1
Sales Behavior
and Sales Success

The V.P. of Sales met me at O’Hare airport and within minutes we were driving through the Chicago suburbs. He wasted no time in getting down to business. “The reason I want you to do this research,” he explained, “is because our sales are about 30 percent lower than they should be. As you know, we’re a Fortune 100 company and we invest a lot in recruiting and training. Yet I’m not getting the results I’m looking for. I want your research people to travel with some of my sales reps and find out what’s wrong.”

This was a perfect opportunity. My organization, Huthwaite, had been working for several years to develop a method called behavior analysis, which allowed us to watch salespeople at work and to figure out which of the sales behaviors they used were the ones most linked to success. I jumped at the chance to try our new methods. Using our research team and some managers from the V.P.’s own organization, we went out in the field to watch how his people behaved in sales calls.

Two months later we were ready to meet with him again to share our findings. In the meeting room, as I stood up to speak to the V.P. and his sales management team I knew he wouldn’t like what we were about to say. I decided to take him through the easy bits first, so I said that we’d observed 93 calls and that we’d been out with some of his best performers and with some who were—I searched for a delicate word—well, less than best.

“Yes,” he said impatiently. “You don’t have to remind me. What did you find?”

I answered cautiously. “Let’s first discuss what’s going on in the successful sales calls,” I suggested, “and see what’s different about them. We found...”

“Let me guess,” he interrupted. “You went out with some of our superstars. I think I know what’s different about their calls. They’re good closers. Am I right?”

I hesitated for a moment. “Not exactly,” I answered, “at least not if you mean that they use a lot of closing techniques. In fact, in your successful calls we recorded a lot fewer closes than in the calls that failed.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he protested. “What else did you find?” Before I could reply, a thought struck him. “I guess objection handling could be just as important as closing,” he conceded. “Maybe my top people are better at overcoming objections.”

Something told me this was going to be a difficult meeting. “Uh, again, not exactly,” I answered. “We found that your successful calls contained very few objections. In terms of objection-handling skills, I don’t think your top people were any better than your poorer people.”

That was clearly the wrong thing to say. One of the sales managers present helpfully tried to get the meeting back on track. “Why don’t you tell us what you found about probing skills?” he suggested. “I think that this would be more useful.”

The V.P. brightened up noticeably. “Yes,” he said, “probing skills are very important. When I’m invited to address sales-training classes, I always stress how essential it is in selling to ask good questions. Lots of open questions—you know, the ones that can’t be answered in one word. I tell new people to avoid closed questions and concentrate on asking more of those open questions. I guess that’s what you found my good people were doing?”

I was cornered and in trouble. With real desperation in my voice, I replied, “You’re quite right that good probing skills are important. But from watching your people sell, it doesn’t seem to matter whether their questions are open or closed. In fact, your best people aren’t any different from your worst in terms of how they use open and closed questions.”

The V.P. was indignant. “Are you serious?” he asked incredulously. “Do you realize that you’ve just taken the three most important areas of selling—closing, objection handling, and probing—and told me they don’t matter?” He looked around the table and asked, “Isn’t that what this guy’s saying?” There was an awkward silence. Finally one of his junior managers spoke, picking his words with care.

“If what he’s saying is right,” the junior manager began cautiously, “and I must emphasize if, then we’ve been wasting a whole lot of time and money on our sales training. After all, that’s exactly what we’re training people to do—to uncover needs with open and closed questions, to overcome objections, and to close for the business.”

The V.P. thought for a moment. “That’s right,” he said. “Those are the three key things we teach our salespeople. And not only us—that’s what other big corporations teach their people too.” He searched his memory. “That’s what IBM teaches,” he said. “GTE does, Xerox does, AT&T too.”

“And Honeywell, and Exxon,” added one of his managers.

“I was in Kodak,” said another, “and those were the three key things in their sales training.”

The V.P. turned to me. “I don’t want to cast doubt on your research ability,” he said, “and I thank you for your efforts. However, I’m sure you’ll understand that your findings go against our experience—and the experience of other major corporations—so I’ve got to believe your conclusions are wrong.”

