How to use SPIN Selling questions to inform your go-to-market strategy
In this article I’ll show you how creating SPIN Selling questions can be an important tool for anyone in a revenue leadership role - not just sellers and sales enablement.
This is an exercise I recommend to CROs, VPs of Revenue Operations and heads of marketing, sales and customer success.
What are SPIN Selling questions?
SPIN Selling is a methodology devised my Neil Rackham and popularised in his 1990 book “SPIN Selling”, built from research conducted across many thousands of successful sellers at the time.
SPIN breaks down selling into a series of questions:
Situation: what is happening right now?
Problem: what is the problem with how it works today?
Implication: what does this mean to the business if it isn’t fixed?
Need/Pay Off: what might you do differently if it was fixed?
In short - the research showed that poor performing sellers spent a lot of time on situation and problem questions, whereas top performers were effective in developing explicit implications and then painting the vision of removing that pain.
When I first became a salesperson in 1999, SPIN Selling was the methodology we followed and we all had a copy of the book on our desks.
Perhaps just because it was my first, SPIN Selling has always held its place in my heart as other ‘methodologies’ including Challenger, Gap and MEDDPICC have come along.
And the reason is - it provides a simple way to guide your thinking about your buyer in any new role you take on.
Anyone can create SPIN questions (not just sellers)
Over my career, as an individual contributor and sales leader, the first thing I did in any role was to spend time crafting a series of SPIN questions.
Side note: I would always do this for my interview which was a slam dunk approach - highly recommended.
It didn’t matter if there was another sales methodology in play, or an existing set of questions. And it didn’t matter if I was the one that would actually ask the questions, or I was leading the team that would.
The process of creating the questions was what was important and so I recommend this to leaders in marketing, sales, customer success or revenue operations.
Creating your questions
To provide some examples as inspiration, I’ll use some of my own questions that I developed for the RevOpsCharlie buyer enablement platform. The questions are aimed at a B2B SaaS CRO or VP of Revenue Operations - and they should give you an idea of how you’d craft your own questions for your own buyer personas.
Situation Questions
Situation questions are fact finding. Indeed they feel like an interrogation when you are on the receiving end of them - which is why buyers get frustrated if you overuse them, especially if you could have found this information out yourself.
“How many sales people do you have?” You can and should find that out yourself.
Side note: you can reframe situation questions as validation, “From my research it looks like you have 100 AEs, is that in the right area?”
For this exercise list down as many questions as possible that would help you get an understanding of the current situation.
My example situation questions:
How is your sales and marketing team structured to handle the front end of the buyer’s journey?
What pipeline coverage do you have currently?
What is your target pipeline conversion?
What lead sources make up your pipeline?
Which sources convert best?
How long does it take an AE to ramp to full productivity?
How much of your AE’s calendar is booked with customer meetings?
What percentage of pipeline is created by your AEs’ own prospecting?
How many meetings are your SDRs each generating each month?
What percentage of MQLs convert to becoming an opportunity?
What are the main reasons MQLs don’t convert into an opportunity?
Who is ultimately responsible for pipeline?
Where is your biggest challenge in your funnel - top, middle or bottom?
How does pipeline compare across your newer products?
How does pipeline compare across geographies?
How does pipeline compare across different customer segments?
What are the biggest challenges you face creating pipeline?
Who owns the buyer journey in your organisation?
Can you tell me more about your target customer and what typically attracts them to your product/service?
How does your team prioritise and qualify leads? Do marketing and sales say the same thing?
Which personas in the buying group do you provide content and tools for?
How often do you validate your understanding of the buyer journey with current prospects and customers?
What content or tools have you built specifically to help buyers in their buying journey?
Have there been any recent changes in how buyers buy that are impacting your sales strategy?
Problem questions
Problem questions start to hone in on the issues that the customer faces with their current situation.
We’re looking for pain - something that irks your buyer and that is causing downstream challenges beyond the problem itself.
My example problem questions:
Why do you think you struggle to generate the required pipeline?
What prevents AEs from creating enough pipeline?
What prevents SDRs from creating enough pipeline?
Why are your SDRs seeing less success than they were previously?
What do the sales team think of the leads coming across from marketing?
What do marketing think of how the sales team follow up their leads?
What are the biggest challenges in the handover from marketing to sales?
What are the biggest challenges in the handover from SDRs to AEs?
Are there specific stages in the sales process where leads tend to drop off or stall?
How much value do your SDRs provide to their prospects in their initial outreach?
How would customers rate your SDRs and AEs for their business acumen?
What percentage of your SDRs’ outreach relates to the business problem versus the solution?
How does your seller’s current quota attainment compare to the plan?
How well do you understand the places your buyers hangout to network and learn from their peers?
How well do you feel your content and tools support buyers in the early stages of their buying process?
What feedback have you received from SDRs and AEs about the content and tools they have at their disposal?
What feedback have you received from buyers about the content and tools they can access from your marketing and sales teams?
What are the biggest frustrations your SDRs and AEs express about engaging and converting leads from marketing?
What common themes do you notice in deals that don’t close later in the sales process?
How do you assess the quality of the leads entering your sales pipeline?
What content that your onboarding and customer success teams use do you think buyers would get most value from at the start of their buying journey?
Which buyer personas do you provide the least amount of content or information for?
