Remember the incident involving the sinking of the Russian Submarine the Kursk? The vessel was lost with all hands while the Russian authorities stood around and bombastically ranted - "there is not a problem". Interesting how people can be too proud to admit there are issues at times isn't it?

A while ago I wrote one of my most controversial blog posts ever, on why sales pain is dead. Interestingly, and totally by accident, it has also become the most well-read of all my posts. I knew when I wrote the post it would yield some negative feedback from certain folks within the sales training community - and it did. That is what I want to talk about in this post, the push-back and how in this case they simply ended up making my point more than they made their own.

We teach people the value of push-back and we are constantly trying to get sales people to do it more. Nothing is more effective at building the relationship quickly than letting the prospect know when they are out of line or when you don't agree with them- however when you do this you have to make sure you don't miss a few crucial elements. When I got the push-back from my previous post it was clear some of the people that were the most vocal were breaking all of the rules, not someone I would want training my sales people. Here are the two mistakes they all made:

• They didn't listen or read my post correctly - before you push back you need to know exactly what you are pushing back on. I got lots of resistance on things I didn't say and none on the focus of the article. Most focused on the existence of pain - I know it exists! I never said it didn't! I simply said that prospects were sick and tired of being pulled through the pain extraction exercise and that it didn't take doing that to close business and to close it quickly.
• They got mean - Nobody reasoned with me on an intellectual level. Nobody provided a calm and logical explanation as to why my thoughts were off - they just blew me up! Is that what you want your sales people to do when they encounter resistance or a view they don't agree with?

So I thought it would be helpful to clarify myself and explain (perhaps more clearly) why many of these techniques (not just pain extraction) are dead.

They are old and past their expiration date - I saw my first presentation on the submarine back in the early nineties and I went to another about a year ago. Same slides, same clip art and the same cheesy delivery and it was still presented as unconventional and "a new way of doing things" which it is clearly not by 20 plus years. In sales the prospects are more educated and savvy than they have ever been, not only do these methods appear old to me, they are old to the prospect.

They irritate the client - One of my largest clients came to me because they didn't like what they called "the tricks" that were being played on them. They didn't appreciate the spin and the twisting and the feeling that they were being controlled. They picked up on the "buyers are liars" philosophy and felt like that was not a good basis for a business relationship.

They are unethical - Many came back after my last post on pain and defended the existence of pain, but nobody came back and argued against something else I complained about - metaphrasing. This (along with reversing) are at a minimum borderline unethical. When is it OK to take something someone says and either twist or add to it and feed it back to them? It isn't.

Too Tactical - many people came back at me and offered lengthy explanations as to how their calls go and beautifully they extract pain from the client and how effective they are at execution. That's great, good for you. But you represent a very small portion of the population using these tactics and most of the practitioners don't succeed.

Most of the clients that I deal with want their sales people to utilize some skills that are more sophisticated and more natural than the methodology I described above. Sales skills need to constantly be improving and changing - the process I am speaking about went through a change itself from 5 to 7 stages, but that was 20 years ago.

Armor was new at one point and then along came gunpowder.