SPICED Sales Methodology

The SPICED Sales Methodology:

If you've been in sales for any length of time, you may have seen many sales methodologies come and go in terms of popularity. Senior sellers and sales leads may have been through at least half a dozen sales trainings based on 'new and improved' sales methodologies.

But as the sales landscape continues to evolve and some verticals become more competitive than ever, choosing and adopting the right sales methodology for your organization can be a game changer, especially when coupled with great sales and buyer enablement tactics.

What is the SPICED sales methodology?

Like other popular sales methodologies, the SPICED sales methodology is based on an acronym. SPICED stands for situation, pain, impact, critical event, and decision. The framework behind these five steps helps sellers understand and diagnose a prospect's needs and provide a compelling solution that meets their needs.

Similar to how a doctor might take a medical history and recommend tests before making a diagnosis and treatment plan, the SPICED framework allows sellers to better understand their prospects before recommending a solution and closing the deal.

While this acronym seems simple to remember and implement - going deep into each phase of the framework can still be a challenge for sellers to get all the details they need from their prospects. Let's look deeper at each letter in the acronym and how to get all of the information you need to create the best proposal and close the deal.

S: Situation

Think of the "S" situation as your prospect's backstory. How did they get to where they are in the story, and just as important, where are they looking to go? For example, if you sell project management software, your prospect might be a digital marketing agency that currently has 10 full-time team members and 8-10 contractors at any given time. They're looking to formalize their processes from business development to project completion, grow to at least 50 full-time team members, and add a project and account manager role to help them better manage business after they've won it and grow current accounts.

P: Pain

When it comes to seeking out your prospect's pain, you want to understand how your prospect came to engage with you. Keeping our project management software example above, your prospect may know they need a tool to help them organize current and future tasks to visualize capacity better and know how much more work they can take on before hiring additional help or increasing their use of contractors.

I: Impact

The impact part of this framework speaks to how you impact your prospect's business. Here is where you can start thinking about how your customer's business will change if you win the deal. Implementing your project management software in a small but growing agency can help the team work more efficiently, spend less time in meetings reviewing status updates, eliminate the need for manual capacity planning calculations, and help them grow.

As the seller, the more you can quantify this data, the more compelling your argument might be. So, if you understand that the agency owner spends two hours per week on traffic meetings, five hours creating capacity planning sheets, and three hours a week following up for status updates on project-related tasks, all of which will be eliminated (and replaced with simply adding the project plan and assigning tasks and due dates ), that is a pretty good ROI.

CE: Critical Event

The critical event answers the qualifying questions of "Why now?" or "Why in [insert timeframe]?" It speaks to the deadline to achieve the intended impact. For the digital agency, the critical event would be bringing on the next group of new hires. Having a fully set up and utilized project management tool with the corresponding processes will make onboarding this new group of team members that much more efficient.

D: Decision

The decision in SPICED challenges sellers to learn about the entire decision process, including the timeline, committee, and criteria. This is similar to some of the steps in the MEDDIC or MEDDPICC framework, where you map out the decision process and the decision criteria.

In competitive markets like project management software, getting to the decision criteria and understanding how you will be evaluated (and by who) can make or break your deal. For example, if one of the decision criteria is that the winning software has to have automation or integrate with another tool and yours doesn't, you'll be out of the running and want to spend your time with prospects that are a better fit.

Another point to consider when thinking about the decision is the long term health of the partnership. How can you ensure this is a customer who will want to work with you for the long haul, and not simply churn after a few weeks or months. This could happen for a number of reasons including the cost of your solution relative to their budget, or even changes in headcount that are planned for the near term. If the customer grows too big to use your service or faces deep headcount and budget cuts, these are also factors that could impact a long term partnership.

Why do companies use the SPICED sales methodology?

Like some of the other sales methodologies you may know (MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, and SPIN selling), SPICED is a qualification framework and is primarily used early in the sales process to qualify opportunities and gather information that will help you move the deal forward.

