As a sales leader, you're always searching for ways to help your team succeed. But the reality is, your salespeople will face a variety of challenges – from enthusiastically offering solutions before understanding customer needs, to struggling to build trust and credibility. Overcoming these obstacles is crucial for driving consistent sales performance and growth.
We spoke with our sales experts to identify the 10 most common sales challenges organisations face, and the best strategies to overcome them using SPIN® Selling to empower your team to have more meaningful, value-driven conversations.
1. “Our salespeople rush to offer a solution before uncovering the customer’s needs.”
Many salespeople are too eager to present their offering before fully exploring the customer's challenges. Without a complete grasp of the customer's problems, reps risk proposing solutions that don't fully align with their actual requirements.
Our research shows that sellers who offered their solution after thoroughly exploring the customer's needs were more successful than those who rushed to present early on. When the salesperson offers a solution that specifically addresses a need voiced by the customer, they are much more likely to progress the sale effectively.
The SPIN® Selling methodology teaches your team to ask strategic questions that uncover deeper insights into customer problems before presenting anything. By using the SPIN questioning framework, sellers can guide customers to reflect on their challenges, helping them understand the full impact and increasing the perceived value of the proposed solution.
2. “Our teams all have a different approach to selling, which means differing customer experiences.”
When your sales team lacks a unified approach, it creates variable customer experiences and makes it difficult to measure progress and ensure quality interactions across an organisation. Consistency builds trust and credibility with customers, reducing perceived risk.
It's important that the whole team uses a common sales language so that important needs aren't missed, and you can more easily track where they are in the sales process. A consistent methodology like SPIN Selling ensures your reps use the same tools and techniques, making it easier to onboard new hires, provide effective coaching, and determine the next logical steps in the sales cycle.
This unified approach also facilitates better collaboration among salespeople. When the entire team speaks the same language, they can more easily share information, identify complementary opportunities, and deliver a cohesive customer experience.
3. “Our sellers lack the confidence to have complex conversations.”
In complex sales conversations, engaging with confidence is key. Any insecurity felt by the salesperson often leads them to focus solely on product features rather than having meaningful conversations about customer needs.
Being able to confidently guide these complex conversations shows the customer you're a trusted and knowledgeable advisor who can help them achieve their goals. This builds long-lasting, stronger business relationships. The SPIN® framework equips salespeople with a structured approach to have these impactful dialogues, boosting their confidence and effectiveness.
4. “Our sales teams don’t adequately prepare before a meeting.”
It isn't always easy to find the time to fully prepare for a meeting with a potential client, particularly within virtual selling environments. Your salespeople may be going from meeting to meeting without a moment in between to gather their thoughts or do any kind of meaningful planning. This means they're less likely to meet their objectives - if they even had time to plan some in the first place!
One way to overcome this is to carve out dedicated time for your team to prepare for each call. This could involve using tools like Huthwaite's Persuasive Case Analysis (PCA) form, which gives sellers the opportunity to think about a client's potential problems in advance and helps them prepare questions that can prompt customers to consider how your solution can help.
Alongside the PCA form, there are other resources like the Call Planning tool and the T-form, which guide your team in planning, note-taking, and meaningful follow ups leading to better overall meeting outcomes. These tools can be integrated within your CRM, making it easy for reps to access and use them consistently.
5. “Our sales teams find it difficult to build trust and credibility with clients because they are focusing on the product, not the customer.”
When sales teams focus too much on product features, they risk alienating clients. This product-centric approach can make customers feel like their needs are secondary, damaging trust and credibility.
Huthwaite's research shows that less successful sellers spend about 35% of their time discussing product features, while successful sellers focus much more time uncovering customer needs.
Using the SPIN® framework offers a customer-focused approach that ensures clients feel heard and understood, establishing stronger, trust-based relationships that lead to more successful outcomes. Rather than leading with features, salespeople are equipped to have meaningful dialogues that uncover the customer's true challenges and position your offering as the best-fit solution.
Learn about the science behind the SPIN methodology and why it works. Download the whitepaper
6. “We find that the decision cycles are too long.”
In complex sales, it's inevitable that there will be some degree of back and forth between seller and customer. However, overly long decision cycles can be a common sales challenge that slows down business growth, causes customer frustration, and leads to lost opportunities. As sales teams struggle to close deals, both sellers and customers may experience increased stress and uncertainty.
When salespeople focus on addressing the needs expressed by the customer, they can offer a tailored solution that suits all people affected by the problem. This shows the customer that the seller truly understands their challenges and is proposing the best-fit solution. It also helps the customer see the consequences of not finding a resolution, further motivating them to move forward.
