SPIN Selling

SPIN Selling: A Legendary Sales Methodology To Guide Your Discovery Calls

What Is SPIN Selling?

Spin selling guides the sales conversation once a prospect is engaged. It helps the sales professional understand what questions they should be asking to conduct a compelling discovery call. First, Let’s’ take a closer look at each letter in this acronym. We recently did a breakdown of BANT, so check that out, too, if you’re curious. 

S – Situation

S stands for Situation, and these questions help you better understand what’s going on in your buyer’s world. Through this line of questioning, you should be able to uncover what’s happened with the prospect historically and what led them to begin a conversation with you. It would help if, in addition, you were trying to identify the key facts that help you effectively understand the background of your buyer and their organization.   

Here are a few examples of Situation questions you can ask on your next discovery call:

  • What are you currently doing today, and how does that compare to what you were doing in the past?
  • What’s leading you to explore a new solution now?
  • What tools are you using, and what does that process look like today?

Once you clearly understand the facts and where your customer stands, you can move on to the next part of the acronym, which is the P.

P – Problem

P stands for Problem questions, which should be used to have your customer divulge their pains to you. You should aim to learn what’s causing them trouble and push them to find a solution.

Much like the Situation questions, you are simply collecting facts. You want to get a solid understanding of what is bothering them and what it is they are trying to fix. After all, the job of a great salesman is to be a helpful consultant. How can you consult on an issue if you don’t know their problem?

Here are a few problem questions you can look at as examples of what you should be asking:

  • How much time are you spending doing this process manually?
  • Do you ever have instances where something falls through the cracks?
  • Is this issue hurting your business?

I – Implication

Now what comes next is I, which stands for Implication questions, and these should be used to highlight a cause and effect relationship based on your understanding of the buyer’s current Situation.

Truly skillful salespeople set themselves apart through their masterful use of these questions. By asking the right questions, the sales rep can bring the prospect to realize the severity and importance of the problem without explicitly telling the prospect. When done effectively, the customer will essentially come to sell themselves on the idea that something needs to be done and FAST.

To help you better understand what implications are and how you can use them, check out a few of the examples below:

  • If you don’t do anything to change your current process, what do you foresee happening to your business moving forward?
  • If you don’t address these inefficiencies, how much would that cost your business every year?
  • What’s the opportunity cost of not bringing in a new solution and addressing this issue?

If you’re good at utilizing this framework, you can even piggyback off your problem questions to lead into the implications.

Let’s take some of our examples from earlier to help illustrate what I mean:

  • How much time are you spending doing this process manually?
  • If you continue to go about this in the same fashion, would that negatively impact your other responsibilities?
  • Do you have instances where something falls through the cracks?
  • What was the business impact in those kinds of situations?
  • Is this issue hurting your business?
  • If you don’t do something about it now, what do you think the annual cost to your business will be?

N – Need Payoff Questions

N stands for Need-payoff questions. This means you should use these questions to highlight what the customer stands to gain by choosing to move forward with your product or service.

What are the benefits of working with you, and what do they stand to gain by doing so?

Below are a few examples of need-payoff questions to help you better understand what they are and how you can use them in your own sales processes:

  • By automating processes that you’re doing manually today, how much time do you think you’ll be able to save?
  • What are some ramifications you can foresee from having more freed-up time?
  • Understandably, you’d save a lot of money by implementing a solution to address this issue today. But what would those savings mean for your business?
  • Using a tailor-made system built just for your business will likely see a massive jump in efficiency and, ultimately, your business’s reputation, which is something you can advertise. Do you find value in having something like this as a competitive differentiator?
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Conclusion: SPIN Selling

Granted, the examples I’ve provided may not be the perfect match for every situation and every product or service. Still, hopefully, it provides you with a basic understanding of what this framework is and how to use it. Using this simply as a model to guide your future sales processes, hopefully, you’ll be able to conduct highly effective discovery calls that will ultimately lead to more significant sales.

Additionally, these are essentially just the fundamentals because we are condensing the book into a short blog post; if you want to dive deeper and expand your knowledge on how to use the SPIN selling technique most effectively,I’dd recommend picking up the book and giving it a read yourself.There’ss much more detailed information in there around the effective use of this framework that wearen’tt able to cover here.

