What lawyers need to know about SPIN Selling – Part 1 of 3

I hate the phrase SPIN Selling. It sounds like something that should be used to sell a used car or a political position, by manipulating the facts and ignoring what a client really wants and needs.

In fact, it is just the opposite. SPIN Selling is the ultimate consultative selling technique, in which sales people really listen to buyers, come to understand what they need, and help buyers to find solutions that genuinely meet their objectives.

As legal marketing becomes more sophisticated and lawyers look to learn more about how related professions develop new business, I predict that SPIN Selling will be one of the most influential sources of new ideas. It has already been widely accepted by everyone else. According to the website of the man who invented SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham, “more than half the Fortune 500 train their salespeople using sales models derived from [this] research.”

But why did Rackham pick a name like this, with so many negative connotations? Because it did not have those negative connotations when he created the system in the 1970s. Rackham wanted to summarize the four types of questions that successful sales people ask in a catchy anagram, and came up with SPIN for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff. It was only a few years later that people started using the word spin perjoratively, to refer to manipulating political facts (in 1984, after the Reagan-Mondale presidential debates, according to National Public Radio’s history of spin).

These days, the name may put some people off, but the research and data behind it pulls them back in. In a world full of sales gurus who claim to have facts and figures to back up their claims, only one system is supported by the type of systematic data that lawyers and academics will respect: SPIN Selling.

Rackham’s web page calls it: “the largest ever research study of successful selling... supported by major multinationals including Xerox and IBM… The research took 12 years at a cost of $30 million, in today’s dollars.”

So what does SPIN Selling have to say to lawyers? Let’s start where Rackham does in The SPIN Selling Fieldbook, by asking a fundamental question about how you perceive the selling process. When you are talking to a potential client about a new engagement, who do you think should talk more, the potential client or the lawyer?

You’ve probably heard over and over that lawyers need to differentiate themselves from competitors. To do that, you need to talk, so it seems quite reasonable to assume that you should be doing most of the talking.

This conclusion fits comfortably with the standard personality profile of people who go into the legal profession. Peter Johnson, a lawyer himself and a principal at Law Practice Consultants, was the first to tell me that “At any given moment, the average lawyer is either talking, or getting ready to talk.”

But Rackham’s data says that in successful sales calls for large and complex products, it is the buyer who does most of the talking.

The fact that listening is critical will not surprise professional sales people. As I’ve written before, sales pros often quote the old saying that “When you meet with someone, whoever talks the most, will enjoy the meeting the most.” To build a relationship, you want the client to be the one who loves the meeting. Rackham differs from other sales gurus not in this conclusion, but in having the data to prove it, and to go further to analyze the best types of questions to ask.

If in the past you’ve been doing most of the talking with prospective clients, don’t feel too bad. The good news is that to succeed in sales you need to be just a little better than the people you compete with. When you are competing with other lawyers, most of them talk too much too, so you can probably get away with it.

Lots of people talk too much when they begin selling. I certainly did when I started my own company 22 years ago.

Soon after I became an entrepreneur, it became painfully obvious that if I wanted to stay in business, I was going to have to learn how to sell. I thought the hardest part would be getting appointments with the busy people who needed the kinds of custom training programs I was selling when the company started. Once I got in the door, I thought, between the genuine superiority of my company’s approach and my silver tongue, the rest would be easy.

I was right that it was hard to get in front of people, but wrong that I should use that valuable time talking. Mind you, it took me years to learn this. During the years that I was doing it wrong, I made plenty of sales. But not nearly as many as I did after I learned to actively listen, and to ask better questions.

Next week, I’ll talk about SPIN Selling’s distinctions between four types of questions - Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff – and how lawyers can use them to become better listeners.