Selling With Sabine

About Selling With Sabine

Sabine, the host of the "Selling with Sabine" podcast, is a certified sales expert with extensive experience working with Fortune 150 tech companies, including telecommunications and cybersecurity. She also holds an Adult Learning Graduate certificate and utilizes her knowledge from her Instructional Design Graduate program to design and develop sales training assets, such as job aids and micro e-learning courses, for her clients. In her podcast, Sabine guides salespeople, solopreneurs, business owners, and aspiring entrepreneurs on a short episodic journey of how to incorporate sales and service best practices to achieve greater success. If you'd like to connect with Sabine for your training or speaking needs, you can message her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesalestrainingarchitect/. Don't forget to follow her for more insightful content, and share the podcast with your friends, family and business associates!

Publisher

Sabine Taylor

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 May 2023

Latest episode

26 May 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 May 2026

   Why Most People Fail the "Sell Me This Pen" Challenge

   Ever feel like your sales pitch sounds more like a late-night infomercial than a real conversation with a client? In this quick episode, I break down why jumping straight into "pitch mode" is hurting sales professionals, and the exact question you need to ask first to uncover what your buyer actually needs. Transcript: Welcome to Selling with Sabine. I am your host and certified sales coach, Sabine Taylor. I want to start by saying thank you so much for giving me your time today. I genuinely appreciate it. So today, I want to talk about a sales challenge that comes up a lot during job interviews and during training sessions. The challenge is called "Sell me this pencil," or "Sell me this pen." The point is the same, no matter the object, because what the person on the other side who's listening to you they're trying to see if you know how to sell. And here's where most people go wrong. The moment a sales rep hears that challenge, they jump straight into pitch mode. They pick up the pencil, start rattling off features, mention price, and try to convince the person across from them to buy it on the spot. But that is skipping the most important part of the entire sales process. And here's the thing: before you can sell anything to anyone, you have to understand the context. You really need to know who you're selling to and where the product is actually going to be used. Because selling a pencil to a walk-in customer at Staples is a whole different selling process than when you're a sales rep or business owner selling into a hospital system, a government institution, or a K-12 school district. So, hopefully, you see where I'm going with this. So when an interviewer hands you the pen or pencil and says, "Sell me this" again, what they're really asking is, "How would you go about selling this?" Or they should be asking, "What is your process to sell this?" And knowing that, your very first move should not be a pitch. It should be a question to unpack the scenario. You can ask something like this: "Can you tell me a little bit about the customer? Who am I selling to here? Am I a retail associate working with a walk-in customer, or am I an enterprise rep working with a large school district?" That one question changes everything. It signals to the interviewer or trainer that you're not just a product pitcher, but a strategic thinker who understands the sales process and has to flex depending on the customer meaning you have to be flexible. Okay? Because let's be real: rattling off a list of features is what a host does on QVC or what you typically see in a late-night infomercial. In a real face-to-face selling environment, that doesn't cut it. Your job isn't to do all the talking. It's to let the buyer do the talking so you can listen, pick up on their patterns, take notes, and then connect your solution directly to the pain point. That's why you want your customer or prospective customer to talk so that way, you can start to mentally connect the dots of how you're going to pitch the product or service to them. So as we wrap up today, remember this: never jump straight into a pitch. You want to diagnose the customer or your prospective buyer. You want to figure out what environment they're going to be using that product or service in, and you want to lead with the problem first — how your solution solves their problem. And with that said, if you want to elevate your sales approach or train your team to drive real results without relying on aggressive, outdated techniques, I would love to connect. I've trained thousands of business-to-consumer professionals across retail and contact center environments, and I have a real knack for shifting behaviors that drive revenue. You can reach me at sellingwithsabine@gmail.com. Also, if you liked this episode  and I sure hope you did  please consider liking, subscribing, and sharing this content or this podcast episode with anyone you know who's struggling in sales or starting a business and needs help in that arena. Again, thank you, and I'll see you in the next episode. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellingwithsabine/

2. 

