The only possible drawbacks I noticed were that unless phrased carefully, the "rubbing salt into the wound" segment of the problem/implication questions can be taken the wrong way by some customers. Further, a lot of customers (at least in my industry) are probably already acutely aware of the problems they have and their implications. It is still a good read, though.
The book is definitely aimed at sellers of high-dollar, high value-add items and not at booksellers or used car salespeople. As the title of this review indicates, the book was great on the questioning tactics of a sales call, but it does not address the strategic aspects of which customers to target, how to get to know the players at each account, etc. For the other half of the sales picture, I would highly recommend "Strategic Selling" and perhaps even "Conceptual Selling" by Miller and Heiman. Those two books were the two best I have read on selling, but Spin Selling is definitely recommended as an addition to the complex product salesperson's library.
His Training is backed with extensive proof and facts and every single advice is backed by extensive research conducted by huthwaite. very impressed.
"Situation - Problem - Implication and Need-Payoff", these are the four types of Questioning you will learn and the Value and relative importance of each and in what order to be used effectively.
the biggest lesson for me is the Difference of a "Implied Need" compared to "Explicit Need" and how it all boils down to uncovering "Explicit Needs" and to communicate with customers about "Benefits". this book also clears a very common mistake a lot of us do, to look at a product or solution's advantages and convey that as Benefit to customer. As per the author a "Benefit" is one that solves a Customer's "Explicit Need".
don't be discouraged by any review that writes off the book's style of writing to be research oriented, the book is around 190 Pages and it's worth the weight in gold.
This audio was worse than my grade school educational film series. The reader is dull, boring and almost put me to sleep in the car. This is GREAT material. Everyone that is considering any of the books I would heartily give them a 5 of 5 stars.
I fast forwarded through the entire first cd, hoping that I would start hearing the same "meat" I read about in SPIN. What Iheard was a lot of "pre-program" dialog.
If I could speak with Neil Rakham I would say, "Neil, this is an outstanding program. Please get a reader with more emotion".