You walk out of a sales call and replay it. You lectured the buyer, or you nodded along and agreed to send a proposal you never wanted to send. The pattern is older than your career.

This week we work through transactional analysis, the concept underneath most Sandler techniques. Every conversation runs between three ego states: parent, adult, and child. Selling gets done adult to adult, and most salespeople default to one of the other two without noticing.

What the three ego states sound like on a sales call

The parent comes in two versions. The critical parent wags a finger ("that is not what you should have done"), and the nurturing parent soothes. The adult is calm, fact based, and curious, and asks questions like "what would have to happen for this to make sense?" The child shows up as the free child with giddy excitement, the adapted child full of mother-may-I filler phrases, and the little professor, the clever, sarcastic one who reads the room and sometimes attacks whatever someone is self-conscious about.

Why presentation mode backfires

Jim calls himself eminently qualified to talk about the critical parent: both of his parents were critical, and he got a double dose. Presenting puts the seller at the front of the room like a school teacher, telling the buyer what to do. Nobody wants to be sold, but most people need help buying. Underneath the presentation, the seller sits in the child, saying look at me, look what I can do for you.

Why your siblings would recognize you on a sales call

The ego states you lived in growing up become the scripts that run your calls today. People with siblings learned how these dynamics play out between peers, not only with parents and bosses. Play a recording of your last sales conversation for a brother or sister, and they would say, "yeah, that is you."

What a crossed transaction is

Every exchange is a transaction. A parent asks, a compliant child agrees, and nothing breaks. When the child starts negotiating instead, the transaction crosses, and the parent ends up throwing the fit. Drama lives in crossed transactions, and drama exists to avoid responsibility.

Where to start

Look up transactional analysis, then watch how you show up at your next networking meeting. Jim walks through his own networking default and why a clique of familiar faces is the child seeking safety. You own 100 percent of you. Once you know your default ego state, you can adjust it, and you stop trying to fix the buyer.

If this resonated, check out The Show-and-Tell Habit That Ends in "Send Me a Proposal," where we cover what happens when a seller goes into presentation mode on autopilot.

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

You have a prospect in your pipeline you already suspect will never buy, and you have not asked them, because a no would sting. Many salespeople got into sales because they are good at winning approval, and that same strength makes it hard to hear no or to invite one.

In this episode, Jim and I ask why saying no, and hearing no, is so hard for a seller. The short answer: when you need the buyer's approval, every no feels like a verdict on you, so you keep the conversation vague and the pipeline full of maybes. The Sandler fix runs the other way: make saying yes hard and make saying no easy.

**Need for approval: where the fear of rejection in sales comes from**

Jim names need for approval as one of the four deadly sins of a salesperson. The more you need the buyer to like you, the harder you push for a yes and the more you educate to impress. Sandler's rule is sell today, educate tomorrow. Educate first and the buyer's head swirls, and the confused mind says no, or asks to think it over.

**A numbers game, but not a numbers-of-yeses game**

Chasing agreement fills your pipeline with quasi opportunities, most of them chances to chase someone down. You can chase a prospect for years and they may buy eventually. That does not make it a good system.

**How do I get a prospect to tell me no?**

Part of the Sandler up-front contract is telling a prospect at the start that the meeting is to decide whether you are a good fit, and asking them to say so if you are not. Jim shares that it took him a year to get those words out of his mouth, after a career of selling the traditional way and making good money at it. Permission-based selling gives the prospect room to be direct with you. That transparency builds trust, and trust earns you the direct questions that surface the real pain.

**Get a lot of nos**

A no is a blessing. It moves you away from someone who will not buy and frees your time for someone who will. A Sandler peer once asked Jim why he struggled to say out loud something the prospect already owns as a right. The goal of every call is a clear yes or a clear no, never a think-it-over. Jim also brings in the five SWs: "Some will, some won't. So what? Stop whining. Someone's waiting."

**Control your time**

A meeting scheduled for 30 minutes that runs 45 feels generous. I call it an act of self-sabotage, because it tells the prospect what you will tolerate. Recognizing that now is the wrong time is also what lets you set up a real future opportunity with a prospect who is interested.

If this resonated, check out "Stop Wanting the Sale More Than Your Prospect Does," where we cover negative reverse selling and measuring how committed a buyer is.

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

A prospect fills out your contact form or calls to ask what you do, and something switches on. You walk them through everything you can do, the call feels great, and it ends with "send me this in an email and I will think about it." Then nothing.

We call that the buyer-seller dance, and most of it runs on autopilot. When a buyer raises a hand, sellers default to show and tell because that is what every seller who ever sold to them modeled. The way out starts with being more awake in the conversation than the buyer is, and asking more questions than you answer.

**Where the sales performance came from**

We trace selling from shopkeepers and door-to-door vacuum sellers to the used car lot and the subject-matter expert who wakes up one day and realizes they are in sales. Most of us copied whoever sold to us. Buyers never see that history. They see the performance.

**Why educated buyers still get a pitch**

Buyers arrive better informed than ever, yet sellers are still trained to sell by educating. Jim calls it the beauty pageant: you audition to prove how good you are, the buyer sits in sponge mode soaking up information, and you leave with good feelings instead of leverage.

**Wimp Junction**

The old Sandler term for the moment you know exactly what to do and fall back into the pitch anyway. Jim shares how it caught him in his first years as a Sandler trainer, practicing for hours and still defaulting to show and tell in a live call.

**Why does "send me a proposal" go silent?**

A demo built around what impresses you usually misses what the buyer cares about. The call ends with a proposal request, the seller reports strong buying signals, and the next step turns out to be waiting for the prospect to call on Friday.

**How do you stop pitching on sales calls?**

Ask more questions. Curiosity alone produces better sales calls, because you learn what actually brought the buyer to the table. If you want to see how much of your own process runs on the dance, email Jason for the questionnaires we use to measure it.

If this resonated, check out "Stop Wanting the Sale More Than Your Prospect Does," where we cover measuring a buyer's commitment instead of showcasing your credibility.

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