Tony Hughes: A lot of sales methodologies, if we call them methodologies, have come out over the last 50 years and people try to say, "Well, they're better than SPIN because they're newer."
In my experience of using these things and in some cases selling against them, I've often found that they're all complementary because, for most of the ones that people bring out, you still need to have a way of being able to have that conversation with a customer.
Nobody's gone back to the sell-tell days. They've all said it's got to be consultative in some way or another. I've often found it quite interesting having conversations with people about SPIN who want to say it's a very simple model. But when you come to implement that simple model, it's a lot more difficult.
Neil Rackham: Well, I've spent a lot of time with people who've decided to adopt much more complex models. The reality is a salesperson is overloaded. When you're there with the customer, you haven't got a lot of time to think about what kind of behaviour you should use.
You are there in real time and you only have a very limited attention that you can give to trying to try anything new. So 4 SPIN behaviours is about as much as people can handle in terms of questioning. I've seen 16-behaviour models, a 28-behaviour model. You know that it's academically impossible.
Neil Rackham: Just as an aside, can I talk a little bit about what a good model is?
I think it's very important people understand this. Most of the people who develop these very complex models believe that the nearer a model is to reality, the better it is. So they say. "Ah, yes, but if you divided your implication questions up into 4 different types, that would give you much finer discriminations, that would be nearer to what's real." And so these complex models proliferate to try to be more valid or more real.
But a good model is at the intersection of validity and simplicity. After all, if the validity of a model, if its nearness to real life, was what was the measure of whether it was any good, why would we use models? We'd use real life. We need models because real life is too complex to handle, so there has to be a simplification.
So a good model is at the intersection between validity and simplicity. One of the things I've always fought for is the simplicity dimension, because that gets most neglected by people who develop training, by people who are trying to choose the best model for their salesforce.
Tony Hughes: Yeah, it's almost like over featuring some of the models. We see that a lot. Almost as if, "Well, if we're going to pay this amount of money to train our salespeople, we want more in it." Actually, you don't want more in it. What you want is simplicity to get that behaviour change. That's the difficult piece. It's getting the behaviour change that's the difficult thing.
Neil Rackham: I think you're right. In fact, if I could be heretical for a moment, I often get the question, "How come these 4 little behaviours bring about some of the big productivity changes that you've measured and claim your clients have achieved?" My answer is, "It's not the 4 little behaviours. It's the fact that they are part of a systematic coaching process that's gone on over months." There's no free lunch in the sales training business and in the sales learning business. It's hard work and the more you add complexity, the less likely you are to succeed.