Juice up your SPIN selling with a menu list

In a world where most buyers are now at least as well informed as a good seller, how can you give your SPIN selling the edge?

The core of the SPIN selling model focuses on using the best open questions to help a buyer fully identify their problem state, and relies on this problem state to give direction to the selling process. So what’s wrong with this?

Well by the time the buyer has opened their engagement with a vendor (and yes, more than two thirds of engagements are now initiated by the vendor) the vendor already knows what their problem state is, and has now moved to the buying stage of scanning the market for a small choice of providers, or further along still, to gather some reference pricing.

Sellers who doggedly hang on to their SPIN model can quickly alienate their prospect if they insist on using their “problem” questions to identify problem states that the buyer has already identified for themselves. How to fix this? Instead of meticulously labouring through the problem question stage, sellers can cut to the chase by presenting a succinct menu list of headline problem states, and then listen to the prospect as they explain how they are prioritising them and what action they are planning.

Sellers can then use the SPIN model’s greatest strength, which is the implication stage, to bring real value to the prospect. Implication questions help prospects consider the wider business impact of their current problem states that they may not have considered. And this is the perfect stage to introduce value selling tools to help a prospect calculate the £/$/€ cost of their inaction.

These discussions allow sellers to bring real insight to the sales engagement, and enables them to position their proposition as the preferred choice, earning themselves trusted expert status in the process.

When working with our clients we have found that adopting a menu list approach has injected new life to their SPIN selling. It would be great to hear about your own experience.

If you’d like to inject life into your consultative selling model, feel free to message me and let’s set up a call.