Sales / Business Process Outsourcing - Essay Example

The various features and benefits of OPEX are also identified. The analysis is based on Xerox, an industry leader in business process outsourcing. The SPIN sales methodology is founded on the SPIN acronym which stands for Situation/Problem/Implication/Needpayoff. According to this sales strategy, these are the types of questions with which a salesperson engages a prospect. Neil Rackham, who introduced it in his book Spin Selling, founded this methodology. It was developed according to a research carried out with more than 35,000 sales calls, up to 40 researchers and twelve years of effort put into 23 countries.

According to Rackham and the research on the SPIN methodology, every sales call, in spite of how simple or how sophisticated it is, undergoes through the four different stages: preliminaries, investigation, a demonstration of capability, and the last stage is obtaining commitment. Using these stages, the most effective salespeople use the SPIN method to understand the needs of customers and build trust and credibility. According to Rackham, “the simplest finding, valid in all 23 countries where we studied it, was that it’s not what you tell what makes a call successful, it’s what you ask. . It was revealed that in these corporations, the majority of them jotted down questions that they used in their calls.

In contrast, the sales people who were less successful planned what they planned to tell the customer, rather than what to ask. Each of the questions that should be asked should be based on the SPIN letters. Situation questions asked focus on things such as the company, the company background as well as the current expectations of the customer, processes, in addition to other issues such as the competitive situation. Considering that a good salesperson is bound to find out as much as possible of this information in advance of the call, the questions are used in a sparing manner, especially in confirming that the understanding of the salesperson is correct.

When a salesperson asks problem questions, he or she focuses on the problems, issues, needs and any gaps in capability. It is from these that the salesperson moves to what is referred to as the implication questions. The role of asking implication questions is to probe into what would be the consequences of failing to solve the problem in comparison to the value that would be achieved from eliminating the problem. The final set of questions is the Need-payoff questions, which seek to address the positive impact as well as the value expected by the customer from a good solution.

It is from this stage that the sales process is moved to the demonstration of the capability of the vendor, and lastly, to the closing phrases (Sant, 2006). The popularity of SPIN is huge, considering that it provided an intelligent as well as a research-based approach that sales people can used. It also emphasized upon the importance of focusing on the situation and interests of the customer at the outset, which is very