That ended the meeting. As a young and little-known researcher, I didn’t have the firepower to challenge the sales-training wisdom of the world’s leading companies. I licked my wounds during the flight home, and, being honest about it, had to admit that my evidence wasn’t strong enough to be convincing. If I’d been in the V.P.’s shoes, I wouldn’t have listened either.

Since that uncomfortable meeting, my colleagues and I have collected much more compelling evidence. We’ve spent 10 years analyzing over 35,000 sales transactions. We’ve studied 116 factors that might play some part in sales performance, and we’ve researched effective selling in 27 countries. Our studies constitute the largest-ever investigation into sales success. Now, having had the benefit of an additional million dollars of systematic research, we could give that V.P. some convincing answers. We could tell him, for example:

  His sales training was fine for low-value sales. What we had discovered was that the traditional selling methods his people were using ceased to work as the sales grew larger. This was why his top people, who were making high-value sales, no longer relied on such techniques as objection handling and closing.

  We now know that there are much more effective techniques that successful people use in major sales. At the time we didn’t understand these methods well enough to describe them convincingly, but now we’d be able to tell the V.P. how his top people were using a powerful probing (or investigating) strategy called SPIN and that this, more than any other selling skills, accounted for their success.

What’s more, we could also tell him something equally convincing about the companies he listed who were teaching the traditional models of probing with open and closed questions, overcoming objections, and closing. Although neither of us knew it at the time, many of these corporations were becoming distinctly unhappy about the usefulness of this traditional core of selling skills. More than two-thirds of the companies listed during the meeting have come to Huthwaite in the last 5 years to ask us to redesign their major-account sales training. Based on our research into what makes success in the larger sale, we’ve helped them replace traditional models of how to sell with new and more powerful training.

Success in the Larger Sale

Research has an inconvenient way of coming up with evidence that the researchers sometimes wish they’d never found. That’s what happened to me. I was perfectly content with traditional theories of how to sell. When we started our investigations, our aim was to show that classic sales-training methods really worked and had a positive impact on sales success. It was only after we found a consistent failure of sales training to improve results in major sales that we began the long research road that led to the development of the methods described in this book. Before our research, I was happy to think of selling in the traditional terms that our findings now challenge. I was taught—and perhaps you were taught this too—that a sales call consists of some simple and distinct steps:

1. Opening the call. The classic theories of selling teach that the most effective method for opening sales calls is to find ways to relate to the buyer’s personal interests and to make initial benefit statements. As described in Chapter 7, our research shows that these opening methods may be effective in small sales but that they have a doubtful success record in larger sales.

2. Investigating needs. Almost everybody who’s been through sales training in the last 60 years has been taught about open and closed questions. These classic questioning methods may work in small sales, but they certainly won’t help you in bigger ones. Later in this chapter I’ll introduce you to a more effective method of Investigating, which we discovered from the analysis of several thousand successful sales calls and from watching some of the world’s top salespeople in action.

3. Giving benefits. Once you’ve uncovered needs, traditional sales training teaches you to give benefits that show how the features of your product or service can be used or can help the customer. Offering benefits in this way can be very successful in the small sale, but in the large one it fails entirely. Chapter 5 introduces a new type of benefit that research shows is successful in large sales.

4. Objection handling. You’ve probably been taught that overcoming objections is a vital skill for sales success, and you’ll know about the standard objection-handling techniques, such as clarifying the objection and rewording it in a way you can meet. These objection-handling skills are fine when you’re making small sales, but in major sales they contribute very little to your sales effectiveness. Successful sellers concentrate on objection prevention, not on objection handling; based on our analysis of how they do it, Chapter 6 describes methods that you can use to cut the number of objections you get from your customers by more than half.

5. Closing techniques. The closing techniques that can be effective in smaller accounts will actually lose you business as the sales grow larger. Most of the commonly taught closing techniques just don’t work for major sales. Chapter 2 describes effective ways of obtaining customer commitment in these sales.

