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Summary: A Book For The True Professional
Review: A breath of fresh air. The profession of Sales is plagued with all sorts of nonsense, most of it annecdotal at best. Little actual research has been done to identify good processes for sales professionals and consequently we get idiotic advice ranging from "Always Be Closing" and endless manipulative closing techniques for doing so, to recommendations on how to sell "anything to anybody." Such sales tactics are precisely the reason salespeople have been saddled with negative stereotypes.SPIN Selling is the result of extensive observation and analysis of sales calls by behavioral researcher Neil Rackham. His findings are both practical and useful, and are well presented in this book. As sellers, we might give some thought to how we would like to be treated as customers - something that should not be a revelation, but is. We should understand the customer's goals and objectives and help them be successful if we want to be successful. Forget your scripted sales pitch, leave your brochures in your briefcase, ask questions and listen to your customers to understand their needs BEFORE presenting your product. Surprisingly, this will actually shorten the selling cycle and will result in better long-term customer relationships. Rackham's concept of an "Advance" as an objective way to measure the progress of a sales call is, alone, worth the price of this book. As a sales professional with many years' experience, and now as sales training manager for a division of a Fortune 500 company, I highly recommend this book and the methodology Rackham describes. There are other good books for salespeople - but if I could only recommend one, this would be it.
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Summary: The Ultimate Tactical Selling Handbook
Review: I am a corporate sales professional. That means that I don't do "hit and run," one-time sales. Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar offer great tactics for those kind of salespeople, but they don't work for me. Neil Rackham has hit one out of the park with Spin Selling. Turning everything I "thought" I knew about closing on its head, he provides the power tools for making the most of a sales call. The most important concept here is that you, as a sales rep. are not there when the real decisions get made. Therefore, you must arm your prospects with the tools to represent your company well in your absence.Rackham does not disappoint. You will get all the tools you need to prepare your prospect to close the sale for you from this book. I give all of my salespeople Strategic Selling by Miller, Heiman, et. al. and Spin Selling as the ultimate combination of strategic and tactical approaches to corporate selling.Stop throwing commissions away. If you consider yourself a true corporate sales professional, you have no business ignoring this book.
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Summary: Great methodology
Review: 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.
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Summary: Absolute must read
Review: intially the Name "Spin Selling" came across to be as some cheesy and manipulative model being taught by the author.
after reading various books and attending seminars and workshops i was consistently referred to this book.
also i researched some of the high-performance Sales Professionals and most of them had training on SPIN Selling, so
i finally decided to read Rackham's book "SPIN Selling" and
i'm glad i did and yes this book i feel is the Foundation of all the Modern Sales Training out there. His Training is backed with extensive proof and facts and every single advice is backed by extensive research conducted by huthwaite. very impressed. "Situation - Problem - Implication and Need-Payoff", these are the four types of Questioning you will learn and the Value and relative importance of each and in what order to be used effectively. the biggest lesson for me is the Difference of a "Implied Need" compared to "Explicit Need" and how it all boils down to uncovering "Explicit Needs" and to communicate with customers about "Benefits". this book also clears a very common mistake a lot of us do, to look at a product or solution's advantages and convey that as Benefit to customer. As per the author a "Benefit" is one that solves a Customer's "Explicit Need". don't be discouraged by any review that writes off the book's style of writing to be research oriented, the book is around 190 Pages and it's worth the weight in gold.
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Summary: High-value, Professional Selling Defined!
Review: My bachelor's degree is in Computer Science, and I'm preparing to start my MBA studies within a year. I hope to start my own business one day and I knew I needed to generate revenues. But there was only one problem... ...I had no idea how to sell professionally. I had already read a few books by Tom Hopkins, but felt he was targeting used-car salesmen types. It seems as though Hopkins' techniques relied on "closing" gimmicks when it came down to it. (I must say I did learn some good principles from Hopkins, but his gimmicky style is not for me.) I was instantly attracted to SPIN SELLING when I saw that (1) it was based on extensive research, and (2) it dealt primarily with the large sale. Since I want to start my own corporation after my MBA, and want to have Fortune-500 companies as my customers, I realized SPIN SELLING was for me. SPIN SELLING is simply a great handbook on large-sale tactics. Rackham shows how the "closing techniques" used in smaller sales severely damage the success of large sales. He then introduces the SPIN model (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff). Although before reading the book I never considered myself a "salesman", I realized afterwards that I was already using Rackham's techniques in other areas of my life -- and having a great deal of success. For example, as a professional IT consultant, I was using (unbeknownst to me) these tactics to legitimately perpetuate my client billings. Selling is essentially obtaining another person's commitment. Commitments that deal with the purchase of good or services is only one type of commitment. Thus, you can use these tactics/techniques any time you're wanting to obtain another person's commitment. If your desire is to sell large-value goods or services to sophisticated and intelligent buyers then SPIN SELLING is the tactical handbook you need. This book isn't about gimmicks to trick or pressure the customer into buying. This is professional, high-class selling. After I read SPIN SELLING I immediately bought Rackham's "MAJOR ACCOUNT SALES STRATEGY". Thus, I now have a tactical handbook and a strategy handbook that are based on the same principles and extensive research. I've found the SPIN model to be highly effective in my life.
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Summary: Neil Rackham gets it right
Review: 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
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Summary: Definitly BUY THE BOOK ..Skip the audio
Review: 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".
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Summary: Great book on sales tactics, but lacks strategic content....
Review: 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.
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Summary: Too much bashing of "other" books
Review: 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.
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Summary: Excellent for the Technology Industry
Review: I am sure this book's techniques could be applied to a variety of industries, however I worked in the technology field so that is where I applied it at and it worked great. The book very clearly spells out a series of questioning techniques used to evaluate a prospect's position and needs. It starts out by figuring out where they are at, identifying areas of pain, then proposing solutions. He bases his techniques on statistical research his company has personally done on the effectiveness of sales calls, which I found interesting and helpful in deciding which techniques would work well for me. I think his techniques are especially useful to the technology arena where you are finding problems (pain) that prospects are feeling and how to solve it; having said that I don't want to imply that if you aren't in this industry you wouldn't find it helpful. I think any industry where you need to ask questions to get information, and then use that information to offer a solution to your prospect would benefit by this book. One area of the book that I found extremely helpful is his discussion on selling benefits to the customers (based on information you gather using his techniques) and not on the features of your product. His point is that just because you think the product is great because it will toast a piece of bread, doesn't mean it is a desire or need of your prospect and that you would know that from your questions and if it wasn't a benefit to the prospect you wouldn't mention it or try to use it as a sales point. He calls this technique features vs. benefits. The strong point of this book is its ability to help you develop your questioning techniques and apply the information you learn to the sales process. I think it would be a great addition to anyone's library of sales books. I would recommend this book to anyone who is tired of reading off your company's product spec sheet and losing sales because you don't know what the prospect is really looking for.
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