SPIN Selling: The Basics

Although there are many styles of selling in the world today, one of the best known is probably the SPIN style of selling.

This is a selling style that tries to uncover customer needs and problems. It then looks to solve them using the products and solutions your company provides.

SPIN is an acronym that stands for:

S – Situation

P – Problem

I – Implication

N - Need Payoff

Each of the letters represents a phase of the sales process and describes the types of questions you'll be asking the customer.

Let's go into more detail on each section to understand a bit more about how it works.

Situation Questions

We start off the process by asking the prospect situational questions. These are basically simple fact finder questions like: "How do you currently track employee hours?" or "What do you typically use computers for?".

These questions help you get more information on the current situation of the customer, but they shouldn't be overused. They’re usually pretty dry, so you shouldn't be asking 10 of these questions, as you risk boring your prospect to sleep.

Instead, ask a few situational questions, get a better idea of who you're dealing with, and then move on to the next set of questions: problem questions.

Problem Questions

The next set of questions that should be asked when using the SPIN Selling technique are problem questions. The goal of this phase is to get the prospect to tell you some of the issues they might be having with their current situation.

These are going to be questions like: "Do you find it time-consuming to manually enter in your employee work hours?" or "Do you find that your current computers are sometimes slow and glitchy?".

We want the customer to give us a problem, small or large, that we can dive into and ask more questions about. After all, if we don’t know the problems they’re dealing with, how can we offer a solution?

After the problem questions phase, we move onto implication questions.

Implication Questions

The third phase of the SPIN Selling cycle is the implication questions phase. These questions take the problems uncovered in the previous phase to a new level.

We want to make the problem bigger in the eyes of the client.

Keeping with our same line of questioning, here are some examples of implication questions: "Do you think that spending so much time manually putting in employee hours is causing you to fall behind on other work?" or "Is the slow loading time of your current computers affecting your level of customer service in your stores?".

We want the consumer to create this idea of a bigger problem by themselves and see how the minor problem can grow if left unchecked. The key here is to guide people to their own conclusions. Not only does this let them see the intensity of the issue in their own eyes, but it can bring up new problems they may be having.

Once we’ve made the problem bigger in the mind of the prospect, we go to our final phase of questioning: need payoff.

Need Payoff Questions

The final, and possibly most important, phase of the SPIN cycle is the need-payoff phase. Need payoff questions help the client understand the benefits of a solution by telling the salesperson how their current situation could be helped.

These questions are going to look something like: "If you were able to implement a system that automatically tracked employee hours, how would that help your company?" or "Would cutting down the load time on your computers be beneficial to your associates?".

The key to this phase is getting the customer to tell you about how the solution would be beneficial. This is because someone is more willing to listen to the solution when they come to it on their own, as they tend to understand it better.

One Last Tip

As we discussed, the four phases of the SPIN Selling cycle (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need Payoff), are all important steps on the way to leading prospects to a sale.

This process provides a good backbone for a salesperson's line of questioning during a sales call. However, it's important to note that a sales call probably won't go chronologically through each phase once and then be finished.

You might end up going from Situation to Problem to Implication, then back to Problem on a different line of questioning. The goal is to keep the meeting feeling normal while still uncovering needs by going through the 4 phases as it works with the flow of the conversation.

Try implementing this line of questioning on your next sales call and see how it works for you.