SPIN Selling prompts – from the experts in SPIN

One of the areas where we at Huthwaite International have advocated a role for Generative AI in the sales process is in call planning. This is certainly a useful start point if you are new to using AI and have access to the myriad of free GPTs which will answer questions and with which you are able to interact as if talking to a human with expertise.

“A minute spent planning a call is worth ten minutes analysing why a call went wrong or a sale that was lost.” – Neil Rackham

By call, we mean any interaction with a customer or prospect. These might be face-to-face meetings, telephone conversations or meetings using Zoom, Teams or an alternative video conference tool. The point is that most contacts with customers and prospects would benefit from a good plan and most contacts have the potential for you to investigate customer needs, demonstrate your capability to address those needs and gain a commitment from the customer.

Where to start? How about with the objective of the call? Most sellers will see their call objective as being to sell their product, explain their product or introduce themselves to a client or potential client. In business-to-business (B2B) sales, an order is rarely the outcome achieved within a first meeting, and many sales processes – and customer buying processes – require multiple meetings between contact and contract. Explaining your product without the customer’s context is just feature dumping – and who wants to do that? Introducing yourself is part of every successful meeting – but not an outcome worth the travel time – even if you’re only travelling as far as your computer for a Teams call.

Some will have less measurable objectives such as ‘build trust’, ‘establish rapport’ or ‘develop a relationship’. All fine for the next time someone swipes right on your Tinder profile – less effective when your company is expecting measurable progress from each of your interactions with clients.

While you might have ‘had a play’ with AI before, you probably haven’t used it to full advantage. If you’re SPIN® trained, there’s a multitude of ways that AI can help you to prepare and craft an objective before you step foot in the room – either virtual or physical – with a potential client. Here are some possible SPIN® AI prompts you can use to help with call planning. 

Suggested SPIN AI prompts – objectives

The more detailed your prompt, the more likely you are to generate a successful outcome, so here are a couple we have seen work:

1. "I am a salesperson who is meeting a new contact that has enquired via my company's website. I am not sure what they are looking for, but my research suggests they are unlikely to be the final decision maker. I would like you to suggest some call objectives that would represent a positive outcome from the meeting and that would show that the prospect was serious about doing business with me."

2. "I am salesperson having a meeting with an existing customer. I have not met them for around a year. I am keen to find out how things are going and what has changed, but I want the meeting to be more than re-establishing contact and having a chat. Can you suggest an objective for the meeting which shows that they are committed to exploring a new project with us? What objective would show the meeting has been a success?"

The anatomy of these prompts

These have all been tested on various Generative AI Chat Bots and came back with pretty helpful answers.

So, rather than create a whole series of examples, and to enable you to create your own, let’s look at what each prompt includes:

a. The situation/context – who you are, who they are, description of your business relationship.
b. What do you already know/not know?
c. What would constitute success/disappointment for you?
d. What response do you want from the AI?

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Suggested SPIN AI prompts – identifying Implied Needs and their Implications

At this stage, the call plan turns to identifying the potential problems a customer may have that your products or services are uniquely placed to address. As well as identifying areas of dissatisfaction, Huthwaite International’s research found that successful sellers looked for the consequences of leaving problems unresolved. These negative Implications may be associated with lost time, extra expenditure/higher costs, inefficiencies in process, delays to future plans and the impact on people. 

Again, being as specific as possible helps. You might find turning to your own company’s description of your products and services provides a level of detail which will assist you.

Here are two different industry examples  identifying both problems and implications:

The anatomy of these prompts

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Implication prompts

Remember that Generative AI is not a super-duper search engine. It is generative – that is, it answers questions in a human-like way, rather than just supplies you with a million links. It is also interactive – you can ask follow-up questions within the same chat you are engaged in with your chosen Generative AI tool. So, when we look at the Implications of leaving a problem unsolved, we use this framework:

a. Which of the problems identified in response to the first question do you want to drill down on? How large might the problem be? (If you can set some parameters, you’ll receive a much more detailed response.)
b. What’s the area you want to explore further – money, time, plans, processes or people?
c. What kind of response do you want to see? (number of suggested implications, for example).

You can, of course, repeat this exercise for any of the problems previously identified. We would recommend that each potential problem has around 2 or 3 potential implications identified, which will enable the seller to extend the problem in the mind of the customer.

Suggested SPIN AI prompts – Payoffs

The final area of the SPIN® Call Planner is the Payoff section. This is where the seller plans the conversion of the problems and implications identified earlier into Payoffs – or outcomes from resolving these issues that will generate Value for the customer.

As with Implications, these will be related to Time, Money, Plans, Process efficiency and People, but this time they will be positive requirements where the customer is imagining how they will gain from a solution to the issue they are facing. And as with asking an AI to help, you can carry on the previous conversation, for example:

1. As well as potential cost savings, what other payoffs would the farm gain by resolving this issue? Please provide as many as you can think of.

In this case, the payoffs included Improved Product Quality, Strengthened Customer Relationships, Operational Efficiency and Improved Employee Morale!

You may then choose to use a similar framework to clarify the requirement (gain an understanding of the size and timeline for the payoff) and extend the requirement (understand the knock-on benefits of this gain), although using a series of prompts like this will probably provide more than enough ideas to enable you to be well prepared for the meeting.

The anatomy of this prompt

In both cases, the framework for writing an effective prompt will be:

a. Describe the focus – the problem or potential outcome of solving the problem. This might be for the business or for the individual with whom you are meeting.
b. Ask for the payoffs (how this will add value to the client)?

Next steps

That’s the plan complete. You have used a Generative AI tool to help you to complete a Call Planner. Now, however, you need to think about the questions you will ask to move the conversation into a discussion about these potential problems that you believe your products and services can address. You’ll also need to have some clear ideas about the questions you could ask to explore the Implications of leaving these problems unresolved and questions which help you to convert the dissatisfactions you have uncovered into customer statements of want, desire or intention to act.

That’s where your completion of a SPIN® Selling learning journey will help. During your time learning and practicing the SPIN® behaviours – in simulations and exercises and in real customer interactions – you will have received expert feedback and learned the importance of using SPIN®:

• Not as a script, but as a framework
• As the basis for a conversation, not an interrogation
• As a route to ensuring that the customer is at the centre of your sales interactions
• As the basis for reflection to enable you to continually improve and learn.

And finally, having uncovered a requirement that your products and services are well-placed to meet, you can ask for a commitment from your customer to move the sales process forward.

Of course! You started with your call objective. Well done, you have already used AI to generate some suggestions abut what a successful outcome from the meeting would look like. Now you just need to ask for it.

Good luck.

"Our collaboration with Huthwaite has been instrumental in upskilling and empowering over 100 of our colleagues globally. It has provided us with a robust framework to engage with our clients more effectively, fostering a consultative approach that's results driven. As we look to the future, we are excited about the integration of SPIN® with generative AI and the potential it holds for revolutionising the sales landscape."

– Myles Davidson, Head of Sales, Zühlke

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