Tony Hughes: So, would you have done anything different with SPIN, Neil?
Neil Rackham: Yes, I think I would. I was forced – in order to get the SPIN book published – to put a huge emphasis on the difference between small sales and large sales. Even then, back in those days, I realised that that wasn't the issue.
Neil Rackham: You can have what I was thinking of in those days as commodity sales, but I now call them transactional sales versus consultative sales. The difference is that in a transactional sale, what the customer's interested in is the product, because that's what they're buying. Once the internet came along, transactional sales had to shift to the internet. What was left was the consultative sale because at the moment, though this may change in the future, you can't solve problems.
The value add lies there in the salesperson and how they advise and behave. I knew that way back then. I wish I'd been able to write more about that, but the editors felt you really had to talk about small sales and big sales. That meant that what I think would have been a classic book, even now, is very limited because everyone knows that small sales are different than big sales. It was great news in the early 1980s.
It's not great news today.
Tony Hughes: Yeah. Before the internet came in, but when people started bringing in call centres to do the transaction sales and realised it was cheaper than having people out in the field. I remember working with a very large building organisation who decided that's what they were going to do, because they've got some big accounts, they were going to leave their account managers with the big accounts and all of the others were going to go into the call centre.
What happened was all the big accounts, they lost quite a lot of them because they didn't need the salespeople. They wanted to ring up and order 3,000 tonnes of concrete. The smaller accounts wanted the salespeople because they were doing what you said before, they were giving information. They got a relationship with them, they told them what the new products were on the marketplace. They'd compare and contrast and all that kind of thing. So in the end, they ended up losing accounts at both ends because they picked the cheapest way of doing this and what looked like the most efficient rather than effective way of doing it.
And within about a year, I think they moved back again, moved it back round again to the other way around.
Neil Rackham: That's a very good example, I think the big/small divide is a misleading one.