Free tool · Sales
Answer 12 questions on the four phases of SPIN Selling —situation, problem, implication and need-payoff— and find out your level of consultative selling practice. A 0-100 score, a radar by block and recommendations for your weakest area. Free, no sign-up, your data never leaves your browser.
How it works
Situation, problem, implication and need-payoff: the four phases of the SPIN method, with 3 questions per block.
Each answer scores 0 to 3. We add up all 12 and convert them to a 0-100 scale, same for each block.
A 4-axis radar shows you at a glance which phase you question well in and where you lack discovery.
We identify your weakest block and give you 3 concrete actions to strengthen it, with links to learn more.
Consultative selling, explained
The SPIN Selling method was developed by researcher Neil Rackham from a study of more than 35,000 sales calls over 12 years, published in his book of the same name in 1988. Rackham found that in complex sales —those involving several people, high value and long cycles, typical of B2B— aggressive closing techniques worked worse than a specific type of conversation: a sequence of questions that leads customers to articulate their own problem and the value of solving it, before the salesperson presents anything.
The SPIN acronym summarises the four question categories that structure the conversation. Situation questions gather objective facts about how the customer works today —kept to a minimum, because too many exhaust the buyer's patience. Problem questions explore difficulties, dissatisfactions or bottlenecks with that situation. Implication questions are what most sets a consultative seller apart: they help the customer connect that problem to its consequences —cost, lost time, risk— without the seller having to say it. And Need-payoff questions get the customer to explain why solving it would matter to them, turning the seller into someone who helps decide, not someone who pushes to buy.
Consultative selling doesn't replace a well-structured B2B sales process: it complements it in the most human part of the conversation, the discovery meeting. A team with a defined process but poorly trained implication questions still loses deals to a competitor who asks better questions, even with a worse product. Once a customer has put the cost of inaction into their own words, price objections lose much of their force: it's hard to argue over a budget once you've admitted out loud that the problem costs more than fixing it does.
This test evaluates your individual practice —not your whole team's— across the four SPIN phases, three questions per block. Your 0-100 score places you in one of four levels, from the most transactional to the most consultative, and the radar shows you at a glance which phase you question well in and where you tend to jump straight into pitching. If you want to measure your whole sales team's level, beyond your own practice, you can pair it with our B2B sales maturity test, which evaluates process, CRM, prospecting, value proposition and measurement at an organisational level.
Frequently asked questions
Consultative selling is an approach where the salesperson asks questions to understand the customer's situation and problem before proposing a solution, instead of pitching product from minute one. Neil Rackham's SPIN method is the most widely used framework for structuring that kind of questioning in complex B2B sales.
SPIN is the acronym for the four question categories in the method: Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. Neil Rackham identified them after studying thousands of real sales calls, published in his book SPIN Selling (1988).
Between 3 and 5 minutes. It's 12 single-choice questions, grouped into 4 blocks of 3 questions each.
No. All the scoring runs in your browser with JavaScript; no answer is sent to any server and no sign-up or email is required.
The result itself points out your weakest block —situation, problem, implication or need-payoff— and gives you 3 concrete recommendations to strengthen it. If you want to work on it in more depth, you can book a free 30-minute session.
What now?
Book a free 30-minute session and we'll go through your result, your weakest SPIN block and how to train implication and need-payoff questions into your day-to-day selling.