SPIN Selling
- Dan Greenberg
- Nov 21, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 21
In this post I am going to spend more time talking about discovery. I rarely stay on the same topic for two posts in a row, but there is so much to talk about when it comes to discovery. Discovery is what makes or breaks your ability as a seller to be influential. It is not a stage in the sales process, it is an ever present, and consistently necessary component of every conversation from the first time you interact with the client until the ink hits the paper.
There are certainly different possible approaches to building out a discovery strategy that can be effective but I wanted to call out Neil Rackham’s approach because it conforms well with many of the concepts that I have written about, and because it is a well formulated strategy that sets a seller up nicely for execution. I highly recommend the book.
In his book SPIN Selling, Rackham lays out four different types of categories that any discovery question would fall into. I am going to go through the categories as Rackham lays out, and give a quick overview of the book, but then I want to spend a bit of time dissecting each category and expounding on them so that we can get a better understanding of how they relate back to the conversations and your ability, as a seller, to move conversations up the value chain.
The first category is situation questions. Situation questions establish the current situation that your buyer finds themself in, they are answered by factual statements, and establish the starting point for the conversation.
The next category is problem questions. Problem questions allow for the buyer to answer with statements of fact about the problem that is being caused by the current situation.
The next category is implication questions: Implication questions move deeper into the buyer’s mind and are answered by opinions, assumptions and predictions. They ask the buyer to understand the problem and explain what it implied for the business.
The last category is needs / payoff questions: Needs / payoff questions ascertain value. They are answered by prioritizations, and assertions of relevance that establish the value of a potential outcome, and the cost of the absence of that outcome.
There are a few reasons why this framework makes sense. For starters, it allows the seller to ease into questioning. Asking a client about current situations allows the buyer to answer somewhat softball questions. Facts are easier for people to come up with than opinions, and analysis. They take less mental energy and they feel less intrusive, so starting with fact based situational questions does not carry much mental or emotional burden. Of course, it is important to make sure that the questions aren’t simple enough answers that you could have and should have researched them before getting to the meeting.
As you ask a number of situational questions, and the buyer gets a bit more conversationally comfortable, moving to problem questions, which normally carries a heavier emotional burden becomes more acceptable and easier for the buyer to call to mind as they have already been prompted to think more seriously about the situation.
Starting with a number of situation questions, then progressing to a few problem questions, then narrowing that down to a single implication question followed by a single needs / payoff question is a powerful formula for getting to the root of a problem, as well as the desired solution. Keep in mind however, that you will need to repeat that process many times with many people in order to get a full understanding of all of the buying organization’s problems and how they are prioritized one against another.
In past posts, I’ve commented on my displeasure with the common saying that “bad sellers sell products, and good sellers sell solutions”. My issue is not that it is incorrect, but that it falls far short of being explanatory enough to be informative. In order to understand the difference between good and bad sellers, we need to shift the scale and go much farther. The better a seller is, the farther up the value spectrum they live. Moving from selling products to solutions is good, but selling outcomes is better, and selling on value is best. More importantly, we can use discovery preparations, the discovery process, and Rackham’s methodology as a tool to move in the right direction along that spectrum.
Think of situation questions as matching up with products. In other words, when you ask a situation question, your buyer should tell you about something that is a fact; a situation; a current reality. This situation can be matched up with a product that you likely have, and can sell to them to address that situation. But this does not go far enough, because you have not understood how valuable changing the situation is, or if the situation has negative implications for the business, or even if the situation causes a problem, let alone one worth fixing. So yes, bad sellers learn about situations, and then prescribe products before going deeper, that is true, but we have not gone nearly far enough.
Think of problem questions as matching up with solutions. In other words, when you move past situation questions and get to problem questions, you are able to understand what the buyer is experiencing as a result of the set of situations that they are in, and you are able to construct a set of tools into a solution that helps solve that set of problems. But this still does not go far enough, because you have not understood how valuable fixing the problem is, or if the problem has negative implications for the overall business, and how it is prioritized against other problems. So, yes, good sellers do get to the problem level, and do build out solutions to solve those problem sets. But we still have not gone nearly far enough.
Think of implication questions as matching up with outcomes. In other words when you move past situation and problem questions and get to implication questions, you are able to better understand the implications of the problems, as well as the desired outcomes that will change the status quo and bring the buying organization to a better state. You are able to construct, with the help of the buyer, a vision for the buying organization that is emotionally charged and helps them see what a different world could actually look like. But this still does not go far enough, because you have not understood how valuable fixing the problem is, and how it is prioritized against other problems in the business, or against the resource and investment it would take to solve this particular problem. So yes, great sellers do get to the implication level, and help the client envision a new state of existence that breaks them completely away from the status quo, which is the only thing they had been able to envision to that point. But we have still not gone far enough.
Think of needs / payoff questions as matching up with value. In other words when you ask situation questions, and problem questions, and implication questions, and get to needs / payoff questions, you start to be able to understand the hidden factors in the decision, including internal politics, resource allocation decisions, fear, and hope. You are then able to understand how valuable solving this problem actually is for the client, and how much they are willing to sacrifice in terms of time, money and resources to make it happen. You can also start to understand how bad the status quo is for them, and how much it is costing them every day that they do nothing. This is where great persuaders differentiate themselves from the other three levels. At each level above, as soon as the client organization retreats to discuss the problem and the solutions, they have to weigh it against other priorities, and that relative prioritization was never a part of the discussion in any of the first three stages. Only the seller who is able to discuss the value level of the needs, and the payoff of making a switch can be influential when it comes to these pivotal internal prioritization conversations.
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