SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
By Neil Rackham Review by Jennifer Dawson under Melanie’s direction There’s a scene in the critically acclaimed but very nasty 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross that sticks in my head. Alec Baldwin, who plays a bad-ass consultant “from downtown” charged with increasing sales in a Chicago-based real estate office, introduces himself to his incredulous sales team with a profanity-peppered monologue. At one point he flips over a blackboard, revealing several chalked words, their first letter highlighted. Against an ominous backdrop of lightning flashes, Baldwin reviews the words. “A-B-C,” he rants. “A, Always, B, Be, C, Closing. Always be closing.” ABC. Always Be Closing. According to Neil Rackham, a psychologist whose substantial research on the sales process has revolutionized sales training around the world, ABC has been a widely repeated sales mantra since the 1920s. But Rackham is a bit of an iconoclast. In his book Spin Selling—which was first published in 1988 and is still earning devoted followers around the world–Rackham asserts that ABC doesn’t work, at least for large sales with higher price tags and longer sales cycles. SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. Each word describes a kind of question that a salesperson should ask a prospect in order to strengthen the relationship and increase the perceived value of the product or service that is being sold. Rackham’s model is founded on questions: intelligent, considered in advance, and designed to help the customer see problems as needing to be solved and the salesperson as a problem solver. Traditional sales training emphasizes “show and tell.” Salespeople guess at the needs of the customer and focus their pitch on relaying the features and benefits of what is being sold in order to close the deal. Rackham’s model is fundamentally different. Instead of “show and tell” we have “ask and listen.” Instead of the salesperson providing all the answers, we have the customer filling in the blanks. Instead of high pressure tactics we have solutions to problems. Instead of a one-time meeting and quick buck, we...
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