Hi, there welcome salespeople. This module is about one of the most powerful sales techniques that is in in this entire program. And it's called the push away technique. Now, to illustrate it and explain, I'm going to use a physical metaphor. You have to use your imagination. This works much better when we're actually all in the same room.

But let's suppose that you're sitting in your seat, I come over and shake your hand, like I'm shaking your hand and I pull you toward me, what is your immediate reaction and most times when I do that the immediate reactions that that you would pull back on pulling this way you pull that way. If I would come over and your says you sit in the chair, put my hand on your on your shoulder and push, push you. Maybe when you weren't looking, what would be your immediate instinct, your immediate instinct would be to come toward me like that. So If I want you to engage your muscle structure to come toward me, what should I do? push or pull? Well, the answer I think, is pretty obvious.

If I want you to get your muscles engaged to come toward me, what I should do is gently push on you and then you'll, you'll come toward me. So this is what selling looks like. You know, in the physical metaphor. Remember, this is a physical metaphor. This isn't how you sell you don't go out and push people but but basically, this is what you do, you put the person they come toward you, you back up, you push them again, they come toward you, you back up, and eventually you're able to uncover the compelling reason or whatever it is you're looking for. And, and that's, that's how it works.

Now, I'm going to roleplay a couple here for you. But before I do that, I want to mention a couple things. Some guidelines. The first thing is don't ask leading questions. We don't ask questions that sound like are you having a problem With an x, or is y giving you trouble? I mean, they sound like a good questions.

But, but, but you'll never get they're not very effective because the prospect immediately knows if I say yes to that that's good for him. If whatever's good for him can't possibly be good for me. So you can say something like, Well, you'd agree, sir, that it makes sense to lower your overhead. And they say, well, not necessarily, you know, they immediately back up. So that's the that's the verbal equivalent of me, you know, trying to drag you toward me, they go the other way. Another guideline is don't ask probing questions.

I know you went to a lot of traditional salesperson sales training that talked about asking probing questions. I just have a few questions for you. Do you like to be probed? Do you? I mean, when you're asking these probing questions, you know, your instinct is To get defensive, you know, because you can't ask those kind of questions until you earn the right to ask them. Okay, so nobody really wants to be probed.

And and it's also when other people are in the room, they're going to cover up even more. So, you know, for the for those reasons you don't want to ask leading questions, even if I can't get it to execute the push away technique. The way I'm describing, I'm going to describe it to you here are roleplay for you. You at least don't ask those kinds of questions. Just ask regular questions, right? Just ask conversational type of questions.

Remember, it's this, the sales conversation is not an inquisition, and it's not an interrogation. All right. Let me give you a couple of examples of how you would use this. A very simple one is a format of a call. You know, I assume so. Maybe I'm I'm selling some kind of software that prints out reports I might say that produces a report.

That's one of the benefits of producing certain reports to the prospect. I might say, I assume you get reports every week, or, you know, I assume, I assume you're okay. With the reports you're getting, or I assume it's pretty easy to do the reports notice that, that that's pushing the prospect away. It's I'm not saying something like, are you happy with the reports you're getting? Are you happy with the frequency or not? And that, at least you're in a prospect center mode?

If you're asking those questions. I don't think it's very effective. But you're a prospect centered mode. The receptive mode is to not even worry about what progress reports they're getting, you would just say, Well, you know, our, our, our product progress reports every week, and they're very easy to ship. Very easy to produce. And let me show you this PowerPoint that illustrates or let me show you a demo.

And that's the me centered and we you know, we definitely don't want to do that. Okay, I want to illustrate Another format for the for the push away movement is called That sounds good. Now that illustrate this one in the next couple, I'm going to introduce you to my, my friend Charles here who's behind the camera, so you really won't see him, but he's going to assist me with this roleplay. So he's the salesperson, I mean, I'm sorry, he's the prospect. I'm the salesperson. He starts with the somewhere in the middle of the sales call he works out with with a with a statement and then I will employ this push away move.

So God, Charles, our rate is 5% dan. Well, that sounds good. Sounds good as it should be. What should it be? It's been 2% for the past 1010 years until now. So how does the increased rate effective?

