SPIN В2В. How to sell at a high price to an unmotivated client

Picture it: America, the fifties. Along the dusty roads between small towns rolls a middle-aged traveling salesman. In his trunk is a marvel of engineering: a mixer that whips five milkshakes at once. Not one, like everyone else’s — five! He walks into yet another roadside diner, sets the machine on the counter, and delivers to the owner a presentation that gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it.

He tells the owner roughly this: you’re not selling few milkshakes because you don’t need my mixer. On the contrary — you need my mixer precisely because you’re selling few milkshakes. A customer orders a shake, waits, gets bored, gets annoyed — and next time simply doesn’t order. But if you had a five-spindle machine, you’d be whipping shakes faster than you could count them. Increase supply — demand grows. Chicken and egg. And the final chord, a compliment: you’re a perceptive, far-sighted man; you can see a good idea from a distance. Well, what do you say?

Beautiful? Beautiful. Logical? Impeccable. There’s a benefit, there’s a metaphor, there’s even a compliment. Now guess what the diner owner answered.

«Well… thanks anyway.»

It’s a scene from the film The Founder — about Ray Kroc, the man who would later build the McDonald’s empire. When I first saw this clip, I literally snatched it out of the film and told myself: this is about SPIN. Or rather — about its absence. I will absolutely show this to the salespeople I train. And I’ve been showing it ever since — to hundreds of people.

Tell me honestly: how many times have you been that Ray Kroc? How many times have you laid out all your best for the client at once — benefits, numbers, case studies, guarantees — and heard a polite «thanks, we’ll think about it» in reply? If even once — this chapter is for you. If many times — this book is for you.

In this chapter we’ll figure out why beautiful presentations shatter against the client as against a wall. We’ll meet the technology developed specifically not to break through that wall but to dissolve it. You’ll learn how a need differs from a problem, how a strong question differs from a weak one, and why the client resembles a dog lying on a nail and whimpering. And at the end you’ll get an assignment which — if you do it rather than merely read it — will change your conversations with clients within a week.

Let’s go.

1. The Peddler on the Commuter Train

Let’s sort out what exactly Ray Kroc did and why it didn’t work.

I show this clip to salespeople and ask: what was that? What did we just see?

— A presentation, — they answer.

— Correct, a presentation. And how did it end?

— In failure.

— Why? The presentation was excellent.

And here the most interesting part begins. One salesperson, Andrey, put it like this: the need wasn’t uncovered, the pain point wasn’t uncovered. The diner owner he was presenting the mixer to didn’t need production growth. His pain is somewhere else, and that pain wasn’t opened up — so everything sailed past.

And Dmitry added a thought more precise still: or maybe he did need it — but didn’t yet know it himself.

Memorize both formulations; we’ll be returning to them all book long. For now, let me give my own definition of what Ray Kroc was doing. He worked like a peddler on a commuter train. You know those guys? A man walks through the train car telling everyone at once about his goods: «A unique flashlight, runs on a single battery, indispensable around the house…» He doesn’t ask who needs a flashlight. He broadcasts. And what conversion does he get? Right — miserable. One in a hundred. Because a monologue is a lottery: get lucky and stumble on someone whose need has already ripened — there’s a sale. No luck — «thanks anyway.»

In fairness: Ray Kroc had no chance to do otherwise. When he was hauling his mixers around, SPIN didn’t exist yet. Neil Rackham hadn’t yet run his research. Kroc acted as he knew how — like a peddler on a train. But that excuse no longer works for you. You’re holding this book.

Now an assignment. Don’t read on until you’ve done it. Imagine you are Ray Kroc. You’re standing in that very diner with the five-spindle mixer, and before you is the owner with his ancient one-shake machine. You understand that selling head-on won’t work — you’ve just seen how that ends. How would you steer the conversation? Formulate your first two or three phrases right now. Not «I roughly know what I’d talk about» — specific phrases. Write them down.

Written them? Now compare with how my students played it out. I took the role of the diner owner: I’m that fellow, the owner of the little restaurant. Sell to me.

Sergey found his footing first:

— How many milkshakes do you sell a day?

— Two hundred cups, — I answer.

— And when are your peak hours?

— Twelve to two.

— How long does one shake take to make?

— About a minute and a half.

