SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham

Author:Neil Rackham
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The Difference between

Implication and Need-Payoff

Questions

Both Implication and Need-payoff Questions develop Implied Needs into Explicit Needs, and because they have a similar purpose, it’s easy to confuse them. Check whether you’re clear about the difference between them by deciding which is which in this brief extract from a sales call:

The Implication Questions are examples 1, 3, and 4. Examples 2, 5, and 6 are Need-payoff Questions. Don’t be too dismayed if you found it difficult to decide which was which. At first, even the Huthwaite team found it hard. In the early stages of our research, we would often come across examples of questions where we weren’t sure which category fitted best. We’d write these examples up on a large white board in the office. From time to time we’d meet to discuss these tough categorization problems—boundary issues is the technical term—to make sure we had the closely standardized agreement between us that’s needed for this kind of research.

During one of these discussions, the 8-year-old son of a team member came into the office to collect his father from work. We were in the middle of a lengthy argument about the examples on the board, trying to agree which were Implication and which were Need-payoff Questions. The kid looked at the board for a moment and said, “That one, that one, and that one are Implication Questions and all the others are Need-payoff Questions.” We were taken aback—we’d come to the same conclusion but we’d needed half an hour to do it.

“How can you tell?” we asked.

“Easy,” he said. “Implication Questions are always sad. Need-payoff Questions are always happy.”

He’s right, and since then we’ve called it Quincy’s Rule, after its 8-year-old discoverer. Put in a more adult way, Implication Questions are problem-centered—they make the problem more serious—and that’s why they are “sad.” Need-payoff Questions, in contrast, are solution-centered (Figure 4.9). They ask about the usefulness or value of solving a problem, and that’s why they seem “happy.”

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