Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

What Does a Perfect Bowling Game Have in Common With Top-Performing Sales Reps? Walk into a bowling alley on a Friday night, and you'll see a scene that looks like pure recreation. The crash of pins, the rumble of conversation, the squeak of shoes on the approach. But beneath all that noise is something far more serious: discipline, repetition, emotional control, and the relentless pursuit of mastery. That's the real game. And it's the exact game top performers play in sales. Selling rewards consistency, mental toughness, and the willingness to execute the fundamentals long after everyone else has checked out. When you break the sport of bowling down frame by frame, it mirrors what we teach every day at Sales Gravy. Fanatical Prospecting. Emotional control. Owning your process. Staying steady under pressure. Winning one shot at a time. Each frame reveals a truth about the way elite sellers think and operate. Frame 1: The Approach — Fanatical Prospecting In bowling, the shot starts before the ball ever moves. The routine is deliberate: same steps, same breath, same commitment. That's where consistency begins. In sales, your approach is prospecting. It's the moment you decide whether you're a professional or a hobbyist. Pros don't wait for a pipeline crisis. They build a non-negotiable daily rhythm of fanatical prospecting, exactly the way Jeb teaches it. “One more call. One more conversation. One more connection.” That mindset is your approach. That's the discipline that separates a bowler stepping onto the lane with purpose from the one sitting at the bar making excuses. You pick a target, commit, and move. Frame 2: The Lane — Owning Your Sales Process A lane looks the same every time, but it rarely plays the same. Oil patterns shift. Friction changes. Conditions evolve. Your sales process is no different. You can't control a buyer's internal politics or shifting priorities, but you can control how you move through your process. You can control your cadence, your discovery, your follow-up, and your commitment to advancing every opportunity with intention. Average sellers blame the lane. Pros read it. They ask better questions. They recognize where deals stall. They adjust without abandoning the fundamentals. The arrows exist to guide the ball; your process exists to guide you. Ignore it, and you drift straight into the gutter. Frame 3: The Ball — Your Message and the Triangle of Trust A bowler's ball is drilled to fit their hand, weighted for their style, and chosen for the conditions. Your ball is your message—your story, your questions, your ability to connect what you sell to what the buyer actually cares about. When you balance logic, emotion, and values, the ball rolls true. Most sellers throw the same generic pitch at every buyer. Pros tune their message. They refine their openings. They speak the buyer's language. Hit with too much emotion and no substance, you lose credibility. Hit with pure logic and no emotional relevance, you miss the pocket of influence. The goal is simple: strike emotion first, let logic clean up the rest. Frame 4: The Pins — Prospects, Objections, and Physics Pins obey physics. They aren't out to get you. Prospects are the same. Some fall quickly. Some require finesse. Some need a second shot. This is where many sellers unravel emotionally. They take objections personally. They turn one “no” into a story about themselves. Objections aren't judgment. They're feedback. “We're happy with our current vendor.” “Call me next quarter.” Objections are indicators, and tell you where your angle is off. Pros adjust. Ask a different question. Reframe the problem. Bring a story that hits harder. Then take another shot. The frame isn't over until you quit. Frame 5: The Shoes — Mindset and Emotional Control No one bowls in street shoes. You'll slip, lose balance, and go down hard. Your mindset is your pair of bowling shoes. Without emotional control, every call feels unstable. Every objection knocks you off center. Every tough moment spirals. Pros prepare their mind before they prepare their day. They visualize tough conversations. They decide how they'll respond to setbacks before they happen. They choose composure over reaction. A confident mind produces a confident delivery. Buyers feel both. Frame 6: The Equipment — Tech as an Amplifier, Not a Crutch Pros carry multiple balls, tape, tools—gear that helps them adjust and stay consistent. None of it bowls for them. Sales is full of tools too: CRMs, AI, sequencing engines, dialers. But tools only multiply effort. They never replace it. Weak sellers hide behind technology. Pros use it to increase conversations and stay organized. Tools help you understand the “oil pattern” of your territory. But at the end of the day, it's still you, a buyer, and a conversation. No technology closes deals for you. Frame 7: The Team — Culture and Accountability Bowling looks individual, but leagues win seasons. Behind every high average is a team pushing each other, challenging complacency, and celebrating progress. Sales is the same. Great cultures are built around coaching, accountability, and emotional safety. Teams share insights, review calls, and collaborate on tough deals. When someone hits a strike, everyone feels the lift. When someone struggles, the team rallies. You're competing, but you're not competing against each other. You're competing against your potential. Frame 8: The Scoreboard — Metrics and Truth The scoreboard doesn't lie. It doesn't care how busy you felt. It only reflects execution. Your sales scoreboard measures the same: dials, conversations, opportunities created, conversion rates. These numbers are feedback tools. High performers study them. They adjust mechanics, behavior, and cadence based on the data. You can't manage what you don't measure. Frame 9: The Follow-Through — Closing with Composure A bowler's follow-through is controlled and deliberate. The ball is gone, but the motion stays disciplined. Closing requires the same composure. Many sellers execute well early in the cycle. Then, at the moment of truth, they flinch. They rush. They soften.  Pros stay steady. They recap value clearly. They ask directly and confidently. They handle final concerns without panic. Closing is the natural output of a disciplined process. Frame 10: The Final Frame — Finishing Strong with Follow-Up The tenth frame separates casual bowlers from champions. Tired, under pressure, and out of margin for error, pros sharpen their focus. In sales, the tenth frame is follow-up. It's the week after the demo. The stalled proposal. The buyer who goes quiet. Most sellers mentally check out and tell themselves the wrong story: “If they wanted it, they'd call me.” Pros don't buy that lie. Deals are won in the follow-up—professional, relevant, value-driven persistence. That's where reliability is proven. The Game That Never Ends Sales doesn't have a perfect 300 game every time. Some days everything strikes clean. Some days you grind for spares. Some days the ball finds the gutter no matter how good your form feels. The separator is what you do next. Pros study the lane. They adjust their feet. They breathe. They get back on the approach and commit to the next shot with the same intensity as the first. So as you head into your day, think like a bowler playing the long game. Lace up your mindset. Respect your process. Choose your message with intention. Read your buyers the way pros read the lanes. Lean on your team. Track your scoreboard. And never cheat the follow-through. The pins are set. The lane is open. You've always got one more frame. Step up with purpose. Roll with confidence. And when in doubt, make one more call. Ready to take your sales game to the next frame? Build discipline, track your process, and crush your goals with the FREE Sales Gravy Goal Guide. Start mastering your results today.

You're Coachable, But Are You Truly Humble? You've been coachable your entire career. You take feedback, adjust your approach, read books, listen to podcasts, and implement what works. Yet being coachable doesn't automatically make you humble—and that gap may be costing you more than you realize. Nicolas Restrepo, Senior Vice President of Sales at World Emblem, shared on a recent Sales Gravy Podcast episode: “What advice would I give myself ten years ago? Be humble. There's a difference between being coachable and being humble.” Most sales leaders assume coachability covers everything. If you're open to learning, you're set—right? Not quite. The best sales leadership is built not only on willingness to learn, but on recognizing that your success was never yours alone. What Being Coachable Actually Means A coachable leader stays receptive. Feedback isn't a threat. Adjustments aren't a burden. You ask questions, try new techniques, and pivot when something stops working. Coachable leaders attend training sessions and apply what they learn. They don't cling to “the way we've always done it” when the market shifts. Adaptability is their baseline. But it's only half the picture. What Being Humble Actually Means Humility isn't self-deprecation. It's acknowledging the full story behind every win. Humble leaders recognize the customer service rep who handled tough calls, the operations team that pulled off a miracle to meet a deadline, and the mentor who guided them through a high-stakes negotiation. Humility shows up when leaders look at a win and say “we did that” instead of “I did that.” It changes the way you speak, how you coach, and how your team shows up around you. Why Sales Leaders Confuse the Two It's easy to blur the lines. Coachability requires some humility. You have to acknowledge you don't know everything. But it's possible to be coachable and still operate from ego. Some leaders take feedback on their discovery process while taking full credit for the deal. They embrace a new objection-handling framework but never acknowledge the people who supported the outcome. They accept coaching but keep score of how often they were right. Coachability grows your skills. Humility grows your people. The Risks of Only Having One Coachability without humility burns teams out. You may improve individually, but hoarding credit discourages collaboration. When that happens, reps start withholding help because they know their contribution won't be recognized. They stop sharing insights. They stop going the extra mile. Coachable-but-not-humble leaders also tend to ask for help too late. They'll accept advice when it arrives but rarely seek it out until they're underwater. Humility without coachability leads to stagnation. You may share credit generously and build strong relationships, but if you refuse to learn hard truths about your blind spots, your team stalls with you. Some leaders disguise resistance to growth as modesty, deflecting responsibility rather than owning the need for improvement. You need both. Where These Traits Show Up in Real Leadership Consider how coachability and humility show up in everyday situations: After a big win: Coachable leaders debrief to find the repeatable actions. Humble leaders publicly recognize who made the win possible. When something fails: Coachable leaders ask what they could have done differently. Humble leaders avoid placing blame on the team. During onboarding: Coachable leaders stay open to feedback from new hires about broken processes. Humble leaders acknowledge when a new rep brings a skill they don't have. In pipeline reviews: Coachable leaders adjust their forecast based on data. Humble leaders give credit to the rep who spotted a risk early. Why This Matters for Long-Term Sales Leadership Sales leadership is a long game. You're not just managing this quarter's number. You're shaping the culture that determines whether top performers stay or bolt. Coachability keeps you sharp. Humility keeps your team aligned. When both traits are active, people share ideas more freely because they know you'll listen. They fight for deals because their effort is seen. They stay through hard quarters because they trust you're not in it for personal glory. How to Develop Both Traits To strengthen coachability: Ask your team for feedback on your leadership and apply it. Work with a peer or mentor who will challenge you. Notice when you resist feedback and explore why. Read one sales leadership book per quarter and implement one idea. To strengthen humility: When talking about a win, name three people who contributed. Ask for help early instead of waiting until you're stuck. Start meetings by recognizing someone else's win. Pay attention to how often you use “I” versus “we.” Questions to challenge yourself: When I talk about a win, who gets credit? Do reps bring me ideas, or wait to be told what to do? Am I more focused on being right or being effective? When was the last time I publicly recognized someone? The Bottom Line Being coachable gets you in the room. Being humble keeps you there. You can study every methodology, attend every training session, and absorb every leadership book. But if the goal is proving how great you are instead of elevating how great your team can become, you're building on sand. The sales leaders who last, who build high-performing cultures and develop reps who grow into leaders, all understand one truth: success was never a solo act. Stay coachable so you keep growing. Stay humble so your team grows with you. Your people will feel the difference. So will your results. Being coachable and humble is just the start. Learn how to inspire your team, earn trust, and create a culture that drives results. Grab your free chapter of People Follow You and discover the leadership strategies top sales leaders use every day.

Here's a question that'll stop you in your tracks: Would you let someone walk up to you, take your wallet, empty out all your cash and credit cards, and leave your family with nothing? Of course not. That's insane. But if you're in sales and you let rejection stop you from making calls, booking appointments, and closing deals, that's exactly what you're doing. You're handing over your commission check to fear. That was the powerful insight from Wendy Ramirez, a leading Mexican sales expert and author of Lo que nadie habla de las ventas: Estrategias para no ser llamarada de petate or What Nobody Talks About in Sales: Strategies to Avoid Being a Flash in the Pan, on a recent episode of Ask Jeb the Sales Gravy Podcast. When you give rejection the power to stop you, you're literally taking money away from your family. Let that sink in. The Science of Why Rejection Hurts Let's get one thing straight right now: I'm not going to sit here and glorify rejection. Nobody wants to be rejected. Unless you're a pure sociopath who feels nothing (and there aren't many of those in sales), rejection is going to hurt you. It doesn't matter if you're highly outcome-driven like me or highly empathetic. Rejection hurts everyone in different degrees, but it hurts. Period. Here's what's actually happening inside your body when you get rejected: Your brain treats rejection like a physical threat. Fight or flight kicks in. It's a neurophysical response that dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, makes your heart race, and creates this overwhelming urge to either run away or fight back. That uncomfortable feeling? That's not weakness. That's just science. The Problem: Sales Is a Rejection-Dense Profession Here's the brutal reality about selling: If you don't face rejection, you're going to fail. Sales is what I call a rejection-dense profession. When you hit rejection in sales, you don't have the option of going backwards. You can go over it, through it, around it, or dig under it. But your job is literally to go out into the world, find rejection, and bring it home. That's the job description. That's what we signed up for. Think about it like this: A few years back, I got invited to jump out of an airplane with the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army's elite parachute team. I'm not a skydiver (just like I'm not a Spanish speaker), but what an honor to jump with probably the best parachute team worldwide. I asked the guy I was tandem jumping with how many times he'd jumped. Ten thousand times, he said. So I asked him, "Do you ever get afraid?" His answer changed everything for me: "Of course I get afraid. I'm jumping out of an airplane. Your body is going to get afraid. I've just done it so many times that I know exactly what the process is. I'm able to get myself to jump even though my brain says this is the wrong thing to do." That's exactly what you have to do in sales. Building Obstacle Immunity In my book Objections, I talk about something called obstacle immunity. It's the process human beings go through of facing something that feels really big and uncomfortable, but doing it enough times that we lower the size of that obstacle. The fear of being rejected never fully goes away. But you can lower that fear. Here's how you do it: Develop the Ledge Technique The ledge technique allows you to interrupt or break the pattern you feel in fight or flight when you get rejected. It helps you regain your poise and confidence so you know what to say next. It's about taking control of the conversation when someone gives you an objection. Understand the Difference Between Objections and Rejection An objection isn't the same as a rejection, even though they feel essentially the same in your body. When someone objects, they're giving you information. When someone rejects you, they're saying no. Learn to tell the difference. Focus on Emotional Discipline In emotionally tense situations, you've got to be emotionally disciplined. You've got to gain control, gain poise, and handle those objections in a way that allows you to achieve your desired outcome. The Mindset Makes All the Difference Sales is a skill position. There are particular skills, techniques, and tools you need to deploy to be good at the craft. But the thing that makes all the difference is what's in your head. This is no different than athletics. Elite athletes all operate at similar skill and talent levels. They'll tell you that winning or losing happens between the ears. I'm a big golfer. The difference between me having a really good game or a really bad game is one hundred percent what's in my head. My body knows what to do. I know how to swing the club. The mental game is everything. If you don't fix your mindset, you're not going to get the results you're expecting. People think they're stuck and can't move forward. But it's just about moving your mindset. Get more information. Learn something new. Apply what you learn. That's how you increase your mindset and get better results. Stop Giving Away Your Power When Wendy said, "When you give to the clients, when you give to the people that rejected you, the power to stop you, that's what exactly you do," it hit me like a freight train. You wouldn't let someone take your wallet. You wouldn't let someone steal from your family. So why would you let rejection steal your future? The next time you feel that uncomfortable feeling in your chest after getting rejected, remember this: That feeling is just your body doing what it's supposed to do. It's not telling you to quit. It's telling you that you're doing something hard, something that matters, something that will pay off. Face your fear. Make the next call. The difference between average salespeople and elite performers isn't talent. It's the willingness to go through rejection instead of around it. That's how you win. Ready to take your sales game to the next level? Check out The LinkedIn Edge to learn how to leverage the world's most powerful B2B social selling platform to fill your pipeline, build relationships, and close more deals.

Your prospects know when you're waiting for your turn to talk. They can feel when you're performing instead of partnering. And the moment they sense you're treating them like a transaction, you've already lost the sale, or at least the loyalty that comes after it. The difference between good salespeople and unforgettable ones isn't about closing techniques or fancy proposals. It's about becoming the trusted sales advisor your buyers can't imagine doing business without. It's about evolving from vendor to linchpin—the person who holds everything together. What Does It Mean to Be a Linchpin? A linchpin is the small pin that holds a wheel on its axle. Remove it, and everything falls apart. In sales, being a linchpin means you're more than someone who takes orders or delivers quotes. You're the trusted sales advisor buyers turn to for guidance, validation, and expertise. They don't just buy from you; they believe in you. They want your opinion. They rely on your consistency. And when things get messy, they know you'll help them make sense of it all. But most salespeople never reach linchpin status. They stay stuck in the vendor zone: quoting, pitching, following up, moving on. It's safe. It hits metrics. But safety doesn't create loyalty. Why Most Sellers Stay Vendors The vendor zone is comfortable. You know what to do. You have a process. You check boxes. But here's the problem: your prospect can feel when you're focused on yourself instead of them. They know when you're running through a script or waiting to launch into your pitch. And that feeling—that sense of being just another number—kills trust before it ever has a chance to grow. Being a trusted sales advisor requires something different. It requires you to slow down, tune in, and genuinely care about the person across from you. That's where the magic happens. Build Emotional Connection Through Reading the Room The best salespeople don't take behavior at face value. They interpret it. When a buyer seems distracted or cold, linchpin sellers pause and ask themselves: What's really happening here? Is this person overwhelmed? Skeptical because of a bad past experience? Or just thinking deeply because they need time to process? Here's how to sharpen your ability to read buyer emotions: Match and mirror. Notice their pace, tone, and energy, then subtly align with it. People feel safer with people who move at a similar rhythm. Say what you're thinking. Use your inside voice as your outside voice. Try: "It sounds like this project has a lot of pressure behind it" or "You seem hesitant—can I ask what's causing that?" Naming emotions and behaviors politely opens doors. Embrace the silence. Silence doesn't mean rejection. It means your buyer is thinking, absorbing, processing. This is where most salespeople blow it. They open their mouths too soon because they can't handle the quiet. Five extra minutes of patience is often what stands between winning and losing a deal. Reading people is empathy in motion. But it takes work. And most salespeople don't take the time. Lead With Curiosity Curiosity is the trait that rarely gets enough attention in sales training. But when you're genuinely curious about what makes your buyers tick—what drives their decisions, what matters most to them, what keeps them up at night—you move past small talk and into real conversations. When you show up to serve instead of showing up to sell, curiosity becomes natural. You ask questions to understand what your customers actually need. You build solutions together. And that's the moment you become essential to solving their problems. Here's how to leverage curiosity as a trusted sales advisor: Ask one more question. When your buyer answers, don't jump into your pitch. Say, "Tell me more about that" or "What else is behind that concern?" That extra question is where the truth often lives. Replace judgment with wonder. When a prospect makes an odd request, don't think "That's ridiculous." Think "I wonder what's driving that?" That mindset shift changes your energy completely—and they can feel it. Prep curiosity prompts before each meeting. Write down three open-ended questions that start with "how" or "what." Questions like "How will this impact your team's workload?" or "What happens if nothing changes?" uncover real motivation. The phrase "I'm so curious about..." has become a game-changer in discovery calls. It opens doors to deeper conversations. Most buyers will jump right in, and the conversation flows naturally. Your job is to listen, take notes, and get even more curious as they open up. Evolve Into an Indispensable Consultant Most salespeople understand the concept of being consultative: asking questions, offering insights, guiding decisions. But the best take it further. They become so valuable that their clients' success feels harder to imagine without them. When you become indispensable, things don't function properly without you. People need you, not just want you. You bring unique value that can't easily be replaced, because nobody is you. Here's how to go beyond helpful and become essential: Diagnose before you recommend. Don't rush to fix. Take time to fully understand the client's situation. Ask deeper questions. Look for patterns. Confirm what really matters before offering solutions. You'll gain trust faster through understanding than urgency. Teach through insight. Help your clients see their business from a new angle. Bring context, data, or perspective they haven't considered. When they walk away from a meeting thinking differently because of you, you're no longer just a vendor—you're a resource. Lead with consistency and integrity. Show up when it's easy, but also show up when it's not. Be steady, dependable, and transparent, especially when outcomes are uncertain. Indispensable consultants don't disappear when things get complicated. They stay close, communicate clearly, and make it easier for clients to move forward with confidence. When you understand deeply, teach clearly, and lead consistently, you become more than a salesperson. You become part of your clients' strategy. You become the trusted sales advisor they call first. People Buy You First Being a linchpin isn't about what you sell. It's about how you show up for the buyer. When markets shift or leadership changes, your product might change—but your presence shouldn't. People will always buy you first. Show up curious. Listen for meaning, not just for answers. Teach what you know. Stay steady when others panic. This approach moves you from being one of many to being the one they call first. That's how you go from vendor to linchpin. Ready to master the techniques that turn you into the trusted sales advisor your buyers can't live without? Download the FREE Sales Gravy Book of Play by Gina Trimarco and get the tools, tactics, and techniques to become a more effective and agile communicator in spontaneous sales conversations.    

