At the beginning of every meeting, you want to set the agenda, objectives and any necessary introductions – remember, the NCAB academy 5 P’s.

If you are following up on an earlier meeting, it is important to recap the conclusions of your last discussion. Then, you want to get your customer’s agreement to let you ask him some questions, which brings you into the Investigating phase, the SPIN, the most exciting part.

SPIN starts with…

Situation Questions

…which deal with the facts about your customer’s situation. But be careful here; if you ask too many situation questions, you risk boring your customer and damaging your credibility, so ask them sparingly. If you do careful research before your sales call (remember Warm calling, 5 Ps), you already know most of the basic information about your customer before your meeting. The situation questions you ask should only be the ones that will give you information you can’t find elsewhere, or has changed since the last time you met.

As an example, if you are planning to really promote Quick Turn Around at your customer, you might ask the following:

HOWARD: With your quick turn needs, how many new projects are planned this quarter?
CUSTOMER: I don’t know exactly, but it is at least five.
HOWARD: How many prototype runs are you seeing each week currently?
CUSTOMER: Relentless, at least three every day, and at least one project is struggling, we are on rev8 already.
HOWARD: Wow, that’s a lot, what lead-times are your project managers demanding?
CUSTOMER: Normally, 5 -7 days, some are asking 3 working days.

OK, so from this, we are starting to sense an opportunity. What opportunities do you see? Remember, we are not pouncing in and saying “Don’t worry, NCAB are here, we can sort this out!”.
• Design issues with one project, I wonder who we need to talk to?
• Lots of stress, too many RFQs, probably workload issues, response time challenges.

I can smell lots of orders at good margins…

NARRATOR: Howard smells orders! Now that is a good sign. What will happen next? Don’t miss the next lesson about Problem questions!