Planting: Why the Best Salespeople Never Argue Anyone Into Anything

I created a sales process but had staff failing to hit numbers, and it bamboozled me. It was a construction sales process, use a reporting tool to find the construction projects, ring the secretary of a tier 1 construction company, get the project’s contract administrator’s mobile number, ring them up and pitch our client. I kept hearing from my team that this doesn’t work, and I kept ‘proving my team wrong’ by jumping on the phones, calling these secretaries, and getting nearly 100% of the mobile numbers I needed, and the receptionists would often even throw in their own mobile number and ask for an after hours call. I kept accusing my staff of incompetence. I don’t mean to be a wanker when I say this, but the problem wasn’t their lack of ability, the fault with my process, was built on my extraordinary ability. Bare with my, this is not me just tooting my own trumpet.

The guts of it was, that I’m very good at flirting with a secretary and building the trust to get the mobile number, whereas my female sales team, unironically, were not. My failure as a sales manager was that I didn’t recognise that even other skilled salespeople have different skill sets, and while the sales process worked magically for me, it was flawed for them.

I don’t mean to be boastful about my skill level, but it’s relevant to this blog series. People ask me what the supreme excellence in sales is, and I have always said, ‘it’s easy, you just make them think it was their idea.’ I always said that flippantly but didn’t realise it was a complex thing. Which apparently is not that easy.

My dad was training half the global fortune 500 all over USA and the world in the 80’s and 90’s, success magazine rated him in the top 5 in the world. He has hand written references from giants like Richard Branson and Tony Robbins. My old man always said ‘if you’re good enough at sales, you never even need to close deals’. He started my sales training as an eight year old, reading Psycho Cybernetics, How to Win Friends, 7 Habits, and everything else in our sales library, then going out door knocking with Mormon missionaries and his sales teams, both the lead generation war room and the on the road commission only sales crew. It’s no wonder they say I was born on the sales floor. I remember in my first sales interview as an eighteen year old, the sales manager saying to me, “I can see your pedigree, that you’ve been mentored.”

So, then 30 years of sales experience later, I didn’t realize what a complex idea this was. I started writing this as part of our internal Outsold sales training system, to explain this basic idea of make them think it was their idea, and realised it was way bigger and more complex than I had anticipated. The idea stands on the back of giants, as they say. I remember overhearing my younger sister asking our dad to train her in sales and I interjected ‘you wouldn’t get it, come work in my team 5 years first’.

There’s a bunch of Sales and Marketing psychology fundamentals that just aren’t taught anymore needed to bridge to many of these concepts. So I have broken it into a five part blog series called Planting SEED. This is not a journeyman’s Blog series, this is hardcore sales psychology and theory for real students of the game.

This is the first of those blogs, called Planting. It’s the overview or concept explanation.
Planting ideas
Spark Curiosity
Explore
Expand Ownership
Decide.

Why an idea has to be theirs before it sticks

There is real research behind why “make them think it was their idea” actually works, and it goes back further than most modern sales trainers preach.

Self-generated persuasion, out of a set of Yale studies by Irving Janis and Bert King in 1954. In plain language, this means people who come up with an argument themselves, in their own words, end up believing it far more strongly and for far longer than people who are simply told the same argument by someone else. Janis and King had people improvise persuasive speeches on a topic rather than read a script, and the improvisers shifted their own beliefs more, and held onto that shift longer. In sales terms, this is the entire reason a question beats a statement almost every time. The moment a prospect says the problem out loud in their own words, it stops being your sales pitch and starts being their conclusion.

Self-perception theory, Daryl Bem, 1972. In plain language, we work out what we believe partly by listening to ourselves talk. If you hear yourself say something, some part of you assumes you must believe it, because why else would you have said it. In sales terms, this is why getting someone to say the problem, or the solution, out loud in their own voice is worth more than any brochure or pitch deck. Once they’ve said it, they take ownership of it. A mentor said this well ‘when someone tells you their problem, they are hoping you will listen and let the monkey (which is the problem) jump onto your shoulder, and become your problem.

Cognitive dissonance, Leon Festinger, 1957. In plain language, when what we believe and what we’ve said or done don’t line up, it creates real discomfort, it feels like lying, and we resolve that discomfort by adjusting our beliefs to match our own words and actions, not the other way around. In sales terms, once a prospect has stated their own problem out loud, walking it back later creates an internal conflict they’d rather avoid than sit with.

Put those three together and you get the entire logic behind planting an idea instead of pitching one. You don’t argue a point. You ask a question that leads them to state the point themselves. Once they’ve said it, self-perception tells them they believe it, self-generated persuasion tells us that belief runs deeper than anything you could have told them, and cognitive dissonance keeps them from talking themselves out of it later.

Specificity of sales language

None of this needs a script or a clever line. Here’s the difference in practice.

Pitching someone: “You’re spending too much time doing sales yourself instead of running the business.”

Planting it: “So if I’m hearing you right, you’re the one carrying every single sales call right now?”

The founder says yes. Now it’s not your observation, it’s their admission. You didn’t argue them into a bottleneck, you asked a question and let them describe their own. This seed grows into a thought ‘yea I am doing all the sales work’, then the next realization ‘wait a minute I hate doing all the sales work’, then handling their own objection ‘why am I doing the work I hate most?’

Same thing works inside a sales team. Telling a rep: “You need to make more calls.” It’s telling them, and it feels like an attack, it will illicent a defence response. Planting it: “What do you reckon happens to your pipeline if you added ten more calls a day?” Let them do the arithmetic out loud. The target that comes out of their own mouth gets chased a lot harder than the one handed down in a meeting.

There’s a detail in this that’s easy to miss, and it’s the part that actually makes it work. It’s not enough for it to simply be a question. A question can still hand someone a straight yes or no, and a straight no is always sitting right there waiting to be picked. What actually plants an idea is a suggestion or a real choice, something that assumes the outcome and only asks about the shape of it. “Do you want me to call you next week or next month?” never asks if you should call at all, that part is already decided. It only hands over the choice of when. This is choice architecture, documented by Thaler and Sunstein in 2008, and it works because the moment someone picks next week or next month, they’ve quietly agreed to the call itself without ever being asked to.

“What do you think would happen if you came to our conference?” does something slightly different. It doesn’t propose the conference, it asks them to imagine themselves already there and picture what it would look like. Pham and Taylor’s 1999 research on mental simulation found that picturing yourself carrying out an action measurably increases the likelihood you’ll actually do it, more than simply being told to do it. The question doesn’t sell the conference. It gets them rehearsing attendance in their own head before they’ve agreed to attend anything.

Both lines are doing the same underlying job the rest of this post describes, letting someone arrive at their own conclusion instead of being handed one. The difference is that a suggestion or a real choice skips past the yes or no entirely. There’s no decision left about whether, only about which, or what it would look like. That is the sharpest version of planting a seed there is.

Where this series goes from 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

Every post in this series is backed by real, named research, not folk wisdom dressed up as insight. If sales is a profession you take seriously, it’s worth knowing why the tactics that work actually work. Heads up, if you are not a student of the game, this is complex practical sales psychology, not light content.

More thinking like this at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.