The automated "Great job, team!" email blasted to 47 people at 4:37 PM on a Friday isn't authentic appreciation. Neither is the generic gift basket ordered by someone in HR who's never met your top performer, or the corporate recognition program where nobody actually feels valued. These things look like recognition, but your people know the truth: leadership is outsourcing one of the most human tasks—seeing the people who show up every day and make things happen. And your teams feel the disconnect. As Jeb Blount Jr. recently said on the Sales Gravy Podcast: "Don't make your appreciation to customers, to your team, to yourself a completely outsourced behavior. It will be cheap, and everyone will know it." Authentic appreciation can't be delegated to your human resources team or automated through your CRM. And that's exactly why it works. Where Sales Leaders Go Wrong with Recognition Most sales leaders fall into one of two camps. Camp one believes they don't have time for appreciation because they're focused on results. The numbers are what matter. Recognition is soft skills territory—nice to have, but not essential. Camp two wants to show appreciation but defaults to the path of least resistance. They sign the company card. Approve the budget for the year-end gift. Forward the congratulatory email from the VP. Box checked. Both camps are missing what actually moves people. Recognition that matters requires you to see the work that often goes unseen. It demands that you pause long enough to notice not just the outcome, but the effort behind it. That's not something you can outsource. Why Small Moments Compound Into Big Results There's a concept in professional development about making 1% improvements every single day. Over 365 days, those tiny adjustments compound into exponential growth. Authentic appreciation works the same way. You don't need a massive recognition program. You don't need elaborate gestures or expensive rewards. You need consistency in the small moments that tell your team: I see you, and what you are doing matters. Consider the sales rep who stays late to prep for tomorrow's presentation. The account manager who defuses a client issue before it reaches your desk. The teammate who mentors the new hire without being asked. These moments happen every day, and most leaders miss them entirely because they're scanning for the big wins. But your team isn't just looking for recognition when they close the monster deal. They're looking for it on Tuesday afternoon when they're grinding through their 50th prospecting call. They're looking for it when they've had a brutal week and still show up ready to perform. Small acts of authentic appreciation in these moments build trust faster than any annual award ceremony ever will. 3 Elements of Authentic Appreciation Authentic appreciation has three non-negotiable elements. Specific means recognizing exactly what someone did and why it mattered. Not "great work on that account," but "the way you handled that objection about pricing showed real creativity—you reframed value instead of dropping price, and that's exactly the approach we need more of." Timely means you don't wait for the quarterly review or the annual celebration. You recognize the effort when it happens, while it's still fresh and meaningful. Personal means you deliver it in a way that resonates with that individual. Some people want public recognition. Others prefer a quiet conversation. Some treasure a handwritten note. Others just want to hear it directly from you in the moment. Here's what this looks like in real leadership: One sales leader makes it a practice to handwrite notes to team members. Not emails. Not Slack messages. Actual pen-on-paper notes. Some are two sentences. Some are three paragraphs. But everyone is specific to something that person did and why it mattered to the team. Is it efficient? No. Does it scale? Not really. But those notes end up on office walls, in desk drawers, and tucked into planners. Years later, people still have them. That's the difference between authentic and outsourced. Integrate Authentic Appreciation Into How You Already Work Most sales leaders know they should show more appreciation. They feel guilty about it. They add it to their to-do list. And then the day gets away from them. The problem is treating appreciation as an extra task instead of integrating it into what you're already doing. You're already having one-on-ones. Reviewing deals. Walking the floor or jumping on calls. The question isn't whether you have time—it's whether you're paying attention in those moments. When reviewing pipeline, don't just look at the numbers. Notice the effort. "I see you've been hitting activity goals consistently for six weeks straight. That discipline is setting you up for a strong Q1." When someone sends an update email, reply with more than “thanks.” Take 30 seconds to acknowledge what they did: "This breakdown made my job easier. I didn't have to dig for answers. That kind of communication makes our team more efficient." These aren't grand gestures. They're small moments of paying attention and responding like a human being who notices when people do good work. Building a Culture Where Authentic Appreciation Flows Both Ways The best team cultures don't just flow from leader to team member; they flow in every direction. When you model authentic appreciation, your team starts doing it for each other. They notice the work that happens behind the scenes. They start going the extra mile. The culture shifts from everyone waiting for the leader's approval to everyone building each other up. One practice that works: create space in team meetings for peer recognition. Not forced or formal—just an open moment where anyone can call out something they appreciated from a teammate that week. Keep it optional. Keep it genuine. You'll be surprised how quickly it becomes part of your team's rhythm. Additionally, most high performers are terrible at acknowledging their own progress. They hit a goal and immediately move to the next one without pausing to appreciate what they just accomplished. In coaching sessions, start by asking: “What's a win from this week?” Make them say it out loud. Make them acknowledge their own growth. That internal recognition builds resilience and momentum that external praise alone can't create. What Happens When You Get This Right When you stop outsourcing appreciation and start building it into your leadership, everything shifts. Retention improves. People stay where they feel seen and valued. They leave when they feel invisible. Team energy changes. Appreciated people bring more to the table. They take ownership. They go the extra mile because they want to. Difficult conversations get easier. When someone knows you genuinely care about their success, they're more open to feedback and coaching. Culture becomes magnetic. Top performers want to work on teams where their contributions matter. They can feel the difference between authentic and transactional leadership from a mile away. Take Action This Week Stop waiting for the perfect appreciation program or the right company initiative. Start with what you can control right now. This week: Write one handwritten note to someone on your team. Be specific about what they did and why it mattered. In your next one-on-one, ask “What's a win from this week?” and let them acknowledge their own progress. Catch someone doing something right—however small—and tell them in the moment. End your next team meeting with clear recognition for one person. Not generic praise, tell them exactly what you noticed and why it mattered. This month: Create a recognition moment in every team meeting. Make it specific, not generic. Ask yourself: What recognition do I wish I were receiving? Then give that to someone else. When reviewing pipeline or performance, comment on the effort, not just the outcome. Stop Outsourcing What Should Be Human The work you do as a sales leader matters. The people on your team matter. And the small moments where you choose to show up and recognize their effort—those matter most of all. Your team isn't waiting for the next corporate initiative or the annual awards ceremony. They're waiting for you to notice. They're waiting for you to care enough to say something about the work they're doing right now. Stop outsourcing what should be human. Lead with authentic appreciation today, and watch your team thrive.  Want to turn recognition into motivation that sticks? Our Sales Gravy University course, 4 Keys to Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated When Everything Hits the Fan, gives you the proven framework to transform appreciation into performance. Learn how to build a sales culture where people feel seen, valued, and driven — even in hard times.

Here's a question that'll expose one of the most common productivity killers in sales: How much research should you do before making a cold call? That's the challenge Michael Bricker from West Monroe, Louisiana brought to a recent Ask Jeb episode. Five months into his role at Cantara Networks, a fiber-backed internet provider, Michael was supposed to spend three minutes researching each prospect. Instead, he found himself spending 15 to 30 minutes per call, terrified he'd miss the one critical insight that would unlock the door. Sound familiar? If you're nodding right now, you're not alone. This "research paralysis" is one of the most insidious productivity traps in modern sales, and it's killing your pipeline velocity. The Big Lie Your Brain Tells You Let's get one thing straight: Research is not prospecting. Research is research. Every minute you spend digging through a prospect's LinkedIn profile, reading their latest press release, or analyzing their org chart is a minute you're not actually doing any prospecting activity. You're not talking to anyone. You're not having conversations. You're not moving deals forward. But here's where it gets dangerous. When you add in the basic human fear that comes with making cold calls, research becomes an emotional crutch. Your brain lies to you and whispers, "If I just know all this information, it'll be so much better." So you spend 15 minutes researching, make the call, and it goes to voicemail. You make 12 calls a day. Everyone goes to voicemail. All that research, and you didn't get anywhere. How Much Do You Actually Need to Know? Michael had a breakthrough realization that changed everything: "I'm not looking to make a sale on that initial cold call. I'm looking to make a connection." That's the insight that separates efficient prospectors from research addicts. On your first cold call, you're not selling them anything. You're trying to set an appointment so you can ask questions and figure out whether it makes sense to keep talking. That's it. So how much do you really need to know to set that appointment? The answer is not a lot. Think about it this way: The more you get to know your customers, your business, and your industry, the more business acumen you gain. Over time, you'll talk to ten businesses just like the one you're about to call. You'll recognize patterns. You'll see that companies in a certain sector or geographic area all face the same three challenges. You don't need 15 minutes of research to recognize those patterns. You just need to build a message around them. When Research Actually Matters Now, before you throw all research out the window, let me be clear about when it does matter. If you're sending a prospecting email, do some research. You're putting something in writing, so you better have some insight that's not AI-generated garbage. If you make a call, get a hard no from the CEO, and want to try again with a different message, do the research before you call back. You've hit a wall. Now you need ammunition. If you've had a first meeting and you're going into discovery, absolutely do deep research. You're walking in armed because you know they'll be there waiting. All that effort will pay off. But for that first cold call? Stop overthinking it. The Batching Solution If you feel like you absolutely need to do research (and I get it, some people do), here's the fix: Schedule time before your call block for research. Do all your three-minute lookups in one batch. Write your notes next to each name. Then go make the calls. Why does this work? Because you're going to hit voicemail a lot anyway. But at least you'll have the research done and maintain your call momentum. Let's say you run a call block on 25 cold leads. You talk to five people. Those five give you information like "I'm not the right person" or "We don't have that problem." Now you know something. Now go back and do deeper research on those five so you can come back with a better message. That's efficiency. That's strategy. That's how you maximize your prospecting time. The Power of Targeted Messaging Here's what really unlocks productivity: Creating targeted messages for roles or industries instead of personalizing every single call. If you're calling 25 CIOs in the healthcare sector, you and I could sit down and quickly identify what they're dealing with. What issues are they facing? What do they want from their business? How could you help them? We could build one or two messages that'll connect with most people on that list without researching every single prospect. Then you make 25 calls in an hour instead of researching five people and making five cold calls in three hours. Which approach do you think sets more appointments? Every Meeting Has One Job Michael asked about moving deals forward after discovery, and here's the framework that keeps everything simple: The entire purpose of a prospecting cold call is to get the first meeting. The entire purpose of the first meeting is to get the next meeting. Everything else is academic. Each step in your sales process exists to advance to the next step with a committed micro-commitment. When deals stall, it's almost always because you didn't nail down that next step or you didn't test stakeholder engagement. If a prospect says "I'll get you that information next week" and next week comes and goes, what are they telling you? They're not that into this. It's not a priority. Keep deals moving by driving momentum through committed next steps. The Bottom Line Stop letting research become a productivity trap. The goal isn't to know everything before you make a call. The goal is to have enough conversations to fill your pipeline while making each one count. Be confident in your ability to get someone on the phone and convert them into an appointment. If you hit a wall and get valuable information, then go back and research for your next attempt. But if you're researching every prospect before every cold call, you're lying to yourself about productivity. You're avoiding the hard work of actually prospecting. Batch your research. Build targeted messages. Focus on conversations that convert. That's how you build a pipeline that actually moves. Want to transform your approach to prospecting and turn LinkedIn into your ultimate lead generation machine? Check out The LinkedIn Edge and learn how to leverage the world's most powerful B2B platform to fill your pipeline with qualified opportunities.

This is a very special Monday because it's Thanksgiving week here in the United States. This is the week we pause to express gratitude for the people in our lives, for what we've been given, and for what we've accomplished. But gratitude isn't just a feel-good emotion reserved for the holidays. It's also a performance- and life-enhancing routine that can give you sales superpowers. Gratitude Builds a Strong Mindset Sales is a mental game. Your mindset, attitude, and beliefs have more impact on your sales outcomes and ultimate success than any technique, script, or strategy ever will. This isn't soft psychology. This is neuroscience. Gratitude activates the parts of your brain associated with reward and emotional regulation. It releases dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters that make you feel good, leading to increased happiness and decreased anxiety and stress. Your confidence rises, your mind clears, you gain emotional control, and you make wiser decisions. Gratitude fundamentally rewires how your brain processes the world around you. When you practice gratitude consistently, your brain shifts from focusing on what could go wrong and starts seeing what could go right. Gratitude and insidious self-pity cannot coexist. Instead of dwelling on the deal you lost, the prospect that rejected you, or the leads you don't have, you appreciate the lessons you've learned and the opportunities still in front of you. But it goes deeper than just feeling better. Gratitude Builds Resilience In sales, you face rejection constantly. Bad weeks, tough months, prospects who ghost you after months of work, and deals that fall apart at the last minute, even though you did everything right. In this brutal profession, the salespeople who survive and thrive are the ones who bounce back faster from these inevitable setbacks. One of the key traits of highly successful people is an enduring belief that everything happens for a reason. When you can find something to appreciate even in difficult situations, you maintain your emotional stability. You don't spiral into negativity. You don't let one bad call ruin your entire day. Instead, you process the setback, learn from it, and move forward. Abundance vs Scarcity Thinking When you focus on what you do have—your skills, your relationships, your opportunities, your resources—you shift from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. Scarcity thinking is the mother of negativity. It says: "I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough time. I don't have enough support. I'm going to miss my number." Abundance thinking is a mindset of opportunity and potential. It says: "Look at the skills I've developed. Look at the customers who trust me. Look at the opportunities in my pipeline. Look at what's possible." When you operate from gratitude and abundance, you become more creative, more energetic, more persistent. You stop fixating on limitations and start exploring possibilities. You show up differently. You bring positive energy. And people feel it. They want to work with people who are confident, positive, and focused on what's possible rather than what's impossible. Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude But here's the thing. You don't wait to feel grateful. You choose to practice gratitude. The feelings follow. Every morning, you are empowered to make a conscious choice about where to focus your attention. You can focus on what's missing, what's wrong, who's against you, and what's hard. Or you can focus on what's present, what's working, what's possible. Both perspectives contain truth. But only one moves you forward toward the success and happiness you are seeking. Here are some practical ways to build gratitude into your daily routine: Keep a gratitude journal. Every morning or evening, write down three things you're grateful for. My friend Eric, who suffered from a severe brain injury, does this, and the impact it has had on his recovery is nothing short of a miracle. Thank someone every day. Send a text, an email, or better yet, make a phone call. Thank a customer. Thank a colleague. Thank a team member. Express genuine appreciation for something specific they've done. People naturally gravitate toward those who express genuine appreciation. When you thank a customer for their business, when you acknowledge a colleague's help, when you recognize someone's support, you strengthen those relationships. It makes you someone people want to work with, buy from, and help succeed. Mentally acknowledge the good. During your day, when something positive happens, pause for just a moment and mentally acknowledge it or say a prayer of thanks. Don't let it pass by unnoticed. Reframe challenges. When something goes wrong, ask yourself: "What can I learn from this? What opportunity might this create? What's the hidden gift in this situation?" This isn't about pretending problems don't exist. It's about looking for the lessons and possibilities within them. Start your week with gratitude. Every Monday, give thanks for the week ahead and the opportunity you've been given to make a difference in your life, for your family, company, and customers. The beautiful thing about gratitude is that it is like a muscle; it gets stronger with exercise. My Gratitude to You Before wrapping up, I want to take this opportunity to pause and express my gratitude to you. I'm grateful to you for listening to the Sales Gravy podcast. My team and I pour our hearts into producing this show, and your support means everything to us. Your comments, your reviews, your messages telling us how the podcast has helped you, fuels us. I'm thankful for the fans of my books. Writing is one of my greatest joys in life, and you make that possible. Every time someone tells me that "Fanatical Prospecting," or "Sales EQ," or "The LinkedIn Edge" changed their career, it reminds me why I do this work. I'm grateful for the companies around the world that trust Sales Gravy to train their teams. You let us into your organizations, trust us with your people, and give us the opportunity to make a real difference. That's a privilege we never take for granted. I'm grateful for the sales professionals who invest in themselves through Sales Gravy University. Your commitment to getting better inspires us to keep creating better content. And most of all, I'm grateful for the amazing people who choose to work at Sales Gravy. We are blessed with an incredible team that wakes up every morning focused on serving you and making a difference. They're the reason we can do what we do. Thank you for allowing us to be part of your professional journey. Reflecting on Gratitude So as we head into Thanksgiving week, I'll leave you with this simple reflection: Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire. If you did, there would be nothing left to reach for, no reason to dream, no horizon pulling you forward. Be thankful that you don't know everything. It means life still has mysteries to reveal and lessons waiting to shape you. Be thankful for the difficult times. It's in these seasons that you grow stronger, wiser, and more resilient. Be thankful for your limitations. They remind you that there is still room to stretch, improve, and become more than you are today. Be thankful for challenges and obstacles. They forge your strength, your courage, and your character. These are the things that truly endure. Be thankful for your mistakes, because each one is a teacher guiding you toward better choices and deeper understanding. Be thankful for what you've been given. Every gift is proof that someone cares, someone believes in you, someone has invested in your journey. Be thankful for the people who push you, support you, frustrate you, and inspire you. Each one plays a role in shaping the person you are becoming. Be thankful for beginnings, endings, and every transition in between. They are the chapters and seasons of a life story still being written. Be thankful for Monday, because Monday brings new possibilities. And at the end of the day, when you are tired and weary, when you've stopped and made one more call, be thankful because it means you've made a difference. An attitude of gratitude changes how you approach your day—and your prospects. My new book, The LinkedIn Edge, shows you how to leverage that mindset to build genuine connections, engage with your network, and create opportunities that actually convert.

