SPICED sales framework: What it is and how to automate it using AI

Sales isn’t what it used to be anymore. Longer cycles, complexity in decision-making, and a tough competitive landscape. Customers today are spoilt for choice. 

Traditional sales approaches that prioritize transactional relationships and only focus on closing deals no longer work. Today, customers need to know how you can solve their challenges and meet their expectations consistently, or they’ll be ready to switch to a different solution.

But here’s the thing: it’s not always easy to understand your customer needs and how your solution can help them reach their goals. It’s even more challenging to build a long-lasting relationship and provide consistent value so your customers keep coming back to you.

There’s a solution, though: SPICED sales methodology. 

The SPICED framework takes a customer-centric approach to selling, allowing you to deeply uncover and address customers’ needs and pain points to provide genuine value, strengthening your relationships and, consequently, improving your win rates. 

In this blog post, we’ll break down the SPICED sales process and its components, the challenges B2B organizations face while implementing the methodology, and how AI is making the implementation easier, faster, and more reliable. 

What is the SPICED selling method?

Created by Winning by Design, the SPICED framework helps sales teams diagnose customers’ problems, recommend a compelling solution, and foster strong relationships to keep them on board. Unlike traditional sales methodologies, which are aggressively focused on closing the deal, this framework is geared toward long-term customer retention and satisfaction. 

SPICED is a five-step sales methodology and an acronym that stands for:

• Situation
• Pain
• Impact
• Critical Event
• Decision

How to use the SPICED sales framework: A step-by-step guide

SPICED sales framework focuses on understanding customer needs and challenges before presenting a solution. The approach here is consultative and value-based, leading to developing stronger relationships with customers and ultimately closing more deals.

Let’s look at each component of the SPICED sales methodology:

1. Get to the depth of the ‘Situation’

Think of this metric as analyzing the current world of your prospect. This includes gathering information about their industry landscape, competition, existing tech stack, market position, and product capabilities to evaluate if they’re the right fit for your solution or not. 

Some questions to ask at this point (feel free to tailor this to your prospect):

✔️ How many sales representatives work in your office? 

✔️ What sales tools do you use?

✔️ What challenges is your industry facing today?

✔️ What market trends are shaping your decision-making?

2. Identify the ‘Pain’ they’re facing

Pain refers to uncovering prospects’ challenges and frustrations that led them to your product or service. These pain points can be broadly divided into two groups: qualitative and quantitative. 

Qualitative pain points refer to emotional frustrations, such as complex internal processes or a lack of team alignment. Quantitative pain points, on the other hand, are measurable and include examples such as high employee turnover, decreased sales revenue, or lower customer retention. 

Questions you can ask at this stage:

✔️ What challenges is your team facing today?

✔️ Are there specific processes that are slowing things down?

✔️ What kind of technical limitations do you need to address going forward?

✔️ What common feedback are you hearing from your team and customers?

‍3. Demonstrate the ‘Impact’ of the challenges

This is a crucial step in the SPICED sales framework and closely follows the previous stage, the identification of pain. It involves assessing the impact of pain points and how they affect customers’ business and mental well-being. 

The goal here is to highlight the consequences of keeping up with existing challenges and also demonstrate how solving these challenges can benefit their organization. This is also where you start to understand how your product ties into your customers’ unique goals and business needs. Based on this information, you can start building a case study or presentation, demonstrating why your solution is the right choice for them.

Questions to ask at this stage:

✔️ How are these issues affecting your team, customers, or business outcomes?

✔️ What would happen if these (specific) challenges are unresolved?

✔️ Can you estimate the financial or operational impact of these challenges?

✔️ In what ways are these challenges impacting customer retention and satisfaction? 

4. Leverage the ‘Critical Event’

Critical Event refers to identifying specific deadlines or key moments that drive the need for a change. These could be contract renewals, budget cycles, or compliance regulations. Identifying these critical events can help you effectively position your product as an investment that prospects need to make to hit their goals in a timely manner. 

It also further clarifies the timeline you’re operating in and highlights the potential repercussions of delay to your customers. Based on this, you can prioritize the deal in the sales funnel and optimize strategies tailored to your customer’s needs and expectations.

Questions you can ask at this stage:

✔️ Are there any deadlines or upcoming events driving the urgency to address this?

