Conversation transcript
Tony Hughes: One of the things that I think we've found over the last few years with SPIN is that the Problem questions tend now to be so much more future orientated.
They're not just what problems have you got in a very simple way, but given something coming up, maybe like AI, what problems will AI create for your business rather than solving, for example? So that future-looking problem has been something that we've seen salespeople using quite a lot recently.
Neil Rackham: I think we live in a world where risk is increasing all the time and people understand the way things are now but have a lot of fear about the way things are going to be. I had it put very well to me by one person who I interviewed on this and he said, "If I fall down in a hole, there's 50 salespeople who can sell me a ladder to climb out, but only 1 in 50 is going to prevent me from falling in a hole in the first place. That's who I want to buy from."
Tony Hughes: Great analogy. I guess that comes around to consultative selling, doesn't it? It's not just about solving the problem you've got at the time.
Neil Rackham: Yes, the plus of that is it's part of building a relationship into the future. In fact, way back before we had the SPIN model, we had a category called Future questions, which, even in those days, was a predictor of success. Good salespeople asked about the future.