Most new account executives stare at their territory list and feel the weight of it immediately. Fifty accounts. A hundred accounts. Sometimes more. Each one needs research, a plan, and outreach that doesn't sound like every other cold email clogging their prospect's inbox.  Jake McOsker, an account executive at Forrester Research, found himself facing exactly this problem when he moved from BDR to AE. He cracked it by changing how he used AI for account planning.  "Rather than taking 10 to 15 minutes to get an account plan out or understand who the notable stakeholders and the decision makers that I need to go with," he explained, "it's a 2 to 3 minute process to go through each one of these accounts." The traditional approach to AI account planning doesn't solve the territory problem. You ask ChatGPT or Claude for company information, and you get Wikipedia summaries. Founded in 1987. Headquartered in Dallas. 15,000 employees. The chief sales officer you're calling doesn't care about any of that, and showing up with generic facts makes you look lazy, not prepared. When you're new to the role, you don't have years of pattern recognition to fall back on. You don't know what good account planning looks like yet. You just know you need to get meetings with people who have better things to do than talk to a rep they've never heard of. The solution isn't using AI as a search engine. It's using it as a sales assistant with a specific job to do. The Problem With How Most Reps Use AI for Account Planning Here's what usually happens. A rep needs to prepare for a call with a VP of Marketing at a healthcare company. They open their AI tool of choice and type: "Tell me about [Company Name]." The AI spits back: Company history Product offerings Recent press releases Maybe some executive names The rep skims it, copies a few bullet points into their CRM, and calls it account planning. Then they get on the call and realize they have no idea what this VP is actually trying to accomplish this quarter. They ask surface-level questions. The prospect checks out. The meeting goes nowhere. This happens because most reps are using AI like a faster Google. They're asking for information instead of asking for intelligence. AI account planning only works when you give the AI a role and a specific outcome to deliver. Not "tell me about this company." Instead, "You're an account executive trying to book a meeting with this company's CMO in the next two weeks. Based on their recent announcements and what their executives are posting on LinkedIn, what initiatives are they likely prioritizing right now?" How to Set Up AI Agents for Account Planning The difference between a basic AI chat and an AI agent is memory and context. When you create an agent, you're teaching it what kind of output you need every single time. You're not starting from scratch with every account. Here's the framework that works: Step 1: Give Your AI Agent a Clear Role Don't just ask questions. Set up the scenario with urgency and context. For example: "You are an account executive at [Your Company]. You've been tasked with bringing in [Target Company] as a new customer within the next 90 days. Your first call is with their [specific role, like Chief Sales Officer]. Based on the materials I'm providing, what are the top three business initiatives this person is likely focused on right now?" This does two things. First, it forces the AI to think from your perspective instead of just summarizing data. Second, it prioritizes current, actionable information over historical background. Step 2: Feed It the Right Source Material Wikipedia summaries don't help you. But these sources do: Recent press releases about new initiatives or leadership changes LinkedIn posts from executives at the company (especially the person you're calling) Company blog posts about their strategic direction Industry news articles mentioning the company Their "About Us" or "Newsroom" page for current priorities Analyst reports or industry trend pieces relevant to their sector If you're selling to publicly traded companies, earnings call transcripts and annual reports (10-Ks) are gold mines. But most new AEs aren't calling on Fortune 500 companies. The good news is that smaller companies often share more on LinkedIn and their blogs because they're trying to build their brand. Upload PDFs or paste content directly into your AI tool. Then let it analyze the content through the lens of the role you gave it. The output will focus on strategic priorities, not corporate history. Step 3: Ask Follow-Up Questions Based on Persona If you're calling into marketing, tech, security, or customer experience, the priorities are different. Your AI agent should help you understand how company-wide initiatives affect the specific person you're talking to. After the initial analysis, ask: "How would these initiatives specifically impact the VP of Marketing's goals this quarter?" Now you have talking points that matter to the person on the other end of the call. Step 4: Validate With Human Intelligence AI gets you 80% of the way there in three minutes instead of fifteen. But you still need to cross-check. Look at LinkedIn. Check recent news. If you have access to account managers or customer success reps who work with similar companies, ask them if the trends you're seeing match reality. AI account planning is a tool, not a replacement for critical thinking. If the output feels off, it probably is. Trust your gut and adjust. How to Turn Research Into Value Messages The goal of account planning isn't to memorize facts about a company. It's to walk into a conversation with an informed hypothesis about what they're trying to accomplish. When you do this right, your opening changes. Instead of starting cold with "Tell me about your role," you can say: "I saw your CEO recently posted about accelerating your digital customer experience, and I'm assuming that's putting some pressure on your team to modernize how you're approaching customer engagement. But I could be completely wrong. What's actually taking up most of your time right now?" Here's how you've impacted your prospect: First, it proves you did real research. Second, it gives the prospect something specific to react to instead of making them explain their entire world from scratch. Third, and this is critical, it still leaves room for discovery. You're not skipping the "What are your biggest challenges?" question. You're earning the right to ask them by showing you've already thought about their business. When prospects talk about their challenges in their own language, you learn how they frame problems, what matters to them, and where your solution might actually fit. Even if your hypothesis is wrong, you've separated yourself from the 90% of reps who show up with nothing. And when you're right, you skip past the surface-level conversation and get straight into the dialogue that matters. That's how you earn credibility as a new account executive, even when you don't have ten years of experience to lean on. Building a Repeatable AI Account Planning Workflow This only scales if you systematize it. You can't rely on remembering the perfect prompt every time or recreating your process from scratch for every account. Create separate agents for different use cases. One for account planning. One for prospecting outreach. One for call preparation. Train each agent for the output you need so you aren't constantly course-correcting. Save your account plans in a central location. The information changes, so plan to refresh your research quarterly. What mattered in Q2 might not matter in Q4, and your account planning needs to reflect that. The key is building a system that you can repeat across your entire territory without burning out. Two to three minutes per account. Not fifteen. Not thirty. That's how you research 50 accounts in a week instead of just five. What This Actually Looks Like in Practice Let's say you're targeting a mid-market software company. You start by checking their LinkedIn. The CEO posted last week about expanding into healthcare verticals. You pull up their blog and find three recent posts about compliance challenges in healthcare tech. You upload screenshots or copy the text into your AI agent and give it the prompt: "You're an AE trying to close this software company in 90 days. The first meeting is with their Chief Revenue Officer. What are the top three priorities they're likely focused on, and how do those connect to the company's broader goals?" The AI analyzes the content and tells you: They're investing heavily in healthcare vertical expansion, but facing longer sales cycles due to compliance requirements They're dealing with the need to build credibility fast in a regulated industry Their CEO has committed to proving ROI in healthcare within two quarters Now you have a hypothesis. The CRO is probably under pressure to close healthcare deals faster while managing a team that doesn't have deep healthcare expertise. That's your angle. You cross-check this with LinkedIn and see that the CRO has been engaging with posts about sales enablement in complex verticals. You look at recent news and find they just hired a VP of Healthcare Sales. Everything lines up. Your outreach message writes itself. You're not pitching. You're acknowledging what they're working on and offering a perspective on how companies in similar situations have approached the same problem. What to Do After the Meeting Your AI workflow doesn't end when the call does. This is where most reps leave value on the table. After your meeting, take the transcript from your call recording tool (Fathom, Gong, Chorus, whatever you use) and upload it to your AI agent. Then ask specific questions:

Here's a question that hits closer to home than most sales reps want to admit: What do you do when you've been away from prospecting for a while and suddenly the call reluctance feels brand new again? That's the situation Dwayne Malmberg from Sugar Land, Texas found himself in. He'd been crushing it in inside sales and appointment setting since the 90s. He was good at it. Really good. But after taking just over two years away from the phones, a new opportunity came along and suddenly he was facing something he didn't expect. The call reluctance. The trepidation. The mental resistance to picking up that phone and dialing invisible strangers. If you've ever taken time away from prospecting and felt that same knot in your stomach when it's time to get back on the phones, you're not alone. And more importantly, there's a systematic way to rebuild that muscle and get back to crushing it. The Raw Truth About Cold Calling Fear Let's get brutally honest: Cold calling creates emotional angst. Period. I've made tens of thousands of cold calls. I make them with my clients during training sessions. I'll make them tomorrow morning. And I still feel that trepidation on the first couple of calls of the day. It's just human. It's natural. It never completely goes away. Think about it like jumping out of an airplane. A few years ago, I got the chance to jump with the United States Army Golden Knights. I was terrified. My heart was pounding. A sergeant even asked if I was okay because apparently I looked frightened. When we got strapped in, I turned to the Golden Knight I was jumping with and asked, "Do you ever get scared?" His answer was revealing: "Yeah, of course I do. My heart's beating a little bit because it's an airplane and I don't know what's going to happen. But I've done it so many times and I've got a routine." That's the key. The routine. The process. The mental preparation that gets you past the fear and into action. The Big Pull: Why You Need Something Worth Fighting For Here's the problem with facing fear: If you don't have something pulling you forward that's bigger than the discomfort you're feeling right now, you'll procrastinate forever. The discipline to run a prospecting block and do your prospecting is the discipline to sacrifice what you want now for what you want most. So before you even think about picking up the phone, sit down and write out what you want. Why are you doing this? What's the goal? Is it a paycheck? A promotion? Financial freedom? Providing for your family? That's your big pull. That's what you focus on when you start your day, not whatever might happen on the call. Because when you're thinking about something as scary as facing rejection, if you don't have a big pull driving you, you'll end up avoiding the work that matters most. For Dwayne, part of his why was clear: He's a caregiver for his disabled wife and needs the flexibility to work from home while still providing for his family. That's a powerful pull. That's something worth pushing through fear for. Building the Muscle: You Can't Bench Press 250 on Day One Let's say you were a bodybuilder in your 30s. You were strong, lifting heavy, crushing it in the gym. Then life happened. Kids came along. Your career took off. You quit working out. Now you decide it's time to get back in shape. What happens if you walk into the gym and try to bench press 250 pounds on day one? You're going to hurt yourself. Maybe badly. The same principle applies to prospecting after time away. You already know how to do it. You've got the muscle memory. Everything inside you is saying, "I got this." But you can't expect to jump back in at the same intensity level you had before. You have to rebuild the muscle gradually. Start with the equivalent of those 20-pound dumbbells and work your way back up. The High-Intensity Sprint Strategy When I found myself in a similar situation years ago, uncomfortable and fearful about making calls, I developed a strategy that I now call high-intensity prospecting sprints. Here's how it works: Break your prospecting into very small, short blocks. Sometimes just five minutes. Make five calls in five minutes. Or ten minutes. Or fifteen minutes. The key is this: Make it so small and manageable that your brain can't talk you out of it. If I tell you to make cold calls all day long, that feels overwhelming. But if I ask you to knock out just five calls, you can do that. Then here's the critical part: Follow each sprint with something inspiring. Read a chapter from Fanatical Prospecting. Listen to a segment of your favorite sales podcast. Watch a training video. Put good stuff in your ears and in front of your eyes that builds your courage and strengthens your heart. Then do another sprint. More inspiration. Another sprint. Repeat. What happens is two things: First, by actually doing it instead of thinking about it, you get better at doing it. You get what I call sales endorphins. You feel good about yourself because you realize, "Hey, I can do this. Everything's okay." Second, by backing up each sprint with inspirational content, you're feeding your mindset. You're building back that mental muscle alongside the practical muscle. The Time Management Factor for Busy Sales Professionals If you're like Dwayne and have a lot of responsibilities outside of sales, time management becomes critical. You can't afford to waste time or dilute your prospecting efforts. The solution is ruthless prioritization and time blocking. Start your day with your most important, highest priority sales activity. Get your prospecting done first thing in the morning when your willpower is strongest and your emotional energy is highest. Here's why this matters: When you've got a lot going on and you're also doing the hardest job in sales (making outbound calls), by the time you get later into your day, you're worn out. Your willpower is depleted. It's going to be exponentially harder to find the motivation to interrupt strangers. But first thing in the morning? You're fresh. You're ready. You can knock out that prospecting block and then ride that momentum through the rest of your day. Block your calendar in core chunks for everything you need to do. If you have an appointment at 3 PM that'll take three hours, fine. But that first hour of your day? That's sacred prospecting time. Nothing else touches it. The Mindset Foundation: Feed Your Mind Daily The first section of Fanatical Prospecting focuses on mindset because that's where everything begins. If your mindset isn't right, technique doesn't matter. Scripts don't matter. Nothing matters because you won't execute. Feed your mind daily with content that builds you up. Listen to a sales podcast three days a week. Read sales books. Watch training videos. Surround yourself with messages that reinforce the behaviors you want to develop. When you're in a situation where you feel fear or emotional angst, putting good stuff in your ears and eyes has a tendency to make your heart stronger and build your courage. This isn't fluffy motivation. This is practical psychology. You're literally rewiring your brain to associate prospecting with positive emotions instead of fear and anxiety. The Bottom Line Getting back in the prospecting game after time away isn't about summoning superhuman courage or pretending the fear doesn't exist. It's about acknowledging the fear, building a routine to work through it, and gradually rebuilding the muscle you once had. You already know how to do this. You've done it before. You just need to give yourself permission to start small, build consistently, and focus on progress over perfection. Start with your why. Build your prospecting sprints. Front-load your day. Feed your mind with the right content. And remember: The first call is always the hardest because you're lifting that 10,000-pound weight. But once you make it, the momentum starts building. You've got this. Now go pick up the phone and prove it to yourself. Want to learn how to leverage LinkedIn to fill your pipeline and never run out of opportunities? Check out Jeb Blount's latest book with Brynne Tillman, The LinkedIn Edge, and discover how to turn social selling into your secret weapon.

A few years ago, I was on a desperate search for a dining table. My favorite from my old place was a gorgeous, single-piece antique that mathematically wouldn't fit in my new home. I loved that table, and losing it felt like losing a member of the family. So I started the hunt for a replacement, a piece worthy of its memory. I found a potential candidate at a high-end furniture store: a stunning cherry table.  I ran my hand along its smooth, cool surface, picturing it loaded with platters of food, surrounded by the people I love. But then I saw the price tag. It was prohibitively expensive. My wallet slammed shut. I knew it was perfect, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay for it. I walked out, resigning myself to a life of settling. In the end, I found a mass-produced, joined-piece from a department store. And for the next six months, I was miserable. My kitchen table was just … a table. It was functional, but it had no soul. I griped about it constantly, and every time I looked at it, I was reminded of what I'd given up. Discovering Sweat Equity Finally, out of options and patience, I took the advice of an antique store owner. "Go see a woodworker," she said.  I drove to the address, a dingy, dark garage on the southside of town that smelled of sawdust and varnish. Here, in this dusty, disorganized space, I found the most beautiful tables of every shape and size imaginable. A gruff man with calloused hands appeared. I told him about my predicament and my budget. He gave me a direct response: “I can't build you a table for that price.” Just as I was giving him an obligatory thanks and turning to leave, he hit me with an unexpected question: “Are you interested in learning how to make one? It might cost you less than what I've already made.” He wasn't selling me a table. He was selling me an experience. A partnership. Becoming a Co-Creator And so, we began. He showed me the design software. We walked through different scenarios, from Christmas dinner to my kids doing their homework. We chose the wood, figured out the curves for the legs, and decided on the thickness for the top. Every line was to my specifications. I was a co-creator, not a consumer. When he finally showed me the quote for materials and his lessons, it was 30% more than the expensive showroom table. And yet, the decision was simple. I looked at the plans, the time we'd invested in the design, the conversations we had shared, and I said, "Let's build this." I picked out the perfect piece of maple. He taught me how to cut it, sand it, and shape it. How to use a router to create decorative edges. How to apply gloss for a perfect shine. And when we were done, I paid that higher price gladly—despite all its imperfections (I am not a professional carpenter.). This was my table, built with my sweat, crafted with my hands. I'd earned it. One leg was a half-inch too short.  The decorative edges I'd spent hours on didn't quite match. And the lacquer? Let's just say it had a certain, unique texture. This table was, objectively, flawed. And yet, I loved it more than any piece of furniture I had ever owned. When I brought it home, I was so proud. I invited people over just so I could show it off. Every time I looked at it, I found myself thinking how perfect it was, even with its flaws. That slightly askew table wasn't just furniture; it was a blinding flash of the obvious and a lesson in the concept called The IKEA Effect. Applying the Principle in Sales Not long after my dive into woodworking, I found myself in a similar situation with a prospect. We were selling a sales training program, and the decision-maker leveled with me in our proposal meeting: "I love what you're proposing, but your competitors are beating your price. We're on a budget." I was about to chalk the deal up to closed-lost when the memory of that woodworker's shop flashed through my mind. “How about this,” I said, "I know our price is higher, but I think we—you and I—can design something perfect for your team. What if we work together to craft a custom solution, one that covers all your needs and fits into your company culture?" He was skeptical, but he agreed. So we began our own version of a woodworking project. Instead of sawdust and maple, we worked with spreadsheets and shared documents. We spent hours in meetings, outlining their team's specific pain points, the obstacles they faced with pipeline hygiene, and the skills they were lacking. We designed a plan with the right workshops, the right coaching, and the right support for their specific problems. When I finally presented the final proposal, it included a fee that was 20% higher than the competition. But it wasn't a surprise. We had built it together, every step of the way. He saw not just a list of services, but a reflection of his own team's needs. He had invested time, effort, and insight, and had a sense of ownership. How Co-Creation Wins the Deal With our co-created plan in hand, the client happily paid our higher fee. We'd edged out the competition not because of our price, but because we had triggered The IKEA Effect. This behavioral economic principle states that people place a disproportionately higher value on things they have helped to create. Every frustrating moment, every small victory when we are building something creates what behavioral economists call "effort justification." Your brain can't accept that all that work you put in was for something ordinary, so it reframes the result as extraordinary. It's the same reason my handmade table, with its slight wobble and imperfect edges, felt more valuable to me than the flawless, expensive showroom piece. And it's exactly why that prospect was willing to pay a premium for our sales training. By involving him in crafting the solution—by making him a co-creator rather than just a buyer—we triggered the same psychological principle. He didn't just purchase a program; he helped design it. The Lesson: Ownership Matters When people build something—whether it's furniture, solutions, or relationships—they don't just create the thing itself. They create ownership. Here's how you can apply this to your own sales process: Discovery is the new co-creation. Your discovery calls shouldn't be a simple Q&A. It should be a collaborative workshop. Use tools like a shared whiteboard or a live-edited document to build the solution with your prospect in real time. Frame it as, "Let's figure this out together." Your proposal is a project plan, not the final word. Think of your proposal as the culmination of shared work, not a final document you deliver. Refer to it as "our plan" or "the solution we designed." This language reinforces the joint effort. Make it their idea. The more effort your prospect invests in the process—even just by providing a little bit of input—the more they'll value the outcome. Ask open-ended questions that require them to provide genuine insight. Say things like, "Help me understand...," or "What would the ideal outcome look like for you?" When they tell you, it's their vision, and you're helping them bring it to life. The Big Takeaway The IKEA Effect is far more than a psychological quirk; it's a strategic weapon for every salesperson who wants to stop losing on price. The truth is, your customers aren't buying a product or a service—they're buying the feeling of a win.  When you empower your prospects to become co-creators in the sales process, you don't just solve their problem; you make them the hero of their own story.  You don't need to be the low-price leader to get the business. You just need to have the courage to ask them to build a solution with you. Hear more insights based on real-life business successes and flops on Jeb Blount Jr.'s podcast 30 Minutes or Less: How Flawed Sales Incentive Programs Cost Domino's $78 Million, part of The Sales Gravy Podcast.  