In summary, the traditional selling models, methods, and techniques that most of us have been trained to use work best in small sales. For now, let me define small as a sale which can normally be completed in a single call and which involves a low dollar value. Unfortunately, these tried-and-true low-value sales techniques—most of them dating from the 1920s—don’t work today in complex high-value sales. The problem with these techniques isn’t that they are outdated; people wouldn’t still be using them after 60 years unless they had something valid to offer. Their inadequacy, and my reason for this book, is that these techniques work effectively only in very simple low-value sales. Because most writers and training designers have made the inaccurate assumption that what works in a small sale will automatically work in a large one, people have unfortunately come to assume that these traditional techniques are equally valid in major sales, but in this book I’ll be showing you that what works in small sales can hurt your success as the sales grow larger—and I’ll be sharing with you our research findings that have uncovered new and better models for success in large sales.

The Major Sale

I’m writing this book for people whose business is the major sale—and who, like me, have become dissatisfied with the effectiveness of traditional sales models and are looking for something more sophisticated. Many of the major-account salespeople I work with complain that traditional sales training treats them as if they were selling used cars. What’s worse, it treats their customers as simpletons waiting to be exploited by verbal trickery and manipulation. Programs of this kind, regrettably, are the rule in most organizations rather than the exception—and their recommendations are a recipe for disaster in major sales. The main purpose of our research has been to replace these simplistic models with ones specially designed for the high-level business interaction that major sales demand.

There’s been more written about the definition of major sales than about how to sell successfully once you’ve defined them. I’m not going to bore you with definitions. I’m sure that whatever the term you use—whether you talk of major-account sales, big-ticket sales, system sales, large accounts, bulk sales, or just “the big ones”—you know a major sale when you meet one.

What I shall do is briefly run through some of the characteristics of major sales in terms of customer psychology. It’s the changes in customer perceptions and behavior that make major sales different. Let’s look at what some of these differences are and how they can affect your selling.

Length of Selling Cycle

Whereas a simple low-value sale can often be completed in one call, a major sale may require many calls spread over a period of months. One of my former classmates selling in the aircraft industry once went 3 years without making a single sale. On the face of it, it sounds like I’m just making the obvious point that major sales take longer. But there’s more to it than this. What’s really important is that multi-call sales have a completely different psychology from single-call sales. A key factor is that in a single-call sale the buying decision is usually taken then and there with the seller present, but in a multi-call sale the most important discussions and deliberations go on when the seller isn’t present, during the interval between calls.

Just suppose I’m a brilliant orator who can give a truly compelling product pitch. I’m likely to do well in the single-call sale. This is because the person I’m selling to can be sufficiently impressed by the excellence of my pitch to say yes on the spot and give me an order. But what happens if it’s a longer selling cycle, so that I don’t take the order immediately after I’ve made my pitch? How much of what I’ve said will the customer remember tomorrow after I’ve gone? Could the customer repeat my smoothly polished presentation to her boss?

Questions like these prompted us to do a small study in an office products company, where we found that less than half of the key points the sellers covered in their product presentations were remembered by customers a week later. What’s worse, customers who told us immediately after the presentation that they were likely to buy had lost most of their enthusiasm for the product within a week.

A good product pitch can have a temporary effect on a customer, but a few days later it’s largely gone. So if you can get a decision on the spot—as you usually can in a one-call sale—then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use the temporary effect of a product pitch to raise customer enthusiasm and help you get the business immediately. But woe betide you if you can’t get an instant decision. By next week your customers will have forgotten most of what you’ve said and will have lost their enthusiasm for your product.

