Information Pull vs. Push

"Just ask more questions" — yeah, but about what?

Every boss I've ever worked with tells their sellers the same thing: ask more questions. And every seller I've ever coached nods along, walks out the door, and does the opposite. They get to the customer and they start pushing — here's our plant, here's our mixes, here's our on-time percentage, here's why we're great.

I get it. You know your product. You're proud of it. The customer asked for a quote, so you think the job is to tell them why to pick you.

But watch what happens when you do that. The customer takes every feature you push and turns it into a reason to negotiate. "Okay, you've got five plants — so you should be able to come down a few bucks, right?" You just handed them the ammunition.

The move I teach instead is the opposite. I call it information pull vs. push. Instead of telling them what you are, you get them to tell you what they need — and then you hold up whatever piece of you matches.

"What you're doing is we're forcing them to tell us why they value us. Not me tell them why they value me. They're telling me." — from a session with Elias

That's the whole game. If you bring up the value, they're ready to rebut it. If they bring up the value, it's their data. They just sold themselves.

Industry terms this page covers

If your boss told you to "ask more questions," this is the page that tells you which questions — and what to listen for when they answer.

Price intel vs. preference intel

Here's a line I use with sellers all the time, because most of you are already great at half of this job:

"You guys are all really good at going to get price intel. I want you to go get preference intel."

Price intel is what your competitor quoted. Useful — but it's a number, and a number only tells you how to lose.

Preference intel is why the customer works with who they work with. What do they like about them? What drives them nuts? What would make them leave? That's the intel that lets you actually move them.

Sellers bring me price intel all day long. "Steve, the other guy is three bucks cheaper." Great. Now tell me why they keep calling that guy. "Uh... I don't know." Okay, that's the question.

How to pull — three moves that actually work

Move 1: "Who would you pick if price was equal?"

Customer calls, asks you to sharpen your pencil. Before you drop a dollar, ask:

"Let's just say we get to the end of this and you end up with both of our quotes and they're exactly the same price. Who would you pick? What do you want to work with?"

Now they have to tell you. And whatever comes out of their mouth — "well, I'd probably go with the other guys because their plant is closer" — is gold. That's their real decision criteria. Not price. Now you know where to push.

If they say you, the follow-up is: "Really? How come?" Let them keep talking. Every reason they give you is a reason you can hold your price with.

Move 2: Listen for the leaks

When a customer starts telling you about the supplier they work with now, they will leak micro-complaints. Little things. "Yeah, the pumpers keep losing work." "They're late sometimes when it rains." "I don't love dealing with their new dispatcher."

Most sellers blow right past that stuff. I want you to stop at every leak and write it down. That's the wedge you were looking for. Next conversation, you don't pitch — you ask: "Hey, you mentioned the pumpers losing work. How often is that happening?" Now you're poking the pain they already told you about. You didn't invent it. They did.

Move 3: Stroke the ego, pull the secret

For certain customers — especially the hard-charging D-style types — you can't just interrogate them. You have to give them a reason to open up. So I flatter and pull at the same time:

"Raz, I just need to talk to you more and understand how you are so amazing at getting work. I mean, you eat healthy, you work out — that's tough to do, man. You got two kids, and you're still committed to getting work all the time and crushing it. I need to figure out what your secret sauce is, man. I got to understand this."

Now Raz is going to tell me everything. How he gets work. Who he trusts. What drives him nuts. "How do you get business?" is one of my favorite questions — because the answer tells you exactly how to close them.

Stop splaining

Here's the pattern I see over and over. The customer pushes back on price. The seller gets triggered — they feel compelled to justify — and they start what I call splaining. On-time percentage, QC, heat of hydration, three trial batches, proximity to the plant, risk, insurance policy. It all pours out.

The seller walks away thinking they made a strong case. The customer walks away thinking "wow, that guy sure talks a lot."

"You did all the talking. So what happens in a negotiation, unfortunately, is that we get triggered. They asked the question, hey, is there anything you can do on this one, and we feel compelled. So now we have to go, oh, well, the thing that I want to tell you about is... And we just keep going. Instead of, let's just coach this out. Is there a move that you can do right away that shifts it back to him to keep talking instead of you starting to do the splaining?" — from a session with Brandon

The move that shifts it back is almost always a question. "You mentioned you wanted to use us — was there a reason?" "What's making you look at the other guy?" "If I could solve that one thing, would we be working together?" Every question is a pass back to them. Let them articulate. You're not being weak. You're being patient enough to let them hand you the leverage.

The hunter mindset

Here's the frame I want you in:

"If you know your customer better than your competitor knows your customer, then you're able to influence them better. My vision for you is to be able to go into the woods, track down my prey, and bring home dinner. Like, what do you want? Let's go." — from a session with Jared

Your job isn't to be the best pitcher in town. Your job is to know your customer better than anyone else knows your customer. When you do, the information flows, the price conversation takes care of itself, and you stop negotiating against ghosts.

Every conversation is either extracting intel or not. If you left a conversation without learning something new about the customer's world — their pressure points, their people, their pain, their preferences — that conversation was a missed rep.

Homework — a two-week pull challenge

For the next two weeks, I want you to do exactly one thing: before every customer call, write down three questions you want answered by the end of the call. Not product questions. Not logistics questions. Preference intel questions.

Some starter questions if you're stuck:

• "If the price was equal, who would you pick? Why?"
• "When does a job go bad for you guys? What makes it go right?"
• "How do you get business?" (ask them about their customers — you'll learn how they think)
• "Tell me about the supplier you use most. What keeps you with them?"
• "What makes you nervous about switching suppliers on a job?"

After the call, write down what you learned. If you wrote down three questions and you can't answer any of them, you did all the talking. That's the feedback loop.

Do this for two weeks. You will know more about your customers than any of your competitors — and you won't have lowered your price once to learn it.

Where to go next

• The Last Look conversation — the negotiation play where preference intel beats price intel every time
• The 3 Buckets of Questions — the structured framework for what to pull on
• Partnership Progression — the customer model this skill moves people through
• DISC — matching how you pull to who you're pulling from — D-styles, I-styles, S-styles, and C-styles each leak differently
• Clark Kent — the posture that makes customers want to explain themselves to you

Source: drawn from 500+ moments across the live-coaching corpus — the highest-volume teaching concept in the body of work. Quotes lightly cleaned for readability; voice preserved.