MT453 Unit 5 SPIN Discovery Question Set Example

What Does an Hour of Cleaning Cost a Sold-Out Line? An MT453 Unit 5 SPIN Discovery Question Set

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT453: Professional Selling

Unit 5 Discovery Question Set

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Pellston Hygiene, Salado Creek Foods, every person and every figure are composite; the sources cited are real.

Why the Order Matters

Rackham (1988) studied thousands of sales calls in large, complex sales and found that successful calls used more implication and need-payoff questions, while calls heavy with situation questions tended to fail. Buyers tire of answering questions a seller could have answered from research. This set therefore keeps situation questions few and short, spends most of its effort on implications and leaves the need-payoff questions for the buyer to answer in his own words. Every question passes one test: if no plausible answer would change what the representative does next, the question is cut.

The set is written for a changeover observation debrief at Salado Creek Foods, the composite San Antonio dip maker, with the plant manager, Dale Kessler, and the sanitation supervisor, Tomás Reyes, present.

Situation Questions

Question 1, for Mr. Reyes: "How many allergen changeovers does line 1 run in a normal week?" If three or more, continue; if fewer, ask whether the grocery contract will add more.

Question 2, for Mr. Reyes: "Who on the crew runs the changeover, and how many people?" The answer sets the labor side of the calculation.

Question 3, for Mr. Kessler: "What is line 1 producing when it is running, in cases an hour?" The answer, with the plant's margin, gives the value of an hour.

Problem Questions

Question 4, for Mr. Reyes: "In the changeover we watched, the crew waited 47 minutes for hot water to recover. Is that typical?" If yes, the hot water problem is structural; if no, ask what was different that night.

Question 5, for Mr. Reyes: "How often does a swab fail and force a re-clean?" If more than once a week, failed swabs become a second point of value.

Question 6, for Mr. Kessler: "How confident are you in the changeover time on the schedule? Does production plan around five hours, or around what actually happens?" A gap between plan and reality signals hidden cost.

Question 7, for Mr. Reyes: "Which part of the changeover would you change first if you could?" His answer shows where the crew sees waste.

Implication Questions

Question 8, for Mr. Kessler: "When a changeover runs long, what happens to the orders scheduled behind it?" If orders slip, ask how often a customer has noticed.

Question 9, for Mr. Kessler: "With line 1 sold out, does an hour lost to cleaning become an hour of lost sales, or can it be made up somewhere?" If it cannot be made up, the hour carries full contribution.

Question 10, for Mr. Kessler: "What does the new grocery contract do to the number of changeovers?" More changeovers multiply every lost hour.

Question 11, for Mr. Reyes: "How much overtime does the night crew work in a week with three changeovers?" Overtime adds a labor cost on top of lost production.

Question 12, for both: "If a swab fails during the audit, what happens?" This brings the quality manager's concern into the room without her, and sets up the next meeting.

The implication questions do not tell the plant manager what the cleaning costs; they let him add it up himself.

Need-Payoff Questions

Question 13, for Mr. Kessler: "If line 1 got two hours back on each changeover, what would you run in that time?"

Question 14, for Mr. Kessler: "How would fewer failed swabs change how Nadia feels about the spring audit?"

Question 15, for Mr. Kessler: "If we could show you those results on line 1 without changing anything before the audit, would that be worth a trial?"

Each lets the buyer state the value in his own words. Rackham found that buyers who state a benefit themselves are more committed to it than those who hear it from a seller.

The Arithmetic the Questions Surface

The set is designed so that the answers produce one figure. Line 1 runs about three allergen changeovers a week, about 150 a year. The observation suggests about two hours per changeover are recoverable: the 47-minute wait for hot water, time spent on re-cleans after failed swabs and slack in the sequence. That is about 300 line hours a year. The plant's controller estimates contribution on line 1 at about $1,900 per running hour, because the line is sold out and each hour produces product that would otherwise not be made. Three hundred hours at $1,900 is about $570,000 a year.

That figure is an upper bound, stated as such. Not every hour will be recovered, and not every recovered hour will be sold. Anderson and Narus (1998) argue that value should be estimated in the customer's own terms and with the customer's own data, which is why the inputs come from the plant's crew and controller rather than from Pellston. A conservative version of the figure becomes the basis of the value proposition in Unit 8.

How the Set Will Be Used

The representative will not read the questions in order. The branch written after each question exists so that the conversation can follow the buyer. Weitz et al. (1986) found that adaptive selling, adjusting to what each buyer reveals, is associated with better performance, and a set built with branches gives the representative somewhere to go when an answer surprises.

References

Anderson, J. C., & Narus, J. A. (1998). Business marketing: Understand what customers value. Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 53-65.

Rackham, N. (1988). SPIN selling. McGraw-Hill.

Weitz, B. A., Sujan, H., & Sujan, M. (1986). Knowledge, motivation, and adaptive behavior: A framework for improving selling effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 50(4), 174-191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298605000404