Another of our findings, which we’ll examine in much more detail in Chapter 6, was that in the one-call sale you could sell by pushing your product, overcoming any objections, and closing hard for the business—but that in a multi-call sale this style was usually dangerously unsuccessful. Why? Perhaps your own experience as a buyer gives the answer. I can remember, for example, going into a car showroom a few months ago. The seller was one of those pushy types who overpopulate the motor trade. After a couple of perfunctory questions, he gave me a really hard sell, using all the classic closes in the book. I wasn’t ready to decide, so his pressure was both unwelcome and irritating. After I finally escaped, I made all sorts of solemn vows never to return to that showroom. I’m sure you’ve had the same kind of experience. Few customers will elect to go back for a repeat dose of pressure. In terms of your own selling, if you pressure a potential customer, then he or she won’t want to meet you again. The rule seems to be that it’s OK to be pushy if you can take the order there and then, but once you and your customer part company without an order, your pushiness has reduced your chance of final success. And because the customer doesn’t want to talk with you again, you may never discover where you went wrong. So while a pushy or hard-sell style may work in smaller sales, it generally acts against you when several calls are needed to take the business.

Size of Customer’s Commitment

Almost by definition, large purchases involve bigger decisions from the customer, and this alters the psychology of the sale. In a small sale the customer is less conscious of value. As the size of the sale increases, successful salespeople must build up the perceived value of their products or services. The building of perceived value is probably the single most important selling skill in larger sales. We’ve studied it in detail, and several chapters of this book are devoted to how to increase the value of what you offer your customers.

Several years ago we started a study that, because of a reorganization in our client’s sales force, was never completed. This is a pity, because it was all about how the need to sell value increases as the sale gets larger. The client, who sold high-cost products, had asked us to advise on whether it was possible to recruit new salespeople whose only previous selling experience had been with cheaper goods. At the point where the project was stopped, we were coming up with some interesting answers. We found that the salespeople who didn’t successfully transfer to handling larger sales were those who had difficulty building the customer’s perception of value.

I remember meeting one of these less successful people at the Buffalo airport before going out with him to make some calls. He was sitting on a bench with his briefcase open and was surrounded by enough product literature to keep a paper-recycling factory in business for months. He explained, miserably, that he was learning product details because he thought it would help him be more successful. “In my last job,” he explained, “I was selling consumer goods and it was my product knowledge that made all the difference.” He may have been right, but it was his product knowledge that prevented him from being successful an hour later as I watched him fail to convince an office manager to buy a large copying system. The customer was understandably nervous at the thought of spending tens of thousands of dollars. The seller tried to cope with this uncertainty by talking in detail about the product, displaying all his newly acquired product knowledge. It didn’t work. The reason why the customer wouldn’t buy was that she didn’t see enough value to justify so large a decision. After all, her present copiers worked relatively well. It was true that there were some reliability problems and that the copy quality wasn’t great, but did these justify spending a five-figure sum to put them right? Not on your life—and all the seller’s carefully memorized product knowledge couldn’t alter the basic fact that his customer didn’t perceive value.

How should he have handled the call? Later chapters on the SPIN methods will show in detail how to build increased value in cases such as this. But the message to take now from the call in Buffalo is that what may work well in the smaller sale can act against you in the large ones.

The Ongoing Relationship

Most large sales involve an ongoing relationship with the customer. Partly, this is because major purchases usually require some post-sale support—which means that the buyer and seller must meet one or more times after the sale. Also, the people selling major goods or services usually generate most of their business from developing their existing customers. In contrast, a smaller sale may often be a one-off event where the buyer will never meet the seller again.

How does the length of the relationship affect customer-decision psychology? Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate it is through a personal example. Nowadays, as president of the company, I’m more often doing the buying than the selling. A few weeks ago, as a buyer, I had the perfect illustration of how the ongoing relationship of a large sale can influence decisions. I was involved in two sales on the same day. The first sale was a small one. I needed a new overhead projector for my office, so I had asked a local supplier to send a sales rep to talk with me. The character who appeared was a remarkably unlovely individual who wouldn’t have been out of place selling indecent photographs in the back streets of Rio. “It’s your lucky day,” he began, “I’m sure you can’t wait to hear the deal I’ve got for you!” Actually, what I couldn’t wait to do was to get him out of my office. But his price was good, I needed a projector, and I’d never have to see him again. So I cut short his sales pitch, gave him the order, and sent him on his way in 5 minutes flat. From his point of view, it was a successful sale. In most senses it was also successful for me as a buyer. I’d gotten a new projector at a good price—and all it took was 5 sleazy minutes.

