The Sandler Training Hour

Jim Stephens
  • 4.0 (1)
  • Business

Join Jim and Jason Stephens for weekly insights on the Sandler Selling System, navigating the modern sales landscape, and overcoming real-world business challenges.  A Sandler Trainer is a salesperson. We lead by example and talk from experience. Reach out to us: Jason.Stephens@sandler.com Visit our website: https://go.sandler.com/crossroads/

  1. 3d ago

    Why You Keep Chasing Prospects Who Never Decide

    You present your best work, the prospect nods along, and then the conversation goes cold. You follow up once, twice, and eventually they land in a pile you check on for the next nine months. In this episode we look at why that happens, and it usually traces back to the level of pain you never reached. We spend the hour on the third level of pain, personal impact, and how it changes depending on whether you are selling to a business or to a person. Pain instead of a pitch. Traditional selling paints the best possible picture and waits for the prospect to react. We invert that. Rather than hoping our strengths happen to match their problem, we start from what the buyer actually cares about and work from there. The three levels of pain. Symptom, business impact, personal impact. We walk through all three and show why most sellers stop at the surface. In B2C, the middle level often shows up as family or community impact rather than pure business cost. Whose money is on the table. The core distinction of the episode. In a B2B deal you are helping someone spend other people's money, so personal impact is mostly about perception: how peers, a boss, and the wider market will judge the decision. In a B2C deal the buyer spends from a finite personal pool, with competing priorities pulling at the same dollars. Permission to ask the hard questions. For most sellers the barrier here is permission. We talk about why so many of us avoid the questions that move past surface symptoms into what the buyer thinks and feels, and what it costs us when we skip them. Quantify the cost and the budget appears. We work through a simple way to put numbers on a recurring problem in a B2B deal, and why no company lets a large enough problem sit unsolved just because it was not in the plan. Pain by persona. Every deal has stakeholders who are not in the room. We cover how to map buyers by role, why a contractor and a first-time buyer need different conversations, and how to surface the objections of the person who never showed up before they cost you the sale. If you have been collecting think-it-overs and blaming the prospect, this one gives you a more useful place to look. It is built for sales leaders and salespeople who want fewer stalls and cleaner qualifying, in both B2B and B2C. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  2. Aug 10

    Why Prospects Shut Down When You Try to Overcome Their Objections

    You had the answer ready. You delivered it cleanly. And the prospect pulled further away. That pattern has a cause: every time you argue with a hesitation, you confirm the stereotype the buyer walked in with before you said a word. This week we continue our conversation on objections with the core Sandler position: overcoming an objection is the prospect's work, and your job is to help them do it. We walk through what that sounds like on a live call, from the first playback to the moment a stalled deal clarifies itself. Objections are opinions Jim reframes the whole category. An objection is a thought the prospect chose to say out loud. When you hear it as an attack, you get defensive and telegraph it. When you hear it as an opinion, you can acknowledge it and open the dialog instead of shutting it down. The playback that builds trust Before you respond to any hesitation, restate it: "What I'm hearing you say is that moving forward feels like it could create these consequences. Is that what I'm hearing?" The prospect feels heard, and a prospect who feels heard will listen to you. "I have a different perspective. Would you like to hear it?" Jim's follow-up once the playback lands. In 25 years of using it, nobody has said no. When "we need to think about it" means no The gentle put-off. Jim repeats the prospect's words verbatim, then offers a story: often when people say that to me, what they mean is they don't want to move forward and don't want to hurt my feelings. Could that be happening here? Either they confirm the soft no, or they name what they actually need to process, and now you can coach them through it. Questions that quantify commitment On a scale of 1 to 10, where will this project be a year from now? How many minutes a week do you spend thinking about this problem? Clarity questions like these are how to respond when a prospect says they need to think about it without fighting them for the deal. Referrals over close rate The tree metaphor: conversations are the branches, and fruit shows up at the end of some of them. Competence demonstrated on a call brings warm referrals, even from people who were never a fit themselves. Try this before your next call: notice what you feel the moment an objection lands. Defensiveness telegraphs through the phone. Empathy is what opens a prospect to a different perspective. If this resonated, check out last week's episode where we cover why think-it-overs trace back to how you open the meeting. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  3. Aug 3