To a sales leader, it's a familiar story. Month one: Your new SDR is on fire. Energy through the roof. They're excited about cold calling. Month two: Still strong. Meetings are getting booked. Dashboard looks good. Month three: Cracks appear. Rejections pile up. But they hang in. Month four: Burnout. The dials drop. The energy's gone. That superstar you hired 90 days ago is updating their LinkedIn profile—and you know exactly what that means. Now you're back in hiring mode, your team's pipeline is slipping, and your recruiting budget just took another hit. But it's not that the SDR role is broken—the system is. Sales teams are great at starting fast and terrible at sustaining it. People get thrown in with a script and a quota, celebrate quick wins, then act surprised when burnout becomes inevitable. Tim Hester, VP of Sales Development at Alliance HCM, leads one of the fastest-promoting SDR teams in the industry. His team survives month four and keeps thriving. Some SDRs promote out in 60 days. Others stay because they're growing, not just grinding. It's a tactical framework that stops inefficiency. The Problem: You're Forcing SDRs to Run Without a Finish Line When Tim inherited his SDR team, he saw the pattern immediately. One SDR position. No progression. No momentum. Just grind. Talented people hit quota, kept hitting quota, and then started asking themselves: Why am I still doing the exact same job six months later? “Just wait your turn” doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe it never did. The wake-up call came when Tim realized something critical: The things that kill SDR motivation aren't trainable. Work ethic. Mindset. How someone approaches their day and prospecting blocks. That's character. You can't coach it in a workshop. Tim tried way too many times before figuring that out. You can teach someone objection handling. You can show them how to use the CRM. But if there's no light at the end of the tunnel, no amount of training fixes that. That's on leadership, not the rep. The Solution: Build a Roadmap That Rewards Performance, Not Tenure Tim flipped the script on how SDR performance gets measured and rewarded. He created tiered SDR levels based purely on performance thresholds. Not tenure. Not politics. Not “when a spot opens up.” The roadmap has clear levels: from new SDR to quota-hitting SDR to exceeding SDR who now trains the team. Each level comes with a comp bump and more responsibility. Most importantly, it proves effort matters. This framework ensures that when your reps look at the dashboard, they see a clear, actionable path for progression. It's the sales leader's job to ensure that dashboard clarity is tied directly to the next level. The impact is immediate. Reps see exactly what they need to level up. There's no waiting for someone to quit so that a spot opens. Those who want to move fast can; those who need more time have a clear path, too. This framework changed recruiting entirely. Tim could tell candidates on day one: People move up at their own rate; you control your trajectory at this company. Suddenly, the SDR role wasn't a holding pattern. It was a launchpad. The Dashboard: Four Metrics That Actually Matter Metrics are your scoreboard. If your reps don't trust the score, they stop playing hard. When Tim took over, the dashboard was a mess. Crowded with metrics nobody understood or trusted. Reps tuned it out because they didn't know what half the numbers meant or how they connected to their success. Tim stripped it down to four metrics: Dials – Shows effort and how they're working the database. Everyone can pick up the phone. Connections – Only counts conversations with decision-makers. Not gatekeepers. Not assistants. This shows outreach quality. Meetings Scheduled – The conversion from connection to meeting. This is where you see who's actually selling. Meetings Ran – If they don't show up, what's the point? For Tim,

Here's a truth most car dealerships don't want to admit: people don't hate buying cars. They hate buying cars from salespeople who make the customer experience painful. That's the challenge Brendan Carlington from Mount Pleasant, Michigan brought to me on a recent episode of Ask Jeb. Brendan jumped back into auto sales this year after spending time in other industries and he noticed something big. Traditional sales positions are disappearing. Customers can research everything online, get quotes instantly, and even start negotiations with a click. What's missing is training that teaches sales pros how to create an experience people actually enjoy. The vehicle isn't the differentiator. The experience is. Why the Experience Matters More Than the Product I told Brendan something I have felt for a long time. Customers already know what they want before they walk into the dealership. They have seen every trim, every feature, every price point. What they do not know is whether they will enjoy the buying process. That is where you, the salesperson, become the product. Your job is not just to sell the car. Your job is to guide your customer through the process, reduce friction, build trust, and make them feel confident that they are making the right decision. When I buy a car, I already know what I want. If the experience is miserable, I put it off. If I know it will be smooth, engaging, and human, I buy immediately. Modern buyers are craving a guide, not a grinder. The Power of Frameworks Brendan had a simple but powerful philosophy. He said there are three conditions to win: sell a car, give the customer a great experience, and make as much money as possible without compromising those things. That mindset is exactly what great sales frameworks are built on. A framework gives you rails to run on while keeping you flexible in the conversation. It is not a script. It is a repeatable system that lets you adapt to the customer while staying disciplined. When you take complex sales processes and make them simple and repeatable, you create reliability and confidence. That principle is at the heart of fanatical prospecting and objection handling. Learning to simplify complex ideas into actionable steps separates average salespeople from top performers. How to Become the Trusted Guide If you are in car sales or any sales role where buyers can research online, here is the playbook: Unpack your customer's fears. They walk in with emotional baggage from past experiences. Acknowledge it. Ask better questions. The more they talk, the better they feel. When the customer does most of the talking, they have a good experience. Create a VIP moment. Buying a car is a milestone, not a transaction. Build a repeatable system. Know your greeting, discovery questions, and closing flow cold and practice it until it is second nature. Using systems that focus on outcomes, such as first-time appointments, conversion rates, and pipeline velocity, makes the difference between a salesperson who spins their wheels and one who consistently drives results. Practicing this every day builds the kind of discipline that leads to consistent performance and customer loyalty. Making It Fun Again Brendan shared something I loved. Before car sales, he worked in the Vegas nightlife industry and he asked, “Why can't buying a car be fun?” That is the kind of thinking that transforms an industry. Fun does not mean loud music or strobe lights. It means energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm. When people enjoy buying from you, they tell everyone they know. If your dealership or team has lost that spark, it is time to rebuild your sales culture. Focus on making the customer experience unforgettable. Strong sales leadership and coaching techniques help teams focus on guiding the buyer through the process instead of just pushing products. Developing those skills consistently pays huge dividends in customer retention and referrals.

We are moving into the most dangerous time of year for sales professionals . . . the holidays.  From now until the first week of January, you're going to face a perfect storm of distractions, excuses, and temptations that can absolutely destroy your year end number and your first quarter production next year. Sadly, most salespeople don't even see it coming. It's not until the end of December that they realize they're in trouble, but by then, it's too late.  The Trouble With the Holidays The trouble typically starts Thanksgiving week in the United States and continues as we move into the first week of December. That's when distractions start flooding in. You've got company parties, family obligations, shopping to do. All of which knock you off of your routine causing your daily prospecting and follow up activities to drop. And let's be honest, you've been grinding hard for the entire year and you're ready to let your guard down and coast a bit before the end of the year.  By the second and third week of December many of the opportunities in your pipeline that you were counting on closing start to ghost you or tell you that their pushing decisions off to next year. And by now you're so mentally checked out that you're barely doing any prospecting at all.  Once we move into the Christmas and New Years weeks your office is a ghost town, the phones are silent, your pipeline is stalled, you've missed your forecast and you convince yourself there's no point in even trying.  And just like that, you've lost an entire month of selling.   My book The LinkedIn Edge gives you the master blueprint for turning LinkedIn into an optimized, revenue-generating sales engine—whether you're deploying Sales Navigator or not. Learn to work LinkedIn like a professional with step-by-step, immediately actionable tactics that supercharge your presence on the world's largest networking platform. Get it today wherever books are sold.       Holiday Sales Math But here's the brutal truth: You didn't just lose a month. You lost three months. Because all of those prospects that pushed off decisions until the new year are not coming back; and that empty pipeline you're staring at, as you move into January, is going to haunt you through March and potentially, through the entire year.  Your average sales cycle is probably 60-90 days. That means deals you put into the pipeline over the next two to three weeks are crucial for a good January. Likewise, the ones you add in December are the key to delivering a solid February and March.  But if you allow the Holidays to take you off of your game, you might not recover until April or May. Your entire first quarter is shot.  This is the killer and how so many promising sales careers end prematurely. I've witnessed far too many salespeople get fired in March for pipeline problems that started in November when they let their discipline slip during the holidays. Do Not Allow Active Deals Stall and Die The deals currently in your pipeline are more vulnerable right now than at any other time of year. Your prospects have the perfect excuse to push decisions.  When deals sit idle for a month, bad things happen. Stakeholders change. Budgets get reallocated. Priorities shift. Your champion gets distracted by seventeen other initiatives. Your competitors slip in while you're eating fruitcake and drinking eggnog. I've watched salespeople lose six-figure deals that they thought were "locked up" in November, simply because they took their foot off the gas during the holidays.  I've said this before and I'll say it again. Pipeline opportunities that push into the new year are not coming back. Do not count on them. Do not allow yourself to be delusional about them. If you don't get forecasted opportunities closed by the end of the year, consider them dead! For this reason, you must be vigilant with follow up, assertive with your communication and do whatever it t...

Every salesperson knows that feeling, the one right before the big meeting when confidence wavers and doubt creeps in. Alex Weber knows it, too. He's one of the few people to go from hosting American Ninja Warrior to competing on the show. When I asked him what separates winners from everyone else on an episode of The Sales Gravy Podcast, he said: “Winners believe they're going to win. You're not going to win every deal. But even as I say that, I'm never going to let myself actually believe that.” This is a masterclass in sales mindset—the mental toughness every top salesperson needs. The difference between a competitor who freezes and one who performs is simple: The winner chooses belief over hesitation, every single time.  Stop Managing Doubt, Start Dictating Belief The average salesperson walks into a deal trying to manage their doubt. They worry about the competition, they worry about the price, and they worry about rejection. That hesitation bleeds through every presentation, email, and follow-up. The average rep tells themselves, "I hope I get this deal." Winners decide before the phone rings that they are the best solution, they deserve the business, and they are going to win. That mindset is the foundation of high-performance selling. The moment you let the "what if I lose?" question become dominant, you pull back. You ask soft closing questions. You accept the first objection. Top salespeople know that a soft sales mindset guarantees a hard loss. You must carry the confidence of a winner, even when the odds are stacked against you. Failure is Feedback: Burn the Ship and Move On In high-stakes competitive environments, you can't dwell on failure. If a Ninja Warrior misses a jump, they can't afford to spend five minutes replaying the error in their head; they are already in the water. In sales, the deep end is rejection. Too many salespeople treat a "no" like a personal failure instead of professional feedback. They let one bad call destroy their attitude for the entire week. This is why their sales mindset is fragile. Winners understand that every loss is simply data to be analyzed. What did the client object to? Where did you lose control? What did the competitor do better? Process it immediately, then move on. When you fail, you need to "burn the ship." You acknowledge the loss, extract the lesson, and sever the emotional attachment. The inability to recover fast is the #1 killer of a sales mindset. You are guaranteeing an underperforming pipeline if you can't reset your mental state between calls. Commit to the next interaction, not the last one. Build Your Muscle Memory for Pressure You can't expect to be calm and collected during a high-pressure, high-dollar negotiation if you haven't trained for it. Elite competitors don't rely on game-day adrenaline. They rely on muscle memory built through intentional practice under pressure. Practice is how you develop the sales mindset that never wavers. Identify the parts of the sales cycle that make you uncomfortable. If handling tough objections is your weakness, practice them relentlessly until your response is automatic. If you freeze up when cold calling top-tier decision-makers, role-play the opening three minutes of that call until you can deliver it with confidence. Your pipeline grows on competence, not hope.  Stop Waiting for Motivation: Execute on Discipline The worst lie in sales is the idea that you have to feel motivated to prospect. Motivation is an emotion. It comes and goes. Discipline is a decision. The champion's sales mindset relies on routine and process. You don't need to feel excited to make that fifth cold call or send that critical follow-up. You just need to execute your process. If you let your feelings dictate your schedule, you will only prospect when the conditions are perfect. That is an amateur move. Winners know the work is non-negotiable. Discipline is showing up every day, executing the critical,

Here's a question that'll mess with your head: What do you do when you're making seven figures in sales, crushing every goal, and suddenly … you just don't feel the same motivation anymore? That's the question Matthew Feit from Toms River, New Jersey, posed on an Ask Jeb episode. Matthew's living the dream that most salespeople chase their entire careers. He's at the top of his game financially. He's proven everything he set out to prove. And now he's stuck in this weird limbo where the fire that got him there has gone cold. If you're shaking your head right now, thinking this is a champagne problem, you're missing the point. This is one of the most dangerous positions a high achiever can find themselves in, and it's costing top performers their edge every single day. The Jim Story: When Achievement Becomes Your Enemy Let me tell you about Jim. Years ago, when I was living in Florida, I had this sales rep who was an absolute monster. Top of the ranking report. Presidents Club. Rolex on his wrist for winning. Then one day, his director of sales wanted to put him on a performance improvement plan. In sales, a PIP means you are a dead man walking. I drove up to Jacksonville thinking there had to be some mistake. When I sat down with Jim, I realized the problem wasn't his ability. The guy was still incredibly talented. The problem was he'd won everything there was to win, and he just didn't have the next goal driving him anymore. Here's what I learned: The things we do in sales are hard. They're repetitive. We deal with difficult people. It takes massive discipline, which is simply sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. But when you don't know what you want most anymore, that discipline evaporates. Jim's answer surprised me. He wanted a Harley-Davidson, but his wife wouldn't let him buy it. So I worked out a way to structure his commissions so he could get his Harley while still bringing home the money his wife expected. Suddenly, his sales went through the roof again. He had something driving him. The Cognitive Dissonance of High Achievement Here's what's happening with guys like Matthew and what happened with Jim: They've got this level of cognitive dissonance. Part of them is a stone-cold high achiever who needs to be achieving. The other part is saying, "I don't feel it anymore. I don't have that juice." When you're younger or earlier in your career, you're sketching out goals constantly. I remember having a goal book where I wrote down everything I wanted. One of my goals was a house on the inter-coastal waterway in South Florida. I achieved that goal. Then one day I'm sitting there going, "Well, what do I do now?" It's easy to get comfortable when you don't know where to go next. But comfortable is the enemy of excellence in high-performance sales cultures. What Do You Really Want? I hit the same wall this year. Twenty years building this business, book number 17 coming out, and I'm asking myself the same question Matthew asked: "What now?" I finally figured it out. My wants aren't things anymore. Maybe in my 20s and 30s it was about what I was going to own, but today it's different. It's about what I want to accomplish and who I want to work with. I realized I want to work with people and companies I know I can help. That are a challenge for me. Where I can watch them grow and enjoy seeing them succeed. Who really want to work with me and see me as part of their organization, not as a vendor. As a result, I've been rearranging my world so I can be very picky about what I'm going to do, who I'm going to work with, and who I'm going to speak to. I want to do things that give me joy and fulfill my purpose, which is to help people sell more. That's why I believe God put me here. The Twenty Year Vision When I was a little older than Matthew, I looked at my life and asked: "What are the next 20 years going to be like?" I had won every award you could win in sales.

This time of year is critical. As sales leaders map out their budgets for the new year, the conversation always centers on a core conflict: How to cut expenses and, simultaneously, motivate teams to hit larger quotas. What's the first line item to feel the squeeze? Training and development. It is often incorrectly labeled a 'want' and not a 'need.' We hear leaders say, "It can wait until next quarter," or, "Once we stabilize revenue, we'll invest in the team."  This short-sighted thinking doesn't save money. Instead, it's costing organizations a significant, quantifiable amount of revenue and talent. When professional development is treated like a luxury, we undermine the foundational ability of our teams to perform consistently at a high level. Training is the Foundational Requirement for Peak Performance Sales leaders should consider peak performance in any high-stakes environment. In the military, or in elite professional sports, ongoing training is not a choice—it is a non-negotiable, daily priority.  So why is it that, in Sales, we view continuous development as optional or too expensive? The simple truth is that lack of training is the most expensive mistake you can make. Think about the rate of technological change. Most of us have upgraded our cell phones in the last three to five years because the old ones simply couldn't keep up.  The same principle applies to your sales team's skill set. If your representatives are still relying on techniques learned 5, 10, or 15 years ago, then they are operating at a competitive disadvantage. They will be outmaneuvered and outperformed by competitors who are strategically investing in modern sales frameworks every time. Henry Ford's famous quote still holds true: "The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them." If you believe training is expensive, you must take a moment to calculate the monumental loss of reps consistently missing their quotas. The True Cost of Inconsistency and Turnover Look at the numbers. Assume three of your representatives are consistently missing quota by just 20%. That deficit is lost revenue—but it also represents wasted leads, missed opportunities, and the corrosive ripple effect of deals that never even make it into your pipeline. The amount of potential revenue lost due to underperformance is often far greater than the entire annual budget you would allocate to comprehensive sales training. Action Plan for Sales Leaders & Managers To reverse this loss, you must treat coaching as a continuous operational requirement, not a perk. Calculate the 'Cost of Inaction' to Justify Budget: Reframe thinking of training as an expense and start focusing on the cost of the status quo. Calculate the annualized revenue loss from your bottom 20% of underperforming reps (e.g., missed quota * average deal size). Use that concrete number to justify and secure a budget for development, proving that not training is your biggest liability. Implement a Continuous Coaching Framework: Don't rely on annual training events. Transform your managers into daily coaches by mandating 30 minutes of structured, one-on-one coaching per week focused on skill development. This reinforcement is what locks in new behaviors and prevents the initial energy gained in training from fading. The Hidden Expense of Disengagement Talent turnover is another critical cost of lack of training that is often overlooked. A representative who feels unsupported, or who consistently misses quota because they don't have the necessary tools and coaching, is highly likely to seek opportunities elsewhere.  The cost of recruiting, onboarding, and ramping a replacement—which includes the loss of established customer relationships and the disruption to team morale—significantly outweighs the expense of proactive investment. How to Take a Struggling Rep From Liability to Asset

Every sales professional has a horror story that still makes them break out in a cold sweat years later. The deal that imploded spectacularly. The customer interaction that went sideways in ways you couldn't predict. The moment you sat in your car afterward in complete silence, questioning every decision that led you to this career. These moments feel intensely personal and isolating. But the truth is, every rep who's lasted in this profession has been there. On an episode of The Sales Gravy Podcast, Ashley Blount and I collected nightmare sales stories from our years in the automotive and telecommunications industries, plus stories from the sales community. We found 16 tales that prove no one faces this alone. Here are some of the most terrifying. Smelly Dave: The Angel of Death This sales horror story comes from the automotive industry, posted on Reddit by someone who still sounds traumatized. Dave started at the dealership after Sears closed. We found out he'd been the “Angel of Death” at several franchises—Sears, Future Shop, RadioShack. Every place he touched eventually shut down. Dave was in his early 40s, wore the same shirt with the same coffee stain on it every single day, and smelled terribly. Customers would flee after test drives, refusing to come back into the building with him. On one occasion, a customer was dry heaving. Management tried to delicately bring up the hygiene issue, but Dave wouldn't listen. One day, the manager was told to drop off a sold vehicle to a customer, and Dave drove the chase car. As they returned together, the smell in that enclosed space was so unbearable that the manager walked into the boss's office afterward and apologized for whatever he had done to deserve that punishment. The boss laughed, called Dave in, and fired him on the spot. The Bluetooth Incident That Still Haunts Ashley Ashley had been selling cars for a few months when a sweet older couple came into the dealership. The husband was retiring, probably late 60s, and they were one of those rare couples who were actually pleasant to work with. He picked out a lime green Ford Fiesta for his retirement car. They completed the test drive, finished all the paperwork, and Ashley sent the vehicle back to get ready for delivery. When delivering a new vehicle, you always get in with the customer to help them connect their phone to Bluetooth and walk them through all the features. Since it was a couple, the husband was in the driver's seat, his wife was in the front passenger seat, and Ashley was sitting in the middle of the back seat. They got his phone connected to the Bluetooth, matched the code, and turned up the volume on the car. He went to open his phone. The most explicit, obscene audio you can imagine came blasting out of the speakers. Dead silence in that vehicle for what felt like forever. Ashley wished them well, exited the car, and walked back inside, mortified. When asked how it went, she told them the story and muttered, “I don't really want to follow up. I'm not sure that's appropriate.” The Telecom Contractors Who Started a Gunfight I had door-knocked a large hair salon and built a relationship with the salon owner, who also owned the building. He helped me get in the door with all four of his tenants. Because he was switching, they all switched. I closed three to four months of quota on this one deal because of what he did for me.  Installation day arrives. At 6 a.m., my phone rings. I try to sound as awake as possible with my gravelly morning voice, and the owner immediately screams, "Jeb, what the f**k?" He explains that our contractors came out the night before, got in a huge argument, waved guns at each other—he swears one of them shot at the other. Then they came back in the morning and dug a trench that cut every single internet line to the building. Every single one. No internet on the salon's busiest day, and all the other stores were out, too. I arrived at 6:45 a.m.

