SPIN method
By analyzing thousands of sales conversations, researcher Neil Rackham discovered that successful salespeople mainly let their conversation partner do the talking. The SPIN method ask the right questions, in the right order, and above all, they listen. These questions are well thought out. In short: they follow a certain strategy. He called this strategy the SPIN method. SPIN stands for:
S ituation questions
P roblem questions
I mplication questions
N eed/necessity questions
By asking these questions to the customer during a sales conversation , you ensure that the customer sees his own needs and feels that he can come up with the solution himself. This way, the customer is more open to a purchase, which means that you reach your sales targets faster.
Situational questions
At the beginning of a sales conversation, you ask questions to outline the customer’s situation. This is about facts and backgrounds. Do not ask more situation questions than necessary. These questions are less interesting to the customer because they do not provide new insights for the customer. Examples of these questions are:
- How long have you been working with this system?
- How many employees do you employ?
Problem questions
Once you know enough about the customer’s situation, you ask problem questions. With the help of these questions you look for problems, irritations that you can solve with the product or service that you are trying to sell. Examples of questions that you can ask as a Marketeer are:
- Are you worried about…?
- Is this project difficult to implement?
- What bottlenecks do you experience…?
Implication questions
To find the effects and negative consequences of the customer’s problems, you ask implication questions. With implication questions, you delve deeper into the problems that the jiangxi mobile phone number list customer has raised before. These are questions such as:
- How do disruptions to … affect the online product launches production process?
- What are the consequences of…for your profitability?
- What impact does not properly following up on your leads have on your turnover?
Usefulness/necessity questions
Finally, ask questions so that the customer tells what the benefits of a solution are. This gives the customer the feeling that they really need your product or service. Examples of these types of questions are:
- Would it be useful to you if it were possible to speed up this process by 10%?
- What would be the impact if you could improve the quality of your leads?
- How would it impact your profits if your salespeople had more confidence in price negotiations?
No fixed series of questions SPIN method
The SPIN method is a powerful tool to netherlands phone number library achieve the goal of your sales conversation. It is important to know that you cannot ask different types of questions at random. There is indeed a structure, namely from situational questions to the usefulness/necessity questions. However, you can also take steps back. So sometimes it is 3 steps forward (situational questions, problem questions & implication questions) and then 1 step back.
Don’ts of the SPIN method
The things you better not do when applying the SPIN method are:
- Asking useful-impact questions at the beginning of the conversation
- Asking too many situational questions
- Moving too quickly to the proposal for an appointment
- Tell the customer what the consequences of his/her problems are
- Asking useful/necessary questions when you don’t have a solution to the customer’s problem
More about conducting a sales conversation SPIN method
In addition to the SPIN method, framing is also a useful conversation technique. You can read more about this in the following blogs:
- Framing: conversation technique to increase sales
- He who controls the frame controls the conversation
If you want to know more about conducting conversations, these blogs may also be of interest to you:
- Via cold calling in 6 steps to an appointment
- A B2B call script for a tight and structured conversation
- 19 Important Cold Calling Tips
Outsource sales conversation
A good sales conversation is not as easy as it may seem. Are you considering outsourcing your sales conversations? Then there are a number of things you should pay attention to. More about this in our blog ‘What should you pay attention to if you want to outsource lead generation?’