The Sales Conversation (Part Four)
SPIN Selling By Rackham
In a world where your product, brand, and service are the same as everyone else’s, it’s only your sales process that differentiates you.
Challenger Sales Model
Just Give Me The Main Points
Sales is a process of problem-solving, not convincing.
You’ll lose a sale if you solve the wrong problem.
SPIN Selling Method is a sales process that ranks customer problems in order of importance.
Process consists of Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff.
Play the person, not the cards.
Even though they work at the same company, employees want different things, so it's important to understand what they really want.
MOTIVATION
10 years ago, I used SPIN Selling by Rackham to discover what candidates REALLY WANT in a job.
THE STORY THAT’S SUPPOSED TO GET YOU HOOKED
I was working at a boutique recruiting firm that specialized in finding hard-to-find talent. We’d find them everyone from civil engineers working in the middle of nowhere to Directors and Chief Counsels.
The job was simple…but not easy. It was really tough to find candidates who were qualified for a job while at the same time being OK with the pay. Up-and-coming companies didn’t have the budgets to pay what the biggest players were paying, and they were often left with the leftover scraps as a result.
After about six months of failing to place anyone, I discovered SPIN Selling by Rackham, and it helped me find out what candidates really want in a job.
Now at this point, you’d expect me to give you a list of the top 10 things candidates want in a job…but that’s not the point AT ALL.
Why Should I Care?
The point of SPIN Selling by Rackham is that the sales conversation is a sales PROCESS. Sales is the process of problem-solving, not convincing.
Rackham and his team analyzed over 10,000 sales calls. They wanted to find out what separated bad salespeople from good ones. They quickly found out that the salespeople who offered solutions and tried to close the sale early in the call usually FAILED. Why would the people who offered solutions and attempted to close early in the call FAIL to make a sale?
Well, they discovered that the salespeople who tried to close the sale too early were missing the information they needed to make a good pitch. And that’s where the SPIN Selling Method was born.
Sales ≠ Convincing
We often think of sales as a convincing, coercive process of mind-warping the client into agreeing with us. Rackham argued the opposite. He said that sales is a process of problem-solving.
But, it’s not enough to know what your client’s problems are. You have to RANK THEIR PROBLEMS IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE.
You might ask, how do you rank a client’s problems in terms of their order of importance? Well, you first have to gain their permission to ask first, but that’s for another post.
Play The Person, Not The Cards
Well, first of all, you have to realize that not everyone in the same company has the same problem. Just because we work in the same company, a problem for you might not even be a problem for me.
So, in the sales conversation, you have to remember that you’re not talking to a company…you’re talking to a person. A person that might have completely different desires than their co-workers and maybe even their boss. Play the person, not the cards.
Again, you need someone’s permission to ask them questions. If you don’t have their permission, they’ll either end the call early OR stop listening.
The SPIN Selling Process
Rackham and his team, after listening exhaustively to the sales calls, found that the most successful salespeople followed the following process:
Situation - they’d come prepared to understand their client’s situation and gain their trust as soon as possible with the least amount of questions.
Problem - they’d identify the problems in their client’s life.
Implication - they’d calculate the cost of leaving those problems unsolved. Could the client continue to live with this problem unsolved? Why or why not?
Need-Payoff - they’d calculate the impact of solving those problems. What would be the cash flow and other impacts of addressing this problem? And how would that change your life?
You can use this to your advantage when interviewing for a job. A job interview is a sales process where you sell yourself, after all.
SPIN Selling for Job Interviews
Situation
The situation you can figure out ahead of time. You can research the Hiring Manager and find out what they interested to by reading their comments, posts, videos, etc. Remember, play the cards, not the person. Sometimes I’ll spend days researching the person before reaching out.
Problems
Also something you can research ahead of time. Since the job of today’s salesperson is innovation, the more you can anticipate the client’s problems, the better. Your ability to understand their key pain points QUICKLY speaks to your expertise. Today’s client expects you to be clear, concise, and resourceful at a moment’s notice.
Implication
What’s the result of NOT hiring a developer? It’s important to rank problems in terms of the cost of NOT solving the problem. Or else, you’ll end up solving problems that really don’t matter or don’t hurt enough to address immediately. What’s the impact of NOT solving this problem?
Need-Payoff
How does hiring me impact revenue? Is there a major milestone on the horizon? What would the successful candidate be achieving in the first two week’s to make an impact right away?
After going through multiple iterations of problem identification → implication of not solving → benefits of solving rounds, you’ll be able to rank the customer’s problems in terms of personal and professional importance and impact.
PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL IMPORTANCE OF IMPACT. PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL.
Sales is NOT Customer Service
This brings up a key point: whether you’re in a job interview or you’re in a sales position, you’re not in customer service. The role of customer service is to delight the customer. You don’t have to delight the customer. You need to solve their problems. If you solve their problems, you won’t need to entertain them or be so smiley-face all the time.
What Employees Really Want
Oh, and what did people want the most from a job? It depended! New parents wanted a shorter commute and were willing to take lower pay for a better commute. That gave me the ability to get top talent into emerging companies by reducing their commute and increasing the time they had with their family. Other people wanted to work with a company that was financially stable. Others wanted money and that was that. The point is, by taking each candidate through the process of situation, problem, implication, and need pay-off, I determined what was important to THEM.
Recruiting and Headhunting is the only job where the product can change its mind. That’s why I needed to understand how to get people to tell me what was really going on and what they really wanted.
In our next post, we’ll go deep into the biology of sales.
This will get you started. You’ll never look at sales the same way again.
