Good Neighbor Podcast: Orange County

Inside Sandler Training Irvine With Scott Bailey

• Rachel Fyffe & Scott Bailey

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What if the fastest way to a real yes is giving your prospect a safe no? That single shift sits at the core of our conversation with Scott Bailey, the senior Sandler trainer in the West and the force behind Sandler Training Irvine. Scott went from a high-performing yet burned-out medical sales career to a system that boosted his results by 30 percent while cutting the grind—and he’s spent three decades helping teams do the same.

We dig into why most “sales training” is just product talk, and how Sandler’s psychology-driven framework flips the script. Instead of chasing presentations and last-minute closes, Scott shows how to set an upfront contract, align expectations, and remove pressure by inviting a clean no. It’s a pattern interrupt grounded in transactional analysis that clears away think-it-over stalls, shortens cycles, and makes qualifying honest. The method feels less like memorizing tricks and more like learning a language: you build fluency through steady practice until better conversations become second nature.

Scott also walks us through his hybrid training model—monthly two-day boot camps near UC Irvine followed by weekly Zoom sessions for at least six months. That cadence blends immersion with repetition so skills stick. We talk client success across software, high tech, and professional services, the network effect from companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and LinkedIn, and how alumni spread the approach as they move in their careers. Beyond the tools, Scott shares the habits that keep him balanced—daily exercise, personal growth, and a tight community—because sustainable sales comes from systems that protect your time and energy.

If you’re rethinking how you sell, qualify, and hold the line on next steps, this conversation will give you practical steps you can use on your very next call. Subscribe, share this with a teammate who needs a reset, and leave a quick review to tell us your biggest sales roadblock and which Sandler idea you’ll try first. 

Visit: https://go.sandler.com/

SPEAKER_02:

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, a place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Rachel Five.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Now, are you looking for transformative sales tools for organizational or even individual growth? Well, this resource is closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Scott Bailey, with Sandler Training Irvine. Scott, how is it going?

SPEAKER_00:

We're getting uh ready for Thanksgiving, the holiday season, but everything's going great. Got beautiful weather going in around California, nothing to complain about, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, we're really excited to learn about your business. So tell us all about Sandler Training Irvine.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, a little story about it. I was uh I was a biology major and with the goal of becoming an eye doctor, and uh that didn't work out because my parents says we're only buying one degree for you, son. But I had this degree in biology, and back uh back in the 70s, uh, companies were hiring biology majors in the medical field because we could go talk to doctors. We know the lexicon, that's not intimidated, you know, speaking science. So I headed off in a long career in uh medical sales, capped by a uh a very long career in uh kidney dialysis. So I sold the supplies that you would use at a dialysis clinic, did very, very well, and found myself in my early 40s totally burnt out, making making great money and thinking about my next career move. And I heard this uh this ad about Sandler is called the best kept secret in sales training. Well, I was I was ready for a change. You know the old saying, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I found myself uh with a Sandler coach, and we found out that as good as I was, I could be a whole lot better. And enrolled in his program, it was called President's Club. And the thing that's different about Sandler than all of their programs, it's not a seminar. You don't you don't just go for the day and you know check the box and I'm fixed. Sandler is very much like learning a foreign language, and you have to practice it. So it took me six months to really get traction. And uh I saw a 30% increase in my own personal production top line. But more interestingly than that, I was working half as hard. I got my life back. I wasn't working that hard anymore, but I was making more money. Gee, what's wrong with this system here? Come to find out that the training most companies give salespeople is mostly product-based, it's not real sales training. And so I was so impressed with it. This is back in the early 90s, that I bought into the network. So since 1994, I've been running my Sandler office here, uh helping companies and individuals transform in all kinds of different ways. And what we get now is uh the new generation of people getting into sales. We've trained many, many people in uh their early 20s and certainly under 30 years old, which guarantees us a uh you know a base of uh clients uh down the road. So we are actually about 300 training centers strong globally, and I'm the I'm the senior uh Sandler trainer based in uh the in the West. So that's that's my claim to fame. I'm I'm one of the few people that actually has been in this business over 30 years, came through the system as a client, and actually knew and met David Sandler himself. He passed away uh in 1995 of cancer, but left behind this great legacy, and I'll I'll tell you about that after your next question about what what the Sandler system really is.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, well, how did now how did you get into this business? I mean, you kind of leaned into it earlier, but I I don't know if we want to maybe expand on that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, again, nobody nobody plans on becoming a salesperson, right? And and nobody plans on becoming a sales trainer. I I went through it as a client and was so impressed with what it did for me. I said, gee, I could do this for other people. So that's that's been the business model. And we work with all kinds of companies. Uh we have a big footprint in software and high tech. Uh, work with consultants, maybe an attorney who wants to make partner in his or her practice. That's called selling. They call it business development, but everybody sells, right? The problem is most people do it by the seat of their pants. They don't really have a true system that's reliable that they can lean on and a blueprint to follow that will work for you if you follow it. But again, it's it takes time to learn the system. It's it's a lot like getting into shape, and and one of the barriers to it is it does take time. It's uh most people are not willing to put in the time to become this good, in all frankness.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Now, well, what do you think are maybe some miser-misconceptions in your industry?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that it's that it's uh a quick study that you can get it in a couple days. You can't use the analogy of speaking another language. If you I'm guessing you don't know German, I'm just taking a guess. You don't know the German language, I'm just picking a random language. You'd have to go through steps to learn that language, right? You take an elementary German class, right? You do that first, then you take a conversational German class, which would take some time, maybe a year or two, and then to become fluent in German, you'd have to speak it probably every day. That's very much like Sandler. So the model that I've I've settled on, and um, everybody has a pre and a post-COVID story. Our pre-COVID story is that all our training was done pretty much in person in the room. When COVID hit, our training center was on lockdown. We couldn't train in person, so we got really good at virtual training with our clients, and we've taken away all the excuses people had. They don't have to come to the training center anymore, except for two days. So we settled on a hybrid model. When people start my program, they come to a two-day boot camp, which we have every month here at the training center in Irvine. I'm near UC Irvine, and then we migrate you to Zoom training every Tuesday from uh 10:30 to noon for a minimum of six months, and that's that's where you get that's where you get your return, is down the line. You don't nobody walks out of the two-day boot camp, uh, you know, I they they've learned the elements, but that's my onboarding practice that I've been following now for darn near 25 years, and it's we're just gonna keep doing it because it works. We know that if people come for six months, that they're gonna get a lot better, they're gonna transform, their sales will go up. But again, it's up to them. They have to do the work. It's like going to the gym. The the client still has to go to the gym.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

You could have the best equipment in the world, the best trainers, but if you don't show up, what good is the investment, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So we now we know marketing is really the heart of every business. So how are you finding your clients?

SPEAKER_00:

We do a lot of speaking. Uh, I'm blessed with over 30 years, we've done business with over 1,400 companies and individuals, and many of them are still around and they have attrition in their Salesforce. People are retiring or they're they're leaving the company, starting new companies, or they're being let go for whatever reason. There's always a need for uh to train people, and I'm blessed with pretty much most of my business comes from existing clients, but I'm very active in the um Orange County networking scene. You know, you found me through the Irvine Chamber. I also belong to a group called Provisors for 16 years. I had a provisors meeting this morning, which is a group of professionals that did get together to share referrals. So many, many different force uh uh sources. I'm also well known in the network as the boot camp guy. I've got something a lot of other trainers can't or don't want to do, so they'll send me their clients to train. These are other Sandler trainers, and pay me a fee to do that, just so they they know it's done properly to onboard them right. So it comes from all different areas, word of mouth. Um, we we have a big footprint in software, like I mentioned. We've trained some of the major players like Salesforce.com, uh, Oracle, uh, LinkedIn, all these big companies, and and when they when they leave, some of these people leave, they go to work with other companies in in that space and they call us. So it's kind of like that dandelion effect, right? They get blown out there, and uh it's a it's a continuous source of referrals for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Got it. So have you ever thought of doing your own podcast?

