Conversation transcript
Tony Hughes: Was there a point in time that you could remember the eureka moment, shall we call it, when you suddenly realised this stuff actually works?
Neil Rackham: Yes, in two senses. The first was trying it myself. I'm a great teller, give me a chance, and I will give information until there's no more information to give. So I thought, I ought to try this out.
I found that actually, people seem to respond very well when you ask them questions, when you explore things from their point of view, when you try and understand where they're coming from. As someone with at least a touch of the Asperger's in me, that was a great revelation. So that was the first thing.
The second thing was, something happened in Newcastle. Xerox had 17 branches in the UK, and Newcastle was number 17 in the sales ranking. They had a manager called Colin Lane who was under the Xerox sentence of death. You've got 3 months to get something happening, or you're out. When we first got our preliminary results, the head of Xerox research at the time said, Do you want to test it on a branch in the UK? We were a bit scared, but we said, Okay, we'll try it. We went in and we worked with them.
Neil Rackham: They were desperate. They had 7 managers and the branch manager, we worked with them for 6 months. It was a mixture of coaching, teaching on the SPIN® model, and they were hungry for it.
Now, whether it was due to what we did or due to their desperation or due to the fact that the economy in the north was starting to improve a bit, they moved up from being 17th to being 3rd. Then 6 months later, they became the top branch in the UK. Of course, the moment Xerox heard about that back in Stamford, Connecticut, they said, 'Wow, it works! Come over to the States'. I came over to the States, and I never really came back.
