SPIN Selling
by Neil Rackham

List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $10.50
You Save: $19.45 (65%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $2.70 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9780070511132
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of SPIN Selling

Book Review: Complex Selling Both a Tactical and Strategic Endeavor
Summary: 5 Stars

1. In analyzing "Preliminaries", Rackham first warns salespeople that although first impressions count, they are less important that too many of them imagine. Furthermore, Rackham recommends that salespeople get down to business quickly and avoid talking about solutions too soon. Raising areas of personal interest with buyers can sound suspicious. Talking about the benefit of a solution before understanding buyer's needs and building value to satisfy these needs, can also be an invitation for trouble. Unfortunately, Rackham does not remind his audience enough that this approach to preliminaries, though perfectly appropriate in the American culture, can be perceived as offensive in others. Salespeople doing business abroad beware.

2. In looking at the critical "Investigating", Rackham advises that salespeople not only use situation questions and problem questions but also implication questions and need-payoff questions. Salespeople usually ask the first two types of questions to uncover implied needs unless their customers or prospects tell them upfront that they have an explicit need for a specific solution to their problem(s). In high dollar value sales, salespeople must leverage the uncovered problems to make them bigger by exploring their implications. Buyers can indeed perceive an imbalance between the price of the solution and the severity of their problem(s). Because that type of questioning can sound negative or depressing to buyers, salespeople must follow with need-payoff questions to make their customers or prospects feel good about the proposed solution to their problem(s). To his credit, Rackham reminds his audience that the SPIN model is not a rigid formula. The type of questions to be used and their relative importance depend on the circumstances of the specific high dollar value sale at hand.

3. In examining "Demonstrating Capability", Rackham makes the distinction among features, advantages, and benefits. Rackham convincingly shows that offering benefits is key to meet explicit needs expressed by customers or prospects. Selling only features can be a risky value proposition because that tactic potentially makes customers or prospects more price sensitive than they should be. Resisting that temptation can be particularly daunting in the high tech industry that sometimes suffers from "feature creep." Selling only advantages can also backfire against salespeople because that tactic is eventually an invitation to objections raised by customers or prospects. To his credit, Rackham emphasizes objection prevention and not objection resolution by bringing customers or prospects to the insight that the product or service being offered meets the needs expressed by them.

4. In investigating "Obtaining Commitment", Rackham demonstrates with panache that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the number of closing techniques and the success of high dollar value sales. Traditional closing techniques such as assumptive closes, alternative closes, standing-room-only closes, last-chance closes, and order-blank closes can easily generate objections from customers or prospects who are not yet ready to act on their implied and expressed needs. Progress in high dollar value sales is measured in actions on which customers or prospects agree so that salespeople can eventually move on along the continuum stretching from lead to order. As long as customers or prospects do not commit to advancing in that process, salespeople are indeed condemned to stagnation at best, definitive loss of the order at worst down the road.

In Appendix A of his book (which is really worth of his audience's attention), Rackham is humble enough to recognize that a jump in sales following one of his sales trainings based on the four-step approach described above can be totally or partially attributed to other factors such as changes in people, changes in products, changes in pricing or changes in competition.

Finally, as a side note, a good strategic complement to the tactical "SPIN Selling" is "The New Strategic Selling" by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez, and Tad Tuleja. Like the former, the latter focuses on high dollar value sales.

Summary of SPIN Selling

Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation's massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy.

In SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high-value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy-to-apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as ?What makes success in major sales? and ?Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones??

You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won't work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real-world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies - and backed by hard research data - SPIN Selling is the million-dollar key to understanding and producing record-breaking high-end sales performance.

Management & Leadership Books

• Subjects > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership
• Marketing & Sales > Sales & Selling