Recently I read John Nolan’s book Confidential: Business Secrets, Getting Theirs – Keeping Yours and wrote about how to use networking events for information-gathering. One exercise John suggested was recording a conversation to see how much time you spend talking versus listening. What I discovered wasn’t flattering: I talk too much, because I’m apparently uncomfortable with silence, one of the core tenets in John’s book. I still use a lot of what I learned from Confidential in my daily life, but I want to share a few insights of my own about what else might be killing your conversations.
Most small business owners like me think they’re good with people. We’re friendly, we can work a room, and we know how to build rapport. But after reading Nolan’s book, I discovered that being good with people isn’t the same as being good at gathering information from them. Those are two very different skills, and our natural personality might be getting in the way of the second one without us ever knowing it.
John spent 22 years running human intelligence operations for the federal government before bringing those techniques into the business world. One of the more counterintuitive points he makes is that the personality traits that make someone likable and socially successful are often the exact traits that make them a poor information gatherer. And in a small business context, information gathering happens constantly: in sales conversations, vendor negotiations, client check-ins, and networking events. Every one of those conversations is an opportunity you’re either using well or leaving value on the table.
The problem isn’t who you are. It’s whether you know yourself well enough to compensate.
The Extrovert Problem
Here’s the uncomfortable truth Nolan puts directly: extroverts are often their own worst enemy when it comes to elicitation.
The extroverted personality is wired for connection and stimulus. They fill silences naturally. They love to talk, to share, and to feed off the energy of a good back-and-forth conversation. All of that is genuinely useful in many business situations. But in a conversation where your goal is to learn something, that same wiring becomes a liability.
Nolan observed that the extroverted information gatherer tends to undermine the quality of what they collect by finishing the other person’s sentences and filling in the blanks when that person is simply thinking about what they’re about to say next. The moment you fill that silence, you’ve taken the conversation back. What the other person was about to say, the unguarded, unfiltered thought that was forming, disappears. You replaced it with your own words.
This happens constantly in sales conversations. A prospect pauses after you ask a question, and the extroverted owner jumps in to help them, suggesting an answer, reframing the question, or moving on entirely. The pause felt like a gap. But that pause was actually the most valuable moment in the conversation, and they talked right through it.
Extroverts also tend to share too much about themselves. This isn’t vanity. It’s a natural social behavior, the instinct to reciprocate, to build connection through mutual disclosure. But in a business intelligence context, every detail you volunteer about your own operation, your pricing, your plans, or your problems is information the other party is now holding. And they didn’t have to ask you for any of it.
The Introvert Advantage – and Its Own Trap
Introverts have a natural edge here that most people don’t talk about. Nolan is explicit on this point: an introvert is often a magnificent elicitor precisely because they’re comfortable with silence. They think before they speak. They don’t feel the same pull to fill dead air. When someone pauses, the introvert can wait, and the other person, feeling the silence themselves, will often fill it with something they hadn’t planned to say.
Comfort with silence is one of the most underrated skills in business conversation. The person who can hold a pause without flinching will consistently learn more than the person who can’t.
But introverts have their own blind spot. Where the extrovert over-discloses, the introvert can under-engage. They come across as detached, uninterested, or hard to read, which causes the other person to self-censor. People open up when they feel warmth and reciprocity. A conversation that feels like an interview closes people down. The introvert who relies entirely on listening without giving anything back will hit a wall where the other person simply stops talking.
The ideal is somewhere between the two: enough warmth and engagement to keep the other person comfortable, enough restraint to let them do the actual talking.
The Ego Suspension Concept
This is where Nolan makes his sharpest point, and it applies regardless of whether you’re an introvert or extrovert.
He calls it ego suspension. The concept is simple. Your job in an information-gathering conversation is not to be impressive. It’s not to demonstrate your expertise, your experience, your credentials, or your track record. The moment the conversation becomes about you, even through a story you think supports the relationship, you’ve lost the thread.
This is harder than it sounds for small business owners, because their business is personal. They built it. They’re proud of it. When they talk to a prospect, a vendor, or even a competitor at a local event, the temptation to establish credibility by sharing what they know is constant. And sometimes that’s exactly the right move. But Nolan’s point is that most business owners do it reflexively rather than deliberately, and reflexive self-promotion crowds out the listening that would actually serve them better.
Ego suspension means consciously deciding to make the other person the center of the conversation. It means asking questions you don’t already know the answers to. It means resisting the urge to one-up a story with a better one. It means staying genuinely curious rather than waiting for your turn to talk.
Make a decision to go into important business conversations with a specific piece of information you want to come out with. Not a sales goal. An intelligence goal. What do you actually want to know by the end of this conversation that you don’t know right now? Holding that question in mind keeps your ego in check, because you have a real reason to listen.
What This Looks Like in Common Small Business Situations
The sales conversation. The natural instinct is to pitch. The smarter move is to question and listen. But most small business owners rush to pitch the moment they sense an opening. Usually it’s because silence feels like a rejection risk. The prospect who goes quiet after hearing a price isn’t necessarily walking away. They might be calculating. Let them calculate. The owner who jumps in to justify or discount has just undercut their own position unnecessarily.
The vendor or supplier conversation. These conversations are intelligence goldmines that most small business owners treat as purely transactional. Your vendor knows what your competitors are buying, how often they’re buying it, and whether their order patterns are growing or shrinking. They won’t tell you directly. But a relaxed, curious conversation, where you’re asking about the market generally, about trends, about what they’re seeing, will often surface exactly the information you need. The key is not asking directly and not filling the pauses.
The networking event. This is where the extrovert does the most damage. A business owner who works a room efficiently, meeting lots of people, leaving a strong impression, handing out business cards, often comes home with nothing they didn’t already know. The owner who has three deep conversations and asks more than they answer comes home with market intelligence. The measure of a good networking event isn’t how many people you met. It’s what you learned.
The difficult client conversation. When a client is unhappy, the instinct is to defend, explain, and talk. The better move is to ask one good question and then stop talking. “What would have made this right for you?” and then silence. Most business owners can’t hold that silence for more than a few seconds before they jump in to fill it. The client who feels heard, who is allowed to finish their thought without interruption, is far more likely to stay and far more likely to tell you something useful about your service.
The Self-Assessment Nobody Does
Nolan’s underlying argument is that effective information gathering starts with self-knowledge. Before you can manage your personality in a conversation, you have to know what your default behaviors actually are, not what you think they are.
Most people think they’re better listeners than they are. Most extroverts believe they balance talking and listening well. Most people think they know when to stay quiet. The research on this is fairly detailed: we consistently overestimate our own listening ability and underestimate how much we talk.
A simple exercise is to record yourself on your next sales call or vendor conversation. Not to evaluate your pitch but to evaluate the ratio. How much of the conversation are you talking versus listening? How many times do you interrupt or finish a sentence? How often does the other person trail off and then change direction because you gave them a verbal exit before they finished their thought?
Most people who do this exercise are genuinely surprised by what they hear.
The goal isn’t to become someone you’re not. Extroverts have real advantages in relationship-building that introverts often struggle with. Confident self-disclosure can build trust quickly. High energy creates momentum. None of that is bad. But the most effective business conversationalists are the ones who consistently come away knowing more than they arrived with. They are the ones who can consciously dial their natural tendencies up or down depending on what the situation actually requires.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a skill. And like most skills, it starts with knowing where you are before you can move toward where you want to be.
The next time you’re in a sales call, a vendor conversation, or a tough client meeting: will you walk out knowing more than you did going in?