    Why Prospects Keep Saying They Need to Think It Over

    The call goes well. The prospect nods along, says it all makes sense, then asks for the weekend to think it over. You follow up, they go quiet, and your pipeline fills with maybes that stretch your sales cycle another month. This week we kick off a two-part series on objections, starting with the most common stall in sales: think it over. We dig into why salespeople who walk in expecting a stall almost always get one, and how to build the answer into your process before the objection ever surfaces. Part two drops next week, where we widen out to handling objections in general. Set the outcomes before the call starts We walk through the up-front contract and the exact language for naming three outcomes at the top of a call: we move forward, it's not a fit and we part ways, or it's a yes but not right now. When the buyer agrees to a decision structure in advance, the end of the call stops feeling rushed and starts feeling expected. Stop being a professional visitor Jim owns up to the years he spent avoiding assertiveness because he didn't want to feel aggressive, softening every expectation with wishy-washy language. We talk about why high urgency, moving every meeting to a logical next step, is the ingredient that separates a closer from a visitor. You are the easiest person to sell You know your own objections better than anyone. If commitment stays optional in your own head, you'll win every internal negotiation and change nothing. We connect this to why getting more informed can feel like progress while your behavior stays exactly the same. Practicing in your head is not practicing. The response that opens the real conversation Even with clear expectations, some buyers will default to a stall. Jim shares the word-for-word response we recommend, built on candor and nurturing, that surfaces what the prospect is actually thinking without putting them on the defensive. If you're getting a lot of think it overs, here's the question to sit down with this week: what are you doing to set the expectation for one? Look at your current process and find where the stall gets invited in. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  4. Jul 27

    Why Your Sales Conversations End in Assumptions Instead of Agreements

    You walk out of a first meeting and something nags at you. Was that person being straight with you? You have no evidence either way, so you fill the gap with a guess. Your prospect is doing the same thing about you. This week we get into clarity, and what happens to a sales relationship when nobody asks for it. When you stop questioning what someone says, you start reading into what they don't say. Suspicion builds on both sides, neither person names it, and the deal stalls for reasons that never make it into the CRM. Topicality: define the terms before you argue the substance Jason brings in a rule from high school debate. Before you touch the substance of an argument, you define the terms. Get loose with a definition and you can spend an hour taking positions that never touch what the conversation was actually about. Sales calls run the same way. Two people say "budget" or "decision" or "next steps" and mean four different things. Be impeccable with your word Jim pulls the first of The Four Agreements into the conversation and adds the working translation: the goal is not the message you mean to send, it's the message the other person receives. That means translating Jim speak into Jason speak. Behavior style, background, how they think. The more you know about the person, the more precise your words can get. Two people, two scripts Every conversation is two accumulated scripts running at each other. Autopilot is easier, and staying present all day will exhaust you. In sales those scripts were built as a means to an end, and that is exactly what makes a salesperson feel salesy. Nobody wants to be sold. People do need help buying. Taking the push out Jim walks through leading the witness, and why a strong personality type gets more persuasive in their own head and more pushy in everyone else's. His counterweight: you're an expert on your subject matter, not an expert on the person across from you. From there we get into negative reverse selling as a way to remove the push entirely. Suspicion is a bad foundation Two people trying to build a relationship while quietly suspecting each other end up with a bad relationship and a set of assumptions they carry into the next one. Asking clarifying questions before you agree to anything protects both of you. The takeaway Jason lands on at the close: if you want clarity from other people, be clear yourself, and get comfortable with them asking you for it. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  5. Jul 20