Here's a problem that'll tie you in knots: You've got a killer software solution that saves companies massive money on employee benefits. You know exactly who needs it. Fortune 1000 companies with self-insured health plans. But you can't get a single meeting with the people who matter. That's the situation Peter Kleinman from Provo, Utah, found himself in. As the sales and marketing guy for his dad's startup, he was tasked with landing enterprise clients while juggling full-time classes at BYU. He had LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and a burning desire to make it work. He also had virtually no chance of success using his current approach. If you're nodding your head right now, keep reading. Because Peter's problem is your problem if you're trying to sell into enterprise accounts without the business acumen, social proof, or strategy to break through. The 100-Foot Wall Problem Let me be brutally honest: Fortune 1000 CHROs and C-suite executives have built a wall around themselves that's about 100 feet high. Their entire job is keeping people like you from wasting their time. And if you're young, inexperienced, or new to enterprise sales? That wall might as well be 1,000 feet high. Peter was doing everything the sales books tell you to do. He was going straight to the top. He was messaging decision makers on LinkedIn. He was targeting the right titles. He was also getting absolutely nowhere. Here's why: It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with business acumen. You can't speak the language of enterprise buyers if you've never lived in their world. You don't understand their buying process, their risk aversion, or the organizational politics that determine whether your deal lives or dies. Most critically, you're trying to sell something they don't even know they need. And you have zero social proof to back up your claims. That's not a recipe for success. That's a recipe for frustration, burnout, and a pipeline full of nothing. The Bottom-Up, Top-Down Strategy If you can't get to the top, start at the bottom. I'm not talking about giving up on enterprise accounts. I'm talking about running a multi-threading strategy that builds your business acumen while creating pathways into those massive organizations. Here's how it works: Find the amplifiers. These are the people in the trenches who actually deal with the problem your solution solves every single day. They're not directors or VPs. They're managers, analysts, and coordinators who feel the pain but lack the authority to fix it. These people are 100 times easier to talk to than C-suite executives. They'll take your call. They'll teach you. They'll tell you exactly what's broken in their organization and how decisions actually get made. Compress your experience. When you talk to these amplifiers, you're not selling. You're learning. You're asking questions like, "Help me understand how you make these decisions," and "What problems are you running into?" Every conversation compresses years of experience into hours. You learn the language. You understand the pain points. You gather insights that become ammunition for conversations with decision makers. Surface the insights upward. Now when you finally get in front of that CHRO or VP of Benefits, you're not some kid with a PowerPoint. You're someone who understands their organization better than they do. You can tell them stories about what their own people are experiencing and how you can close the gap. That's how you get meetings. That's how you build credibility. That's how you win deals when you have no business acumen and no social proof. The Insurance Broker Shortcut Here's another path Peter needed to explore: Insurance brokers. If you can't talk to the self-insured companies directly, talk to the people who advise them. Insurance brokers work with these organizations every day. They understand the buying process. They know the pain points.

The year was 1938. Families across America gathered, listening during the golden age of radio. On the eve of Halloween, a broadcast interrupted their evening: A live report claimed Martian cylinders had landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Within minutes, panic erupted as citizens fled their homes, convinced Earth was under alien attack. The entire event was fake. It was a perfectly executed radio drama by 23-year-old Orson Welles. Here's the sales lesson tucked into The War of the Worlds sci-fi scare: Welles wasn't just reading a script. He was executing a masterful lesson in emotional engagement. He had listeners hooked, buying into his story emotionally before their brains had time to register, "Wait, this can't be real."  That emotional buy-in is a core tenet of sales: People buy on emotion and then justify it with logic and facts. If rational adults can flee their homes over a fictional Martian invasion, imagine the force of emotion you can unleash when you find your prospect's emotional trigger. Sharpen your emotional intelligence, and you deploy a powerful sales tool. Emotion Gets the Attention, Data Seals the Deal Welles sold tension, uncertainty, and gravity, not a product. His voice was calm yet urgent, delivered with the authority of a trusted news anchor. The audience felt an adrenaline surge—heartbeats rising, eyes widening—before they had time to check the facts. This is the non-negotiable first step in sales. Your passionate storytelling creates the emotional charge. Your tone carries more weight than any spreadsheet full of ROI data. Emotion gets your buyer leaning in and invested in the outcome. The data you provide simply helps them sleep well at night after they've already made their decision. If your message isn't landing, stop reviewing your product deck and start analyzing your delivery. Are you speaking with urgency, and are you connecting to their emotional state? Without that emotional resonance, even the best solution just adds to the noise. Authority Isn't Arrogance, It's Command Welles dressed his fictional story in familiar trappings like live news bulletins, eyewitness reports, and crackling radio static. Each detail made the unbelievable feel legitimate. He commanded belief by establishing immediate, undeniable authority. Bring that same presence to your sales interactions. Authority isn't arrogance; it's commanding belief. Sound like someone who's been there, knows the terrain, and has the solution. Communicate with unwavering authority, and you build trust before price discussions begin. This is how you sell the experience. Prospects must believe in you and your company; belief in your product comes next. They buy the experience of working with you before seeing the product. If you sound uncertain, you'll never build a foundation of trust. Stay Steady to Control the Chaos Welles predicted a strong reaction to his broadcast and stayed calm, controlled the narrative, and guided the audience through the panic he was creating. In sales, moments of crisis or uncertainty test your professionalism. When a prospect goes cold, objections arise, or a competitor attacks, do not panic. Do not mirror their anxiety—it only feeds chaos and cedes control of the deal. Control the process, control yourself, control the outcome. When deals wobble and emotions spike in your buyer, that is your moment to shine. Breathe, slow down, ask questions, and lead steadily. Be the calm voice that reassures, guides, and inspires confidence. Mastering internal composure is the essence of emotional intelligence in sales.  Your Action Plan: Develop Your Sales EQ Mastering composure under pressure is a skill, not a gift. It requires commitment to developing emotional intelligence so you can use logic while others react in fear. Start a 'Rejection Journal' Drill. Stop letting rejection or setbacks paralyze you. Create a Failure Log to immediately document your feelings (frustration,

AI in sales isn't coming soon. It's already here, and it's quietly separating the salespeople who will thrive from those who won't. On the Sales Gravy Podcast, sales expert and author Victor Antonio shares this quote: "You won't lose your job to AI. You'll lose your job to people who are using AI."  While everyone debates whether artificial intelligence will replace salespeople, the real shift is already happening. What you need to know is which parts of your job will still matter when a machine can do everything else. The Trust Formula Still Requires Humans Most people think AI in sales is about automation. It's not. It's about augmentation. Yes, AI can write your emails. It can analyze your pipeline. It can schedule your meetings and generate your proposals. But it can't build trust with a buyer who's about to make a six-figure decision they're terrified of getting wrong. Trust in selling comes down to three things: Understanding the buyer's point of view Demonstrating real expertise Keeping the buyer's best interest front and center When a buyer is staring at a purchase order that could make or break their business, they don't want a chatbot. They want a human being who says, "I've got you. This is the right move." Simple Sales No Longer Require a Sales Rep  Transactional jobs are disappearing. AI sales agents can already handle simple sales from start to finish. A customer calls about a broken window seal. The AI analyzes the image, checks inventory, schedules a technician, verifies the warranty, and puts the appointment on the calendar. No human required. This isn't science fiction. These systems exist today. AI handles simple tasks easily, but complex sales still require humans. Everything on the straightforward end—cold outreach, basic prospecting, routine follow-ups—is getting automated fast. But complex B2B sales are different. When deals involve multiple stakeholders, custom solutions, and high-stakes decisions, buyers still need salespeople. Humans don't trust machines with decisions that keep them up at night. Your job security lives in complexity. If you're selling simple products with simple processes, you need to start adding value now.  What You Should Be Doing Right Now Most salespeople are waiting while AI transforms the industry. Don't make that mistake. Here's how to start experimenting with AI today: Use ChatGPT, Google's Notebook LM, or your AI of choice to digest long articles and research reports in minutes instead of hours. Feed it information about your products and competitors to create your own custom knowledge base. Role-play objection handling by assigning it different buyer personas and practicing your responses. Ask it to critique your proposals before you send them to catch weak points you might miss. These tools aren't perfect. They'll feel clunky at first. But you're not trying to master AI today. You're building comfort with technology that will be 100 times more powerful in just a few years. The salespeople who are experimenting now will be the ones who know how to use AI when it really matters. The ones waiting for their leaders to force them to adopt AI will scramble to catch up. The Skills That Survive AI So what actually matters when AI handles the busywork? The biggest obstacle in complex sales isn't convincing buyers that your solution works. It's helping them trust their own judgment enough to decide. Buyers freeze not because of your pitch, but because of fear: What if I'm wrong? AI can show data, ROI models, and comparison charts—but building buyer confidence still requires human judgment. That's the skill that matters: Building buyer confidence. You need to get exceptional at reading hesitation—when a buyer goes quiet or starts asking the same questions in different ways. They're not confused about your product. They're uncertain about themselves.

Here's a question that'll keep you up at night: How do you take a company from $300K in annual revenue to $1.5 million in 18 months, then scale to $3-5 million within five years? That's the challenge facing Greg Hirschi from Colorado. He's the new executive leader of an 18-year-old company selling ethics assessment services to professional licensing boards. They've expanded from an entrepreneurial model to a small team with one salesperson and one customer service person. The goal is aggressive growth, and Greg needs to know where to focus his limited resources to get the biggest bang for his buck. If you're nodding your head right now because you're in a similar situation, pay attention. Because the mistakes you make at $300K will haunt you at $3 million. The Resource Reality Check Let's be brutally honest about what a $300K revenue company means: You have no money. You have a razor-thin budget. You have one salesperson and one leader trying to do everything. At this stage, you have exactly one priority: REVENUE. You don't have the luxury of fixing operations, perfecting your tech stack, or building elaborate systems. You need to sell. Period. But here's where most small companies screw this up. They think selling means taking anything with a pulse. If it can fog a mirror, they'll do business with it. That's a death spiral disguised as growth. The Operator's Dilemma Greg comes from an operations background. He's analytical, process-driven, and systematic. Those traits are incredible assets for building a business, especially when the goal is to scale fast. But they can also be a liability when managing salespeople. Here's what happens: Operators think in systems and logic. Salespeople think in relationships and emotion. Operators want everything organized and predictable. Salespeople throw deals on the table that are messy and unpredictable. If you're an operator trying to lead sales, you need to understand this fundamental tension. Your salesperson is out there getting hammered with objections every single day, building narratives in their head about why people won't buy. You're thinking, "Just brush it off and do it again. What's wrong with you?" They're thinking, "You have no idea what it's like out here." This is why reading New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg is non-negotiable if you're an operator managing sales. You need to learn how salespeople think, how they operate, and how to lead them effectively without losing your mind. Start With Your ICP or Die Trying The single most important thing Greg needs to do right now to scale is get laser-focused on his Ideal Customer Profile. Not kind of focused. Not "we have a general idea." I mean obsessively, precisely, ridiculously dialed in on exactly who they should be selling to. Here's why this matters so much at $300K: Greg's salesperson has a $600K pipeline and will close 50% of it. Sounds great, right? But if half those customers churn because they're the wrong fit, requiring constant re-education and hand-holding, Greg's salesperson will get stuck in account management mode. They'll stop prospecting for new business because they're too busy re-selling existing accounts. That's how you stay stuck at $300K forever. Your ICP drives everything. It determines your messaging, your marketing, your presentation materials, and which stakeholders you need to reach inside target organizations. It helps you build relevant social proof stories. It allows you to coach your salesperson on handling specific objections instead of generic brush-offs. Most importantly, it gives you guardrails. You can ask your salesperson in pipeline reviews: "Tell me the strategic reason why we should chase this account. How does it fit our ICP? Why is this worth our limited resources when our singular goal right now is growth?" When you're running a $300K company with one salesperson and one leader, you cannot afford to chase every deal.

I've been intrigued by all of the LinkedIn posts lately from sales professionals, leaders, and experts proclaimings the phone is back! Even the “phone-is-dead” evangelists seem to have had a change of heart and are encouraging salespeople to “phone a customer.”  My favorite posts are from salespeople who took this advice, called a customer, and were surprised—even stunned—to discover that their customer actually wanted to talk. It's more proof that buyers are starving for real, authentic, human-to-human conversations with their sales reps and account managers.  When Sellers Make Their First Call in Years I saw one post yesterday from an account manager who said that, for the first time in years, he had picked up the phone and called a customer. In his post, he described how rewarding it was to have a real, live conversation—as if this was some new revelation. He said that even though the phone was “old school,” he had given it a try because his customers weren't responding to his emails anymore.  Although I'm super pleased to see that salespeople are rediscovering the power of the humble phone, I was bothered by this particular post because it is an indictment of just how far the sales profession has fallen over the past few years. It also exposes the malpractice of this guy's leadership team. Seriously, how is it possible that his leaders and company allowed him to avoid having actual conversations with his customers for years?  Pick Up the Phone and Talk to Your Customers Account managers who are not talking with their customers, the ones who keep their customers at digital arm's length and send random “just checking in emails,” are swinging the door open and inviting competitors in. When you fail to proactively manage relationships—when you don't talk with your customers—those customers end up talking to your competitors and considering other options. Nearly 70 percent of customers are lost due to neglect. Not prices, not products, not the economy, not aggressive competitors. Neglect! They feel the sting of being taken for granted. If you've ever been taken for granted (and I bet you have), you know that it makes you feel unimportant, small, and resentful, which can lead to the feeling of contempt. Resentment and contempt are the two most powerful negative emotions in the pantheon of human emotions. They are the gangrene of relationships, festering below the surface, slowly rotting away the connections that bind people together until the relationship is destroyed. The good news is the secret to defending accounts is completely in your control. It's simple. Pay attention to your customers. And guess what? A simple, regular  phone call can make all the difference. Just pick up the phone, dial their number, and ask or say: How are you doing? What can I do to help you? I have an idea for you.   Have a great weekend. Thank you for your business. Regular telephone contact ensures that you are top of mind with customers. Hearing your voice lets them know that you care. It doesn't need to be anything particularly special. You don't need to schedule it on their calendar. You don't need a reason to tell your customers that you appreciate them.  Pick up the phone and say “hello” because it doesn't cost a thing to pay attention to your customers. A “How AI Will Replace You” Reality Check But it's not just that account manager and his company. Rather than picking up the phone and talking with people, sales professionals everywhere have replaced this beautiful, synchronous sales communication tool with email. This aversion to talking with people by phone has become so acute that at least half of Sales Gravy's training and consulting engagements have focused on one thing: Teaching and compelling salespeople to pick up the damn phone and just have real-time human conversations.  So, let's start with a reality check: The telephone is not old school. 

Your sales team has the tools. They know the pitch. The CRM is full of leads. So why are half your reps still missing quota? Randy Wilinski spent 15 years building high-performance sales teams before joining our training team at Sales Gravy. His answer to this question cuts through the usual explanations about territory problems or skill gaps. The real issue? Most sales leaders are managing activity instead of developing people. They're applying pressure instead of addressing the mental blocks that sabotage performance before reps ever pick up the phone. The Real Problem Holding Back Sales Teams Walk into any sales bullpen and you'll hear the same beliefs on repeat: “I'm not good at cold calling.” “Nobody wants to hear from me.” “I don't know if I can hit these numbers.” Most leaders dismiss this as an attitude problem or lack of confidence. So they fire up the team with a motivational speech, send everyone back to their desks—and nothing changes. Here's what's being missed: These aren't attitude problems. They're belief systems that determine behavior. And behavior determines results. Nobody was born knowing how to sell. Your top performer didn't start with the ability to handle objections or close deals. They learned it. But the reps who believe they can't learn it won't put in the work to improve. They'll make half the calls, avoid the hard conversations, and prove themselves right. The real work of building elite performers is getting inside your reps' heads and rooting out the thought processes that are killing their performance. That's where true coaching separates managers from leaders. Why One-on-One Coaching Unlocks Growth Group training builds skill, but addressing mental blocks requires one-on-one coaching—where you can dig into patterns, ask uncomfortable questions, and challenge unhelpful thinking. Why does this rep always sabotage themselves right before closing a big deal? Where did this idea that "people don't like being sold to" come from? What past failure is creating this blind spot? Good coaches shine a light on the patterns that people fail to recognize or flat-out avoid. They name the behavior that's been there all along, but no one wanted to confront. Awareness alone doesn't create change. Your rep can have that breakthrough moment where they realize they are the problem, and still fall back into the same habits. Real coaching means holding people accountable to the change they commit to making. It means checking in, following up, and not letting them slide back into old patterns when things get uncomfortable. That's the difference between feel-good conversations and actual performance improvement. The Coaching Gap in Sales Leadership Most sales leaders don't actually coach. They manage activity, review numbers, and deliver pep talks. But managing metrics does not build high-performance sales teams. Developing people does. Coaching starts with curiosity. It means sitting down one-on-one and asking questions that uncover what is really holding a rep back. Not "why didn't you make enough calls?" but "what made those calls hard to make?" Sometimes the barrier is a belief. Other times, it is a communication issue between the rep and the leader. If you do not understand how each person communicates and processes feedback, you will keep missing the mark. When you tailor your coaching to match how a rep thinks and responds, conversations become more productive and performance starts to shift. That is how coaching turns from another meeting on the calendar into a catalyst for real growth. Creating an Environment Where New Reps Actually Develop The best thing you can do for your team is lower the pressure on outcomes and increase the focus on process. This doesn't mean accepting mediocrity—it means being relentless about the activities while being patient with the results. Your new reps are going to struggle. It's a reality you have to accept,

Here's a question that'll make your head spin: How do you train MLM recruits who have zero sales experience to actually sell instead of just posting on social media and hoping for the best? That's the question Andrew Osborne from Pittsburgh brought to me. Andrew works in direct selling and network marketing, specifically health and wellness nutrition supplements. Like most MLM leaders, he's frustrated watching new recruits default to the guru-approved strategy of posting on Instagram and waiting for the magic to happen. Spoiler alert: The magic never happens. If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. The "social media is the new cold calling" myth is one of the most damaging lies being sold to new direct sales representatives today, and it's costing MLM organizations their best potential talent. The Social Media Trap: When Easy Becomes Impossible Remember that story in Fanatical Prospecting where I went head-to-head with someone who swore their social media guru had all the answers? I said, "Great, you do yours for a week, I'll do mine for a week, and we'll test it out." Guess who won? Here's the brutal truth: Posting on social media feels easy because it lets you keep people at arm's length. You don't have to face rejection. You don't have to interrupt strangers. You don't have to have uncomfortable conversations. But here's what actually happens. After two months of posting videos that get one view each and zero sales, your recruits quit. They're demoralized, broke, and convinced MLM doesn't work. The real problem? They were never taught how to actually sell. Why MLM Sales Training Is Harder Than You Think When Andrew recruits someone into his network marketing organization, they're making two types of sales: selling the product and recruiting new team members. Most of these people have never sold anything in their lives. They came from every background imaginable except sales. Something happened in their life that made them say, "I want more." That motivation is critical, but motivation without skill is just frustration wrapped in hope. The things they need to do are really hard. Nothing in their life has prepared them for what sales prospecting actually requires. They have to sacrifice what they want now (ease and comfort) for what they want most (their goals). That's why the first question I ask every new recruit is this: What are your top five goals in the next twelve months? Not company goals. Not team goals. Their goals. Because if they don't want something bad enough to go through the pain of rejection, nothing else matters. The Only Formula That Actually Works In MLM, there's one simple formula that works every single time: Go talk with people. The more people you talk with, the more you recruit. The more product you sell. It's that simple. Think about it this way. If you had a marketing strategy that could create all your product sales and recruiting automatically, you wouldn't need an MLM. You'd just have an e-commerce business. The reason network marketing exists is because a network of people can spread the word and sell better than online ads. But here's the problem. Talking with people means getting past your discomfort. It means interrupting a stranger in line at Walmart. It means seeing someone at church who mentions financial problems and saying, "Hey, what if I had a way to help you out?" Most people would rather post on TikTok than have that conversation. What to Teach Your MLM Team If I'm building an MLM sales training program for recruits, here's exactly what I'm teaching them, in this order: First, teach them how to open conversations. Not pitches. Conversations. With strangers and with people they know. What's the first question they ask? How do they approach someone in line at Walmart? How do they bring up their network marketing business with friends without being weird? Run drills on this. Practice it until it becomes muscle memory.

