SPIN Selling

SPIN Selling is your guide to becoming an expert salesperson by identifying what the author learned from 35,000 sales calls and 12 years of research on the topic.

The key to becoming good at sales is to know your client’s needs and really understand them. To do this, follow the four-pronged SPIN mentality for asking questions:

Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff

First, you need to identify the situation they’re in right now. Questions in this category are purely fact-based. You might ask “what type of computers do you use in your office currently?” to get the details. Don’t spend too long by asking a lot of questions on this step, though.

The next step is to dig deeper and find out what problems they’re having. Ask yourself what makes it difficult for them to use what they have now. You also want to explore why they might be dissatisfied with it. A question like “do you have any problems with the MacBook Pro’s that you currently use?” would be a good one to ask here.

Now it’s time to dive into the consequences of their problems with implication questions. To them, a little problem here and there isn’t a big deal, but this is your opportunity to shine. You want to ask questions that help them see the severity of the issue, especially what will happen if it’s not resolved soon.

Last is need-payoff questions, which are for discovering the client’s intentions for solving their problems. Asking the right questions in the previous steps makes this one easy. If you’ve done it right, they will see your option as the most effective and obvious for them.

In Simon Sinek’s famous Start With Why, he outlines an important truth about people’s purchasing habits. Nobody buys items, they invest their money in a “why”, or a purpose. But how can you take advantage of this and sell the “why” instead of the “what?” The key is knowing the difference between your product’s benefits and features. A feature is merely a fact, and they don’t really sell. My MacBook Pro, for example, has 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD hard drive, and a 16” screen. On their own, these mean next to nothing. Most people have a hard time even understanding what some of these things mean! It might be tempting to get caught in the trap of identifying advantages. These are better than features but not as powerful as benefits. Advantages identify what your product is going to do to help the customer. At the end of the day, these are just informative though. What you need to do is understand and describe the benefits of a product. This is a…