Feel what’s happening? We haven’t sold anything yet. But the atmosphere is already different: not a huckster broadcasting at the counter, but two people talking about the business of one of them. Then Galina joined in:

— And how many servings does your machine make at a time?

— One. There’s one spindle in it.

— So in peak hours you make, say, seventy-five servings. Would you like to be making a hundred?

— I would…

And in that second — mark it — the client for the first time said «I want» himself. Not the salesperson telling him «you need this,» but the client saying «I would like.» Those are fundamentally different universes.

And then Zhenya asked a question that made me, playing the diner owner, genuinely shudder:

— Tell me, what happens to your sales if your only mixer breaks down?

— I… don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. That actually scared me a little.

There it is. That moment is what the entire technology this book is devoted to exists for. The salesperson hasn’t said a word about his product — and the client already feels uneasy living without it.

But I must tell the sequel too, because it’s instructive. Riding the wave of success, one of the salespeople immediately blurted out:

— So maybe we should replace your mixer with the five-spindle one? If one spindle breaks — four keep working!

And that was that. We were going so well — and fell off. I tell him: stop, stop. You’ve started pushing. Too early. I, the diner owner, have only just begun to understand that you didn’t walk in here for nothing — and you’re already dragging me to the register. An early solution kills a sale as reliably as a monologue does.

Remember: a monologue doesn’t sell. A dialogue sells. The master’s task is to steer the conversation so that the client himself says: «All right, show me what you’ve brought already.»

You can push head-on: «you need this, you need this.» Or you can ask a few questions — and the person will ask for the presentation himself. I’ve seen it many times: a client who has been talked with correctly interrupts the salesperson: «Hold on, wait — how does your material actually install? Tell me more.» He already needs it — before you started presenting. That is the result of the stage this book is devoted to.

CHECK YOURSELF

— What is Ray Kroc’s main mistake, described in one phrase — not «a bad presentation,» but more precisely?

— What changed in the conversation with the diner owner when the salespeople switched from statements to questions — how did the client’s state change?

— With what action did a salesperson nearly destroy the conversation at its best moment, and why is that dangerous?

PRACTICE

Recall your last deal that didn’t happen. Honestly reconstruct the first five minutes of the conversation: how many sentences did you utter, and how many did the client? Count literally. If the score is 20:3 in your favor — congratulations, you’ve found your inner commuter-train peddler. Write that score in the margin — repeat the measurement at the end of the book.

2. What You’re Fighting For: Point A and Point B

Before going further into the technology, let’s make a short stop. It may look like a lyrical digression, but it is in fact the foundation. Without it, everything else is just interesting information that will be forgotten within a week.

First, a clarifying question: does your personal income depend on the results of your sales? If yes — read on attentively. If you somehow answered «no» — over the years of my practice I’ve run into such cases a couple of times, and each time I thought: how does one even work with that… But I hope everything is fine in your case and the link exists.

Now take a sheet of paper. Not «picture a sheet of paper» — take one. This is the first of the book’s many places where the entire difference in results lies between «read it» and «did it.»

First. Write a number: how much you earn, on average, per month today. Show no one; it’s yours.

Second. Write how much you would like to be earning after three months of conscious, purposeful work on your selling. Realistic, but ambitious.

Third. Subtract the first from the second. That difference is what you’re fighting for. For one person it’s eighty thousand, for another one hundred fifty, for a third two hundred thirty. The number is yours, and any number is the right one.

Fourth. Multiply the difference by twelve. Imagine: you reached the new income dynamic and held it for a year. That is how much money appeared in your life additionally. A million and a half? Two? Look at that number. Do you need it?

And fifth, the most interesting. Write five answers to the question: what do you need this money for? What will you allow yourself, what will you buy, what will you get rid of? You have a minute. Five ideas.

When I give this exercise to salespeople, the mortgage always surfaces first. And I always ask: come on — besides the mortgage. A mortgage is a thing that can accompany a person all his life: closed one, opened another. It’s a strong motivational kick, I agree, but it doesn’t ignite. Look for what ignites. One person wrote: finish building the banya, change the car, a vacation. Another — the daughter’s education, a renovation, living without debts. And one simply wrote «a dream.» I ask: what dream? Maybe your dream is to eat an ice cream — you don’t need to plow for a whole year for that; go buy an ice cream. A dream without specifics is not a goal; it’s a caption on a postcard.

