SPIN Selling Applications in B2B Software Sales

How to Apply SPIN Selling in B2B Software Sales

When your sales team reaches out to their prospects, who’s doing most of the talking? If it’s not the prospects themselves, then your team is probably missing out on some crucial information. Getting prospects to talk about and analyze their own problems is one of the best ways for sales professionals to build up a new relationship with a potential buyer. How can they do this? By asking the right questions in the right order, in a process known as SPIN selling.

What is SPIN Selling?

The acronym sounds like something shady you would do with a reporter in the parking garage of a government office. It turns out to be quite the opposite. It’s one of the most effective ways to make a sale in business to business interactions. It’s also highly respectful of the prospect. Even today, sales has a reputation for being underhanded that’s hard to shake. In the past, it was all about leveraging an informational advantage that the sales professional often had over their prospect. Now, however, the tables have turned, and buyers have access to more information than ever before. SPIN selling recognizes that turn and acknowledges that the sales professional is the one who needs to gather more information. In 1988, Neil Rackham published the results of a study of 35,000 sales calls. His analysis explained the most successful process he found repeated throughout those calls. This process is all about asking the prospect a series of specific questions. These questions are designed to help both the salesperson and the prospect learn whether a sale can or should be made. They are qualifying questions, and they also lead to a logical conclusion: does it make sense to buy? He called the process SPIN Selling. The word SPIN in this case is an acronym, standing for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff. Let’s take a look at what each one means and how it applies specifically to B2B software sales.

Situation

This is pretty straightforward. Where does your prospect stand right now? What kind of software solutions are they currently using to manage a particular problem? Is it what they were expecting? What kinds of pain points are they experiencing? What’s their budget like for upgrades? These questions are all about understanding the present context the prospect finds themselves in. Keep in mind that many situational questions are not necessary. Enormous amounts of general company information are available online, so do your homework! Don’t irritate prospects with stuff that Google and LinkedIn can tell you. Save this moment for more questions that help you understand why things are the way they are.

Problem

Here, you’re still asking questions, but these should be framed in such a way as to call their attention to the fact that a problem exists. They may not have even noticed the problem before. Some of these questions may be directly related to pain points identified in the solution phase. Others may have something to do with the connection between their situation and the specific ways your solution could improve it. It’s important to remember here, though, that you’re still asking questions to get them to talk about themselves, not your solution. Questions formatted like “how intuitive is the user interface in the context of training?” and “How satisfied are you with the responsiveness of their tech support?” tend to yield interesting and thought-provoking answers.

Implication

Those thoughts allow you to drive the point home. If you’ve helped them identify a problem, now you need to help them see how it plays out further down the road. In other words, what are the implications for your company if that problem remains unaddressed? Think of questions like, “If you didn’t have to spend that much money on monthly subscriptions, how could that help you grow in other areas?” and “How is that lag time impacting agent productivity and career satisfaction? These questions create urgency in the prospect’s mind. There’s a recognition that they need to make an adjustment before they start to fly wildly off course.

Need-Payoff

This is where it all comes together. If your questioning helped your prospect recognize that their current situation is problematic and needs urgent attention, then you can help them see for themselves the benefits of your solution. This is not where you start listing features. Nor is it a moment for obvious and condescending questions like, “if you could save that money, would that be helpful?” On the contrary, Sales professionals need to be as careful in this step as in any other. They must tie the problems and implications to very specific alternatives. “If, by using Service Y, you could take those $10,000 you’re paying for Solution X each month and redirect more than half of it into your customer service training, how would that help your team establish market leadership?”

Implementing Powerful Sales Strategies, Faster

Boom Demand sales development representatives use SPIN selling and similar techniques in our outreach to our potential clients and their own prospects. What techniques are you currently using to bring more promising leads through the top of your sales funnel? To what extent are you finding that your most talented sales professionals are bogged down by the need to focus on cold calling and emailing? How much more revenue could you be earning if your in-house sales team members were spending 100% of their time building on existing relationships and closing new deals, instead of cold prospecting? If your sales team had the support of a low-cost, outsourced SDR team that was constantly sending warm prospects to your account executives, how would that help you reduce turnover and improve morale within your sales organization? See what we did there? Those might not be your exact pain points, but if they’re even close to what you’d like to improve, contact Boom Demand today! We can help smooth out those bumps and boost your sales funnel like nothing you’ve tried before.

Outsourced SDR Teams Streamline Sales Innovation

Why You’re Better Off Hiring an Outsourced SDR Team

Companies looking to scale operations often turn to the specializing trend in sales; that is, they build an SDR team. SDRs, or sales development representatives, focus on the top of the sales funnel, cultivating leads that they refer to account executives down the line for relationship-building and deal closing. This allows sales teams to achieve more sales, more efficiently. Some companies do this all in-house, but others have discovered the advantages of using outsourced SDR teams. Let’s take a look at why outsourcing this sales role could help your company more than keeping it in the family.