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BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline

What Does “BANT” Mean In Sales?

BANT Explained

The professional world of sales is filled with acronyms and terms that are used for the sake of brevity and efficiency. Each industry has its own unique set of acronyms that stand for different things. Sales is no different. Allow me to start with BANT.

What is BANT? 

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. It was first developed at IBM some time ago and has since revolutionized how people sell, particularly in the software industry.

It became so popular because it was a simple framework by which anyone could quickly and reasonably accurately qualify their sales opportunities. By ensuring that reps could pull the necessary information and identify 3 of the four items in this criterion, sales managers could be confident that the situation was indeed a genuine opportunity with a strong likelihood of closing.

what is bant

B – Budget

Suppose a prospect was to inform you as a rep that they have already set aside a budget for the initiative at hand. In that case, it’s a strong indicator that the company is serious about making something happen. Of course, whether that business opportunity is brought to your company is an entirely different story. Still, at the very least, you know that the target account has the necessary funds if all things align.

You might think that the ideal sales situation always has identified a budget. But, unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Having a budget before engagement means that there is a serious consideration, but there are external factors you also need to consider.

For example, having a budget set means the prospect has already put a price in their mind on how much they value your particular product or service. Furthermore, if they already have a pre-determined budget, it’s likely been set due to their engagement with another vendor. Of course, this is not a guar,antee but tely a possibility.

A – Authority

Having authority in this process means that t you, as the rep, have identified the stakeholders, decision-makers, and financial signers for this initiative. Within the occasion, I often separate these individuals, especially in a larger organization, who are different people.

For example, when a company is looking to bring on a new tool for their sales team, the stakeholders are the members of that sales team, as they will be the ones using the tool day in and day out. So if the tool that’s brought on board happens to be ineffective or has a horrible user experience, they are the ones that are going to have to stuff, er and as so understandable, ly they have a massive stake in the evaluation.

Having a massive stake in the decision does not make them the decision maker. There is always someone who needs to approve the decision,n; someone to give the final okay before everything is finalized and agreed upon. The decision maker may be a group of people but usually managers, directors, or other executives in the organization.

A decision maker’s signature will be necessary to complete the deal, but more importantly, you’ll also need the signature of someone in charge of finances to finalize any paperwork. Depending on the organization, the decision maker may also be the financial signer; that is, they’ve been given authority over finances, but more often than not, this is likely to be a different person who sits in the finance department.

what is bant

N – Need

Now to move on to the need. Understanding the need of an organization is to understand its situation and challenges. In essence, this is the why behind the initiative. What is motivating them to pursue your product or services? Why are they choosing to engage with you now?

Are they just kicking the tires because it seems to be the new industry trend? Or is it perhaps in response to some incident that has recently occurred within their organization?

Whatever the motivating factor is, it’s essential for you as a sales rep to identify what it is. This can be considered one of the most critical factors of this criterion as it will give you the most power in being a successfully persuasive sales professional. The stronger their motivation, the more control you have to sell without a discount or push for a quicker sale. Maybe even both.

T – Timeline

Having a timeline means that you have spoken with the prospect, and they’ve mentioned a specific date they’d like to decide or finish implementation.

This is perhaps the second most potent factor of this criterion, as it’s another lever you can use to speed up your current sales cycle. If ever you feel as though the progress in the sales process is slowing down, you can kindly remind your prospect of their goal to have the solution or service implemented by a specific date.

From there, you can work backward to illustrate what groundwork needs to be laid out for you guys to meet their given timeline. But, again, the keyword here is their timeline. This is not a time frame that you, as a rep, are imposing on them but rather one they’ve divulged to you for whatever reason.

Your power now comes from being a diligent consultant working to help your prospects better achieve their goals.

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Conclusion: BANT

Hopefully, this quick overview of the BANT qualification criteria has helped help you understand how you can better qualify for your opportunities. Of course, it’s likely something you are already using for your day-to-day work, but perhaps this has given you some deeper insights as to why this qualification method has become such an industry standard.

-Dean Park

Dean Park is a seasoned tech sales professional with a wide range of organizations, from startups to enterprise businesses. Dean is also a sales mentor at GrowthX Academy in San Francisco.

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welcome

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We hope you enjoy this series of upcoming blog posts.

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