Tony Hughes: Neil, could you tell me a little bit more about the size of the research and the sample? Because my understanding is that to repeat that research now would be virtually impossible.
Neil Rackham: Yeah, it was huge. In fact, it's caused a lot of sceptical people to raise doubt about the whole premise that we worked on. How the hell could a research team watch 35,000 calls in real life? That's years and years of work. The reality is, that it was our methodology.
Our methodology was to run productivity projects with companies Xerox, IBM and Motorola. What we did in companies like these was we take groups of about 20 sales managers and we get them each to pick out 3 salespeople they wanted to coach over the next 3 months, intensively. Then we teach them SPIN analysis so they could code a SPIN call accurately.
Once we got them up to research level, which we defined as a correlation of 0.85 against standard tapes, we let them go out and watch 3 of their salespeople and get a sort of baseline call. Then they systematically coached over 5 calls where they took readings again.
So with each salesperson, there'd be 6 calls. There'd be 60 salespeople, so that's 360 calls in just that little project and they would all be of research standard, because every time the managers came together for the monthly review, we give them further training and testing and make sure that their observation skills were up to the right level.
That's how we got the massive sample. It was good to have a massive sample because it's very noisy data, but we could have done it with much smaller samples. But why, if you have the luxury of big samples, its much more conclusive.
The other thing, though, is a lot of people, quite rightly say "4 little questions can't bring about the kind of productivity changes that you've got. You're claiming that the first thousand people who were trained using the SPIN model against control groups had a 17% higher sales volume. That's enormous. We don't believe it." Well, the reality is it wasn't the four little questions. It was the whole coaching process, which was also the research process. These projects were very integrated and that's what made them powerful. So it made them hard work, but they did work.