Hurt and Rescue

A sales campaign we are running came close to climax this week. The final issue appeared to be the MD’s reluctance to sign-off on lots of money across several prospective projects, of which one was ours. Our Champion then offered to remove one of the projects to reduce the aggregated figure, and make the new amount more palatable.

He described this to me as “classic hurt & rescue”. Which naturally got me thinking. I understood what he meant straight away; from his perspective something along the lines of start high, knowing you can come back down and still get most of what you want, and from the other party’s as lessening the pain. It’s true sales is such an exciting arena in part because every day you genuinely learn something. And as this encapsulation of the slant was new to me, I thought it merited further investigation.

And I came across this great site, for more on hurt and rescue read on how to push someone into the water, then throw them a rope.