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

You ran a great call. The prospect agreed with everything. Then the deal sat for three weeks, and you found yourself wanting the sale far more than they did.

Deals stall when the buyer's pain is not strong enough in the present to make change a priority. Your job is to find out how committed they are to fixing the problem, not to prove how good you are. In this episode we start with a water heater breaker that flipped three days in a row and trace the exact moment a nuisance became a problem worth paying to fix.

**Why a prospect has no urgency to buy**

On Saturday the breaker was an inconvenience. On Sunday it hinted at something bigger. On Monday it flipped back the second it was reset, and suddenly it mattered. Buyers move through the same stages. Sandler looks at motivation in four parts: gain in the future, gain in the present, pain in the present, and pain in the future. Urgency to act shows up when pain is acute and pervasive, when the problem is not going away on its own.

**The two ways people avoid fixing a problem**

Most of us do nothing about it, or we talk to someone who cannot fix it and let them make us feel better about waiting. Your prospects do the same. If your selling system is built to showcase what you can do instead of asking what they need and whether now is the time, you will get very little urgency back.

**Measure commitment with a scale of 1 to 10**

Urgency is always followed by a plan to execute. We walk through the close Jim uses: lay out what you could do, then ask where they sit on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means "that is the plan I want" and 1 means "we need to find something else." The number tells you whether you have a buyer or a conversation.

**Stop being a professional visitor**

When you skip that measurement, the call becomes a performance about your credibility, and the end of the meeting turns into an assessment of how you feel about yourself. You end up helping someone process their problem while they keep doing nothing about it.

**Negative reverse selling and the truth serum question**

Once you want it more than the buyer does, you become the pushy salesperson. Negative reverse selling gives the prospect a clear choice to do nothing: "It seems like this is not a problem, and a year from now you will be in the same spot, only better at dealing with it. Is that fair?" Most people are not content with that answer, and the ones who say yes just saved you months.

If this resonated, check out "Why You Keep Chasing Prospects Who Never Decide," where we cover what happens after a deal stalls.

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 know you should call that past client. You have known it for three years. Every day you do not, the phone gets heavier.

We think the problem is rarely skill. When the reason behind a prospecting call is self-serving (find more money, get a referral, hit a number), your brain works against the action because it feels selfish. Change the motive and the follow-through changes with it. In this episode, Jim and I stay on mindset instead of technique, because if you are stuck getting on the bike, technique is not your problem.

**Why does prospecting feel so selfish?**

Jim opens with the first principle: your brain is unreliable. The story you tell yourself ("they will see through me, they know I just want their money") keeps you off the phone. Curiosity fixes it. People love talking about their favorite subject, which is themselves.

**The five foot rule**

David Sandler taught that anyone within five feet of you is a conversation. Not a close. A conversation.

**Some will, some won't, so what, someone's waiting**

We talk about the ego we carry into prospecting, and the "dance monkey dance" habit of showing off instead of asking what brought someone in.

**Calling past clients without feeling salesy**

Jim has never made a past client call where the person was not genuinely glad to hear from him, even after spending days building up the nerve. Make it a call to a friend, not a call to a client you want more business from. A third-party story gives you an easy reason to reach out.

**Friction and call reluctance**

Good habits need less friction; bad habits need more. Start with a small list and a warm first call, because in Sandler the hardest call to make is the first one. Schedule your calls early in the day so you are not carrying the dread until 4 p.m.

**Perfectionism as a torture chamber**

Drawing on David Burns, we look at how perfectionism built your client base and now keeps you from the relationship work you do best.

If this resonated, check out "What Avoiding the Uncomfortable Sales Calls Is Costing You," where we cover the cost side of the same avoidance.

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

Every few months the calendar hands you a fifth week, the one that falls outside your standing meetings, and most of it disappears into catch-up work before you notice it arrived. That extra week is the most strategic time you get all quarter. The salespeople who plan it in advance use it to get ahead of their pipeline instead of behind their inbox.

In this episode we break down the fifth week of the month: why it slips away, how to claim it, and how the same thinking sharpens the way you time outreach to a buyer. Underneath the calendar talk sits a bigger idea. Strategy is thinking like the other person, and that is the same muscle as empathy.

**Why the fifth week disappears**

Parkinson's Law says work expands to fill the time you give it. Your recurring meetings never claim the fifth week, so it fills with whatever shouts loudest, usually three months of email. Name it as strategic time before it arrives and it stops vanishing.

