SPIN Selling

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Summary: The best book on selling!!
Review: I first read this book in 1990 and it helped me become my company's top producing sales rep. Since then, I started my own company, and I continue to use the concepts in SPIN Selling almost everyday! A must read!

Rating:
Summary: Best Sales Book
Review: 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.

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Summary: Complex Selling Both a Tactical and Strategic Endeavor
Review: Unlike most developers of sales training, Neil Rackham methodically backs up his claims with in-depth research. To build the flexible, adaptable SPIN model, Rackham has observed and analyzed a large number of high dollar value sales made around the world. Rackham convincingly demonstrates that successful salespeople marketing high dollar value products and services do not rely on the sales tactics geared towards low dollar value sales that are traditionally taught to salespeople. Successful salespeople typically go through four stages that Rackham has identified as: preliminaries, investigating, demonstrating capability, and obtaining commitment.

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.

Rating:
Summary: The book STINKS
Review: This book and its concepts are old and stoggy. Even worse is the seminar!

Rating:
Summary: spin selling
Review: my wife and I are both salespeople-this is the first book in 30 years we agree can be used so effectively-I am giving it and the workbook to our salespeople and plan to use it- in about a year or less I will send results--

Rating:
Summary: Given the subject's limitations, as good as it gets!
Review: Having first hand knowledge of the subject, I am of the mind that selling is next to impossible to teach, learn and predict. This may raise eyebrows, but let's deal in veracity, shall we?
Man has not invented or perfected the science which can predict human behaviour, reaction or rsponse. Psychologists and sociologists may well be the first to tell you so.
Given this context, no text can claim to have mastered the art of selling - it just is not a possibility.
Having said that, SPIN Selling does as good a job as any; having researched and field-tested its recommendations and results. That is as good as it will ever get - and yet, as mentioned earlier, there are no guarantees.
As such, I admire the book for being best-of-breed, but have to believe that neither this nor any other method will come close to covering it all or covering it precisely.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely an awesome book!
Review: I have had this book for now over 7 years. I have read this book more than few times -- just like getting a booster shots. The book is not just for selling or sales people -- it is how you go about dealing with people every day. You want to be persuasive, convincing, sell your proposal to your better half -- You must read the book. Of course, this is a great book for selling, because, I have used the technique proposed, it works absolutely well. What this book assumes and tells you is that : People do not buy products, people buy from people. How do you build that relationship to a stranger. Read this book.

Personally, I believe this is a must own book for most!

Rating:
Summary: Not bad for dull subject matter
Review: Personally, I thought this book could have been condensed down quite a bit (I found the graphics to be nearly useless). However, it did help me to recognize, consolidate, and understand much of what I have picked up on my own over the last few years.

In addition, I found myself in agreement with most of what the author had to say which helped to build my confidence level. The book contains many useful examples which highlight the author's methods. The most interesting portions of the book are the author's disproval of the effectiveness of some well-known sales techniques when used in large accounts. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who makes his living in sales. You are almost certainly going to pick up something useful.

I also agree with the reviewer below with regard to the title of this book. Perhaps the author should venture into marketing as his next area of research.

Rating:
Summary: A sales book a techie type can stomach
Review: I'm a geek, but, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was forced to create some sales training. I had this book recommended to me, and it saved my sanity.

The title is very unfortunate. "SPIN" in this book doesn't refer to the stuff that White House flunkies and PR flacks do...it's an acronym for the components of Rackham's sales methodology.

If you're not a sales type, you may have been grossed out by the high B.S. level of most books about selling. This book, on the other hand, is very factual and direct, and it's free of hoopla, glittering generalizations, and vacuous, trivial "case studies." Most amazingly, it presents sales in a way that makes it seem not so morally repellent. If it's humanly possible for sales to be a customer-service function, it's by following the practices in "Spin Selling."

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for "large" sales
Review: Generally, I enjoyed reading this book. It is easy to read and also is convincing as it, time and again, refers back to field research done by the author. To underline this, many observations of actual sales-calls are "quoted".

If you are new to sales, you might find that the continuous assumption that "you have been, of course, for a long time been familiar with the following concepts..." gets a bit irritating after a while. A side-effect is, that the author quite often feels the need to defend himself against established sales-culture. Also, the fact that the book brings useful news for those selling "large" items only does not exactly jump from the publisher's notes.

However, if you are in large sales and wondering why the old-establised methods aren't working for you, then this book could be worth its weight in gold for you and then some.