B2B Marketing

I just got through reading a book on SPIN® selling by Neil Rackham. It is not a new book and was first published back in 1987 and most sales people would have heard of it or at least be familiar with the recommendations. What particularly intrigued me was that it was research based, and evaluated 35,000 sales calls made by 10,000 sales people in 23 countries.

The book laid out an excellent framework which challenged conventional wisdom up to that point of effective selling of high-value products and services. Areas challenged were typical competencies such as closing techniques, why you shouldn't focus on benefits or services provided to the customer but instead attach to explicit needs etc and the need-payoffs and more. The basic technique shows a framework for:

Situation questions
Problem questions
Implication questions, and
Need-payoff questions.

It got me thinking about the amount of times, in the capacity as an organisational buyer, I would get turned off by sales reps trying traditional selling techniques on me such as the assumptive close because I could spot them a mile off and didn't appreciate being sold to in that manner. But for marketers there is certainly a need to understand and contribute to sales process above and beyond the stage when a marketing qualified lead is passed to the sales team.  As a marketer, by working directly with the sales force on guideline structures for approaching different stages in the sales process, there are several benefits:

Good marketers, you would think, should be best equipped to translate and map organisational offerings to customer's explicit pains. As such, an opportunity to work collaboratively with sales people on development of approaches towards the sales process, should prove beneficial to the organisation as a whole.

By getting directly involved with the sales team, marketers have an opportunity to gain deeper insight to their prospects across the whole spectrum of the sales cycle. If as a marketer, you have an opportunity to go on field calls with the sales teams, then do so without hesitation. There is nothing like real life observation to provide you insight that you can never gain just by discussion. And, if you don't have the opportunity, try to seek out some proactively. S.P.I.N is certainly not spin. No matter what way you want to package it, deeper insight and attaching to buyer's explicit needs will provide your organisation greater opportunity for success.