Most salespeople have been trained to ask good discovery questions. SPIN Selling, MEDDIC, Challenger — they all hinge on the same fundamental assumption: if you ask the right questions, your prospect will tell you what you need to know.
But there’s a problem that comes with just asking questions. Questions put people on guard. The moment a prospect feels interviewed, something subtle shifts. Their answers become shorter, more polished, more rehearsed. They stop thinking out loud and start defensively managing the conversation.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO, behavior expert Chase Hughes — who has trained Secret Service agents, Navy SEAL leaders, and government officials — revealed a technique that intelligence professionals have used for decades to get people to share far more than they intended to. It’s called elicitation, and it might be one of the most underused skills in sales.
Elicitation is the art of gathering information using statements instead of questions. The core insight is simple: when you make a statement, a person volunteers information. When you ask a question, their brain activates a filtering mechanism — what Hughes calls a “security alarm” — and they answer only what they feel safe sharing.
The difference isn’t subtle. It’s the difference between a prospect giving you a curated answer and thinking out loud with you.
There are three core elicitation techniques that translate directly into sales discovery:
Technique 1: Correcting the Record
People have a deep psychological need to set the record straight. When they hear something slightly wrong, they can’t help but correct it — and in correcting it, they often reveal far more than they intended.
Hughes illustrates this with a business intelligence example: instead of asking “When are you planning to expand?”, an operator might say, “I heard you’re looking at expanding in Q3 or Q4.” The response is almost always a correction: “Actually, it’s Q2 — but we haven’t finalized the vendor decision yet.”
The person just answered a question they were never asked.
In sales discovery, try this:
Instead of asking “What’s your budget?” — a question that almost always triggers a defensive, vague answer — try: “From what I’ve seen with similar companies your size, teams like yours usually have somewhere between $X and $Y set aside for this kind of initiative.”
Watch what happens. They’ll either confirm, correct, or clarify. Any of those outcomes gives you more usable information than a direct question would have.
Technique 2: Bracketing
Bracketing means offering a range rather than asking for a specific number or timeline. It gives the other person something to react to rather than a blank space to fill — and reacting feels less threatening than disclosing.
If you say, “I imagine you’re looking at getting this live sometime between January and March,” your prospect won’t just answer yes or no. They’ll naturally tell you where the real timing pressure lies and why.
In sales discovery, try this:
Rather than asking “What’s your timeline?”, say something like: “Most teams we work with are targeting somewhere between 60 and 90 days to get this up and running. I imagine you’re somewhere in that range?”
The bracket invites them to place themselves on the spectrum — and in doing so, they’ll typically give you the why behind the timeline without you having to pry.
Technique 3: Disbelief
Disbelief might be the most counterintuitive of the three. When you express mild, genuine surprise at something — not sarcastic, not dismissive, just curious disbelief — people naturally expand their explanation to convince you.
Hughes describes it this way: if someone mentions they just got back from a challenging trip and you respond with “No way — that sounds like it was completely smooth sailing,” they’ll immediately start telling you everything that went wrong.
In discovery, this is gold.
In sales discovery, try this:
When a prospect casually mentions a pain point — say, that their current process “takes a while” — resist the urge to ask a follow-up question. Instead, say: “Honestly, that surprises me. I’d have thought a company at your scale would have that pretty well figured out by now.”
They will explain themselves. At length. And in doing so, they’ll tell you exactly how deep the pain runs.
The Unifying Principle: Make It an Observation About the World
The reason these techniques work — and why they don’t feel manipulative when done well — is that they sound like observations about the greater picture, not interrogations. As Hughes puts it, “Anytime you’re using any of these techniques, it should feel and sound like you’re making an observation about the world.”
The moment it feels directly aimed at the prospect, the effect disappears. This is why the classic cheap rapport-building tactic of saying “I can tell you’re someone who really values X” tends to fall flat. The language is pointed too directly, and people instinctively feel it as manipulative pressure.
Elicitation works because that pressure is removed. There’s no question to dodge, no blank to fill. There’s just a statement sitting there, waiting to be confirmed, corrected, or challenged — and basic human nature takes care of the rest.
Here’s what a short discovery sequence putting all three techniques together might sound like:
“I was looking at your LinkedIn before this call — it looks like your team has been growing pretty fast. I’d guess you’re probably still running most of this on spreadsheets or something like HubSpot at this point.” — (Correcting the Record)
“For a team your size, most folks we talk to are dealing with somewhere between 500 and 2,000 leads a month they’re trying to manage.” — (Bracketing)
“Honestly, given how much you’ve scaled, I’d have thought this process was pretty locked in by now.” — (Disbelief)
By this point in the conversation, a prospect who might have given you guarded one-line answers to direct questions has now told you their tech stack, their volume, and exactly where the friction is. You haven’t asked a single formal discovery question.
A Note on Using This Ethically
Elicitation is powerful, and that comes with responsibility. The goal in sales should never be to extract information from someone against their interests. Used well, these techniques actually create better conversations — ones where prospects feel heard, where they think out loud, and where real problems surface rather than staying buried beneath rehearsed answers.
The best discovery isn’t an interrogation. It’s a dialogue where the prospect feels safe enough to tell you what’s actually going on.
Elicitation, done with genuine curiosity and care, creates exactly that kind of conversation.
This week’s challenge: In your next three discovery calls, pick one elicitation technique and replace one direct question with it. Notice what changes about the quality and depth of the information you receive.
The results might surprise you.