Neil Rackham

Neil Rackham is an author, consultant, and academic. His writing focuses on "consultative selling," an approach he pioneered and documented in his book SPIN Selling (McGraw-Hill). Rackham has been a visiting professor at the University of Portsmouth, Cranfield School of Management, and the University of Sheffield, all in his native England, as well as at the University of Cincinnati, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences, business schools, and corporations around the world.

Neil Rackham was born in England and spent some of his early years in Borneo. He was later educated at Totton Grammar School, Hampshire, England, and then studied psychology at Sheffield University, where he was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1966. He continued as a post-graduate research fellow in psychology at Sheffield through 1969, developing new tools to study and measure the role of interpersonal skills in successfully negotiating and selling.

Rackham’s work as a research fellow led to his first books, The Evaluation of Management Training (Gower Press, 1970), written with Peter B. Warr and Michael William Bird; Developing Interactive Skills (Wellens Publishing, 1971), co-authored with Peter Honey and Michael J. Colbert; and Behaviour Analysis in Training (McGraw-Hill UK, 1977), with Terry Morgan. From 1970 to 1974, Rackham served as managing director of Performance Improvement Ltd. In 1974, he founded the Huthwaite Research Group, which later became Huthwaite Inc., a global research and consulting firm based in Northern Virginia, and Huthwaite Ltd., based in the United Kingdom.

Having developed methods for measuring interactive behavior in his research fellowship, Rackham produced a series of seminal articles that focused on practices and behavior associated with successful negotiations: He decided to apply these same methods to the world of sales and explore effective behaviors in successful business-to-business selling, Rackham sought the support of major multinational companies including Xerox and IBM and raised an initial $1 million for a landmark study. The project, the first to scientifically measure selling and buying behavior, involved a team of 30 researchers who studied 35,000 sales calls in over 20 countries. The research spanned 12 years.

From 2015 until 2020, Rackham worked with a team of 5 post-doctoral researchers at the University of Sheffield in the Behaviour in Teams Research Unit, using AI and behavior analysis to investigate collaborative teamwork.”