    Why Prospects Take Your Free Advice and Never Buy

    A prospect says the words every seller wants to hear: I need help. You show them everything you know, they thank you for the advice, and the deal goes nowhere. If that pattern sounds familiar, this episode names what is causing it. This week we dig into what happens in the seconds after someone asks for help, and why the instinct to start fixing costs sellers deals, leverage, and time. Most people in business development are natural problem solvers, and that reflex is exactly the trap. The inbound lead trap An inbound lead lands squarely in your wheelhouse and the happy ears switch on. We walk through why giving a prospect the information that lets them judge you, before you gather the information that lets you qualify them, puts you in a lose-lose position from the first call. Unpaid consulting Jumping straight to solutions earns you plenty of referrals, and almost none of them pay. We break down why free fixes get politely received and rarely acted on: a prospect who has not shared everything they know will treat any answer as half baked. Gauge commitment before you prescribe Having a problem is not the same as being willing to invest time, money, and energy in solving it. We cover why measuring commitment is the first job when someone says they have a problem, and what happens when you skip it: you insert yourself into a feedback loop you will grow to resent. The problem they bring is never the real problem Nine times out of ten, what a prospect describes is the surface indicator. What they are actually saying is: I am stuck, help me think through this. We connect this to why some companies live with surface-level problems forever. The ego underneath chronic fixing The uncomfortable part of the conversation. If you are compelled to answer every question, you are getting a need met: being needed, being appreciated, staying in the thick of things. Jim owns his own history as a chronic fixer and the value he lost to it. Facilitate discovery instead The job is not solving problems. The job is facilitating discovery, then reaching a mutual agreement about next steps. We also get into why the word itself matters: framing a call as discovery instead of a sales call changes how you show up, because mindset has to drive behavior. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  6. Jul 13

    Why You Chase Prospects Instead of Asking for the Next Step

    You avoid pushing because you do not want to look like the stereotypical salesperson. So you soften, you hedge, and you leave calls without a firm next step. Then you spend the week chasing. The problem is not that you are too aggressive. It is that fear of aggression has quietly turned you into a professional visitor. In this episode we separate assertiveness from aggression and show why the gap between them is where most sellers lose clarity, and deals. Why your read on your own assertiveness is unreliable We open with an uncomfortable truth: your sense of how assertive you are is subjective. It is anchored in how you were raised. Jim describes being told by his wife, "why did you say that," about a comment he did not even register as sharp. If you lean passive, asking for help or interrupting a server can feel aggressive. If you lean forward, you may run over people without noticing. You cannot calibrate off your own perception, so we look at what the situation actually requires instead. The fire hydrant problem Jim tells the story of learning to ride a bike, fixating on the one fire hydrant down the sidewalk, and hitting it. Sellers do the same thing. They stare at the salesperson stereotype they are trying to avoid and steer straight into it. The fix is not to focus harder on what to avoid. It is to map where you actually want to go. Assertive and permissive at the same time Being assertive does not mean pressuring the buyer. We break down how to hold your position while leaving the decision genuinely in the buyer's hands: "I am here to help you decide whether you want this or not. It is completely fine if you don't." Most buyers reached out because something has been frustrating them for months. They are closer to a decision than you think, and pressure is the wrong tool. The clear future commitment We get into the Sandler idea of never ending a call without a clear future commitment: a scheduled meeting on the calendar, a mutually agreed agenda, and a defined outcome. For a lot of people who come to Sandler, that feels almost unthinkable, so they chase instead. We make the case that direct leadership, being crystal clear on when you meet and what happens next, is the healthiest way to move from passive to assertive. Why a plan beats courage Conversations move at a thousand miles a minute. If you have to summon nerve in the moment and invent the words on the spot, you will find every wrong way to say it. We compare it to a shooter at the three-point line who has repped the motion enough that it runs on autopilot. Assertiveness with a plan is not a complicated move. If you tend to avoid being direct because you do not want to pressure anyone, this one reframes the whole thing. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  7. Jul 6