Which part of the buying journey do you provide the least amount of content or information for?
What consistency in tone and messaging is there between the content your marketing, sales and onboarding teams use?
What content or tools do you provide to buyers that helps them to identify or quantify a problem with their current situation?
What types of content or tools are your sellers creating themselves to help buyers identify the business problem?
What types of content or tools are your buyers creating themselves to help their senior leaders identify and quantify the business problem?
Implication
In the problem questions we started to identify issues with the current situation, and lower performing sellers will jump on these problems and move excitedly to the solution “oooh our ACME widget can fix that!”
But these implication questions are where you can turn an annoying itch into a serious business challenge that needs immediate attention.
My example implication questions:
In what way have these pipeline challenges impacted your ability to meet sales targets?
How many additional sales people do you plan to hire to cover the reduced quota attainment so you can still achieve the plan?
What does the reduced quota attainment mean to your cost of acquiring customers?
How have you seen the reduced pipeline impact your seller’s morale and voluntary attrition rate for top performers?
What could be the impact of low seller morale on longer term customer satisfaction and retention?
Which vendors do you think buyers go to to learn about the business problems they face?
What impact do you see later in the sales cycle if sellers hold onto poorly qualified leads at the start?
What impact does it have on your conversion rate when buyers come to you later in their supplier selection process (with an RFP for example)?
How well do buyers think your company understands the specific needs of their role?
What do your sellers think about the content and tools you provide them to use in their outreach?
What do your buyers think about the change in your content’s tone and messaging as they engage with your marketing, sales and onboarding teams?
What does your CEO think about the content and tools you provide to buyers? What do they hear from the Exec Sponsors at your customers?
How easy is it for a buyer to understand how your company can help them with their business problem?
How well do buyers think you understand their unique challenges?
How easy do buyers think it will be to do business with you?
How does your lack of buyer content and tools affect your SDR/AEs ability to get responses in their outreach?
What do buyers do when they can’t get problem focused information from your company?
How might these pipeline and revenue challenges affect your ability to execute strategic initiatives such as acquisitions or opening in new geographies?
What is at stake for your personal career goals if the sales pipeline does not improve?
What is the impact on investor confidence if revenue targets continue to be missed?
Need/Pay-Off
I always smile when I get to Need/Pay-Off - it feels like a classic example of starting with the acronym (SPIN) and having to work backwards to the phrase for the last letter!
That being said, the Need/Pay-off questions help the buyer to envisage a future world where this problem is solved.
We ask the buyer to consider what they might do differently if this wasn’t an issue - they start to imagine a better place!
My example Need/Pay-off questions:
What would buyers do differently if they could get high quality, educational information that helped them to understand and quantify a significant business opportunity?
What would it mean to your sellers to have more predictable, qualified leads entering the pipeline?
What would your sellers do differently if they have buyer-focused content and tools to share with buyers?
What would your sellers do differently if they had content targeted at each member of your buying group?
If you could streamline your lead qualification process what would that mean for your sales efficiency?
How would the handover from marketing to sales be different if buyers had engaged with a tool providing data on their current situation?
Imagine a solution that reduces the time your sellers spend on unqualified or low-potential leads. How would that change their day-to-day activities?
What would the impact be to your cost of acquisition if you could close deals faster due to better buyer readiness?
What would be the impact to your cost of acquisition if you passed educated and vetted buyers straight to your AE instead of via an SDR?
How would the handover from AEs to onboarding be different if buyers had provided data on their current state through a buyer enablement tool?
How might your conversion rates improve if your sellers were aware of the full buying group?
How would your unplanned leavers metrics change if your AEs had full pipelines?
How would you change your hiring plan if you were able to increase the number of Sales Qualified Opportunities by 50%?
How would your forecasting confidence change if your buyers were engaging in a consultative exercise with your solution consultants during the sales cycle?
What would you do differently if you were able to double the conversion rate from MQL to SQO?
How would it affect your cost of acquisition if buyers identified themselves earlier in their buying process?
How would it affect your conversion rate if your current customers shared your content and tools with potential buyers in the private communities they were members of?
How would you align your SDR/AE team differently if 50% of your leads were coming in as educated buyers having engaged with an enablement tool?
Why should you create these questions?
If you are a CRO, CMO or VP of Revenue Operations why should you spend your time creating these questions?
Don’t you have a sales enablement team doing this for your sellers?
Personally, I find the process of being creative hugely valuable to me.
As I am working through each section I imagine myself in a conversation with a particular buyer, maybe an exec at a potential customer, and I walk my way through that meeting - diving from one section to another adding in new questions.
I know that I need to focus my attention on the implication section, and that forces me to think not about our product or fact finding, but on really trying to understand the pain that this situation is causing the customer.
If I can’t as a senior revenue leader develop my own implication questions I am not of great value to the rest of my go-to-market team.
Any time you spend that helps you get a better insight into the world of your buyer will help you to be a better leader, and if you have an eye on a future CRO role - this exercise will help you get into the mind of a seller.
So grab an empty notebook, get out of the office and let your mind get to work.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Enablement Assessment - Answer nine questions in five minutes and receive your free personalised report to help you SDRs and AEs generate pipeline.
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Buyer Enablement Platform - We’ll design, build and manage your buyer enablement platform on your behalf - generating quality pipeline in under 90 days.