Speaking of specifics. Oleg, one of my students, wrote: a boat with a motor. And here I couldn’t hold back, because I’d found a kindred spirit: I myself had an inflatable boat with a nine-point-nine motor for five years, and recently I got myself a sixty-horsepower cabin boat and passed the license exam. And let me tell you: passing the boating license is a feat in its own right — a thousand questions with absolutely no bearing on real life; my brain nearly exploded; I passed the theory on the second try and the practical on the third. But here’s my point. I don’t judge your goals — they’re your goals. I judge the specifics. If I see «a boat with a motor, twenty-five horsepower» — I see there’s energy in it. There’s a reason to get up in the morning and sell.

And now the most important question of this block. I advise you to hang it on the fridge, on the monitor, or as your phone wallpaper — I’m barely joking. The question is: how am I going to increase my income? Not «by how much» — you’ve already written that. But — how? What specifically will you do differently?

I put this question to salespeople and watch the same picture every time. People write: «develop myself,» «sell more to earn more,» «level myself up.» I ask Artyom: what does «developing yourself» mean? Will you do more push-ups? Take up running? That’s not a goal; that’s intellectual chewing gum. Understand this: a goal is the brain’s order to the body. If you order the body an abstraction — «develop,» «sell more» — the body shrugs and goes on doing anything at all except selling. The body executes only concrete orders.

What does a concrete order look like? Oleg — the one with the boat — formulated: visit the developers by the end of the month. I say: the word «all» sounds exactly as unspecific as «none.» How many? He thought: seven. Now that’s a goal. Visit seven specific clients, work through each one’s needs with the technology you’ll master in this book, and give each one a presentation. A goal like that can be completed in a month, and it is guaranteed to move your sales. And I recommend you set yourself the same one right now: an N number of clients on whom you will run SPIN as you read this book. We’ll read — and train on them.

Remember: a goal is the brain’s order to the body. The body does not execute an abstract order. «Develop myself» is not a goal. «Hold seven SPIN meetings by the end of the month» is a goal.

CHECK YOURSELF

— What difference did you get between point A and point B — and what does that number, multiplied by twelve, mean to you?

— Why doesn’t the formulation «I’ll sell more to earn more» work as a goal?

— How does your personal answer to «how am I going to increase my income» sound — in the format of a concrete order to the body?

PRACTICE

Choose a number — how many clients you will work through with SPIN while reading this book. Five? Seven? Write that number next to the sum from the exercise. These two numbers are now linked.

3. Loader or Salesperson?

Now an exercise I give every salesperson — and every time it exposes something people haven’t thought about for years.

In any business, in any product group, in any line of services, there are two categories of what you work with. The first — what people buy from you. The market wants it on its own. You don’t have to sell it — it gets asked for, people come for it, they take it. The second — what you sell. The client doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking about it. He has to be convinced of it; you have to strain for it.

Take a sheet and draw up two lists for your product. On the left — what people buy from you. On the right — what you have to sell. I’ll give a hint on how to think, using the example of the construction-materials salespeople I worked with — their product is insulation.

When I first gave them this assignment, they started listing SKUs: people buy this board, and we have to sell this membrane and this adhesive foam. A fine start, but I asked them to dig deeper: which characteristics get bought, and which have to be sold? And here it got interesting. What gets bought — the name. The brand everyone knows; nothing needs explaining. Proven quality gets bought. Habit gets bought — «we’ve always taken it, we’ll take it now.» And what has to be sold? One of them, Sergey, raised a subject I’m grateful to him for to this day: on the market, his material has become a household word, and that word is used for all similar products, including outright garage-made ones. So what has to be sold is the uniqueness of the real product versus the counterfeit. Novelties the market doesn’t know yet have to be sold. And — attention — the price has to be sold. Because the real thing cannot cost the same as the garage-made thing.

Let’s stop here, because this is fundamental. SPIN is not for everything in a row. SPIN is for the right column of your list. For what doesn’t sell itself. For expensive products, expensive packages, expensive solutions. The left column sells without you.

And from here — a division I want to settle in your head forever. Two sub-personalities live in each of us: the loader and the salesperson. From the loader, people buy. He ships. The salesperson sells. He convinces, shapes the need, changes minds.