With limited time and resources, and editcts to do more with less, qualifying leads is more important than it has ever been. The questions you'll ask to gather information for each letter in the SPICED acronym lend themselves perfectly to intake forms, discovery calls and the activities you conduct early in the sales process, before a formal proposal or sales presentation.

What type of companies is the SPICED methodology suitable for?

The SPICED sales methodology is generally suitable for a broad range of companies with fairly long and complex sales cycles in competitive markets. This could include SaaS, enterprise sales, and technology sales in various industries.

The companies that want to avoid implementing the SPICED methodology are those with more transactional short-term sales. For example, you might not use SPICED if you're selling a single coffee pot, water cooler, or copy machine in an office, but it might come in handy if you're selling breakroom services for a global company or a suite of printers, scanners, and copiers to a company that needs hundreds of these machines.

Advantages and disadvantages of the SPICED sales methodology

As with every methodology you might use in your sales process, SPICED comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Broadly speaking, here is what you may want to consider when deciding if this is the right sales methodology for your sales organization.

Advantages:

• Provides a framework to qualify prospects
• Helps sales reps think about their questions and gather all of the relevant details before they make a formal proposal
• Builds relationships and trust
• Can set up a sales rep for a long-term relationship with a client
• Aids in the decision-making process about whether or not to pursue a prospect

Disadvantages:

• It doesn't fully address the back half of the sales cycle and closing the deal
• It can be time-consuming to implement and guide clients through
• It doesn't work well in transactional sales environments
• Requires a lot of information from prospects early in the sales process

Practical applications of the SPICED sales framework

Now that you understand how the SPICED sales framework is used, and how it can benefit your sales team, lets think about it more in the context of how a salesperson might implement it.

Situation:

To assess the situation, ask questions about past events and where the prospect wants to go. Questions that might help with this include:

• How many people are in your accounting department?
• What software have you tried?
• How has the economy impacted your business recently?
• Who else is a part of this process?
• What are you hoping this process looks like moving forward? How big of a change is that from where you are today?

Pain:

To understand pain, ask why the prospect has come to meet or is seeking solutions. The more these questions are asked, the more likely the prospect will start to vent. While some of this venting is healthy, prioritizing the pain to focus on the most pressing needs is a better strategy. Some questions to help get a prospect talking might include:

• How does the current process work?
• Can you talk me through more of the inefficiencies?
• Do different team members do this process in different ways?

Impact:

In order to propose the best possible solution for your prospect, another step in the process is assessing the impact. Questions that might help you with this include:

• What is the cost [time or financial] of having this process not work efficiently?
• If you had [solution] how would your work be different?
• Who will be impacted by [change]?
• What resources will you need for implementing [change]?

Critical Event:

To unpack the critical event and understand your prospect's sense of urgency and how that aligns with the implementation timeline for your solution, ask types of questions like:

• What will happen in the next [unit of time] if you don't find a solution?
• When you do identify the solution, what are the implementation milestones?
• Is there anything that would speed up or block your need for [solution]?

Decision:

Perhaps one of the most essential pieces of the SPICED framework is understanding how the decision will be made. When closing deals, you want to know if you have a chance as early in the process as possible. To gain a genuine understanding of the decision process and criteria, ask questions like:

• What are the criteria you'll use to evaluate solutions?
• Who will be involved in making the final recommendation?
• Who is the final approver or contract signer?
• How long will the decision process take?
• If selected, how long will we have for onboarding?

How is the SPICED Methodology best implemented in a sales team?

Like most traditional sales methodologies, or sales strategies, simply holding a training and sending reps off to implement it, is not sufficient. Bringing SPICED into your sales team requires some culture shift to ensure successful adoption.

After training reps to understand the methodology, sales leaders should help their teams practice asking open ended questions for each phase of the framework as well as active listening skills to encourage prospects to keep talking and share more.

Another place to integrate the framework is within your sales tools. Make it easy to take notes about each of the steps in your CRM. Consider infusing your battle cards and sales playbooks with scripting and questions to draw out each of the steps in the process.

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