SPIN® -Selling by Neil Rackham

Author:Neil Rackham [Rackham, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-04-27T23:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.9 When selling new products, questions fall and features increase

We had an interesting opportunity to test whether something as simple as excessive features and advantages could really account for the slow growth of new product sales, when an important company in a medical market invited us to carry out an experiment with the launch of one of their new products. The product was a sophisticated, and expensive, piece of diagnostic equipment. It was dearly in the category of the larger sale. The machine was launched to most of the salesforce in the conventional way – a high-key presentation of its features and advantages by the product marketing team. But, for a small experimental group of sales people, we were allowed to launch it differently. Instead of showing them the product and describing its features and advantages, we didn’t even let them see what they would be selling. ‘It’s not important’, we explained. ‘What is important is that this machine is designed to solve problems for the doctors who use it.’ We then listed the problems the machine solved and the needs it met. Finally, we had our group make a list of accounts where these problems could exist, together with the problem, implication and need–payoff questions they would ask when they visited those accounts. By launching the product in terms of the problems it solved and how to probe for them, we were able to shift our small group’s attention away from the product and back to customer needs. The test that this was an effective strategy can be seen in the sales results. Our group averaged a 54 per cent higher level of sales than the rest of the salesforce during the product’s first year.

This research on new products also gave me an explanation for something which had puzzled me for many years. Some of the people with the best records for selling new products are the most cynical about product launches. I remember going to a product launch in Acapulco some years ago. The event was splendiferous. Big names from the entertainment world had been hired at unbelievable cost, the place swarmed with public relations, media specialists, communications consultants and a variety of similarly expensive people. The salespeople, eagerly awaiting the great event, filed into the main hall to hear one of the most spectacular and costly feature dumps of the decade. I was depressed at the enormous expense my client had gone to in order to make the salesforce communicate the new product ineffectively, so I decided to wait outside until all the fuss and spectacle was over. As I sat by the pool I noticed two other people who had slipped out of the same presentation. Talking with them, I found that they were both very experienced high performers. ‘It’s just another product’, said one, ‘When the fuss dies down, I’ll go back in and figure out which customers need it’. Clearly he wasn’t going to fall into the trap of neglecting needs in favour of features and advantages.

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