And now an uncomfortable story. There are managers who have worked in sales fifteen or twenty years. The man got lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you look at it: he sells a product everyone needs, there’s a line for it, he works in a shortage economy — this one gets some, that one doesn’t. And so for twenty years. How does he see himself? «I’m a super-salesman. Twenty years in the field. Heaps of clients.» In reality he is a first-rate loader. He may never once in his life have sold. Never fought an objection. Never gone in cold to a client who’s doing fine and works with a competitor at a lower price. Never once changed a person’s mind. All his life — he shipped.

Tell yourself honestly, only yourself: what percentage of your result is made by your inner loader, and what by the salesperson? Rate from one to ten how much this is about you. It’s not a verdict — it’s diagnostics. The loader in you is needed; he has his own work: there are clients and goods that genuinely don’t need selling — they just need shipping on time and without screw-ups. But there is the other part of the work. The salesperson is a hunter, a tiger walking his territory: he finds a new client, or sells twice as much to an old one, or sells at a higher price, or gets every novelty onto the shelf. That is his prey. And it is for him that this book is written.

Remember: from the loader, people buy — the salesperson sells. SPIN is for the salesperson: for expensive products, novelties, and everything that doesn’t sell itself.

CHECK YOURSELF

— What ended up on your «they buy from me» list, and what on the «I have to sell» list?

— Why do twenty years of tenure in sales say nothing about whether a person can sell?

— In which situations of your work is loader mode appropriate, and in which are you losing money by staying in it?

PRACTICE

Take your right-hand list — «what I have to sell» — and circle the one item on it that carries the most money for you. That is the item on which you will drill every tool of this chapter and the next ones. It is your prey for the coming month.

4. Where SPIN Lives: The Five Stages of a Sale

Before dissecting the technology, let’s put it in its place — in the literal sense. Any sale, whatever you deal in, passes through five stages. Test yourself: can you name them from memory? Write them down without peeking.

Now let’s check. Stage one — establishing contact. Note, not «the greeting» — a greeting is merely one element of contact, and you can’t name a whole stage after it. Stage two — needs discovery. But I ask that one more word be added to that name, and when I ask salespeople which word must be added for it to sound true, someone always guesses: shaping. Discovering and shaping needs. Feel the difference: you can discover what already exists. To shape means to create a need where the client hasn’t yet become aware of it. Remember Dmitry’s line about the diner owner: «maybe he did need it, but didn’t know it yet»? That’s it. Stage three — the presentation. Four — handling objections: we don’t want it, but we have to. Five — closing the deal.

So then: SPIN is the tool of the second stage. Its heart. Part of SPIN also works on establishing contact — you’ll see later how questions bring people closer — but its main work is here: to discover and to shape the need. The second book of this series will be devoted to the presentation, the third to objections. Everything in its place. For now, absorb the order: first SPIN — then the presentation. Ray Kroc did it the other way around, and you saw the result.

And one more fundamental principle before we move on. People buy anything for two reasons: because they want to gain something — that’s the positive purchase, the purchase of a dream. And because they want to avoid something — that’s the purchase from pain. A question for you: which purchase happens faster — from a dream or from pain?

Many salespeople answer: from a dream — a dream attracts, after all. Now recall yourself. A dream can be postponed — by a month, a year, until retirement. We dream professionally and at great length; at that discipline we’re all masters of sport. But pain is here and now. A tooth aches — you go to the dentist today, not «plan it for next quarter.» All fast sales are made from pain. Therefore the salesperson must know how to create the «from pain» state in negotiations — even where no pain was originally presumed. Then deals close faster.

Remember: fast sales are made from pain. A dream the client is prepared to postpone for years — pain demands a solution now.

CHECK YOURSELF

— What are the five stages of a sale called, and why can’t the second stage be called simply «needs discovery»?

— At which stage does SPIN work, and what must happen before you open the presentation?

— Why does a purchase from pain happen faster than a purchase from a dream — explain with an example from your own life?

PRACTICE

Recall your last three purchases costing more than a month’s salary — personal ones, not work ones. Next to each, write: was it a purchase from a dream or from pain? What actually pushed you? This small self-analysis will teach you to see the mechanism from the inside.

5. Need and Problem: Learning to See Underwater

Now — the distinction without which SPIN doesn’t work. Take two words salespeople usually dump into one pile: need and problem. What’s the difference? Think, formulate it in your own words, before reading on.