✔️ What happens if you don’t resolve this by [specific date or milestone]?

✔️ Are there market or industry changes influencing your decision timeline?

5. Understand the ‘Decision’

This is the final stage in the process, and you need to figure out here what you can do to make the deal happen. It involves learning about your customer's decision-making process and identifying their evaluation criteria and other critical factors they consider before making the final decision. 

Your job at this stage is to uncover any concerns or hesitation they might have. Remember, you may need to pitch your solution multiple times to different decision-makers, so prepare ahead and, if possible, cultivate internal champions who can make it easier for you to close the deal. 

Final questions to ask:

✔️Who will be involved in making this decision?

✔️ What decision criteria is most important to you in choosing a solution?

✔️ Do you have a timeline or budget in mind for implementing a solution?

Challenges of implementing the SPICED methodology

Unlike other methodologies that are relatively straightforward, the SPICED framework requires an in-depth analysis of customers' needs and pain points and can be challenging to adopt at first. 

Let’s look at some of the challenges B2B sales leaders face while implementing the SPICED framework in their organization: 

1. Complexity in implementation

SPICED is a nuanced sales qualification process that requires extensive training to implement correctly. Reps need to spend a considerable amount of time extracting information for each component—which becomes overwhelming and confusing without proper training and guidance. 

Solution: Start with the basics. First, work on overcoming reps’ hesitation and resistance to adopting the methodology. Take it step-by-step and introduce the sales methodology gradually within your team. Ensure everyone knows the ‘why’ behind implementing the framework and how each component contributes to effective sales qualification. 

2. Inconsistent application & data collection

Without a common language, reps may misinterpret different terms of the methodology, leading to a flawed or inconsistent application. For example: “Impact” and “Critical Event” are interchangeable in specific situations, but without proper understanding, reps may not know how to gauge that in a conversation and record information under the correct component.

The other issue with the current SPICED implementation is inconsistent data entry and collection. Reps have their way of entering and maintaining records, which leads to multiple data formats, duplicate records, and incomplete information. This nearly makes it impossible for sales managers to review deals and forecast the pipeline accurately. 

Solution: Standardize definitions and best practices related to the SPICED framework to ensure uniform adoption. Provide regular feedback to hold reps accountable for implementing the methodology and entering the data into the CRM in a standard format. 

3. Requires a deep understanding of the framework

Unlike other methodologies, the SPICED framework requires a deep analysis of the customer’s psyche. It requires peeling the layers to understand buyers’ core motivations, frustrations, and the solutions they’re seeking. Without robust training in each principle of the methodology, reps cannot uncover these answers naturally and seek the insights they’re looking for.

Solution: Emphasize learning through enablement and other training materials. Nudge reps to shadow experienced leaders on the call to absorb and assimilate their mannerisms. Even better, promote asynchronous learning with conversation intelligence tools that allow you to record, transcribe, and extract insights from sales calls. 

4. Needs regular reinforcement & accountability checks

To ensure successful and consistent SPICED implementation, the onus equally lies on the sales managers and leaders. They need to conduct regular checks to ensure reps are implementing the methodology and provide regular feedback. Without regular reinforcement, reps may fail to effectively apply the principles or may use their own judgment to qualify sales opportunities.

Solution: Conduct ongoing training sessions to reinforce key principles and effective implementation. Establish an open feedback loop to allow reps to share their insights and experiences of implementing SPICED. Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the framework and make adjustments based on the feedback you receive from team members.

How to use AI to automate your SPICED framework implementation

AI has significantly transformed how sales teams operate by automating routine tasks, extracting real-time insights, improving deal qualification, and boosting overall team efficiency. Let’s look at how you can automate nearly all aspects of the SPICED sales methodology using AI:

1. Automate the account research

Before you hop on a discovery call, it’s good to have some information about your prospect, their background, and the industry they operate in, so you can establish a rapport from the get-go. AI can help you collect and enrich available data on prospects, such as demographics, company size, product offerings, funding status, and key stakeholders, so you can prepare for your sales call strategically. 

Think about this: It’s better to open the conversation by saying, “Hey! I saw you raised $250 million in the seed fund. I’m extremely happy to be talking to you and exploring how our solution can help you scale.”

Versus saying, “Hi! Nice to meet you.”

See the difference it makes. 

