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. 4d ago

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. Jun 19

    Why Buyers Won't Open Up to You (And Won't Refer You Either)

    You explain your solution clearly. You make your strongest case. The buyer nods, goes quiet, and the deal never moves. The instinct is to sharpen the pitch; the fix runs the other direction. This week we sit with one idea: for a buyer to see you, you have to see them first. We talk through why the most polished, confident pitch can quietly push people away, and what changes the moment you stop being the one with all the answers. The "look at me" pitch repels the people it's built to win Before Sandler, Jim sold the way most of us were taught: here is what I do, here is how I fix your problem, here is why I am the best option. We unpack the attitude hiding underneath that approach -- "you're broken, I'm not, let me fix you" -- and why it reads as repulsion instead of attraction, no matter how good the solution actually is. From information giver to information receiver The shift is not about talking better; it is about receiving. We get into what happens when you ask questions that pull out things a buyer may not even know about themselves. Bonding and rapport do not inch up. They skyrocket. People change, so stop rejecting yourself on their behalf You reached out. They went cold. So you decided they were a no and moved on. We name the quiet move underneath that: "You didn't reject me; I just didn't hear back. But I'm rejecting it." Priorities change, problems change, people change. Your job is not to paint the solution -- the buyer already knows what a solution looks like -- but to find the gap between the pain they feel and the commitment it takes to close it. Seek first to understand We land on Covey's old habit, the one that still holds: seek first to understand, then to be understood. Show genuine interest in someone at a networking event and watch what happens. Your interest triggers their interest. That is a relationship in the beginning. One scheduling note: starting next week the audio drops Monday, so the episode reaches you heading into the week instead of out of it. Jim is traveling, so Monday is a solo episode, and the video moves to Wednesday. If you're tired of hoping you'll be different tomorrow, give us a call today. 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. Jun 12

    Why Prospects Take Your Free Advice and Buy Nothing

    You demonstrate your expertise in the first meeting, the prospect nods along, and then nothing happens. No decision, no follow-up, no deal; just a buyer who walked away with your best thinking for free. We call it unpaid consulting, and it may be the most common deal killer that never gets noticed. This week we break down why salespeople fall into the trap of proving themselves by giving away solutions, and what to do instead. The Beauty Pageant of Bids When the buying convention is three quotes and a comparison, every seller performs the same routine: identify problems, propose solutions, attach a price tag. We talk about why the three-bid structure is the easiest place to slip into unpaid consulting, and why standing out by "demonstrating competence" puts you in a lineup instead of a conversation. The Movie Theater Problem Jason offers a frame for why we default to the performance: a sales call runs on a social construct, the same way an audience suspends disbelief at a movie. Buyers stereotype you as a salesperson; you either push back or play the part. Most of us play the part. Insecurity Disguised as Expertise Jim names the real driver. Most salespeople are insecure about their lack of knowledge of the buyer, so they compensate with an abundance of knowledge about their subject. The Sandler shift flips it: you may be the expert in your field, but you know nothing about this buyer until you build expertise about them first. Doing Nothing Is the Most Popular Solution The most used way humans solve a problem is to do nothing. We talk about why finding a prospect's commitment matters more than proving your capability, and why a good discovery process disqualifies the bad-fit clients you would otherwise regret winning. Jim also shares the two years he wasted trying to make the Sandler system fit his business before learning the lesson the hard way: it is a proven system, just work the system. If this resonated, check out last week's episode on reticular activation, where we cover why you cannot stop noticing something once you have learned to see 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

  8. Jun 5

    Why Buyers Stall When You Solve Their Problem Too Soon

    You run a strong call. You hear the problem, you explain how you would fix it, you watch the prospect nod along. Then nothing. The deal that felt alive goes quiet, and you are left wondering what changed. On this episode we look at the brain science underneath that silence. The reticular activating system is the filter that decides what you notice; we see what we have been programmed to see. For a seller, that filter is dangerous: a prospect names a problem, you instantly hear your solution, and you start presenting before you have finished listening. Why your best advice talks you out of the deal When you hand a prospect the fix for free, you do not create urgency; you create relief. They feel the problem is handled, so the compelling reason to act disappears. Instead of a reason to move forward, they walk away with a justification for living with it longer. Coming in with a clean plate The alternative is to interrupt your own pattern. We talk about arriving void of assumptions, listening instead of solving, and resisting the pull toward premature presentation that turns discovery into unpaid consulting. A device that activates their awareness Jim walks through the intake process he actually uses: a short qualifying call, then a survey built to switch on the prospect's own filter. The goal is not to tell them what is wrong; it is to help them discover a problem they had stopped noticing and quantify what it costs them. What the buyer's filter is hunting for Your prospect has a filter too, and it is scanning for the stereotype of a salesperson out for blood. We get into why a flash of insecurity reads as hidden motive, and why practicing your questions and your presentation is not polish; it is trust. Want to feel this for yourself? Email us and we will send you the same survey Jim uses, so you can experience your own awareness sharpen through the lens of selling. 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

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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
    123
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Sandler Training Hour
  • Show Website
    The Sandler Training Hour