    Why One Hard Conversation Never Fixes the Problem

    You finally had the hard conversation. You said the thing you had been avoiding. A week later the same behavior is back, and now you are bracing to have the exact same talk all over again. This week we get into the part of hard conversations nobody prepares you for: the follow-up. One conversation does not buy permanent compliance, and no human has ever worked that way. We break down why the reminder matters more than the confrontation, and why quietly treating a person as a problem to fix turns the whole relationship into a game. Five Seconds of Courage Gets You Started; the Follow-Up Gets You Results Working up the nerve to open a hard conversation is a real hurdle. We talk about why thought precedes action, and how our own supposition about the other person's reaction stops us before we say a word. But the courage to bring it up is only the first half. The harder skill is what you do the second, third, and fourth time the issue surfaces. Compliance Is Not a Magic Button A lot of us manage the way a bad manager once managed us: through compliance only. We walk through why that fails, using a simple example of an employee who keeps showing up late. Telling someone to stop is not leadership; finding the gap between what they intend and what they actually do is. Stop Fixing the Person; Start Helping Things Go Right Here is the reframe that changes the conversation. When you treat a person as a problem to fix, you have turned them into an object, and controlling an object that has free agency is manipulation. We swap the fix-it demand for a better question: "How can I help you be on time?" Same issue, completely different posture. It puts ownership where it belongs and takes the finger-pointing out of the room. The General Process Fails the Specific Person Define your process so tightly that every prospect and every person gets handled the same, and you have solved for a category while ignoring the individual. We get into why the payoff grows the more you understand what makes each person different, and why the most efficient move is rarely the most effective one. If you have ever caught yourself thinking "they must have forgotten," or repeating the same feedback until you are sick of your own voice, this episode is about what to do instead. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

  8. Jun 29

    Why Your Sales Activity Isn't Getting the Results You Expected

    You are doing the activity. Day after day, the calls and the follow-up and the pipeline work; the results you expected never show up. And the advice you keep hearing is the worst advice there is: try harder. This week I tell a story from a bicycle tour across Wyoming, where I got six flat tires in a single day and fixed every one the same way. I was not getting better at changing a tire; I was managing the emotion of getting another flat. That is the trap, and it has a sales version that quietly costs people their whole year. The cost of managing the emotion instead of the problem Practicing emotional management instead of changing your approach has a cost: it compounds. I patched six flats before I went through the tire itself and found the metal shard that caused all of them. One real diagnosis up front would have saved the other five. The sales version is doing the same activity and never asking what I expect it to do differently tomorrow that it hasn't done yet. The Success Triangle: behavior, attitude, technique Behavior is what you actually do, not what you intend. Attitude is what you believe about what you're trying to accomplish. Technique is how you do the thing. Behavior and attitude with no sharp technique behind them look like one thing from the outside: poor execution dressed up with good intentions. Your cookbook is the dashboard you actually control The cookbook is your daily minimum sales behaviors, the things that tell you a year from now you're still standing. Without it you get the roller coaster: a ton of prospecting, then panic about delivery, then nothing left to deliver, then a scramble back to prospecting. Audit what the cookbook is producing or you're running on hope. Why beating yourself up in private keeps you stuck Shame only survives in the dark. Most of the people around you actually want you to win, strangers included; they just don't know you're struggling, because you never asked. If you don't practice directness about asking for help, everyone keeps going about their day. A mood log audit for your prospecting David Burns covered daily mood logs on his podcast this week. Point that idea straight at sales: right after you hang up a prospecting call, log what you felt, what set it off, the thought underneath it, and a more accurate way to see the same moment. Do that for a couple of weeks and your emotional volatility stops being the weather; it becomes data you can audit the same way you audit your cookbook. Two roads from here. Find the right direction and audit whether the results back it up, or accept that you're at the mercy of your own volatility. The difference between 30 years of experience and one year of experience 30 times is whether you stopped to audit the data and leaned into what was working. The Sandler Training Hour Hosted by Jim & Jason Stephens | Crossroads Business Development Join hosts Jim and Jason Stephens from Crossroads Business Development as they discuss techniques, tactics, and the occasional tangent associated with the Sandler Selling System. Whether you are prospecting, negotiating, or closing, The Sandler Training Hour gives you the actionable advice you need to stop "winging it" and start controlling the sale. 📧 Reach out: jason.stephens@sandler.com 🌐 Crossroads Business Development

See All (126)

About

Join Jim and Jason Stephens for weekly insights on the Sandler Selling System, navigating the modern sales landscape, and overcoming real-world business challenges.  A Sandler Trainer is a salesperson. We lead by example and talk from experience. Reach out to us: Jason.Stephens@sandler.com Visit our website: https://go.sandler.com/crossroads/

Information

  • Creator
    Jim Stephens
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    126
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Sandler Training Hour
  • Show Website
    The Sandler Training Hour

You Might Also Like