# Stephen Cassidy

Stephen Cassidy writes about using conversation to build relationships and trust, especially in recruiting and sales. Cassidy's posts connect practical conversation steps—listening, asking, reflecting and acting—with personal observations from walks with Benson.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/stephen-cassidy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephencassidy
- LinkedIn followers: 7,724
- Topics: sales, recruiting
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Useful for speaking, workshops, or content about consultative conversation in recruiting and sales.

- Best for: Recruiting or sales training brands wanting a speaker, coach, or content collaborator.
- Not for: Paid sponsorship packages with fixed video deliverables, audience targets, or performance reporting.
- Check first: Ask for recent LinkedIn audience analytics or a survey on industry, seniority, geography, engagement.

### Takeaways

- Process and Results lays out seven steps: Engage, Discover, Understand, Explore, Agree, Act, Reflect.
- The End of the Trail gives four debrief questions about showing up, noticing, learning, connection.
- Cassidy contrasts counting phone calls with measuring engagement time per call.

## Main ideas

- **Conversation is a process, not a talent**: Cassidy's core claim is that conversation in sales, recruiting, account management and leadership follows one process, which can be broken into steps rather than left to instinct. Writing after a series of conversations with staffing professionals, they say these roles are "building relationships through conversational steps" and give the sequence: Engage, Discover, Understand, Explore, Agree, Act, Reflect. The words may change; the process does not. Activity gets you to the conversation, the conversation creates engagement, engagement builds the relationship, and results tell you something about the process.
- **The art is judgement in the moment; the science is everything built around it**: Cassidy splits the work in two and insists neither half is left to chance. The art is what happens live — knowing when to speak, listen, ask, wait, and walk beside someone rather than ahead of them. The science is the preparation and review around the conversation: aiming, focusing, developing questions from what you learned, paying attention in real time, measuring, reflecting and adjusting. They treat the two as walking beside each other, making the process itself one of the most important tools in the kit. The post also takes on the phrase "build trust", noting it has been repeated so often it blurs, like being told to lift with your knees, and replaces the slogan with specific behaviours.
- **The process leads, and the direction shows up after you start walking**: Cassidy argues you do not need to know where the process is taking you. Show up, pay attention, notice what appears, and let the process reveal the next step; direction becomes visible after you begin. They present this as the method behind the writing as much as a belief: notice something, write it down, turn it over, follow what appears. Cassidy extends it to the work itself — the book walks beside me, the posts walk beside me — and concludes they thought they were leading the book when they had actually been walking beside it. "Making the Invisible Visible" is the name of that wider work, which they describe as circling conversation, recruiting, process, awareness, trust and curiosity.
- **Goals and the trail are companions, not opponents**: This is where Cassidy's thinking turns. "The End of the Trail" opens with what they call a contradiction — results, numbers and measurements turning up at the end of a walk — then rejects it. Placements, revenue, retention and clients matter; the goal is the destination, while the trail is how you get there, and how you walk it shapes what happens on arrival. Cassidy argues the result often improves once it stops being the only measure of success, and that awareness of your atmosphere, conversations, choices, reactions and connections does not compete with the scoreboard.
- **Satisfaction is a moment you notice, not a result you produce**: Cassidy's most reflective post examines what satisfaction means when your work runs on conversations. An artichoke cooked for 48 hours with the lid on finally opens up, and they liken conversations, writing a book, recruiting and selling to something that opens in its own time. The turn is that satisfaction may not be a result at all but a "wow" — a moment of recognition when a conversation arrives somewhere. Cassidy asks themselves whose satisfaction is being measured: theirs, the other person's, the result, the number, or that small internal moment when something says yes, that is it. The post leaves the question unresolved.

## Work to read

- [Process and Results: The Arts and Sciences of Conversation](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephencassidy_process-and-results-the-arts-and-sciences-activity-7511375534740836352-saes)
- [The End of the Trail](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephencassidy_the-end-of-the-trail-my-morning-with-benson-activity-7503044566535573505-iZlJ)
- [The Process Leads](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephencassidy_the-process-leads-my-morning-conversation-activity-7512823300973146112-i2_A)
- [Satisfied Is a Wow](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephencassidy_my-morning-conversation-with-benson-started-activity-7505198231509692416-ClXx)

## Partnerships

Stephen Cassidy's posts do not document a sponsorship, brand collaboration or paid partnership offer. The four posts are first-person essays on conversation in recruiting and sales, the value of reflection, and observations from morning walks with a dog named Benson; one refers to writing a book. They include no rate card, media kit, sponsor disclosure, affiliate link or partnership contact route. For a recruiting or sales training company considering a workshop or content collaboration on consultative conversation, the posts show the subject matter Cassidy writes about but provide no published formats, terms or engagement details for planning or budgeting. Ask directly about availability, format, scope and pricing before committing.

## Alternatives

- Mike Martinussen: Choose Martinussen when the buyer’s real problem is the commercial system around sales conversations, not conversation technique itself. His published material names specific problems the practice fixes — unpredictable forecasts, the founder-led growth trap, high-risk VP Sales hires and underperforming sales managers — and two defined ways of working: a 90-day GTM reboot at a fixed price and fractional sales leadership, entered through a two-week GTM audit. A training company seeking a co-branded diagnostic, or a client asking what happens to the pipeline after the workshop, gets a concrete answer here. Martinussen also publishes a firsthand career narrative, walking the same street to a first sales job in 1994, and a consistent thesis: people buy from people, trust and curiosity still matter, and technology can accelerate a strategy but cannot replace one. That thesis aligns with the buying decision about how sales conversations get run.
- Barbara Bruno, CPC, CTS: Choose Bruno when the need is to train recruiters and the buyer wants a producer with a recurring recruiter-facing format and a stated way to book. One post offers a staffing tip on handling rejection — learn from it, act on it, move forward — alongside a direct route to training, speaking and one-on-one consulting, plus a pointer to a YouTube channel. The other promotes a weekly video explaining why candidates ghost recruiters, with practical strategies and honest insights framed as immediately applicable. If the workshop needs someone already publishing recruiter content on a schedule and the buyer wants a visible booking path, this is the better-matched candidate.
- Loren Lahav: Choose Lahav when the deliverable is leadership development or a keynote opening rather than conversation mechanics. The posts focus on a leader’s stance toward the people they develop: seeing talent and potential before the person sees it, saying "there, that, do you see her?", building an environment where people are challenged and believed in enough to find their own answers, and pursuing an ambition that grew bigger than the individual. In one post, Lahav writes directly about being a woman who helps people see what is already inside themselves. For a module on developing a team for sales managers, or a conference opener before a process session, this material does what a conversation framework cannot.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/