In the Outsold sales system, for Planting SEED, these are the basic concepts you need to know before we can explain.
1. The Curiosity Gap, George Loewenstein’s 1994 information gap theory.
In plain language, this means that if we deliberately omit a key piece of information, that gap creates a sense of discomfort, and we become curious about what that gap is and what causes it. It leaves something elusive missing. We want to know more. When we finally answer the gap, it brings a sense of relief. In sales and marketing terms, this is genuinely useful for headlines, discovery questions, and subject lines. In a general pitch, the very thing you want the person to be curious about is committed intentionally.
Example: On a call, instead of opening with pitching what you do, try: “We ran the numbers on teams your size last month, and there’s one thing almost every one of them is doing that’s quietly costing them about four hours a rep, every week. Want me to walk you through it?”
That creates a nagging feeling that you don’t know something important, and it’s costing you while you don’t know it.
2. The Zeigarnik Effect, named after Bluma Zeigarnik, who published her findings in 1927 after her professor noticed something odd about waiters in a Berlin cafe. They could recall complex unpaid orders in perfect detail but forgot them completely the moment the bill was settled.
This means, putting a pin in it. An unfinished task leaves a kind of mental tab open. It is the reason that task switching is described as the single most stressful thing in modern society. Your brain keeps checking back in on it until it’s closed. In sales terms, this is why partial information, cliffhanger follow ups, and “I got most of the way through this for you” openers work so well.
Example: On the phone: “I actually started putting your cost breakdown together already, got about eighty percent of the way through it, then realised I need one number off you before I can finish it properly. Have you got ten minutes?”
Sam’s brain will keep circling back to that unfinished number the same way the waiter’s brain circled back to the unpaid tab. Receiving that number allows Sam to let it go.
3. Anchoring, documented by Tversky and Kahneman in 1974.
Basically, the first number or reference point you see becomes the ruler you use to judge everything that comes after it, even when that first number has nothing to do with the real decision. In sales terms, this is the entire logic behind showing your top tier pricing before your recommended tier.
Example: “Our Enterprise package runs eighteen thousand a month for teams over fifty. Most teams your size land on our Growth tier, which is four thousand two hundred a month.”
Four thousand two hundred suddenly looks almost reasonable, sitting next to eighteen thousand.
4. The Contrast Effect, the basic perceptual principle that Robert Cialdini documented commercially in his 1984 book Influence, most famously with the classic example of showing a customer the expensive suit before the cheap one.
Put simply, we don’t judge things on their own. We judge them against whatever is standing next to them. A five hundred dollar watch looks expensive by itself. Put it next to a three thousand dollar watch and it looks like a bargain, and nothing about the watch changed at all.
Example: “Most agencies take twelve weeks to place a single sales hire. We can have a fully trained rep on the phones for you in under two.”
Twelve weeks is doing all the work there. It makes two weeks sound like someone cutting you a break.
5. Emotional Contagion, documented by Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson in 1993.
In plain language, emotions spread between people roughly the way a yawn does, mostly without either person noticing it’s happening. My dad always said ‘nothing is as catching as enthusiasm’, except for lack of it’. If you’re flat and hesitant on a call, the person on the other end starts to feel flat and hesitant too, even if they couldn’t tell you why. If you’re genuinely fired up, some of that rubs off on them before you’ve made a single point. Jordan Belfort (The Real Wolf of Wall Street) excellently explains the ten tonalities in his straight line sales.
Example: A rep who opens a call sounding bored gets a distracted, half interested buyer almost every time. A rep who opens with real energy about the problem they’re solving gets a buyer who leans in, before a single feature has been mentioned.
6. Planting the Seed, grounded in the priming research John Bargh published through the 1990s on the automaticity of social behaviour.
This means an idea introduced casually today, with no push behind it, can quietly shape a decision someone makes weeks later, and they will almost always believe the idea was their own.
Example: On a first call, mention in passing, “A few of our clients ended up expanding into fractional management about six months in, once the sales side was humming.” No pitch, no ask. Six months later, when that client is ready, they bring it up themselves. in sales terms 6 months ago you couldn’t use a gang of wild horses and a team of elite sales peeps to get them to sale, now they come knocking on your door.
7. Analogy and Storytelling, An old mentor said to me once ‘Good sales people are good story tellers’. Green and Brock’s narrative transportation theory from 2000 is a persuasion tool as old as Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Their research found that people absorbed in a story are far less likely to argue against the point it’s making. So, when someone is genuinely listening to a good story, the sceptical, argue back part of their brain goes quiet. That is exactly why a story lands an idea that a straight pitch would get picked apart trying to make.
Example: Instead of “our onboarding reduces time to value by forty percent,” tell it as a story. “One of our clients used to lose their best rep’s product knowledge every time someone left. Six months after bringing us in, a senior rep left on a Friday, and Monday’s calls didn’t miss a beat.” No stats to argue with, just a story handling the objection before it arises.
What this means in Planting SEED
None of these seven principles are tricks. They are documented, studied, and in most cases nearly a century of research old. What changes is whether you use them deliberately or stumble into them by accident.
That’s how Spark Curiosity fits inside Planting SEED. Planting is the philosophy, make them think it was their idea. Spark Curiosity is the first move that makes that possible. Before someone can arrive at their own conclusion, they need to actually be leaning in, not just engaged, but curious. Every principle above is a different way of getting that lean before you’ve made a single argument. Get this step right and the next one gets a lot easier, because a curious mind explores far more willingly than a defensive one.
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.