You've probably heard it a hundred times lately—AI is coming for your job. Every week, there's a new headline about another role being automated, another company replacing people with bots, another “AI agent” that can do the work of ten humans in half the time. And if you spend too much time reading those headlines, it's easy to start wondering, What happens to me? What happens to salespeople like us in a world where machines can do almost everything we used to do? AI is Here to Stay You can't escape the truth. AI is going to change everything and impact almost every part of our lives. The train has left the station, and it will not be turning back. AI is going to displace a lot of people and jobs, but it's not going to replace everyone. Because no matter how smart machines get, they can't feel or connect the way you and I can. Sales is, and always will be, the ultimate human profession. It's the one job built entirely on human emotion, human judgment, and human connection. What You Can Do That AI Can't Just think about it: AI can write words. But it can't create belief. It can predict who might buy. But it can't build trust. It can score a lead. But it can't lead a human being through uncertainty, fear and doubt while giving them confidence to make the right decision in complex situations.  That's what you do. That's what we do. That's what salespeople have always done—long before there was technology, long before there was AI, and long before algorithms tried to simulate emotion. In sales, it's not about the product. It's about the person. People buy you. What you sell might get you to the door, but it is how you sell that determines whether they let you in.   Every sale is a transfer of emotion from one human being to another. It's the transfer of  belief and confidence and trust. When a customer says “Yes,” they're not just saying yes to a proposal or a price. They're saying 'Yes' to you. No matter how powerful technology becomes, that moment—that human moment—will never be replaced by a line of code. As modern sellers, what we need to understand is that AI isn't the end of selling. It's just the next leap forward in our incredibly resilient profession.  Keeping it Real AI will replace some salespeople, so we need to keep it real. There are reps who are lazy, transactional, and just go through the motions and never bother to think, adapt, or grow. Those reps will get left behind. So AI will not make sales professionals less valuable, but it will absolutely make the gap between poor and exceptional salespeople wider and more pronounced.  But the top performers—the ones who combine human empathy with AI-powered insight—will be unstoppable. Because when you merge the intelligence of machines with the intuition of a human being, it becomes a force multiplier.  How to Become Irreplaceable with AI Right this moment, top sales professionals and high-earners are elevating their performance with AI tools that do the grunt work. It'll build your lists, do your research, automate your follow-ups, and write every sort of draft.  It will give you more time for human-to-human connections: to listen, discover, develop creative solutions, persuade, and see the emotional context behind the data. The question isn't whether AI will replace you. The question is whether you'll use AI to become irreplaceable. It's simple. AI can give you the right words to say. But only you can make someone feel something when you say it. AI can pull the data, do the research, and build your presentation. Only you can look someone in the eye and say “Trust me. We can solve this together.” and close the sale.  Your Emotional Intelligence Seals the Deal That's The AI Edge. It's not about the tools. It's about using the tools to amplify your humanity. In the age of AI, your #1 competitive advantage is emotional intelligence. It's your ability to understand how people feel,

The gap between average salespeople and elite performers lies in process. While most reps chase quick wins and hope something sticks, top producers follow proven sales strategies that consistently deliver results. They've mastered the fundamentals that turn prospects into customers and customers into advocates. If you're ready to finish the year strong and blow past your quota, these five battle-tested sales strategies from previous podcasts will transform how you sell. 1. Deliver an Unforgettable Customer Experience by Mastering Your Emotions Your prospect doesn't care about your bad morning or the three deals that fell through yesterday. When you walk through the door or dial their number, you're the only conversation they're having with your company today. Elite salespeople know emotional consistency separates closers from pretenders. Think of it like a pro golfer staying calm and cruising forward regardless of what happened on the last hole. As Jeb Blount explains: How your customer feels about you is more predictive of outcome than any other variable. They buy you first, and then they buy your product. They buy you because they feel safe, heard, and confident you will deliver. This means you have to compartmentalize every interaction. Your fifth appointment of the day deserves the same intensity and professionalism as your first. When you show up desperate, prospects sense it immediately. When you rush through discovery, they feel undervalued. Jeb emphasizes this critical point: Buying a house, car, or service is deeply emotional for the customer. Before every interaction, take sixty seconds to reset. Acknowledge whatever is bothering you, mentally file it away, then walk in focused entirely on their world and their goals. 2. Commit to the Day One Follow-Up Mindset Ask yourself: How many times do you attempt to reach a prospect before quitting? If you answered three or four, you are leaving money on the table. Most reps quit after just three or four attempts, and sometimes without ever hearing a ‘No.' They just stop and let leads rot in the CRM instead of risking rejection. As Jessica Stokes reminds us, top producers understand this: While you are tracking your sixth or seventh outreach attempt, for the prospect, every touchpoint feels like day one. They are busy running their business—not waiting for your call. The problem is not just the number of attempts; it is the spacing. When you leave a voicemail and wait a month to "give them space," you lose momentum and start from scratch every time. The winning sales strategy is persistence with velocity. That means touching base every few days or weekly. When you maintain momentum, prospects remember you. The real failure is letting quality leads die because you are afraid to pick up the phone and risk hearing "No." 3. Turn Your Empathy Into a Weapon, Not a Weakness If you have ever hesitated before making a cold call because you thought, "I don't want to bother them," you are dealing with what Jeb Blount calls projection, and it is costing you deals. Projection happens when you assume prospects hate being interrupted as much as you do. You start deciding for them before you've even made the call. Successful salespeople recognize interruption is a professional necessity. Your job requires it; your income depends on it. Letting empathy paralyze your prospecting is dangerous. The internal conflict is real: You want to be an empathetic person, but you also have to be an interrupter. The mindset shift: Understand that projecting is the most dangerous thing in sales because you are deciding for your customer in advance what they want or need. Real empathy means showing up, asking sharp questions, and letting them tell you what they need. You cannot solve problems you never discover because you were too afraid to start the conversation. 4. Build a Velvet Rope Around Your Business What if your clients felt less like transactions and ...

How do you prepare your mindset and create the discipline to be effective every single day? That's what Jeff Velez asked on a recent Ask Jeb episode, and it's the question that separates the pros from the amateurs in sales. Sales is the hardest profession in business. It's the only job where you have to go out and find rejection and bring it home every single day. Every ask you make carries the potential to be rejected at a deep, painful level. That's why we get paid so well. And that's why most people can't hack it. But the ones who do? They've figured out the secret. Find Your Carrot My friend Will Fratini from ZoomInfo nailed it when he talked about what motivates him, or his carrot. His five-year-old daughter once bought him a carrot Christmas ornament, and he carries it with him everywhere as a reminder of why he shows up every day. But here's what matters: Your carrot needs to be specific and tangible. Not some vague "I want to be successful" nonsense. I'm talking about something real. A commission check of X dollars. A boat. Generational wealth through real estate. A college fund for your kids. Think of it like an old-time horse and carriage. You put a carrot on a stick in front of a stubborn horse, and suddenly it'll go forward even when it thinks it can't. That's what your carrot does for you when everyone else is giving up. Your carrot is what pushes you past the point where giving up would be completely justified. It's what separates the best from the rest. The Hard Truth About Sales Discipline Let's be clear about what sales discipline actually means. You have to show up every day and do a certain number of activities. Every. Single. Day. Consistently. And in order to do those hard things consistently, you need that carrot. It's about sacrificing what you want now (which is easy) for what you want most (which requires doing hard things). I want to do things that are easy. But in order to get what I want most, I've got to do things that are hard. That's the entire game. The Scottie Scheffler Example Look at Scottie Scheffler, the PGA golfer. When he makes a bogey, he bounces back with a birdie or better 62 percent of the time. The rest of the field? Less than 18 percent. Why? Because Scheffler is crystal clear about what's important to him. He knows his carrot. He understands what fulfillment means. When something goes wrong, there's no cascade of "everything is wrong." His ego doesn't take a hit because he's focused on what matters most. He picks himself back up, brushes himself off, and keeps moving. But here's what most people don't know: It wasn't always this way. When he first brought on his caddie, Ted Scott, Ted told him straight up: "I'm not working for you unless you get the attitude, temper, and anger under control." Think about that. The caddie refused to work with him unless he fixed his mindset first. That's how important mindset in sales really is. Everything else comes after. Your Visual Cue Go get yourself a carrot ornament. Seriously. Find one on Amazon, hang it in your office, and use it as your visual cue for what matters most. When you're sitting at your desk in the morning trying to get started, or when something has gone wrong and you're trying to bounce back, that carrot will remind you why you chose this soul-sapping profession in the first place. Because maybe the only thing harder than sales is golf. But you chose it. Now own it. The Secret Superpower Here's the bonus that Will dropped that's pure gold: Sometimes your carrot isn't even about you. Sometimes the ultimate sales superpower is genuinely helping someone else be the star of the show. The best sellers in the world don't care about how great their product is. They care about making their customer the hero. If you genuinely believe you're there to help someone else's day get better, you're going to come through. And when you have that extra little carrot hanging th...

Here is an undeniable truth: The No. 1 reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline, and the No. 1 reason you have an empty pipeline is that you are not doing enough prospecting. In sales, everything rests on putting qualified opportunities in your pipeline. Prospecting is the beginning and the end, alpha and omega. If you don't prospect, you will fail. That is a guaranteed truth. Each and every sales day, you must connect with prospects, engage them in meaningful conversations, and convert them into pipeline opportunities.  It's a Noisy World The problem is that we live in a noisy world in which those same prospects are being inundated with prospecting messages from dozens of other salespeople who are also attempting to get their attention.  So, if you don't stand out, you lose.  But I doubt I'm telling you anything that you don't already know. It's freaking hard to get attention when prospecting, and it's not getting easier. There are days when it feels like you could be jumping up and down in front of your prospect in a pink bunny suit while throwing hundred-dollar bills in the air, and they'd still ignore you.  The Sledgehammer Approach Is Dead One of the key reasons so many salespeople fail to break through is that their entire prospecting strategy is pounding away at prospects through a single communication channel—typically a series of automated emails sent through a sales engagement platform like Outreach or SalesLoft.  Sadly, this sledgehammer approach just doesn't work anymore. Recent data reveals that salespeople are sending as many as eight times more emails today than they did five years ago and getting just a tenth of the results.  A big reason prospects are tuning out is that AI-powered sales automation tools have scaled email prospecting activity to an extraordinary level.  In the past, writing a prospecting email involved strategic thought and taking time to craft a message that was unique to each prospect. It was a slow process, which meant salespeople sent fewer but better prospecting emails. Today, AI engines can pump out hundreds of cold email variations in seconds with shallow, and often cringeworthy, personalization that, more often than not, turns prospects off. And as AI-generated prospecting emails flood inboxes, the sheer volume of this outreach has eroded any impact from the improved efficiency.  Constant exposure to this irrelevant, repetitive AI-generated crap has left business executives exasperated. They are overwhelmed and have tuned out, turned off, and are ignoring all prospecting messages—good or bad, human or AI-generated. Break Through the Noise Most sales professionals today are desperate to find new techniques to help them break through the noise and get attention when prospecting so that they can engage in more meaningful conversations.  Most salespeople want a bigger, stronger pipeline filled with qualified opportunities. Yet many overlook one of the most powerful prospecting tools right at their fingertips: LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn, Why Now It can be argued that the moment the sales profession changed forever and the door opened to modern selling as we know it was when Alexander Graham Bell said on the very first telephone call, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” The telephone's impact on the sales profession was profound and lasting. Then, as now, the phone remains the most efficient and effective means for conducting real-time, synchronous human-to-human conversations with prospects. Bell made his call to Mr. Watson 150 years ago. Since then, only a handful of pivotal technologies have advanced the sales profession with such impact: The automobile gave sellers the freedom to cover wider regional territories more efficiently. Air travel literally gave sales professionals wings, expanding their reach nationally and globally. The internet put unimaginable data at the fingertips of both sales professionals and buyers.

Cold calling terrifies most salespeople more than losing their biggest account. The rejection. The hang-ups. The voice telling you that you're bothering people who don't want to hear from you. Before transitioning into sales, Steve Munn spent nine years as a professional hockey defenseman. As a hockey player, his job was to make life difficult for the other team and absorb whatever they dished back.  "Part of it was getting punched in the face," he said on a recent episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast. "If I get a no from a prospect, that's maybe a bad day, but it's certainly not as bad as getting a concussion or a broken nose again." That perspective shift, understanding what actually constitutes a threat, changes everything about how you approach cold calling. It goes beyond being tougher or having thicker skin. Your Fear Isn't About the Call Most sales professionals will do anything to avoid call blocks. They'll update their CRM. Reorganize their pipeline. Respond to emails that could wait three days. Anything but pick up the phone. The problem isn't the person on the other end of the line. You don't want to be the one who fumbles, doesn't have the right answer, or proves you don't belong in that conversation. Imposter syndrome thrives in sales because every call is another opportunity to prosecute yourself. Every objection becomes evidence that you're not cut out for this. Every hang-up confirms what you secretly suspected: You're bothering people who have better things to do. That internal narrative is all in your head, and it's costing you deals. Get Your Mind Right First You can't make effective cold calls when you're living in your head. Anxiety, overthinking, or trying to sound perfect makes every conversation feel forced. Nothing bad actually happens on a sales call. Your life isn't in danger, and a hung-up phone or curt “not interested” barely registers as a problem. The best cold callers aren't fearless. They're prepared mentally before they start dialing. Find what gets you into the right frame of mind: review recent wins, remind yourself that you're solving real problems, or call a colleague for perspective. The goal is connecting with another human, not executing a perfect pitch. People can tell the difference. Separate Message From Delivery When someone says "we're all set" and hangs up, they're not making a judgment about your worth as a salesperson or a human being. They're communicating one thing: They're not interested right now. The delivery might feel harsh, and the tone might sound dismissive. But the message is simple and impersonal. Athletes learn this early. Coaches scream. Teammates criticize. Opponents talk trash. If you react emotionally to how something is said rather than hearing what's actually being communicated, you become ineffective. In sales, the same principle applies. When you stop taking the delivery personally, you can actually hear what's being said. Sometimes what sounds like a hard no is actually "you haven't given me a reason to care yet" or "call me back in six months." You Don't Need to Know Everything One of the biggest barriers to cold calling is the belief you must have all the answers. You hesitate because you think, "What if they ask something I don't know? I'll look like a fool." Here's what that thinking misses: You have a team. No salesperson operates in a vacuum. You've got service teams, technical experts, partners, and colleagues who collectively know far more than you do individually. The expectation that you should show up with encyclopedic knowledge is self-imposed and unrealistic. What matters on a cold call isn't demonstrating expertise. It's demonstrating curiosity and commitment.  When you release yourself from the pressure to be perfect, cold calling becomes about investigation rather than performance.  Ask Questions Nobody Else Does Most salespeople treat cold calls like a race to present their solution.

Here's a question that keeps startup founders up at night: How does a first sales hire build pipeline and prospect effectively when there's zero technology, no tools, and absolutely no data resources available? That's the challenge Matthew Russell brought to the table, and it's a scenario that's far more common than you'd think. Companies transitioning from founder-led sales often throw their first sales hire into the deep end with nothing but a laptop and a "good luck" pat on the back. If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. But here's the good news: some of the most successful sales teams were built from exactly this position, and there's a proven playbook for making it work. The Hook Is Everything When Will Frattini joined his boss Jane in Austin back in 2011, they had zero presence in the market. No reputation, no established relationships, no fancy tech stack. Just two people and a mission to build from scratch. The first lesson? Your job isn't to reinvent the wheel or create some elaborate sales process. Your job is to figure out what hook the founder used to close their first deals, then ruthlessly replicate it. This means getting the founder to show you exactly how they won business. Listen to their calls. Shadow their meetings. Mirror their approach. Don't try to be clever or add your own spin yet. Just learn what actually works. Here's the critical part: you need the founder to be brutally honest with you about your early meetings. Will's boss Jane had the right to refuse any meeting he set. If it didn't qualify, she'd tell him exactly why. That feedback loop is gold because it teaches you the difference between a meeting that sounds good and a meeting that actually advances the sale. Master the fundamentals before you try to optimize. The Metrics That Actually Matter Forget about creating a complex sales process with seventeen KPIs. In the beginning, you need exactly one metric that matters: qualified meetings that convert to next steps. Will's early goal was 20 to 30 worthwhile meetings per month. Eventually they scaled that to 60 per rep. But notice the word "worthwhile." These weren't just any meetings. They were conversations with real potential that the founder or sales leader validated. The qualifier matters because it forces you to get better at targeting and messaging, not just activity for activity's sake. You can't game this system by booking junk meetings. When Victoria Walker asked how long it takes to build metrics in a niche market, the answer is simple: you'll have metrics after day one. How many calls did you make? How many connections? How many appointments set? But here's what trips up most new outbound teams: they expect instant results, don't see them, and quit before the cumulative impact kicks in. The 30-Day Rule Changes Everything The prospecting you do today pays off somewhere in the next 90 days. This is the rule of cumulative impact, and it's why most outbound efforts fail. Companies start strong, don't see immediate results, and abandon ship. Then they restart six months later with different reps, different messaging, and the cycle repeats. This is death by fits and starts. Your commitment has to be ironclad: we're doing this every single day for at least 90 to 120 days before we make major changes. You'll make small tweaks to messaging and targeting along the way, but you don't stop the engine. Think of it like an elite sports team watching game film. You're looking for incremental improvements. Last month you closed five good deals. This month you're aiming for six. You're not rebuilding the entire playbook every two weeks because the metrics look scary. Handling the "How'd You Get My Number?" Objection D'elvis Huerta raised a challenge every salesperson faces: prospects who are surprised or even concerned when you call their cell phone. They ask how you got their information, and it throws you off your game.