   10 May 2026

   When Leading Questions and Assumptive Selling Become Manipulation

   Description Have you ever agreed to something in a sales conversation and later wondered how you got there? In this episode of Selling With Sabine, I discuss how leading questions and assumptive selling techniques are used in high-pressure sales environments, and how those communication patterns can quietly influence customer decision-making before a true agreement has even taken place. Transcript: Welcome to selling with Sabine. I am your host and certified sales trainer Sabine Taylor. Thank you for giving me your time today. I truly do appreciate it. Today, I want share my thoughts on leading and assumptive style questions, the kinds that are often used in high pressure sales environments. But for this episode, I also want to connect that conversation to something much more personal. My experience representing myself in court, my background as a certified sales trainer, and what I have observed influencers saying online to sell their high-ticket coaching program. So let me explain… What started as me being represented by counsel in a child support case led me to basically firing all of my attorneys and representing myself as a pro se litigant. I did that because I did not feel they were asking the judge or the witnesses the right set of questions. And questions are important because this is how an attorney begins to influence the judge to rule in their favor. But the key is to ask the right style of questions. So when I started representing myself, I had to learn how to frame the questions correctly. You see, at court, judges manage extremely heavy caseloads. There is very little patience that they have for litigants who appear appear unprepared to ask the right questions even when that litigant has no formal education in law. With that said, if I ask the question that the judge deemed was argumentative, improperly framed, or if I failed to follow procedural standards surrounding questioning, that judge would automatically interrupt me requiring that I reframe the question or threaten me to move proceedings without allowing me the opportunity to question my witness. And remember, in the courtroom, being able to ask questions is critically important to winning your case. Now what helped me adapt in the courtroom was my background as a sales trainer. My experience in sales coaching taught me how to think on my feet and reframe questions in real time. And that only happened for me in sales because I was teaching sales reps and telling them the same message over and over and over again. So naturally, I developed an ability to reframe any questions at a drop of a dime. Now when I hear certain sales influencers teaching overly scripted leading questions and pairing them with assumptive sales tactics, I want to become that lawyer in the courtroom. And I want to say, objection. Leading questions, your honor. So that way, the judge will magically appear and say sustained. Rephrase your question, counsel. Rephrase your question, salesperson… So for an example, a leading question that you might hear from an influencer with a high ticket coaching program that they are trying to sell you will sound something like this. So…what if I told you that you would be meeting with me weekly…and twelve other ambitious women on a Zoom call, and all of you would be working through the necessary steps to confidently close high ticket sales and build financial freedom? Would that make you feel like you were joining a community of high achieving women focused on growth and accountability? Would you then agree that joining this coaching program would help you build generational wealth to support your family? So would you then agree that breaking up the payments into four installments would make it possible for you to join this community… Pause. And wow. When I hear that, I'm like, okay. If anyone is trying to sell like this, that customer needs to run for the hills and run for the hills fast. These are the type of influencers that often appear on a headline news for scamming their customers out of thousands of dollars because they're using sales techniques like this. Pause. And what makes this leading question very powerful is when that influencer pairs it with assumptive sales techniques, and that assumptive sales technique can sound like this. So when we get started…or once we're in community… again, pause. This is where my brain says, hold up. Wait a minute. When did this moment become a we moment? At what point did I suddenly become a we? Did I agree to something already? Because…grammatically, something very powerful is happening. That influencer has shifted from I and you into we. So at first, the conversation with the influencer starts like, oh, I can help you with that. Your business can benefit from this. But then suddenly, the language changes…to when we get started, as we move forward, once we begin implementing, and psychologically…that shift…matters. Because the moment we enters the conversation, that influencer no longer sees that customer as an independent decision maker with the ability to decide whether the deal is good or bad for them. But linguistically, they are being moved as a customer into partnership, into agreement, into participation for some product or service that they have no intention on buying or signing up for. And, typically, these types of tactics are used on customers who are quiet or who the influencer feel is a bit gullible. But just because… someone or a customer is silent, that should never automatically be interpreted as an emotional commitment. See, this is where ethical communication matters, and it matters a lot in sales, especially in highly regulated industries like finance, insurance, health care, and real estate, and the list goes on. These are the type of high pressured sales tactics that can create legal problems for that influencer, especially if their customers feel like they're being pressured into signing up for a service or a product that they don't fully understand. And when that happens, they can sue. And any judge or attorney involved in that type of case will be quickly be able to tell if the question the influencer used was proper or improper. And no seller wants to be before any legal professional in a case revolving around assumptive or leading questions because, quite honestly, this is their world. As judges and attorneys, they dissect questions for a living. So with that said, when the sales process begins to rely heavily on high pressure sales tactics, that seller is compensating for a skill deficiency that was never properly addressed through trading. Pause… If a sales professional truly understands their product and knows how to actively listen and has practice objection handling every day and can confidently navigate around different customer personas, there is no need to force momentum through psychological pressure. Pause. Real confidence in sales does not come from manipulation. It comes from preparation. Pause. It comes from practicing your role plays with your role play buddies. Pause. Because when salespeople do not know how to sell through skills, they often attempt to sell through force, and force based selling eventually damages customer trust, brand, and credibility and could land that seller in front of a judge, and that is a big pause… So with that said, if you're serious about improving your sales approach or training your team to operate at a higher level without relying on aggressive outdated sales techniques that I just talked about, I would love to connect. I've trained thousands of sales and customer service professionals in highly regulated industries working across retail and call center environments in the business to consumer space. And I would love to help you shift behavior in a way that drives measurable and sustainable sales results. So you can reach me at SellingwithSabine @gmail dot com. That is simply the name of this podcast followed by at gmail.com. And, of course, if you found the value in today's message, and I really hope you did, please consider sharing this podcast with your friends and your family plus colleagues, particularly anyone who's thinking about going into business for themselves or already in business. And I encourage you to visit my LinkedIn page and I will leave my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And with that said, I thank you for listening and have a great day. Bye bye for now https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellingwithsabine/

