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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique research into major sales success, 27 Jul 2003
What made this book unique for me, amongst dozens of other sales books in my collection, is that this is researched based - what Neil Rackham recommends has been proven to work by thousands of other salespeople.For a psychologist, Rackham sounds like a pretty good salesperson himself, drawing on personal examples of how he has sold clients on research projects. However, the book presents the SPIN model as developed from observing thousands of sales calls in action. The results are convincing - success in major sales comes from following this model. The SPIN techniques, which centre around a questioning model, go against a lot of coventional sales wisdom, but Rackham can demonstrate how and why his approach works. The book begins by differentiating large and small sales, which most other sales books and training programmes do not, then goes on to explain the research. This leads to an explanation of the techniques and a great final chapter on 'Turning Theory into Practice'. In one sense, all you need to know from the research is that success largely depends on asking questions that uncover four areas: Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. But the book is worth so much more for everything else it contains. For example, if you're in major sales, would you like to know the impact different methods of opening the call can have on the outcome? Or how about how your success rate will be affected by the number of times you ask for the order? What about how to sell benefits and overcome objections? This all sounds like standard stuff, but the results the research came up with throw up surprising answers to all these questions. If you're in major sales and haven't read this book, there's a very good chance that you were trained in techniques that are actually HINDERING your ability to maximise your sales. For that reason alone, buy this book and make sure you're not throwing away commission every time you make a call.
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by Neil Rackham
by Keith M. Eades