Cicero once said, "Cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food to the body." Sales is fundamentally a mental game. Your capacity for understanding your prospects at a deeper level and developing creative solutions that solve their problems – that's your winning edge. In a profession where you need to outwit and out maneuver your competitors in order to win,  your ability to think, to truly contemplate and reflect, might be the most underutilized competitive advantage in your sales arsenal. Always Responding. Never Reflecting. Yet most salespeople these days are starving their minds. They're constantly in motion, constantly busy, constantly doing, constantly in front of screens – but rarely thinking.  We've created a culture where being busy equals being productive. Most salespeople spend their days reacting – to emails, to phone calls, to urgent requests, to the latest fire that needs to be put out. We are always responding, never reflecting. Always moving, never thinking strategically about where we are going. Noise Kills Your Ability to Think William Penn wrote, "True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment." Think about that for a moment. You wouldn't dream of going weeks without sleep because you know your body would break down. But you regularly go weeks, maybe months, without giving your mind the silence and space it needs to just think and function at its highest level. We live in the age of noise. Constant noise. Digital noise, physical noise, mental noise. Your phone is buzzing with notifications. Your email is pinging every few minutes. Your CRM is demanding updates. Your manager wants reports. Your prospects are texting. Your colleagues and customers are interrupting.  We have so many things going on at once and so much noise in our lives that it has become almost impossible to think. All of this noise is killing your ability to think clearly, to make good decisions, to see the big picture, to be the creative and thoughtful professional you were meant to be.  Schedule Thinking Time That's exactly why scheduling thinking time is so important. Most people don't take the time to think because they don't feel like they can afford to. Sitting quietly and thinking doesn't feel like work. It feels like you're being lazy. Our culture has programmed us to believe that if we're not visibly doing something, we're not being productive. Likewise, constant stimulation has become a drug. Silence feels uncomfortable because we've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. I passionately believe that we must schedule, on our calendars, for thinking. No distractions, no music, no TV, no laptop, no phone – just you and your thoughts, alone. Notice I said "schedule" it. If you don't put it on your calendar, it won't happen. You'll always find something more "urgent" to do. Thinking Time Taking time to just think is powerful. It slows you down, helps you relax, and frequently generates incredible ideas and inspiration.  Thinking time isn't meditation, though it shares some similarities. It's not prayer, though some people find it spiritual. It's simply dedicated time for your mind to process, reflect, and contemplate. The beauty of thinking time is that it can take many forms.  The Quiet Corner Think  Find a quiet space – your office with the door closed, a park bench, your car in an empty parking lot, or a corner of your home. The location doesn't matter as much as the lack of distractions. Start with just 15 minutes. Don't try to go for an hour right away. Build the habit first, then extend the time. The Walk and Think This is my personal favorite. Take a long walk – alone, without music, podcasts, or phone calls. There's something about the rhythm of walking that unlocks creative thinking. Steve Jobs was famous for his thinking walks. Many of his best ideas came while walking around Apple's campus or thro...

Most salespeople lose a sales meeting before they ever open their mouth. They show up with decks of slides, lists of discovery questions, or AI-generated talking points, thinking preparation is about having more material.  But while they're busy organizing, their prospects are mentally checking out—and the meeting hasn't even started. Lee Salz, bestselling author and founder of Sales Architects, has observed this pattern for decades. "If you want to win more deals at the prices you want, you need a better first meeting strategy. Everyone says I want to win more deals, so they focus on closing at the end. But that's not where the opportunities are. The opportunities to win more deals start in that first meeting." The Sales Meeting Problem Hiding in Plain Sight Ask any salesperson: "If a prospect agrees to meet with you, what do they get out of it?" The response is usually stunned silence. That silence reveals the problem. Too many sales professionals approach the first sales meeting with an extraction mindset, focused on what they can learn instead of what they can give. Think about how you prepare. Do you make a list of questions to gather information? Do you pull together slides about your company, products, and clients? That might feel productive, but here's what it communicates: This meeting is about me. When prospects can't see immediate value in the conversation, they resist. They may decline the meeting altogether, or worse—they show up already skeptical, arms crossed, counting down the minutes until they can escape. Why Traditional Discovery Is Failing You Sales training has conditioned reps to believe that discovery meetings are the foundation of the sales process. In theory, this makes sense: You need information to qualify opportunities. But here's the problem—buyers don't experience value when they educate you. They already have suppliers, vendors, and service providers. Another salesperson asking them to “tell me about your challenges” just feels like more work. Worse, traditional discovery feels like an interrogation. You're pulling data without leaving anything behind. And prospects are savvy enough to sense when you're there to take rather than give. The Emotion Gap in Every Sales Meeting You already know people buy on emotion and justify with logic. You've heard it in every sales book, every training, every keynote. Walk into the average first meeting, and you'll see the same setup: a rep armed with facts, features, processes, and pricing structures. All logic, zero emotion. The result? Buyers nod politely, take notes, and then ghost you. Not because your product isn't good enough, but because you failed to make them feel anything. Your competitors who are consistently winning aren't necessarily better at selling features. They're better at weaving emotional connection into the very fabric of their meetings. They create trust, credibility, and resonance in the first 15 minutes. The Three Non-Negotiables of Every Winning Sales Meeting High-performing sales professionals understand that every first meeting must accomplish three core objectives: Meaningful Qualification: Determine whether this opportunity aligns with your ideal customer profile while also helping prospects better understand their situation.  Clear Differentiation: Prospects need to understand what makes your approach unique, but not through feature comparisons. Real differentiation comes from your methodology, philosophy, and approach. Show them how you think about solving problems, not just what you sell. Emotional Foundation: Establish the connection that energizes deals. This involves demonstrating genuine interest in their success while positioning yourself as a trusted advisor rather than just another vendor. How to Prepare for Sales Meeting Success The outcome of the meeting is decided long before you show up. Top performers treat preparation like a competitive advantage.

Here's a question that'll make your head spin: You know AI is transforming sales, everyone's talking about it, but you're still staring at ChatGPT like it's some mysterious black box, wondering what magical question you should type in first. That's the reality for most salespeople in 2025. They know they need to embrace AI, they've heard the success stories, but they're paralyzed by the complexity and overwhelmed by the options. If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't technical—it's mental. Salespeople are asking the wrong question entirely. The Wrong Question That's Keeping You Stuck Most people approach AI like it's some mystical oracle they need to appease with the perfect question. They think there's some secret prompt that will unlock AI's full potential, like finding the right combination to a safe. Here's the brutal truth: There is no perfect first question for AI. The real problem isn't what to ask—it's how you're thinking about the problem. Instead of asking "What should I ask AI?" you need to flip the script entirely. The Mental Shift That Changes Everything Twenty minutes before recording our latest Ask Jeb episode, I was working on a new training program for Sales University. I had a slide deck and workbook that needed proofreading, and my first instinct was to think, "Who can I get to proofread this thing?" That's how most of us think: "How can someone else do this?" or "How can I get this done?" But I caught myself and asked a different question: "How can AI do this?" I uploaded the slide deck to AI and asked it to proofread for me. Fifteen seconds later, I had a response—not perfect, but a starting point. I refined my prompt, asking for typos organized slide by slide, and boom—seven minutes later, the entire deck was cleaned up. What would have taken me 45 minutes and still resulted in missed errors was done in minutes, with better accuracy than I could achieve manually. Why You're Already Qualified to Use AI Here's what Will Frattini from ZoomInfo pointed out that hit me like a lightning bolt: You already know how to use AI. You've been doing it for years. If you've ever asked Siri for directions, told Alexa to turn up the music, or typed a question into Google, congratulations—you've been using AI. The only difference now is the sophistication and power of what's available. The barrier isn't technical competency. It's the mental block of overthinking it. You don't need to understand large language models or machine learning algorithms. You just need to ask a question and hit enter. That's it. That's the profound simplicity everyone's missing. Think Like a Conductor, Not a Solo Act Here's the game-changing mindset shift: Stop thinking of yourself as someone who needs to learn AI. Start thinking of yourself as a conductor standing in front of a symphony orchestra. You've got Claude for certain tasks, ChatGPT for others, ZoomInfo Copilot for prospecting intelligence, Gemini for research—each AI is like a different instrument in your orchestra. Your job isn't to play every instrument; it's to conduct them all to create something beautiful. The apex predators in sales aren't going to be the people who master one AI tool. They're going to be the conductors who know when to use which AI for maximum impact, iterating and refining until they get exactly what they need. This means developing your prospecting methodology becomes even more critical—you need to know what outcome you're trying to achieve before you can direct your AI orchestra to help you get there. Your Practical Starting Point Stop overthinking this. Here's your action plan: Step 1: Pick one AI tool you have access to. Your company probably already provides something. If not, start with ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the major platforms. Step 2: Identify one recurring task that eats up your time. Email templates, research,

Welcome to Grind Season. This week, we enter the most pivotal period of your entire sales year. From now until mid-December, how you choose to invest your limited time will determine whether you end your year strong, hit your income goals, make it to the winner's circle at President's Club, and start next year with a full pipeline OR wallow in mediocrity, miss your number, and damage your career.  Write Your Sales Comeback Story If you're ahead of your goals, this is your time to build an insurmountable lead and give yourself an unfair advantage as you enter next year. Do not rest on your laurels and coast. Grind it out and build a massive next-year pipeline. If you're on track, this is your time to accelerate, finish strong, and propel yourself into the President's Club.  If you're behind, this is the time to shift from being defense to offense. Most salespeople who are going to miss their annual quota already know it by now. They can feel it. See it in their pipeline. Sense it in their gut. But what separates winners from losers is that winners use this moment as a wake-up call, not a death sentence.  Stop making excuses about market conditions, difficult prospects, or bad luck. Start taking complete ownership of your results and your future. Stop thinking like someone who's behind. Start thinking like someone who's about to write their own sales comeback story.  Your energy and confidence level will directly impact your results during Grind Season. If you show up defeated and desperate, prospects will sense it. If you show up confident and focused, prospects will respond in kind, and you will sell more. But whatever your situation, this is not the time to coast. This is the time to get serious about finishing the year strong. The Grind Season Mindset "Grind Season" is more than just a motivational catchphrase – it's a winning mindset grounded in the unglamorous, but essential, embrace of this crucial period with intense focus, hard work, discipline, and consistent, intentional activity.  It's about ignoring distractions, drowning out the noise, being stingy with your time, and using every moment of your sales day to put new opportunities into the pipeline and actively advancing those deals through the pipeline. This isn't about activity for the sake of activity. It's about deliberately and proactively getting back to the basics and fundamentals of prospecting and sales at a time in the sales year when it matters.  Your Pipeline Reality Check Here's the key gut-check question you must look into the mirror and answer right now: Where do you stand relative to your year-end number, and based on that answer, what will be your next move? To fully answer that question, begin with a pipeline reality check. Your current quota attainment tells you where you've been. Your pipeline tells you where you're going. Far too many sales professionals look at their pipeline and see what they want to see, not what's actually there. This is especially true at this time of year when we allow baggage from the first half of the year to remain in our pipeline, hoping that somehow we might close it. But here's the deal, during Grind Season, hope is not a strategy.  The truth is, those deals have been dead for a long time. The stakeholders are ghosting you; they never commit to next steps, and most haven't returned your calls in months. In the words of Sales Gravy University trainer and author Kristie K. Jones, “stalled” is not a step in the sales process.  So start by getting brutally honest and ruthless with your current pipeline. First, clean house. Go through every opportunity and ask yourself: "If I had to bet my own money on whether this deal will close by the end of the year, would I take that bet?" If the answer is no, move it out of your active pipeline and replace it with something else. Stop lying to yourself and counting on it for this year's numbers. Second,

Most salespeople waste their careers fighting over the same crowded prospects. Meanwhile, untapped markets are sitting in plain sight. These are the industries, segments, and territories your competitors don't take seriously—or don't even notice. They're wide open, and they reward the salespeople willing to do the work. On the Sales Gravy Podcast, I spoke with Nicholas Lalla, an economic development expert who helped bring more than $200 million of investment into a market everyone else had written off. His blueprint for revitalizing a forgotten city is the same framework you can use to uncover and dominate untapped markets in sales. Why Untapped Markets Are Goldmines The best markets are often the ones no one is talking about. When the crowd decides a territory is “too small,” “too tough,” or “not worth the time,” they leave the door wide open. That's where the opportunity lives. And let's be clear: An untapped market doesn't have to mean a new zip code. It could be a niche industry your competitors dismiss, a customer population they ignore, or a vertical nobody's paying attention to yet. If you don't know much about a market, chances are your competitors don't either. That ignorance is your advantage—if you're willing to dig in. The Data-Driven Discovery Method Most salespeople gamble on gut instinct when picking new markets. That's why they waste time chasing “big name” logos that never buy, or avoiding prospects who look difficult but actually have massive potential. Top performers take a different path. They go where the data points. Before committing to a market, study the numbers your competition ignores: Industry growth rates – Expanding sectors often fly under the radar. Investment flows – Follow where capital is going before sales catch up. Labor market trends – Job growth exposes emerging business needs. Government spending – Public dollars usually spark private demand. Data doesn't close deals. But it stacks the odds in your favor and ensures you're hunting where opportunity actually exists. The 100-Conversation Rule Numbers tell you where to look. Conversations tell you what's real. Don't just study demographics—talk to 100 people tied to the market. Customers. Ex-customers. Prospects who should buy from you but don't. Even suppliers and partners. Ask them about their challenges, their frustrations, and the gaps they see. Don't pitch—listen. By the time you've had 100 conversations, you'll know more about that market than your competitors ever will. And you'll have built a network of early relationships that pay off down the line. Look for Adjacent Opportunities The breakthrough comes when you stop looking for completely new industries and start examining adjacencies. Instead of jumping into foreign markets, identify prospects that connect to your existing expertise. If you sell to manufacturing, explore adjacent industries like logistics or supply chain management. If you work in healthcare, consider medical device companies or pharmaceutical services. Adjacent markets let you leverage existing knowledge while expanding into less competitive territory. The Focus Formula  Most market expansion strategies fall apart because of a lack of focus. Salespeople chase every shiny opportunity and end up spread too thin. The result? Lots of motion, zero momentum. Domination beats diversification. Pick three or four high-potential segments and go all-in. Pour your time, energy, and relationship capital into saturating those markets. That density builds brand recognition, referrals, and trust. Scattershot prospecting creates exhaustion. Focused prospecting creates dominance. Building on Legacy Assets: The Hidden Accelerator Don't ignore what already exists—leverage it. The most counterintuitive insight about untapped markets is that the best ones build on foundations you already have. Your "legacy assets" might include:

Here's a question that'll keep you up at night: What do you do when you believe in "buy or die" but you're terrified of ruining future opportunities with annoying prospecting sequences? That's exactly what Angie Anderson asked during a recent Ask Jeb session, and it's a problem that's plaguing salespeople everywhere. Angie subscribes to the buy or die mentality but doesn't want to destroy her odds of winning in the future by becoming the prospect's worst nightmare. If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. The tension between persistent prospecting and respectful relationship building is one of the biggest challenges facing modern sales professionals, and getting it wrong costs you deals—both now and in the future. The Buy or Die Misconception That's Killing Your Pipeline Here's the brutal truth: Most salespeople completely misunderstand what "buy or die" actually means. They think it's about hammering prospects until they crack, but that's not persistence—that's harassment. Real buy or die mentality recognizes that the prospect is never not a prospect, but sometimes now is not the right time. The key is knowing when to push and when to pull back. Your sequence length and touch frequency should be driven by one critical factor: deal complexity and account size. Short Cycle Sales Need Short, Aggressive Sequences Run 10-14 touch sequences over 10-30 days with touchpoints every 2-3 days. These prospects have buying windows that are typically always open, and the stakes are relatively low. Complex Accounts Require Long-Term Relationship Building For massive, high-value accounts, you could run sequences that extend up to two years. Touch them monthly or quarterly to stay top of mind, waiting for the right opportunity window to open. The magic happens when you track meaningful engagement. In any properly executed sequence, 30-50% of prospects will give you some form of signal—yes, no, or even "go away." All of these responses give you something to work with. But here's the critical part: When you get complete radio silence from the other 50%, you stop. Pull them out of your sequence, slot in fresh prospects, and circle back in 90 days or six months. You have infinite time to go after them—use it strategically. Why Generic Messages Get You Blocked Every Time This brings us to the second major challenge facing modern salespeople: crafting relevant messages that actually resonate with busy prospects. James Baldwin perfectly captured this struggle when he asked about leveraging tools like ZoomInfo to create relevant messaging. He sees tons of information but doesn't know what to use or how to use it effectively. This is where most reps completely miss the mark, and it's costing them relationships. The Research Failure That Destroys Credibility Want to know the fastest way to get permanently blocked? Send a message that screams "I know nothing about you or your business." This happened to me recently with a rep from a major software company. They did everything technically right—multi-channel approach, proper timing, professional voicemails—but they failed at the most critical element: relevance. They prospected Sales Gravy without doing even basic research. My LinkedIn profile was right there. My content was everywhere. I've literally said thousands of times that if you mention my books when prospecting me, I'll almost always respond. But they were too lazy to look. That's not persistence—that's sales malpractice. How to Turn Data Overload Into Relevant Conversations The problem isn't lack of information—it's information overwhelm. Modern tools give you access to massive amounts of data, but most reps freeze up trying to figure out what matters. The solution is asking better questions of your data. Instead of just building lists, use AI-powered tools to ask specific questions: "What are three conversation starters that would make this CEO interested in talking with us?

I had intended for this Money Monday to be something powerful, a new message that would get you fired up for this week and this season. But last week, while delivering training to an amazing group of young salespeople with wide-open minds, I learned that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. It disturbed me deeply and I feel compelled to deliver this message. The Assassination That Shook America On Sept. 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while addressing an audience at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. A young man, thirty-one years old with his whole life ahead of him, was killed for no other reason than someone disagreed with him. After learning about the assassination, I found myself incredibly disturbed that a person in the public square could just be shot and killed like that—murdered right in front of everyone. So I did what I always do when I want to understand something: I started learning. I watched hours and hours, dozens and dozens of Charlie Kirk's videos to learn more about the man, his message, and why someone would think it would be okay to assassinate him. I still haven't found the answer to that last question. This Isn't About Politics Before I go any further, let me be crystal clear: This is not a political message. This is not a religious message. It is about how we treat each other as human beings. If you know me, if you've been to my events or training, you know I never talk about politics or religion. If you look at my social media feeds on any channel, you won't find much that would help you understand what my politics or religion are. Do I have convictions? Yes. Do I believe certain things? Yes. But they're my beliefs, and I keep them to myself because my job is to train salespeople. I'm a sales author, trainer, expert, and consultant. That's my lane. I train salespeople no matter what they believe. I train salespeople no matter what their religion. I train salespeople and help salespeople no matter where they're from or what their walk of life is. I don't care where you come from because my entire purpose, my reason for being on earth, is to help you sell more, help you gain confidence, and to help you with your biggest sales questions and challenges. What Charlie Kirk's Example Taught Me What I discovered in watching those videos was something that transcends political beliefs. Charlie Kirk's example was his willingness to go sit down face-to-face with people who disagreed with him, sometimes vehemently, and just have a conversation. And do it respectfully. I noticed something remarkable in his videos: More than once, he said, "You know what, I stand corrected." Someone would come to him with a different set of facts, and he would say, "Okay, that sounds right. I agree with you." In many cases, he would shake the person's hand after a debate. He was respectful. It was never about the person. It wasn't personal. He didn't hate the person. He had conversations about their ideas. How Charlie Kirk disagreed mattered. That is what we need to get back to. Not someplace in the future—today, right now. The Human Cost I watched his wife's, Erica's, message to the world, and I found myself on an airplane as a grown man with tears streaming down my face, trying not to let everyone see that I was crying. It was heartbreaking watching her pain. She has two kids; they are one- and three-years-old. That assassin changed their lives forever. I can't imagine when one of them gets older and either finds the video of their daddy getting assassinated or someone puts it in front of them. If you step into that frame for just a moment with your human empathy, it will make you hurt. Charlie's children will be raised with stories instead of memories, photographs instead of laughter, and silence where their father's voice should have guided and loved them. The Conflict We All Face Everywhere in our lives with other people, we have disagreement. Everywhere in our lives,

What if one simple discovery question could close your next big deal? Here's the one I used: “Tell me what's going on with your team?” Then I shut up and listened. The buying committee talked, debated, and worked their way toward their own clarity. By the end of the call, they had essentially closed the deal for me. I barely said a word. That's not a fairy tale—it happened. And it proves why most sales discovery fails: reps focus on their checklist and pitch instead of helping the buyer gain clarity. The Certainty Crisis Killing Your Deals Dr. Lorenzo Bizzi joined The Sales Gravy Podcast and revealed a simple truth: Buyer uncertainty kills deals. Traditional sales discovery often increases that uncertainty. Rigid qualifying questions, seller-centric agendas, and shallow data gathering make buyers feel misunderstood and cautious. When you approach discovery this way, you're eroding trust. Sure, buyers are evaluating your product—but they're also evaluating whether you understand their world. And if you can't help them gain clarity, even the best solution won't move the deal forward. The Science of Deep Sales Discovery The most effective influence tactic isn't charm, rapport, or even product demos. It's clearly displaying the arguments and reasons why your solution works for their specific situation. But you can't build rational arguments until you truly understand the problem. And you can't understand the problem until you master deep discovery. Deep discovery operates on two levels: The Organizational Level: What metrics matter to the company? What are the measurable business outcomes they're trying to achieve? What's the cost of inaction? The Individual Level: What's at stake for each stakeholder personally? How will this decision impact their performance review, their standing with leadership, and their career trajectory? Remember: Organizations don't make decisions. People do. The Power of One Question The most powerful discovery conversations start with one well-crafted, open-ended question that invites the buyer to tell their story—not your story about how great your product is.  The question I used—"Tell me what's going on with your team?"—worked because it was: Open-ended, with no leading assumptions. Centered on their world, not my product. Neutral, without judgment or bias. Broad enough to go anywhere. When you ask the right question and then listen, the buyer starts convincing themselves. They begin connecting the dots between their current situation and what they need to change.  And here's the key: If the buyer says it, it's the truth. If you say it, you're just another salesperson spinning a pitch. Cognitive Empathy Is The Difference Maker Dr. Lorenzo Bizzi defines several types of empathy. But for salespeople, the distinction that matters is simple: affective empathy pulls you off course, while cognitive empathy keeps you sharp, connected, and in control. Affective empathy—actually feeling what your buyers feel—will drain your energy and cloud your judgment. When they're frustrated, you get frustrated. When they're uncertain, you become uncertain. Cognitive empathy is different. It's the ability to recognize and understand what your buyer is feeling without taking it on yourself. You stay clear-headed and outcome-focused, while still connecting deeply with their situation.  In discovery, cognitive empathy shows up in the emotional nuance most salespeople miss—a pause before they answer, a change in tone, or hesitation in their voice. That's your cue to lean in, ask a clarifying question, and uncover what's really driving their hesitation. "You paused when I asked about your current system. What's on your mind?" "I heard some frustration in your voice when you mentioned the timeline. Help me understand what's driving that." Deals get won in the emotional subtleties that surface-level discovery never uncovers.

