Conversation transcript
Tony Hughes: What about resistance? Because obviously, people had been doing tell-sell for such a long time. Then, when you came out with a new model of questioning, there must have been a lot of resistance to change?
Neil Rackham: Huge resistance, the best example of that is I had to go to eight publishers before I could publish SPIN Selling. I wrote it under contract for Prentice Hall. When I sent them the manuscript, they gave it to their expert, their guru, a man called Roy Hall. He wrote such a panning review, he said "There is but one truth in this dungheap of words." That was his opening sentence. He said, "You'll be the laughing stock if you publish this. It goes so against conventional wisdom. Selling is about overcoming objections and closing." He was a hard sell, small sale type. This was bad news for him. Once that happened, Prentice Hall cancelled the contract, and no other publisher would take it.
Neil Rackham: In the end I sort of bribed McGraw Hill by saying, "If you publish it, any unsold copies after three months, I'll buy". It turned out, of course, it was their best-selling business book of all time. So every six months when I got my royalty statements, I'd send them to Prentice Hall saying, "This could have been yours!"
Tony Hughes: How long did it take from writing the book and publishing it to it being accepted as the new way of doing things?
Neil Rackham: It happened quite quickly in the United States. The reason for that was Xerox was thought of as the leading sales company. IBM was also very, very highly thought of as a very sophisticated sales and marketing business. Once, IBM heard that Xerox had this new technique, they gave research funds and started to adopt in a number of their divisions. So with Xerox and IBM both using SPIN, and a lot of good buzz about it in the industry, it grew very rapidly. That's why the sales of the book just climbed every quarter, better than the last quarter, for more than 10 years, until in the end, it hit 6 million books worldwide.
Tony Hughes: Yeah, so IBM and Xerox were held up as the epitome of sales organisations back in the day, so it must have been a great coup to have them on board with SPIN Selling?
Neil Rackham: Yeah, that was it. Then in the consulting field, we got McKinsey and of course, McKinsey wouldn't call it selling because McKinsey doesn't do anything vulgar like sell. However, the process by which they deprived their clients of large sums of money was very interesting to them. We had a model which gave me a big insight int our own stuff.
Neil Rackham: What McKinsey said was, you can't consult one way and sell another way. It has to be a consistent interaction. It has to be client-centered. It has to look at them and their issues". I suddenly realised, yes, it's a consulting model. They used to teach it not as a sales model, but as a consulting model. They'd say to their new consultants, "We're going to teach you a model of how to help clients solve the problems that they want solved, not the problems that you want solved". They had this horrible little warning.
They said, "In this room, you come from the top 1% of the best business schools in the world, and yet 60% of you will not be here in two years' time. Why? Not because you can't solve problems. Any problem that's thrown at you, you can solve. It's because you can't solve problems the way clients want those problems solved. Because you don't listen to clients. You don't understand clients. And we're going to teach you a consulting model which centres around understanding clients and their needs." They never, ever mentioned sales, ever.
Tony Hughes: It was interesting. In the 1990s, I did a lot of work with Hewlett Packard all over the world and it was their consultants that I was doing the work with. They bought into it straight away. I realised and have said to a few people since then, some of the best salespeople I've ever met are consultants who you can stop them being experts.
Tony Hughes: If you can teach them those skills and use them in that consultative, persuasive manner, they made brilliant salespeople, absolutely fabulous salespeople.
Neil Rackham: Yeah, that would be my experience too.