In one case study, a company saw their sales success rate jump from 23% to 69% after their first SPIN® coached call, and then climb to 94% after their third coached call. By teaching reps to have more impactful, need-focused conversations, SPIN® helps shorten the decision cycle and increase the likelihood of winning the deal.
7. “Our salespeople often overlook deeper issues and offer the ‘wrong’ solution too quickly.”
Salespeople sometimes fail to dig deeper beyond the initial problem presented by customers and simply take a customer's issues at face value. Not taking the time to investigate and explore which other areas could be affected now or in the future can lead them to miss key account information that could help secure the deal, and the opportunity to build maximum value for the customer may be lost.
When a seller takes the time to listen and uncover the complete picture, the customer believes they are recommending the best solution possible. SPIN® equips your team to look beyond the surface-level problem, identify all avenues of the opportunity and offer a solution that comprehensively addresses the customer's challenges.
8. “Our sellers aren’t recording key information in the same place.”
One issue we often see after a sales training initiative is the new behaviours and terminology that were met with real enthusiasm start to fade, and the old habits creep back in. This is partly due to a lack of integration between the training methodology and the existing CRM system. When there's no clear, systematic way for salespeople to continue using the new skills they've learned, it becomes difficult to reinforce them in day-to-day activities.
SPIN® tools can be seamlessly integrated within your existing CRM, providing a consistent framework for logging and tracking customer interactions. This reinforces the methodology in the salespeople's workflow, helping to embed the new behaviours and ensure uniform recording of client information.
By having SPIN® resources available within the CRM, teams can more easily prepare for future calls, plan follow-up actions, and share/communicate customer needs with other key stakeholders like pre-sales, project managers, and customer service. This systematic approach to information recording also supports better coaching opportunities and enables more accurate assessment of current and new sales.
9. “We are regularly invited to engage with prospects when they’ve already written a specification that we have not had chance to influence.”
When a sales team is invited to respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP) after the prospect has already developed a specification, the challenge can be inherent in the RFP itself. The specification may be aligned with a competitor's strengths or fail to fully capture the unique value your offering can provide.
To overcome this, sales reps need to find ways to influence the process even after the RFP is written. One way to do this is by asking insightful, value-driven questions that make the prospect rethink their priorities. By identifying any gaps in the RFP and proposing solutions that offer better outcomes, reps can position their offerings as more tailored to the prospect's needs, even if those needs were not fully addressed in the original specification.
In addition to responding to the RFP, it's crucial for sales teams to proactively engage with potential clients much earlier in the Buying Cycle™. By building relationships before an RFP is issued, reps can help shape the specifications themselves. This requires a deep understanding of the client's industry, business challenges, and future goals. By regularly conducting discovery sessions, offering thought leadership, and identifying where prospects are in their buying process, sales teams can subtly guide them toward solutions that play to your organisation's strengths.
With this SPIN®-driven approach, sellers move from simply reacting to RFPs to proactively driving the conversation and influencing the criteria for success.
10. “Previous training hasn’t been effective, as we didn’t get the opportunity to practice.”
Often, the reason that training programs don't provide a strong ROI is because participants don't have the opportunity to practice their new skills, and therefore lack the confidence to apply them within their role. As a result, they're more likely to revert to the old way of doing things, and the desired behaviour change never materialises.
Salespeople need the opportunity to practice, so they can truly understand how to apply what they've learned every day. Without this, they're much more likely to ignore their newfound knowledge and simply continue doing what they've always done.
At Huthwaite, all SPIN® Selling learning journeys are broken down into three distinct phases:
- Acquire Knowledge: Participants complete eLearning before the classroom/virtual session to become acquainted with the materials. This can be completed while on the job, meaning less time is taken away from their role.
- Skills and Practice: This phase is the classroom session, where participants are working together with their peers and an expert facilitator. During this phase, they'll learn the SPIN® methodology and can put their newfound skills into practice in a safe, controlled environment.
- Workplace Transfer: After completing their training, participants head back into the workplace to begin applying what they've practiced. They'll have created an action plan and will be able to confer with their peers and an expert on Huthwaite's collaborative learning platform.
Having the opportunity to practice means your team will feel confident in using their SPIN® skills and can immediately begin to use them back in the workplace. These new behaviours eventually become embedded in their day-to-day role, driving long-term, sustainable change.
Key takeaways
Implementing the SPIN® Selling methodology can help your sales organisation overcome these common pitfalls. By teaching a structured, customer-centric approach, SPIN® empowers your team to drive more successful, trust-based relationships that deliver measurable results.
Want to learn more about how SPIN® can transform your sales performance? [Download our white paper] to discover the full power of this proven framework.
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Transform your sales performance and discover the full power of this proven framework by downloading "The Science Behind SPIN"