Now let’s see how AI can help you implement various aspects of the SPICED framework:

2. Extract buyer insights & generate follow-up emails

One of the core benefits of the SPICED methodology is that it helps you gather in-depth information about a prospect for effective sales qualification. However, it’s hard for reps to retain all the information discussed on the call, and taking notes simultaneously means reps can’t fully focus on the conversation. 

This is where AI comes in. As reps go through discovery questions, AI analyzes the conversation and takes detailed notes following the SPICED framework. This ensures reps have access to structured notes anytime they want, making it easier for them to get instant context and prepare for the next conversation. 

Avoma goes a step further, allowing you to generate AI-powered follow-up emails based on the SPICED notes. It also suggests potential next steps or action items, ensuring you always stay on top of your deals. 

3. Automate CRM data management

As we saw above, SPICED is a comprehensive sales methodology that requires extensive discovery of customer’s needs and pain points. Now, imagine—on top of that—reps also need to fill in the details in the CRM and ensure it’s updated as per the last interaction. That’s a lot of time wasted that reps can utilize for high-impact selling and nurturing stronger relationships with prospects.

AI-powered tools can automate and populate meeting notes & key insights to the CRM, ensuring reps no longer spend hours updating the information manually.

Take Avoma, for instance. Once you set up custom SPICED fields in the CRM, Avoma automatically maps your meeting notes & key insights to the relevant fields in the CRM. Any changes you make to the deal activity get automatically synced and updated in real-time. This allows both reps and managers to get a complete overview of the sales pipeline, identify relevant trends and patterns, and optimize their sales strategies accordingly. 

4. Use AI-powered SPICED scorecards to track implementation

Managers rely on the rep’s judgment to understand how well they’ve implemented the methodology. They have no clear, objective way to track the questions they’re asking and understand if they’re applying the core principles of the SPICED methodology effectively. 

This is where AI-powered scorecards come in. With scorecards, managers can evaluate reps’ coverage against each parameter—Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision—and track their adherence to the methodology. 

After the call is over, AI automatically scores the call based on the SPICED framework. Managers can instantly understand the discovery questions reps asked, those they simply touched upon, and which they missed out on.  Reps can also self-assess and understand what they covered and where they dropped the ball. 

AI can also aggregate information across calls, meetings, and emails to provide a detailed overview of a deal. This can help you track rep’s performance, identify relevant patterns, and customize sales training programs to help them improve their skills.

Use Avoma for your SPICED framework implementation

As we saw above, SPICED sales methodology requires an in-depth study of your customers to understand their needs and challenges. Avoma can help you automate and streamline the SPICED framework, enabling managers to track adherence to the methodology and reps to qualify opportunities more efficiently.

For starters, it can record and analyze each conversation and generate AI-powered notes following the SPICED methodology. This ensures reps can completely focus on discovery and understanding the true needs and challenges of prospects rather than being distracted by manual note-taking. 

Once you're done with the meeting, the notes and key insights are automatically pushed to the respective SPICED fields in your preferred CRM. Any changes you make to the notes get synced and updated in real-time, and you always have access to the freshest, most up-to-date information.

But here’s the game-changer. Tracking reps’ adherence to the sales methodology and if they’re applying the core principles effectively is always a struggle for sales managers. That’s why we created pre-built/ready-made AI-powered SPICED scorecards that allow you to track rep’s coverage against each SPICED component and ensure they’re implementing the methodology effectively and consistently. 

With AI scoring, each sales call is automatically scored based on the pre-built SPICED scorecard. You can immediately evaluate if reps are asking the right discovery questions and where they’re slipping up. On the dashboard, you can quickly zero in on low scores, identify areas of improvement, and provide immediate feedback to reps to hold them accountable. 

Reps can also check their score after each call to learn the areas they covered and where they dropped the ball. Additionally, Avoma AI also provides justifications for each score, telling reps what they could’ve done better with regards to every question, so reps can take the learning and apply it from the next sales call itself. 

Overall, using AI for SPICED implementation allows reps and managers to free up considerable time, ensure consistency and accuracy in implementation, and ensure faster and more streamlined sales qualification and higher win rates. 

Want to see how you can implement AI-powered SPICED scorecards in your organization? 

Talk to our sales team. Check out additional features of Avoma here.