In the Outsold sales system, for Planting SEED, these are the basic concepts you need to know before we can explore.
1. Socratic Questioning, Oldest evidence of sales psychology, actually thousand of years old first attributed to Socrates, by way of Plato’s dialogues, the original elenchus method.
In Simple terms, instead of telling someone the answer, you ask a series of questions that leads them, step by step, to work the answer out for themselves. In sales terms, this is the backbone of a proper discovery call. You are not stating the pain, you are questioning your way toward it.
Example: Instead of “We’re the best car servicing in the country,” ask: “What happens if your brakes fail?”
2. Autonomy Bias, grounded in Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory, 1985.
Basically, people resist being told what to do, but they will happily walk toward the exact same conclusion if they feel they got there under their own steam. In sales terms, this is why an early recommendation almost always gets resistance, and the same recommendation offered as an open question rarely does.
Example: Instead of “you should outsource this,” ask: “What would need to be true for you to feel comfortable handing this off to someone else?”
3. Reverse Psychology, grounded in Psychological Reactance Theory, Jack Brehm, 1966.
In plain language, when people feel a choice is being pushed on them or taken away, they instinctively push back, sometimes straight into the opposite of what’s being suggested, purely to protect their own sense of freedom. In sales terms, this is rarely used as a trick, it’s more useful as a way to remove pressure and test genuine interest.
Example: “Honestly, this probably isn’t right for everyone, it might not be for you.” Said sincerely, this often makes someone argue themselves into wanting it.
4. Guided Self-Discovery, constructivist learning theory, closely tied to the Socratic tradition.
Guided self-discovery is when people retain and believe what they work out for themselves far more than what they’re simply told, even when the content is identical. In sales terms, this is the logic behind an audit or a walkthrough of someone’s own numbers, rather than a slide telling them what’s wrong.
Example: Walking a hotel manager through their own booking numbers compared to their maintenance spend, and letting them notice the correlation between lower maintenance and lower bookings themselves, rather than telling them outright.
5. Leading with a Problem, the consultative selling backbone, formalised in Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling, 1988.
In plain language, open with a real problem the person likely has, not with what you sell, so they’re engaging with the problem itself before they’ve heard a pitch.
Example: “Most stores your size, lose track of stock the moment it moves from the storeroom to the shelf floor. Does that happen to you?”
6. Reframing, cognitive reframing, out of Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy work, 1970s.
In plain language, the same fact, presented from a different angle, changes how someone feels about it, even though nothing about the fact itself changed.
Example: Instead of “you’ve lost three good tradies this year,” reframe it as “you’ve actually proven three times you can attract good tradies, the problem’s been keeping them.”
7. Silent Pauses, a staple of negotiation literature, notably Herb Cohen’s You Can Negotiate Anything.
In plain language, silence after a real question creates a pressure that the other person almost always fills, often with more than they intended to give away.
We write it in a pitch like this: “what’s actually stopping you from raising your prices <Pause>?” Then say nothing. Let them fill the silence. It emphasizes the question. You should also slightly increase your pitch at the end to denote a question.
8. Mirroring and Trust & Rapport, the Chameleon Effect, Chartrand and Bargh, 1999.
In plain language, subtly matching someone’s pace, tone or language makes them feel unconsciously understood, and builds trust faster than the actual words being said. We fear the unown and trust simillarity.
Example: If a prospect talks fast and direct, matching that pace builds rapport quicker than a slow, scripted pitch ever would.
9. onfirmation Bias, Peter Wason, 1960, the original confirmation bias experiments.
In plain language, once someone has stated a belief out loud, they unconsciously start looking for information that supports it and dismissing information that contradicts it.
Example: If a factory owner says early on, “our downtime is the real problem here,” everything you show them afterward that supports that belief lands harder than it otherwise would. Everything you say that argues that belief needs to be argued harder.
10. Subtle Validation, rooted in Carl Rogers’ work on reflective, client centred listening.
Simply put, agreeing with part of what someone says before adding to it makes them feel heard, which makes them far more open to what comes next. Agree and expand in the direction you want the prospect to go.
Example: “That’s a fair point, and it’s exactly why most businesses end up carrying that cost for longer than they should.”
What all this means in Planting SEED
Every one of these ten principles does the same underlying job. None of them state a conclusion. I say to my sales teams nearly every day, ‘don’t pitch, find the itch’. All of them lead someone toward finding one themselves, through a question, a silence, or a reflection handed back to them in their own language.
That’s how Explore fits inside Planting SEED. Spark Curiosity gets someone leaning in. Explore is where they actually start doing the work of diagnosing their own problem, out loud, in their own words, which is exactly the mechanism the Planting post covers, self generated persuasion runs deeper than anything you could have told them.
The Full Planting SEED series (Victory without battle)
Planting why the best salespeople never argue anyone into anything. Here
Spark Curiosity looks at how you get someone leaning in before you’ve said anything persuasive at all. Here
Explore covers the exact questions that get a buyer to discover their own need. Here
Expand Ownership looks at why people value solutions they helped build over solutions handed to them. Here
Decide covers how you get someone to commit without ever applying pressure. Here
More thinking like this at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