Later that day I was involved in a much more significant sale. We were thinking of changing both the hardware and the software of our accounting system. The change would mean a couple of new computers, an integrated suite of accounting software, and 6 months of time to put the whole thing together. I estimated we were talking about at least a $70,000 decision. The seller was a reasonable enough person—perhaps a little shallow and maybe just a bit too anxious to do business—but certainly a great improvement on the overhead-projector rep I’d bought from earlier in the day. Nevertheless, as the sales call progressed, I found myself becoming hesitant. As in the overhead-projector sale, the price was good—and I certainly needed a new system—but I was increasingly reluctant to go ahead. “We’ll think about it and let you know,” I told him. Afterward, when I analyzed what had happened, I realized that my hesitation with the computer system was that I wasn’t so much buying a product as entering a relationship. Unlike the case of the overhead projector, where I fervently hoped I’d never have to see the seller again, with the computer I was entering into a decision where I would have to work with the seller over a period of months. And I wasn’t certain that I wanted to do this.

What’s the moral of the story? Once again it shows that what works in smaller sales may become quite inappropriate as the size of the decision increases. In a small sale it’s relatively easy to separate the seller from the product. Although I hated the projector seller, I liked his product enough to buy it. But with the larger decision, seller and product become much harder to separate. Although I liked the computer system, there was no way I could buy it without also buying a relationship with the seller. Because large decisions usually entail an ongoing involvement with the customer, they demand a different selling style. Later chapters will analyze what this difference is and how to use it to build lasting customer relationships.

If you’re anything like the major-account salespeople I work with, you’ll sometimes feel like a very small cog in a very big and impersonal sales machine. It’s often difficult to see that your work has any measurable impact. So it should be comforting to know that, as the sale grows larger, the customer puts more emphasis on the salesperson as a factor in the decision. In a large sale, product and seller may become inseparable in the customer’s mind.

The Risk of Mistakes

In a small sale, customers can afford to take more risks because the consequences of mistakes are relatively small. In my own case I’ve a whole closet full of gadgets I’ve bought that didn’t work or weren’t half as useful as I imagined they were going to be. Right now, the top shelf contains, among other things, two automatic dialers, a fancy coffee maker, and a clock that speaks the time every hour in an improbable electronic accent. I like to think I’m not the only one who buys useless things from time to time—maybe you’ve a similar shelf of your own. In all my inappropriate purchases there’s been a common factor—nobody else need ever know I’ve made a mistake. If it was a business decision, I’ve been able to hide it in my budget somewhere so that even Betty, our eagle-eyed and chronically suspicious budget controller, can’t find out.

But it’s different with a bigger decision. If I buy the wrong car, I can’t put it on a shelf where my wife won’t notice it. When I’m looking for a new computer, at least 10 people in my company play some part in the decision, and everybody will use it once it’s installed. So if the computer doesn’t work, then my whole company knows I made a bad choice. Larger decisions are more public and a bad decision is much more visible.

Customers become more cautious as the decision size increases. Purchase price is one factor that increases caution, but fear of making a public mistake may be even more important. I once had a client in London who cheerfully bought a $40,000 research project from me after just one morning’s selling. The decision involved his budget and nobody else’s. If the research didn’t work out, he had a way to bury the cost so that he would be the only one to know. On the other hand, I had to negotiate much longer and harder with that same individual to get him to spend an additional $1500 in an area where his colleagues would be directly involved.

The Four Stages of a Sales Call

Major sales are significantly different from smaller sales in terms of customer psychology. As a result, they require some very different selling skills. It would be tempting, based on these psychological differences, to go further and to argue that everything about the major sale should be unique and different, but this would be just as untrue as the traditional assumption that all sales, whether large or small, require identical skills. However, one of the simplest models of a sales call does seem to be applicable to any size of sale; almost every sales call you can think of, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, goes through four distinct stages (Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1. The four stages of a sales call.