Economic Advantages

Outsourcing exists in the first place because it’s less expensive for some organizations and people to do certain business activities than others. So, in the simple search for better profit margins, companies seek to cut costs by hiring those for whom it costs less to do the jobs they want done. There are many ways this can happen. One is by simple innovation. One company finds a better, faster way to do a job, so they can lower their prices and win more clients. Another company bases its operations in a state or country where the costs of living and doing business are lower, with the same result. Some combination of these economic conditions provides a way to save money while getting the same job done. Outsourced SDR teams are no different. They exist because they can do the same work as an in-house team, at the same level of quality, but for less money. Whether they’re onshore, nearshore, or offshore compared to your organization, they have all the communications technology they need to be able to work with your existing sales team. At least, that’s how we do it with our nearshore SDR teams. Boom Demand SDRs integrate seamlessly into our clients’ sales organizations, as if they were working out of the building next door to you. Meetings happen online with video chats, and collaborative shared documents keep everyone literally on the same page.

Focused Expertise

Another way that outsourced SDR teams are better than in-house is that they are highly specialized. Rather than splitting your internal sales organization into two teams with distinct management needs, you keep your focus on closing deals, and the SDRs elsewhere focus on bringing you warm prospects. SDRs require a slightly different set of skills and talents to be successful versus traditional sales professionals. There’s certainly some overlap, as almost all salespeople know how to do cold calling, email prospecting, and social media outreach. But SDRs focus exclusively on those tasks, rather than the longer process of dealmaking. This calls for a different management style, different pay and incentive structures, and a different approach from Human Resources. In other words, doing this in-house has the potential to put more strain on your organization than you might anticipate. By contrast, outsourcing this function lets you leave those burdens in the hands of another company, one that’s far more experienced and accustomed to dealing with them. Think of this, again, in terms of the economic law of Comparative Advantage. To use an agricultural example, the USA could grow a lot more coffee plants if it wanted to. Farmers would have to build lots of expensive greenhouses to replicate the right climate conditions. Or, the country could just buy most of its coffee from Brazil, where the conditions are naturally ideal. Saudi Arabia could try to grow wheat for itself by desalinating ocean water and pumping it into the desert. But why bother with all that when it’s less expensive and faster to ship it from the USA?

Outsourced SDR Teams Can Pivot Faster

Companies that specialize in SDR work have much more freedom to experiment on your behalf. They can test out different messaging and strategies for you at a far lower opportunity cost than you’d experience in-house. You can think of an outsourced SDR team as a sales laboratory. The advantages of an outsourced SDR team make it easier for them to shift in response to market conditions. If you need to scale up operations, they already have the personnel in place for you. Likewise, having to scale down hurts an outsourcing partner a lot less than it does to your own staff. They can quickly re-position their SDRs onto other clients’ campaigns. They can also bolster their internal marketing efforts when you need fewer personnel working for you. Consider using Boom Demand’s professional nearshore SDRs to boost your sales volume! Contact us today to experience the specific benefits your business will enjoy from working with us!

B2B Blog Posts to Read Each Day of the Week

The Top B2B Software Blogs For Each Day of the Workweek

What’s the best way to make sure you’re getting the most out of your B2B software? Try reading a B2B Blog every day! Starting your day off with the latest news and ideas from leaders and other experts in the field is sure to keep you current. It’s a great way to make certain that you’re not missing the latest advances and strategies. This way, you can stay at or above the level of your competition. To make it simple, we’ve chosen one blog for each day of the week.

Monday: HubSpot

Mondays are a chore, we know. Even if you love your job to death, it’s sometimes hard to come back into the office after a great weekend. That’s why we like HubSpot first thing on Monday morning. Their B2B blog is never boring. They always cover a variety of topics relating to marketing and sales, and they keep it light. Some of their posts are downright funny, and that’s a great way to start the week. Having a laugh first will put you in just the right frame of mind.

Tuesday: Ramp: the InsightSquared Blog

Call it Technical Tuesday. Ramp, the InsightSquared blog, is a powerful way to learn about the specific ways that tiny changes can make a huge difference. This blog focuses on minor adjustments marketers can make to their strategies. Those minor adjustments, applied over time, can turn out to compound into exponentially greater success. Keep the ball rolling on Tuesday looking for those insights into small things that can become great.

Wednesday: Salesforce

Things tend to slow down on Wednesdays, so it’s a great time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. As one of the most successful companies of the SaaS and B2B marketing era, Salesforce naturally has a wider perspective. Their B2B blog takes a look at the way marketing interfaces with the outside world. Current events, humanitarian efforts, and macroeconomic changes can all affect the way you do business. So take the middle of the week to pause and think about why you do your work and how it affects the world around you.

Thursday: SiriusDecisions

The SiriusDecisions blog is a powerful resource for the last part of the week because it bridges the gap between the technical and the practical. When you’re stuck trying to get a particular aspect of your strategy to function better, look here for insights. Whether it’s a new management or technology strategy, this B2B blog is sure to give you the jump start you need to finish the week strong.

Friday: Bizible

This B2B blog by Marketo is perfect for wrapping things up. Not that there’s ever an end to marketing. We like reading Bizible on Fridays because they always give you something to think about. Chewing on the concepts they cover during the weekend will position you to make well-informed decisions in the week to come.

Reading a B2B Blog Daily Helps, and Boom Demand Helps Even More

It’s one thing to learn all you can about the latest in sales and marketing by reading a B2B blog each day. It’s another to let experts help you boost your outreach efforts immediately. Contact Boom Demand today to start implementing powerful scaling solutions that will grow your business like nothing you’ve tried before!