3. 

   6 May 2026

   In Sales, There's No Such Thing as Luck

   In sales, people love to call outcomes "luck." But in today's episode, I take a closer look at that belief and explain what's really driving results behind the scenes. Transcript: Welcome to selling with Sabine. I'm your host and certified sales coach, Sabine Taylor. Thank you for giving me your time today. I truly do appreciate it. Today, I want to talk to you about the concept of luck and why I don't believe in it. To drive this point home, I want to take you back to maybe the fourth grade when fractions was introduced to you. You may recall that your math teacher told you that anytime you have a zero in the denominator, it is undefined, meaning you have nothing to divide. So think of it like this. You told your friends to come over your house, and they will enjoy some delicious pizza. But when they arrive, there was no pizza to be found. There was nothing to divide. That too is considered undefined. When it comes to sales, there is no such thing as an undefined sales event. What I mean by that, sometimes I hear professionals say, I did so much work. I went to the right schools. I networked. I met the right customer, and I persisted. I am so lucky. No. That is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. That is not luck. That's being ready. You see in sales, to really close a deal right and to get the results you're looking for, you can't wing it. You can't just show up not knowing anything. You have to research. You have to put in the time, understand the competitive landscape, understand your product, nail your pitch. So that way, the customer will be influenced to say yes to you. That is being ready Now some people may say, well, Sabine, what do you say if I'm walking and I found ten dollars on the street? What do you say there? Well, I get where you're going with that. But even still, somebody had to work to earn that ten dollars. And let's say that person got it as a gift. Well, that person who gifted them had to work and get that ten dollars. The point is you gotta work. In sales, you gotta study. You gotta prepare. You gotta understand the competition. You gotta understand who your customers are talking to. So that's essentially my word of the day. There is no such thing in my book mathematically as luck. And in sales, there is no luck. Everything's just defined by the amount of time and effort that you're willing to put in to close that sale. So with that said, if you are serious about improving your sales approach or training your team to operate at a higher level without relying on aggressive or outdated techniques, I would love to connect. I've trained thousands of sales and customer service professionals across retail and call center environments in the business to consumer space, and I know how to shift behavior in a way that drives results. So you can reach me at selling Sabine @ gmail dot com. That is simply the name of the podcast followed by @ gmail.dot com. And, of course, if you found value in today's message, and I hope that you found some value, I would ask that you would help me become more discoverable by sharing the show with your friends, colleagues, and family especially if you have friends and family who are entrepreneurs. And if you would also subscribe, you can check me out on different platforms such as Substack, and check out my credentials on LinkedIn. I will link everything in the show notes. So, again, I want to thank you for your time, and I will see you in the next episode. Have a great day. Bye Bye for now. sellingwithsabine@gmail.com https://substack.com/@salesandserviceinpractice https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellingwithsabine/

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Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

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