1. Preliminaries. These are the warming-up events that occur before the serious selling begins. They include such things as the way you introduce yourself and how you begin the conversation. Some people believe that the Preliminaries are much more important than the word suggests. I’ve been confidently told by a number of very successful salespeople that it’s during the first 2 minutes of a call that the customer forms crucial initial impressions that will influence the rest of the sale. How important is this initial impact? How much do first impressions count? I’ll be sharing with you in Chapter 7 some research that led us to conclude that in larger sales the Preliminaries have less influence on success than we’d first thought.

2. Investigating. Almost every sale involves finding something out by asking questions. You may be uncovering needs or getting a better understanding of your customers and their organizations. As we’ll see, this is much more than the simple collection of data. Investigating is the most important of all selling skills, and it’s particularly crucial in larger sales. In Appendix A you’ll find some case studies which show that the average person in major-account selling can increase overall sales volume by more than 20 percent by developing improved Investigating skills.

3. Demonstrating Capability. In most calls you will need to demonstrate to customers that you’ve something worthwhile to offer. Most of us in larger sales are selling solutions to customer problems. In the Demonstrating Capability stage of the call, you have to show customers that you have a solution and that it makes a worthwhile contribution to helping solve their problems. Sometimes you demonstrate capability by a formal presentation, sometimes by actually showing your product in action, and sometimes by describing some potential benefits that you could provide. But however you do it, in almost every sales call you must convince your customer that you’ve something to offer. There are some very effective ways to demonstrate capability in the major sale, but as we’ll see in Chapter 5, some of the methods for Demonstrating Capability in smaller sales will no longer work for you as the size of the sale increases.

4. Obtaining Commitment. Finally, a successful sales call will end with some sort of commitment from the customer. In smaller sales the commitment is usually in the form of a purchase, but in larger sales there may be a whole range of other commitments you have to obtain before you reach the order stage. Your call objective may, for example, be to get the customer’s agreement to attend a product demonstration, or to test a new material, or to give you access to a higher level of decision maker, and in none of these cases is the commitment an order. Larger sales contain a number of intermediate steps that we call Advances. Each step advances the customer’s commitment toward the final decision. It’s in this area, unfortunately, that the classic closing techniques taught in most sales-training programs are ineffective and may even hurt your chances of success.

These four stages—Preliminaries, Investigating, Demonstrating Capability, and Obtaining Commitment—are present in almost every sales call. Although this four-stage model is a very simple one, my colleagues and I have found it useful because it has allowed us to break sales calls down into a series of steps that we can study individually. I’ll be returning to it throughout the book, using it to provide a structure for explaining some of our research findings.

Of course, the importance of each step will vary with the type of call. I remember once watching a southern banker in Kentucky selling trust services to a customer who looked like Colonel Sanders’s twin brother. In this case the Preliminaries took up almost 80 percent of the discussion. Before either party was ready to talk about business, there was a careful “sniffing-out” process that established some of the things essential to doing business in the rural south, such as where you were from, who you knew, and whether your uncle kept horses. Only after an hour of cautious social talk was the customer ready to reveal something of his business needs.

In contrast, I recall the first time I ever went on a sales call in the garment district of New York. There were no chairs in the buyer’s office. I assumed this meant that we weren’t supposed to stay long enough to sit down. On the wall behind the buyer’s desk was a stark notice: “Spit it out and get out.” In this call the Preliminaries consisted of “Hello, I’ll be brief” from the seller and a grunt from the buyer.

Sometimes the Investigating stage can take up almost the whole call. In selling consulting services, for example, you would have to find out a great deal about the customer’s needs before you could determine whether there would be a basis for a business relationship. I’ve watched an all-day sales call by a management consultant where all but 15 minutes was spent on Investigating. But at the other extreme, I’ve seen calls where the Investigating stage consisted of just one question, the rest of the call being taken up by an elaborate product demonstration.

So the exact balance of the four stages will depend on the type of call, its purpose, and where it comes in the sales cycle. But most calls do include all four stages, even if some of them are very brief.

