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It’s been 20 years since Neil Rackham published his 1988 book, SPIN Selling. For those of you who are too young to remember when this book was a business best seller, I can tell you that it turned a lot of traditional sales training concepts upside down. To a great extent it set in motion some major changes in how we currently view the customer/salesperson interaction.

1950’s style sales training wasn’t very pretty, nor was it very effective. Neil started a trend with his book that made us challenge those outdated views of the sales process. He also made us look more objectively at how sales professionals are trained and how we interact with prospects and customers.

Let’s review what made this book so noteworthy in relation to sales skills and concepts.

1. The author took time to research his material. Prior to the writing of this book (and even today) much of what passed for sales training was just the writer’s personal experiences and biases. Neil used a scientifically crafted approach to prove his points. This is a trend that fortunately is becoming more prominent in sales training today.
2. Neil broke the sales process down into four basic steps which you’ll find in most current sales training. Prior to his book these steps were not so clearly defined and understood.
3. He introduced ideas that were probably thought to be sinful to even consider in sales training circles 20 years ago. Things like: first impressions are greatly overrated, using scripts is a great way to destroy the sales process, questions are everything when it comes to selling, etc.

While I certainly don’t agree with all of the content in SPIN Selling, I have to applaud the author for researching his subject so well and not being afraid to be a contrarian. We need more Neil Rackhams in sales training.

While we don’t talk as much about this book today, many of its concepts have been integrated into current sales training. We shouldn’t forget the powerful contributions that were made by this book.

Should you read this book? It would be most helpful to those that are involved in consultative sales versus transactional sales, but I would encourage it as a classic sales training must-read, regardless of what type of sales environment you work in.

© 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Tags: questions, sales-training

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