Conversation transcript
Tony Hughes: As you know Neil, fifty years of SPIN soon next year. I've just got a few questions to ask you around where it came from because being the father of SPIN. you can tell us more than anybody.
Neil Rackham: Well, I'd have to go back a little before SPIN to the first time I thought about sales. I was a research fellow at Sheffield University looking at interactions between teams, starting to look a little bit at negotiation, I was interested in any interaction that was measurable. I was a measurement freak.
One day, someone said to me, “Why don't you study sales that's an interaction?” I said, “Erghh! I could be a respectful academic, why would I look at sales?” They said, “Can you answer this question? In the average salesforce, the top 10% outsell the bottom 10% by a factor of three to one, and no one knows why.”
I thought about that, and I thought, that is one very interesting question. That's when I started turning my attention to sales.
Next thing that happened was I got some research funding, because people will pay good money to have studies of sales, especially where it looked as though there was the possibility of creating new methodologies.
Something that we can't even understand now was how bad selling was in the early 70s, when I was really starting to look at it. Most American methods were transported to Europe when they'd run out of steam in America.
So, like twenty short-fire closes to close any sale. Books like compelling selling, which said, don't allow customers to open their mouths because they'll get doubts. So, keep talking, keep talking, and never ask questions.
A lot of people said, well, maybe those things work in America, but people in Europe don't think that way.
Now, at that time, Xerox was making too much profit. They had to get rid of it very quickly and I just happened by chance to approach them and say ”I think I have a method for creating a specifically European sales model. The other models which you are teaching at the moment, which people don't seem to like very much, are about the psychology of the American customer. So it could be different.”
That's when we first started to get the funds and began looking for a model. In the end, that's what led to SPIN.
Tony Hughes: Very interesting, I didn't realise that it had come out of the difference for Europeans.
Neil Rackham: Of course, the ironic thing is we found in the end that there wasn't a difference. We studied it in our research in Xerox in thirteen different countries.
We expected, for example; Southern Europe would sell differently from Scandinavia. No, we found that the people who were successful tended to follow the same pattern. Then later it became the predominant sales method in the United States too.