SPEAKER_00:

Have I thought of doing my own podcast? Yeah, I'd rather be interviewed for them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, but okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Now, uh, outside of work, what do you like to do for fun?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, there's three things that I do uh golf, golf, and golf. No, it's just I I live in a very nice golfing community that uh I'm right there uh next to the club that I can literally walk to. And I I would say that 80 to 90 percent of my social life focuses around the country club and the golf. It's a very great country club. We have a comedy show coming up coming up in a couple of weeks. We have couples golf, uh, Christmas tournaments, and I've developed a really nice network. My girlfriend and I have developed a really nice network of close friends. We do a lot of golf, and we we like to cook and uh you know drink some wine from time to time. And I I exercise every morning, so I'm I believe in personal growth. I'm always reading something on personal growth, and uh I started off as a psychology major, I think, primarily to figure myself out. But so there's a lot of a lot of psychology that we use here in training.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Well, Scott, please tell our listeners one thing they should remember about Sandler training Irvine.

SPEAKER_00:

Great question. Well, Sandler training was devised by a man named David Sandler, hence the Sandler selling system, who was very frustrated with the way he was being trained as a salesperson. And he felt that salespeople make who likes to be sold, right? Who likes to be sold? And the training that he got was traditional training, which is still around today. Most traditional sales training focuses on a presentation and a close. Get in front of as many people as you can, tell them why you're great and why they should buy from you, and then ask for their business, right? Ask for a yes. It's called the ABC rule, always be closing. You've heard of it, so has your prospects. And they develop defense mechanisms against it. They already know what they're gonna say. When you when you say, Would you like to buy this today? They say, I want to think it over, which our data shows over 90% of the time it's actually a no. So instead of closing for a yes and settling for a think it over, which is actually a no, let's close for a no up front. Sounds like this. Rachel, we'll be meeting today for about an hour. We'll be asking each other some questions at the end of the hour. You and I may determine that we don't have a fit here. Be absolutely comfortable telling me no. So we go for the no instead of going for the yes. And when you go for the no, you're gonna get no's, right? You have to you have to you know develop a strong backbone for that. Nobody likes rejection. Once you get conditioned for that, a no is so much better than a think it over. What happens when you close for the no? The yeses appear much faster, and it reduces all the tension and the friction and all that crap, honestly, that comes with selling. So it's called pattern interrupt. Every technique we teach is the opposite of what everybody else teaches, and that's why it works. Because the prospect is expecting you to close them, and I could say, hey, there's no no pressure here, just let's just agree at the end of our meeting that we're not a fit. And if we're not a fit, that's okay. Or if we are a fit, let's explore some opportunities to work together. Does that make sense? So it's a conversation, it's called an upfront contract. David Sandler studied psychology, and it's comes it's borrowed from a field of psychology called transactional analysis. There's a lot of material on that. And he was trained by a psychologist and used in the field, and that's how the system system came about. So everything we teach is the opposite of what everybody else teaches. Giving the example of closing for the no instead of closing for the yes is probably the one most people would understand the best.

SPEAKER_01:

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_00:

That's an example of it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, how can our listeners learn more about Sandler training or bite?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I have a phone number. It's okay to call me, right? It's 800, the number four, B-A-I-L-E-Y. 800, the number for Bailey. I have a website, Bailey Marketing. That's the parent company that owns Sandler, Bailey Marketing.sandler.com. Shows you our a little bit about us and the calendar. Most people want to know about the calendar. If they're interested in coming to a two-day boot camp, those are posted on there. Our next one is December 10th and 11th. Those are for two full days. People come 8:30 to 4:30. And then we repeat that process every month throughout the year. That's that's the onboarding piece, and that's how everybody gets started. It's proven to work, and and that's the that's that's how we that's how we bring in bring new people in, is the two-day boot camps.

SPEAKER_01:

Wonderful. Well, Scott, I really appreciate you being on the show, and I really wish you and your business all the best moving forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for having me, and I wish you and everybody a happy Thanksgiving as we move into these um important times, which we call the holidays. Everybody get a little bit of rest and don't forget to set some new goals for 2026. Now is the time to wait till January.

SPEAKER_01:

Wonderful. Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnporgecounty.com. That's gnporangecounty.com or call 714 94 862.