We're not profitable at 5% ours? Okay, that's good. Now notice the push away there was when I said you know that sounds good. Even if I'm an industry expert, and I know 5% is a little high, right? Or maybe I don't know, but whatever it is, I'm gonna say that sounds good. It pushes him away.

He doesn't see me as as coming after him he does his automatic defenses don't go up. And you notice as we continue, there wasn't a lot of push away. And it was just the one. Right? And I'm now just asking some questions to flesh it out. And eventually we got to the point where, you know, he's not not profitable.

Okay, another format for the push away move is something which I call, you know, why is that a problem or, and you'll see how that how we illustrate this here in a second. Again, Charles is going to be the prospect and we're talking about a, you know, a piece of software, a CRM for, for keeping track of cart, maybe something like salesforce.com or something like that. So, go ahead, Charles, you're the prospect. We're not happy with our current CRM software, Dan, why not? We can only have 100 simultaneous users Why is that a problem? Well, we have 150 salespeople now and many times, they have to wait to update the pipeline.

That means they're either wasting time on making calls, or our pipeline is not accurate. really helpful. Does that happen? constantly. Okay, now, this is again, very subtle. It's not much of a push away, right?

I really what I'm doing is refraining from jumping in and solving this problem or showing them how I can fix it. You know, really when I said, you know, why is that a problem? Look it. It's obviously a problem, but I don't know how big of a problem until until I hear Charles expound on it by me pushing back, he comes back toward me and explains it. Rather, if I, if I would leap in and say, Well, you know, we can handle up to 250 without degrading the, the, the performance, you know, it wouldn't be as good you'll get some information, but I wouldn't get the pain that I I was looking for, okay, now here's one that's a little more challenging. And and when I suggest to salespeople in coaching and training that they should use this, they very often rebel against that and think that I'm crazy when I suggest that they should do this, but if we call it you know, why can't the company handle that?

And again, it's I don't, every time I've had somebody do this, it's never I've never had a situation where it turned out badly. But But salespeople can imagine all kinds of things that could possibly go wrong with this. So, okay, let's go Charles, you're the prospect. We're having trouble damn with our hva system. Well, can XYZ company handle that under their current maintenance agreement? Probably but we want you to take a look at it.

Okay. Be happy to but why we're not sure they have the skill for this problem. Okay, you see what we did here is You know, in this scenario, if you haven't figured it out, you know, I'm a competing person. And I know that they have an existing maintenance agreement with one of my competitors. I mean, people in that business tend to know that. And he's asked me to look at something now the typical salespeople person would just go take a look at it, and say, Oh, yeah, we can help.

And then they might write up a quote or proposal and send it to them and try to follow up and then they what is the prospect? Do? They take it and give it back? You know, give it to the give it to the competitor, or they take it internally, and I don't really know what's going on. Matter of fact, what I haven't done is qualified them because I really don't know what the pain is here. So by pushing back, pushing away, you know, my prospect came toward me and told me that he really wasn't sure that they could handle this type of thing.

Okay. So there you have it, if you saw you get three or four examples of how to use it now. So where do you use it? You use it to help you use it practically everywhere. But primarily, you'll use it to help you find pain as the examples we gave here. You can help.

You can use it in the in the in the budget, if you'd say something like, you know, you probably haven't figured out how much you want to spend on this yet have you and something like that. So you can use it in a budget, you can help it help them develop urgency, you can help uncover the decision process so you can use it any place in every place. So a couple of caution things when you're using it. Number one, watch your tonality, you can if you're using this, you can be very sarcastic, it can come off sounding very sarcastic. So you don't want to say something like, Well, why can't I see handle that? Right?

My tonality is like, Why? Why are you asking me and I don't want to do that. I want to ask you with a more curious. I'm just you know, I'm more than happy to do but why would you ask me Do you already have a contract like I'm confused about and we'll talk about that technique and another module called struggle. You have to ask with humility and not with arrogance. And it has to be sincere.

Right? You know your sincerity in these in just about every part of sales, not just about in every part of sales makes it work. So I believe this is one of the most powerful sales techniques that that we have in the entire package here. Just go out and try practice it in low risk selling situations where it doesn't really matter until you get good at it then you can use it into more high risk situations.