Which Stage Is Most Important?

Are all four of these stages equally important in ensuring that a call will be successful, or is one more vital than the others? If you judge from the emphasis given it by sales training, by books on selling, or by experienced sales managers, then the Obtaining Commitment stage has to come out as the clear winner in terms of importance.

Let me quote from a sales manager in Rochester who, during our research, wrote me a letter explaining why he thought Obtaining Commitment was the most crucial stage of the call: “The bottom line,” he wrote, “is that if you can’t close, you can’t sell. I’m convinced that most salespeople suffer from being weak closers. If there’s one thing I wish my people would do better, it’s being able to obtain commitment from the customer by stronger closing.” I’m sure that most practicing sales managers would share his view.

The reason why I raise the question about the relative importance of the four call stages is that the answer depends on the size of the sale. In small sales, there’s some evidence to suggest that the manager who wrote to me is correct. The people who are good at obtaining commitment—the strong closers, as he would put it—are indeed very successful in smaller sales. In the major sale it’s a different story.

The Investigating Stage

Success in the larger sale depends, more than anything else, on how the Investigating stage of the call is handled. We’ve collected data on Investigating skills from massive studies involving many thousands of sales calls.

Let’s begin by reviewing the Investigating stage of the call and why it’s so important. Almost every call, I’ve said, involves Investigating—finding something out from the customer that will enable you to sell more effectively—and to investigate, you must ask questions. Each one of our early studies of selling, in the late 1960s, came up with the same fundamental finding: There were a lot more questions in successful calls, those leading to Orders and Advances, than in those calls which resulted in Continuations and No-sales, which we classified as unsuccessful.

Questions and Success

There’s no doubt about it, questions persuade more powerfully than any other form of verbal behavior. And this is not just in selling. Studies of negotiations, management interactions, performance interviews, and group discussions—to name just a few of the areas studied by Huthwaite and other research teams—have all come up with the same basic fact. There is a clear statistical association between the use of questions and the success of the interaction. The more you ask questions, the more successful the interaction is likely to be. And some types of questions are more powerful than others.

Now it’s been standard practice in selling to distinguish between two types of questions, open and closed:

  Closed questions can be answered with a single word, often “yes” or “no.” Typical examples of closed questions would be “Do you make the purchasing decisions?” or “Is your existing business more than 5 years old?” In some training programs these are called directive probes.

  Open questions require a longer answer. Typical examples would be “Could you tell me something about your business?” or “Why is that important to you?” Open questions are sometimes called nondirective probes.

This isn’t a new concept. E. K. Strong was writing about selling with open and closed questions in 1925, and there’s some evidence that the distinction goes back well before then. Most writers during the last 60 years have adopted the distinction between open and closed questions and have generally made the following points about them:

  Open questions are more powerful than closed questions because they get the customer talking and often reveal unexpected information.

  Closed questions are less powerful, although they are useful with certain customer types, such as the garrulous buyer who can’t stop talking.

  Even though closed questions are less powerful, you may be forced to use them in certain types of calls—for example, where very little time is available. However, some writers challenge this.

  Open questions are particularly important to success in the larger sale, although closed questions can be successful if the sale is small.

  A general goal of sales training should be to help people ask more open questions.

These conclusions, on the face of it, seem perfectly reasonable and logical. But are they valid? As far as we could tell, nobody had ever scientifically investigated whether call success was influenced by the use of open or closed questions. It seemed an ideal area for some research.

We carried out several studies and were astonished to find that there is no measurable relationship between the use of open questions and success. In one manufacturing company, we tracked 120 calls and found that calls high in closed questions were just as likely to lead to orders and advances. In another study in a high-tech company, we found no differences in the mix of open and closed questions between top and average performers. Some of the best salespeople in this very successful company didn’t ask any open questions during the calls where they were observed; every one of their questions could be answered with a single word. At the other extreme, several of the top people only asked open questions. Some used a mixture of the two. There was no identifiable relationship between success and the use of open or closed questions. We even carried out some studies to find whether successful people tended to start the call with open questions and then move to closed questions as the discussion progressed. We found that some successful salespeople did indeed adopt this pattern. But we also found an equal number of cases where people were successful by starting with closed questions and then moving progressively toward open questions. In other words, none of our studies showed that the classic distinction between open and closed questions has any meaning in high-value sales calls.

