situation. These are Implicit Needs.
Implication questions come third. You ask about the consequences, effects, or implications of the prospect’s situation.
Need-payoff questions com fourth and last. These are questions about the value, importance, or usefulness of a solution to the prospect’s problem. The Implicit Needs have been converted to Explicit Needs.
You should then expose the benefits of your product – how it meets the Explicit Needs of the prospect. This is much better than objection handling which is just confrontation, which is built on the assumption that if you beat your opponent at the objection game, he will purchase your product.
Bear these in mind next time you are selling something to someone – Traction’s Acid test and SPIN Selling’s sales process – and hopefully you’ll find more success!