SPIN Selling Summary

joseph
joseph
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

All sales go through four basic stages:

  • Preliminaries
  • Investigations
  • Demonstration of capabilities
  • Commitment

The one that makes or breaks the sale is the investigations.

You have to remember that every sales attempt doesn’t have to result in an immediate win or loss.

A prospective client may not know exactly what they need. It’s up to you to help them find out.

Making a sale depends on knowing your client’s needs, which are often quite complex. Needs may begin quite small, but develop into real problems — meaning a solution becomes necessary.

Customers that know exactly what they want have explicit needs, i.e. they need a double sided photocopier. Customers may also have implied needs, that might be revealed to you as they make general concerns (i.e. ‘we’re using too much paper.’)

The key to achieving big sales is turning implied needs into explicit needs.

An implied need is a signal that a client wants to buy, but it’s a weak signal that needs to be strengthened. If you can seize on implied signal and turn them into explicit needs you can convince them to buy more or faster.

SPIN is split into:

  • Situation. How do you currently take payments?
  • Problem. Why are you looking to change?
  • Implication. What’s that 8 hours you’re wasting reconciling payments stopping you from doing?
  • Need-payoff. If we could save you 8 hours/week, what would the main benefit be?

Your opening will neither make or break the sale.

Don’t focus on features of your product, focus on benefits. Features are informative facts about a product or service. These don’t necessarily sell, they just describe (i.e. this car drives at 200mph).

A product’s benefits show you how your product might help your customers, i.e. you can get to work 10 minutes quicker and wake up ten minutes later.

Don’t give your client the chance to give objections — stop them before they start. To do this, use implication and need-payoff questions to lead a client into expressing needs explicitly. Better to treat the cause of problems rather than the symptoms.

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joseph

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joseph

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