Most major companies are spending a fortune teaching people a distinction that—at least in the larger sale—does nothing useful in terms of improving sales results. At a conservative estimate, corporations across the world are spending upwards of a billion dollars a year on sales training that teaches their people an irrelevant questioning technique. Even more incredible, until our little study nobody had ever carried out objective research to discover whether there was any validity in all that was being taught about open and closed questions.

A New Direction

We decided that the focus of our research would be to develop new and positive questioning models that could replace the old ones, which were proving so unsatisfactory. From watching sales calls, it was clear that successful people didn’t just ask random questions. There was a distinct pattern in the successful call. If only we could tie this successful pattern down, we’d have a better way to think about Investigating than the seemingly irrelevant distinction between open and closed questions.

As you’ll see in the following chapters, we found that questions in the successful call tend to fall into a sequence we call SPIN. In summary, the SPIN sequence of questions is:

1. Situation Questions. At the start of the call, successful people tend to ask data-gathering questions about facts and background. Typical Situation Questions would be “How long have you had your present equipment?” or “Could you tell me about your company’s growth plans?” Although Situation Questions have an important fact-finding role, successful people don’t overuse them because too many can bore or irritate the buyer.

2. Problem Questions. Once sufficient information has been established about the buyer’s situation, successful people tend to move to a second type of question. They ask, for example, “Is this operation difficult to perform?” or “Are you worried about the quality you get from your old machine?” Questions like these, which we call Problem Questions, explore problems, difficulties, and dissatisfactions in areas where the seller’s product can help. Inexperienced people generally don’t ask enough Problem Questions.

3. Implication Questions. In smaller sales, sellers can be very successful if they just know how to ask good Situation and Problem Questions. In larger sales this is not enough; successful people need to ask a third type of question. This third type is more complex and sophisticated. It’s called an Implication Question, and typical examples would be “How will this problem affect your future profitability?” or “What effect does this reject rate have on customer satisfaction?” Implication Questions take a customer problem and explore its effects or consequences. As we’ll see, by asking Implication Questions successful people help the customer understand a problem’s seriousness or urgency. Implication Questions are particularly important in large sales, and even very experienced salespeople rarely ask them well. We’ll be giving a lot of attention to Implication Questions in this book.

4. Need-payoff Questions. Finally, we found that very successful salespeople ask a fourth type of question during the Investigating stage. It’s called a Need-payoff Question, and typical examples would be “Would it be useful to speed this operation by 10 percent?” or “If we could improve the quality of this operation, how would that help you?” Need-payoff Questions have several uses, as we’ll see in Chapter 4. For now, perhaps the most important one is that they get the customer to tell you the benefits that your solution could offer. Need-payoff Questions have a very strong relationship to sales success. It’s been common, in our studies, to find that top performers ask more than 10 times as many Need-payoff Questions per call as do average performers.

The SPIN Model

These four types of questions—Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff—form a powerful questioning sequence that successful people use during the all-important Investigating stage of the call. I must emphasize that it’s not a rigid sequence. Top people don’t ask all their Situation Questions before moving on to Problem Questions, for example. But it would generally be true that Situation Questions are mostly asked early in the call and that the other questions broadly follow in the S-P-I-N sequence.

In this book I’ll be looking closely at these SPIN questions and showing you ways to use them to improve your success in major sales. I’ll be drawing on Huthwaite’s research studies, but even more, I’ll be using the experience of my training colleagues, Dick Ruff and John Wilson, who have designed programs that have helped tens of thousands of major-account salespeople from Fortune 500 companies to improve their selling skills and their sales performance. The SPIN questions work because they are derived from watching successful people in action. We hope that, like thousands before you, you’ll find SPIN a very practical sales tool.