SPIN

Backbone of great discovery

	Purpose	Questions
S Situation Questions   Gather context – Understand the current state	Build a purpose of the customer’s worldStackTeamProcessesScale	What does your current infrastructure look like? How big is your data engineering team?How many data sources are you currently ingesting?
P Problem Questions   Surface pain – Find the friction	For current situation, Uncover:DifficultiesDissatisfactionsFrustrationsShow the customer that there may be a pain	How long do your heavier analytical queries take to run?How often do your pipelines fail? How do recovery look like?Are there times when analyst are waiting on engineers to run queries for them because of access or performance issues?
I Implication Questions   Amplify the pain – Connect business to cost	Take a problem and make it feel urgent and expensiveConnect surface-level friction to real business impactHere is where deals are won	When does queries run slow, who is waiting? What are they unable to do during that window?If the pipeline fails overnight, how does that affect the morning reporting cycle? You mentioned analysts sometimes wait on engineers for queries? How many analysts-hours a week would you estimate are lost to that dependency?
N Need-payoff questions Let them sell themselves on the solution	Get the customer to articulate the value of solving the problem themselves. Aks: what would it mean if this was fixed?This step builds commitment and sets up your demo perfectlyCustomer should describe a better future with their own words	If your analyst could run the query under 10 seconds without waiting on engineering, what would that mean for your team?If your pipeline was reliable enough that you’d never have a missing dashboard on a Monday morning, how would that change how you plan for the week?

• How do you run a discovery call?
  • I structure discovery around SPIN.
  • I start with a handful of Situation questions to understand their current stack and team — but I keep this short because I do my research beforehand and don’t want to waste their time on things I could find myself.
  • Then I move into Problem questions to surface the friction they’re living with — slow queries, pipeline failures, analysts waiting on engineers. The goal is to make pain conscious that they may have just accepted.
  • The most important part is Implication — I ask questions that connect each problem to real business cost. A slow query becomes a delayed board report. A pipeline failure becomes a blank CFO dashboard on a Monday morning. That’s what creates urgency.
  • Finally, Need-payoff questions let the customer articulate the value of solving the problem in their own words. By the end they’ve sold themselves — I haven’t pitched anything yet

• How does SPIN connect to MEDDPICC? Where do they overlap?
  • SPIN Problem + Implications = MEDDPICC – Identify the pain + Implicate the pain
  • SPIN Need-payoff questions = MEDDPICC Building your metrics
  • SPIN Situation = MEDDPICC gathering context for Decision Criteria and Competition
• I use SPIN to run the conversation and MEDDPICC to make sure I’ve gathered everything I need. They’re complementary. SPIN is the technique, MEDDPICC is the checklist