**Pre-plan the week before it lands**

Block the fifth week for the work that is important but not urgent: goal setting, and planning the next month or quarter. Deciding in advance is what separates a bonus week you waste from a week that moves your number.

**Read the buyer's calendar, not only your own**

Timing is a form of caring. Someone in accounting does not want your call during month-end close. A standing meeting on the first or the fifteenth competes with a billing team's busiest day. Track a prospect's birthday, then check that it did not land on a weekend, so your note arrives on the day and not a week late.

**Why you cannot find a buyer's pain by looking for it**

Pain is emotional, so an intellectual search for it comes up empty. You reach it by feeling the buyer's experience in the places where they hurt, and that builds a deeper connection faster than any clever question.

**Qualify the person, or perform for them**

On any call you can qualify the person in front of you, or you can demonstrate your competence by performing. Performing makes every conversation about how you feel about yourself, which is a hard place to sell from.

**One thing to try this month**

Find your next fifth week now and put one strategic block on the calendar before it fills. Note: it's next week!

If the pain thread lands, listen back to "Stop Pitching, Start Diagnosing," where we get into discovery and why buyers open up.

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 set a number back in January. Now Q4 is here, and the gap between that number and where you actually are is staring back at you. The instinct is to either beat yourself up or stay busy with whatever is easiest to check off. Both feel productive. Neither moves the number.

On this episode we walk through how to get your head on straight before the last quarter, so you spend your remaining weeks on the work that actually changes the result instead of the work that just feels urgent.

**Blow the dust off your goals**

Stop asking only whether you are ahead of or behind plan. Ask whether you are doing the behaviors that produce results. If you are behind and the behaviors are missing, you are expecting magic to happen.

**Behaviors first, then technique**

If you are not doing the behaviors, no tactic will save you. If you are doing them and still coming up short, then it is a technique problem, and technique is a craft you can improve. The top sellers treat it exactly that way.

**Stop rewarding yourself for self-punishment**

It is fine to sit on the curb for a minute. It is not fine to stay there. A slump becomes permanent when you get better at beating yourself up than at doing the specific behaviors that pull you out.

**Chase a result, not a feeling**

Passive selling is more comfortable in the moment, and you can skate by on decent leads. But if what you are really chasing is relief from the internal conflict, there is a disconnect between that and what you signed up for.

**Spend your hours where the return is**

You have a limited number of hours a day. Referrals, introductions, and strategic partnerships beat cold leads on return, and raising your average ticket raises your results. Mid-size deals produce mid-size results.

**Burn the bridges to hope**

No one is showing up at your door with a platter of business, and there is no cheerleading squad for sellers. You have to be your own squad, own the technique, and do the high-ROI work even when it is not the fun work.

Our next Sales Essentials program starts Tuesday, October 6, a ten-week bootcamp that helps you build your sales process under the Sandler methodology. It runs Tuesdays, 1:00 to 2:30 PM Mountain. If you want a scorecard to grade yourself honestly and a room that helps you screw your head on straight every week, reach out.

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 tried AI, walked away unimpressed, and quietly filed it under overhyped. Most salespeople did the same. The tool is not the problem. The problem is that you are treating a machine like it is intelligent, when the intelligence in the exchange is yours.

On this episode we make the case that AI is not artificial intelligence at all. It is a machine that does what it is told, and it will draw conclusions and hand you a generic deliverable the moment you give it a vague request. If you have only ever used it as a faster Google, you have seen the shallow end and assumed that is all there is. Learning how to use AI in sales starts with a different posture.

Why AI keeps giving you generic answers

It has no context for who you are or what you do, so it fills the blank field with the most predictable version of what you asked for. Feed it a vague prompt and it builds a house on an empty lot.

Think like the architect, not the customer

Jim spent his career in design sales, painting a picture for clients and then building it. That is the posture that works with AI. See what you want clearly, supply the context only you have, and help the machine catch the vision.

Build guardrails that make it ask questions

Left alone, AI jumps the gun and gives you what it thinks you want. Force it to slow down and ask you questions first, the same way discovery works in a real sales conversation.

Start with one repetitive process you already own

Do not try to automate your whole job. Take one process you run every week, document the steps, and build it with AI collaboratively. Jim records every sales conversation, uploads it, and lets AI handle hours of back-end work, then scores the call so he can see what he missed.

Why resistance is a "you" problem

AI is going to level the technical playing field. When that happens, the difference maker is the thing people-oriented sellers already own, the ability to communicate with another human. Sit out the shift and the gap only widens.

Pick one repetitive process in your work this week, describe it out loud, and build the first rough version with AI. Start there.

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