Breaking Down The Parts Of A Cold Call With Spin Selling

So, you've just landed your first sales role. Congrats! But maybe you don't know how to cold call yet? Maybe you don't know how to introduce yourself? Maybe you're not comfortable with the questions you need to ask. And you definitely don't know how to close yet. Well, you are in the right place, my friend.

You see, there isn't really a cut-and-dry one size fits all answer for you because the best salespeople in the world use a number of different frameworks and methodologies to make sure that they're getting the most out of every prospect interaction because the best salespeople know conversations with prospects can be well, hard to come by.

So when you do get someone on the phone, you have to be ready. And to make sure they're ready, many of these sales. People are turning to one framework called SPIN Selling.

What Is Spin Selling?

SPIN selling is actually an acronym used in sales to help segment a key moment of a cold call, the discovery phase. The discovery phase is one of the most important parts of a cold call, but it's often the one that new sellers struggle with the most because typically it's in the discovery phase that your script gets tossed out the window. Because sure, you can include the questions that you want to ask in your script, but frankly, you have no idea how the prospect is going to answer them.

So SPIN selling helps guide the seller through the discovery phase. It helps them stay in control of the conversation while also making sure that they collect all of the key details they need to properly close the call. Now that we've talked about what SPIN selling is, why don't we talk about the fun part? How to use it in practice! And to do that we need to know what it stands for.

What does SPIN selling stand for?

SPIN selling stands for Situational, Problem, Impact, and Need. Cool, now that we've got that out of the way. Let's start from the top with situational questions.

Situational Questions

These are very simple, straightforward, high-level questions to help you get familiarized with your lead. To have an effective cold call, you need to have a good understanding of your leads business, and if you weren't able to discover those things through your research prior to the call, now's your chance.

At Uvaro, many of our cold calls involve speaking with sales leaders about things like hiring, onboarding, training, and retention. So some situational questions you might hear a Uvoro rep asks are:

What are your big priorities for 2023? Could you tell me a bit about your sales hiring strategy? How do you find quality sales talent?

Essentially, you're trying to validate that your product or service is indeed relevant to this business. So for us, we're trying to validate whether their sales team is a priority to them and if they're looking to grow in the near future.

Problem Questions

Once you know this conversation is a relevant topic to them, you can take that prospect one step further through the rabbit hole with your problem questions. Now we get to peek under the hood.

This time, start to probe deeper into those situations that you asked about earlier, asking questions to deliberately poke holes and find flaws in their strategy.

You mentioned doubling the headcount next year. How do you plan on finding your talent? Considering turnover has been an issue for you lately, how has that affected your ability to hit quota?

Here we want the prospect to start thinking about these situations and the underlying problems that exist within them, even if they never have before.

Huh, doubling the headcount isn't going to be as easy as I might have thought. How am I going to do this?

Now, once the prospect does confirm that a problem exists, we want to better understand what the actual impact of that problem is to them and to the business.

Impact Questions

Let's focus on our example at Uvaro of speaking with a sales leader who's really struggling to keep people on their team. Given that our hypothetical prospect has confirmed that turnover is an issue for them, what can we do to probe a little bit further, dig a little bit deeper so that they feel that pain point all the more?

We ask about the effect:

What has this frequent turnover done to your team's ability to hit the target?

Which might get the following response...

It's a fair question. It's really hurting us. We don't have enough people, so we're really struggling to hit quota. We're on our second month in a row missing actually.

Now we have them right where we want them because they've confirmed that they have a problem and we understand from a quantifiable level how it's impacting them and the company as a whole. We take this information so that we can properly frame our last set of questions, need questions.

Need Questions

Really simply what need questions are meant to do is take the prospect from that pain point filled or negative mindset that we've put them into through our line of questioning and reframing using our product and services value proposition, the better, more positive future state they could see if they simply explored what we're offering to them.

So if turnover wasn't something that you needed to worry about anymore, what would it mean for your day-to-day? What would it mean if you had a pre-vetted pool of quality sales talent you could pick from as soon as somebody leaves?

These questions are specifically designed to get a positive answer out of the prospect. What we essentially are hoping they're going to say here is something to the effect of...

That would be a game changer for us.

Now, once you've taken your prospect through all four segments of SPIN, it's time to put a bow on it and close.

The Closing Part Of A Cold Call

Now we're working on a full breakdown of the best closing techniques that you need as a new salesperson, so make sure to subscribe if you want to see that one.

But for now, we'll just talk about the basics. If you get to this point in the conversation, you know they have a problem, you know how it's affecting them, now all you need to do is position your product or service in a way that helps them understand how it can alleviate that pain. At Uvaro that would look something like...

"I really appreciate the conversation up to this point, my understanding is that you are looking to increase your targets by 50% next year, but turnover's been a persistent issue for you over the course of this one that you expect to persist to next as well. Is that right? Perfect. And you also mentioned that turnover affects your team in ways other than flat out just not hidden target. That's the stress that contributes to burnout because they have to make up for the loss productivity from reps that have left. Is that right? Thanks for confirming that with me. Given the needs that you see on the horizon, this is why I think that you should take a closer look at Uvaro."

Well, my friends, I hope you feel more confident and prepared for your first day of calling than you were at the beginning of this video. And let us know what type of sales role did you land?

Getting a better understanding of what roles our audience is interested in can help us come up with content that just is more relatable and useful for you!