SPIN your business problems on their head

When people talk about SPIN, many things come to mind. Maybe those carefully chosen words a politician uses to turn a situation to their advantage or playing a roulette wheel or even images of Shane Warne ripping the ball past Mike Gatting to knock over his stumps.

The SPIN I’m referring to here is a well-recognised sales methodology utilised successfully by solution sellers. It’s efficient and helps customers recognise the actual cost of a particular business issue. Otherwise, indecision becomes the biggest threat to making a sale.

SPIN is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication and Need Payoff, which are the four stages of questioning used to reveal the issue being addressed fully. A quick summary is as follows:  

Situation: Find out what the overriding issue is.

Problem: What is the specific problem that’s causing.

Implication: This is where you drill down into the specifics of how the problem impacts the business.

Need Payoff – The final step where it’s asked, “What will it mean if these business problems are not rectified?”

Logical stuff, right? 

Interestingly most salespeople stop at the Problem stage and immediately start offering solutions. Customers are just as guilty of wanting to leap into this stage. The fact is you cannot honestly assess the value of the offering until you fully understand the business impact. Understanding what it means to have the problem fixed helps you establish the time/effort/money you should commit to fixing it.  

While SPIN was developed as a sales tactic, Business owners can also apply it to any issue within their organisation. Do you really need a salesperson to take you through these steps to identify the actual cost of a problem and why you should fix it? Most people would say “no,” and rightly so. When you go down the SPIN path in your assessment, you spend far less time concerned about whether you should or shouldn’t take action and how much you need to spend. Most of the focus goes on how the solutions will fix it. Informed decisions are therefore made in a timelier manner, meaning the benefits are realised much sooner.

The next time you identify an issue in the business, give it a quick SPIN before deciding what action to take. Or contact Thrive and let us help you SPIN your way through your business problems.