SPICED, live on the call.
Situation, pain, impact, critical event, decision. The diagnostic frame built for recurring-revenue sales, where the deal is only as strong as the diagnosis behind it. Kairos tracks how far the diagnosis has gone and fires when a rep moves on too early.
What happens on your side if this isn't solved by the end of the quarter?
A diagnosis before a prescription.
SPICED comes from Winning by Design, built for SaaS and other recurring-revenue models where the first sale is the start of the relationship, not the end. The idea is that a rep should be able to diagnose the customer's situation the way a doctor would before recommending anything, and that the same diagnosis should carry through onboarding and renewal.
It is a diagnostic framework. Its strength is that it forces impact and critical event into the open, the two things that separate a deal with a date from a deal that drifts. Its weakness is that it is easy to run as a survey: five questions, five answers, no judgment.
Teams that run it well treat each letter as a conversation that earns the next one. Teams that run it badly fill in Situation for twenty minutes and run out of time before Critical Event.
The five stages.
| Stage | Letter | What must be true | How reps miss it | What Kairos fires |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Situation | S | The facts of how the buyer operates today: team, tools, volume, process. Enough context to diagnose, no more. | Twenty minutes of discovery questions that could have been answered by research. Buyer disengages. | "I've read up on the basics. What's the part of how this works today that I wouldn't see from the outside?" |
| Pain | P | A specific problem the buyer owns and feels, stated in their words. | Rep accepts the first pain mentioned, which is usually the symptom, not the problem. | "When that happens, what does it actually cost you that week?" |
| Impact | I | The pain quantified in business terms: revenue, cost, risk, time, and who it lands on. | Pain is emotional, impact is never numbered. Nothing to build a case on. | "If you had to put a number on it for your CFO, what would it be?" |
| Critical event | C | A date or consequence on the buyer's side that forces the decision. | There isn't one, and nobody asked. The deal has no reason to close this quarter. | "What happens on your side if this isn't solved by the end of the quarter?" |
| Decision | D | Who decides, how, by when, and what they need to see. | Discussed before impact and critical event exist. The decision has nothing to decide on. | "When you've bought something like this before, how did the decision actually get made?" |
Where reps break it.
The survey.
The rep has five questions and asks all five. The buyer answers all five. Nothing was diagnosed because nothing was followed up. SPICED is five conversations, not five fields.
Impact without a number.
'It slows us down' is pain. 'It costs us about forty hours a week across the team' is impact. Most reps stop at the first because asking for the second feels like pushing. The deal then has no business case.
No critical event, no deal.
The most common reason a SPICED pipeline slips is that half the deals have no critical event. The rep didn't ask because the honest answer might be 'there isn't one,' which is exactly the information that should change the forecast.
The next question, at the moment the rep would skip it.
Kairos tracks the diagnosis as a sequence. It knows when situation has gone on too long, when a pain was accepted without a follow-up, when impact has no number, and when the rep is about to move to decision without a critical event. It fires the question a senior rep would ask at that point, and stays quiet while the diagnosis is progressing.
The most valuable fire is the one at the critical-event gap. It is the question reps avoid most, and the one that most changes whether the deal is real.
That sounds like a symptom. Ask what's underneath it: when it happens, what breaks first?
If you had to put a number on that for your CFO, what would it be?
What happens on your side if this isn't solved by the end of the quarter?
SPICED diagnoses. Pair it with a framework for the conversation or the close.
SPICED gives the deal a diagnosis and a date. Teams often add a conversation framework for how to run the call and a qualification layer for enterprise deals.
SPICED + GAP Selling
Both are diagnostic. GAP goes deeper on current state and root cause; SPICED adds the critical event. Together they are thorough.
SPICED + Challenger
Diagnose with SPICED, then teach the reframe. The impact number becomes the setup for the commercial insight.
SPICED + your playbook
Your impact benchmarks by segment, the critical events common in your market, your decision-process patterns.
SPICED with Kairos.
The SPICED diagnosis checklist.
One page. The five stages, the buyer-confirmed test for each, the follow-up question that turns an answer into a diagnosis, and the critical-event test every deal should pass before it enters the forecast. Print it, pin it, run it on your next call.
Finish the diagnosis on the call, not in the CRM.
Free for individual reps. A demo for teams.