Here's a question that'll make you rethink everything about sales performance: What happens when your team has all the skills, tools, and training they need, but they're still underperforming because they can't regulate their emotions under pressure? That's exactly what Natalie Brooks from Charlotte discovered when she noticed how drastically emotions were impacting her team's performance during tough selling days. Meanwhile, salespeople like Jordan from San Diego are making decisions they later regret—pushing forward on deals they know are wrong just because they look good on paper. If you're nodding your head right now, you're witnessing one of the most overlooked aspects of sales performance: emotional regulation. And it's costing you deals, talent, and revenue. The Dysregulation Problem: When Emotions Hijack Performance Here's the brutal truth: When you're emotionally dysregulated or your nervous system is hijacked by stress, focusing on anything becomes nearly impossible. Your best discovery questions go out the window. Your qualifying discipline disappears. Your prospecting consistency evaporates. Think about it. You can have the perfect sales process, but if your rep is in fight-or-flight mode from a string of rejections, they're not executing that process effectively. They're just going through the motions while their emotional state sabotages their performance. This isn't just about "feeling better." This is about creating the mental and emotional foundation that allows elite sales performance to happen consistently. Why Most Sales Leaders Miss This Completely The reason most sales organizations ignore emotional regulation is the same reason they obsess over talk time metrics—it's easier to focus on activities than outcomes. It's much simpler to say "make more calls" than to create an environment where your team feels safe enough to regulate their emotions and perform at their peak. But here's what happens when you ignore the emotional component of sales: Your reps start making fear-based decisions. They chase deals they know are wrong fits because they're afraid of having an empty pipeline. They avoid difficult conversations because rejection feels personal. They burn out because they're running on adrenaline instead of sustainable energy. Meanwhile, your top performers aren't just skilled, they've learned to manage their emotional state in a way that supports peak performance. The Three Pillars of Emotional Regulation in Sales Personal Regulation: The Foundation Everything starts with personal habits that support emotional stability. Your "why" becomes your anchor during tough moments. When you're tired, exhausted, or questioning what you're doing, that purpose pulls you through. But purpose alone isn't enough. Your daily habits outside of work create the foundation for emotional regulation at work. Sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress management—these aren't "nice to haves." They're the infrastructure that supports your ability to stay sharp and focused when deals get challenging. Team Regulation: Creating Safety As a leader, you have a responsibility to create psychological safety where your team can regulate together. This might look like mid-day resets where everyone takes a few deep breaths or does a quick activity to release tension from difficult calls. The key is consistency. When emotional regulation becomes part of your team culture—not just something you talk about during tough times—it shows that peak performance includes emotional wellness. Process Regulation: Trusting Your System Here's where emotional regulation meets sales discipline. When you have clear qualifying standards and you trust your process, you don't have to make emotional decisions about which deals to pursue. Ultra-high performing salespeople show discipline by recognizing that they only have so many hours in the day. They create rules they can live by rather than relying on gut feelings in the moment.

While your competitors are stuck in voicemail purgatory, a small group of top performers has unlocked a secret pipeline of qualified sales leads. They've discovered how to stop chasing and start attracting, all by generating warm leads through podcast interviews. Not by starting their own shows, but by treating every podcast appearance as a lead generation machine built on conversation and credibility. As Molly Ruland, CEO of Heartcast Media, puts it, "You don't need a hundred new clients tomorrow. Two people who really like you and understand your business talking about you in rooms you're not in can change your pipeline."  This mindset shift transforms how you approach every conversation so that it compounds into trust, referrals, and revenue. The Real Problem with Your Pipeline You're sending out hundreds of emails, making dozens of cold calls, and hoping something sticks. It's exhausting—and it rarely produces the kind of relationships that lead to real opportunities. Your prospects don't want to be sold to. They're sick of transactional relationships. They want genuine conversations and solutions from people they trust. This is where most salespeople fail to find a qualified sales lead. They're focused on the sale, not the connection.  So what's the alternative? It's learning to treat every podcast appearance as more than just an interview. Done right, podcasts become a warm stage where you can demonstrate expertise, build credibility, and start relationships that turn into pipeline. To make this work, you need a simple, repeatable system—a four-step process that transforms a single podcast conversation into a flow of qualified leads. Step 1: Finding the Right Stage The process is about being smart, not getting famous. You don't need to get on the biggest podcast in the world. You need to get on the right podcast. The right podcast is where your ideal customer profile (ICP) is already gathered, listening, and learning. A show with 50 listeners who are all in your target market is a thousand times more valuable than a show with 50,000 listeners who will never buy from you. How do you find the right podcasts?  Ask your best clients what they listen to.  Research key influencers in your space.  Look for shows that specifically address the problems you solve.  Your goal is simple: Find and get on shows hosted by industry connectors, aggregators, and experts who have already earned the trust of your prospects. This allows you to skip the cold outreach and get a warm introduction to your next qualified sales lead. Step 2: The Introduction That Doesn't Sound Like a Pitch Once you've identified your target shows, the next step is getting invited. This is a crucial moment. A generic email won't cut it. You have to craft a message that offers value, not asks for a favor. Your outreach needs to be personalized and direct. Don't talk about how great you are. Talk about the host's audience. Explain why your expertise, insights, or unique perspective will provide undeniable value to their listeners. Reference a specific episode or a past guest to prove you've done your homework. And don't limit yourself to email. LinkedIn is one of the most effective platforms for securing podcast invitations. Sending a thoughtful, personalized LinkedIn message—paired with a strong profile that showcases your expertise—positions you as a credible guest. When a host sees you consistently sharing relevant insights on LinkedIn, your ask feels natural instead of opportunistic. When you offer to help them provide a great episode, you position yourself as a partner. You're not begging for airtime. You're offering a valuable conversation. This approach immediately sets you apart and begins the relationship-building process that is essential to finding a qualified sales lead. Step 3: Mastering the Conversation The interview itself is not a sales call. Your goal is to be a helpful,

A day in the life of a rep heading toward sales burnout: You wake up ready to crush your sales goals, skip breakfast to get an early jump on calls, grab fast food between appointments, and by 2 p.m., you're mentally checked out, struggling to focus on that critical prospect meeting.  That's the reality facing Angela Mendez from Austin and Marcus Taylor from Denver. Angela's crashing every afternoon when she skips meals or eats on the go. Marcus is burning out fast, juggling a packed pipeline and back-to-back Zoom meetings. If you're nodding your head right now, this article is your wake-up call. Because the energy crisis and burnout epidemic in sales isn't just about being tired—it's costing you deals, destroying your performance, and stealing your edge when you need it most. Why Sales Reps Experience Afternoon Energy Crashes and How to Fix Them Let's start with the key facts of energy management: Your brain is an engine, and like any engine, it needs the right fuel to perform. When you skip meals or grab whatever's convenient, you're essentially putting sugar water in a Ferrari and wondering why it's sputtering. Here's what happens when you don't fuel properly: Your blood sugar crashes, your focus evaporates, and your personality literally changes. You become irritable, indecisive, and ineffective—exactly when you need to be sharp, confident, and persuasive. The solution isn't complicated, but it requires preparation and discipline. Start with breakfast—period. This isn't negotiable. You need something that gives you a slow burn: oatmeal with fruit, protein like eggs, something that keeps you steady until lunch. If you don't eat protein in the morning, you'll be hungry by 10 a.m. and making poor food choices. Pack your day the night before. Get a cooler. Fill it with real food: apples and almond butter, walnuts, dried fruits without added sugar, vegetables and hummus. Keep fresh fruit and vegetable juices without added sugar in small bottles. This isn't about being a health fanatic—it's about maintaining peak performance when deals are on the line. Here's the game-changer: Don't wait for fatigue or extreme hunger. Stay ahead of it. The moment you feel your energy dipping, that's too late. You should be fueling consistently throughout the day, not rescuing yourself from a crash. And here's a pro tip that might sound simple but works: Carry apples everywhere. When you start getting hungry and your personality begins to shift, an apple gives you just enough sugar and energy without the crash that comes from processed snacks. It's your emergency reset button. How Back-to-Back Meetings Create Sales Burnout and What to Do Instead Now let's talk about Marcus's burnout problem, because this one hits close to home for every salesperson drowning in Zoom fatigue and calendar chaos. Being on camera wears you out way faster than face-to-face meetings. If you're scheduling yourself back-to-back-to-back without recovery time, you're your own worst enemy. There's no formula that's going to solve the problem of walking from one meeting directly into the next meeting into the next meeting. Your brain can't handle it, and your performance will suffer. Take control of your calendar. I know this sounds obvious, but how much of your scheduling nightmare did you do to yourself? How often do you say yes when you should say no? How many meetings do you accept because of FOMO—fear of missing out—when the meeting is actually superfluous? Audit your last 30 days of meetings. Really look at them. How many could you have declined? How many were necessary for moving deals forward versus just making you feel busy and important? Here's what's really happening: You're filling your calendar to prove your value and demonstrate how busy you are. But a packed calendar isn't a badge of honor—it's a recipe for burnout and poor performance. It takes confidence and self-ownership to say,

Leadership is the single most important factor in a sales team's success. You can have talented reps, strong products, and a solid sales process, but without effective leadership, performance stalls. As Duff Tucker, Sales Trainer, puts it on this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast: "You have to model the behaviors that you want your team to live out. When you model those, you get a lot of credibility. You have respect. You have influence.” In today's hyper-competitive sales environment, your team has choices. Top performers can work anywhere. Average reps will coast if you let them. But the teams that consistently crush quotas, retain top talent, and create cultures where everyone wants to win all have one thing in common: a leader who has mastered the fundamental skills that turn potential into performance. Here are five leadership skills every sales manager must master to drive their team to the next level.  1. Clear Communication: No Confusion, No Excuses Sales teams don't fail because of a lack of talent—they fail because of unclear expectations. Leadership starts with communication. If your reps don't know exactly what you expect, how you measure success, or where they're falling short, you're setting them up to miss the mark. Clarity means: Defining priorities: What activities matter most (calls, meetings, proposals) and why. Eliminating ambiguity: No mixed signals, no “read between the lines.” Giving feedback in real time: Don't wait for quarterly reviews to correct course. Practical tip: After every meeting, send a short recap of agreed actions and timelines. It reinforces expectations and removes excuses. Vague leadership creates vague results. 2. Goal Setting & Vision: Building Direction, Not Just Numbers A sales leader isn't just a scoreboard watcher. Your job is to give your team something bigger to aim at than just “hitting quota.” Without a clear vision, teams drift into reactive mode and lack initiative. People perform better when they're chasing a clear, meaningful vision.  Effective goal setting requires more than revenue targets. It's about: Tying team goals to organizational strategy. Breaking big objectives into manageable activity benchmarks. Painting a picture of what winning looks like so reps can see themselves in it. Practical tip: Start every month by walking your team through why their goals matter and how success impacts the company, the customer, and their own careers. When reps buy into the vision, they push harder to achieve it. 3. Coaching: From Boss to Builder Micromanagers kill momentum. Coaches create it. Leadership in sales means shifting from telling people what to do to building people who can do it themselves. Great sales coaching involves: Observation: Ride-alongs, call reviews, pipeline inspections. Targeted feedback: Specific, actionable, focused on behaviors, not personality. Development mindset: Every interaction is a teaching moment. Practical tip: Block weekly one-on-one coaching sessions that focus on skills and pipeline health. Ask questions that uncover roadblocks instead of delivering lectures. Consistently coached reps outperform those left to figure it out alone. 4. Adaptability: Leading Through Change Markets shift, customers evolve, and strategies that worked yesterday won't guarantee tomorrow's success. The best leaders view challenges as opportunities. Adaptability looks like: Adjusting sales strategies with confidence. Staying ahead of industry trends, not reacting late. Modeling resilience when things don't go according to plan. Practical tip: Hold monthly “market pulse” sessions where you and your team discuss shifts in buyer behavior, competitor activity, and emerging tools. This keeps your team agile and ready to move, rather than stuck waiting for direction. 5. Accountability & Recognition: The Performance Balance Leadership is about balance, not being a cheerleader or tyrant.

Here's a question about sales territory disputes that'll make your head spin: What do you do when overlapping territories and shared relationships turn your sales team into a collection of lone wolves fighting over who owns what? That's the exact predicament faced by Kayla Lujan, VP of Sales at Down to Earth Landscape and Irrigation, in Orlando, Florida. Her team manages defined territories, but their business model creates inevitable crossover with HOA managers who oversee multiple properties spanning across different reps' territories. As she put it: "I've really seen the team kind of lose focus on working as one or team selling and more of … a what's mine versus working together." If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. Territory disputes are one of the most destructive forces in sales organizations, and they're costing companies their collaborative culture and their best deals. The Psychology Behind Sales Territory Wars Salespeople are wired to win. And when territories overlap, that competitive drive turns inward, creating internal battles that hurt everyone. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was a VP of sales managing local and regional account executives. We had big regional accounts sitting in local territories, and the fighting was relentless. Local reps would work around the system, hide opportunities, and go through back doors to protect "their" accounts. The result? We lost major deals because the wrong person with insufficient skills was working them solo, or we'd win the business only to have explosive commission disputes after the fact. But here's what shocked me most: When we gave people the choice between money or credit on the ranking report, they fought harder over the credit than the commission. They'd forgo 100% money but wage war over who got recognition for closing the deal. That tells you everything you need to know about sales psychology. It's not just about money—it's about winning, recognition, and status. The Real Cost of Territorial Thinking Territory disputes create uncomfortable team meetings and destroy your sales effectiveness in three critical ways: Lost Deal Value: When the wrong rep works a deal alone because they're protecting their turf, you lose the collective expertise that could close bigger opportunities. Relationship Damage: Customers get confused when multiple reps approach them without coordination, making your organization look disorganized and unprofessional. Top Performer Exodus: Your best salespeople get frustrated with the politics and infighting, leading them to seek opportunities at companies with better team cultures. The companies that figure this out win big. The ones that don't hemorrhage talent and revenue to organizations that actually know how to build high-performing sales teams. The Solution: Strategic Commission Pools and Clear Ownership For Kayla's HOA challenge—and similar overlapping territory situations—here's the framework that actually works: Assign Relationship Ownership: The rep with the core relationship (the HOA headquarters contact) owns account retention and expansion. They're responsible for keeping that account long-term and get compensated accordingly. Create Local Opportunity Roles: Local reps in each territory focus on building relationships with on-site contacts—facility managers, groundskeepers, community center staff. They get compensated for new project acquisition and spot opportunities within their geographic area. Implement Commission Pools: Instead of fighting over who gets what percentage, create a commission pool for each major account. The pool gets divided based on roles and contributions, not territorial claims. Force Up-Front Agreements: Here's the crucial part: Make involved parties agree on commission splits before any work begins. Post-deal disputes are exponentially harder to resolve than pre-deal agreements. The Leadership Mindset Shift

Sales activity is the lifeblood of your career. But for too many salespeople, it's the very thing holding them back. You're generating a ton of activity, your calendar is packed, your inbox is overflowing, and by the end of the day, you're drained.  But your numbers aren't moving. You're not gaining ground; you're just driving in circles. As Ron Karr, author of Velocity Mindset, says, the difference between amateurs and top performers isn't how fast they move, but whether they're moving with a clear, defined direction. The problem isn't laziness. It's that you're mistaking motion for momentum. And that's why you feel stuck. The Problem: Sales Activity Without Purpose Most salespeople today are trapped in a cycle of sales activity that leads nowhere. Instead of pursuing long-term, meaningful outcomes, they chase short-term wins: a quick meeting booked, a proposal sent, a Request for Proposal (RFP) answered. But those wins don't move the needle. They pull you onto a field controlled by competitors. You're responding to bids, filling out forms, and competing on price. That's not selling—it's order-taking. And order-taking will keep you broke no matter how much activity you pile on. The Real Cost of “Busyness” Busyness isn't just about wasted time. It's about emotional avoidance. The reason you bury yourself in low-value sales activity is that it feels safe. These tasks create the illusion of productivity while shielding you from what you're really afraid of: rejection. Instead of calling the prospect who's gone cold, you refresh your CRM. Rather then reaching out to the big account you've been circling, you tidy your inbox. Instead of pushing into a tough conversation, you polish the proposal one more time. You're not lazy. You're working hard. But effort without purpose is like a car spinning its wheels in the mud. Lots of noise, lots of energy, but no forward motion.  The Solution: High-Leverage Sales Activity Not all sales activity is created equal. Some actions produce a 10x return. Others are pure waste. Top performers know the difference—and ruthlessly prioritize the former. Here are three high-leverage sales activities that separate pros from amateurs: Proactive Prospecting Your sales pipeline is the fuel tank for your career. If it's empty, you're not going anywhere. Prospecting isn't a side task you do when you have extra time. It is the job. That means making outbound calls, sending personalized emails, and using LinkedIn to connect with people who aren't already in your orbit. Stop waiting for the phone to ring. Go make it ring. Meaningful Conversations Once you get a prospect's attention, the goal isn't to rattle off product features. It's to have a value-driven conversation. That means asking discovery questions that uncover their goals, their pain points, and their motivations. It means showing up as an expert and positioning yourself as a trusted advisor, not another vendor. When you consistently create conversations that center around the customer's needs, you become indispensable. Prospects should feel like they'd be foolish not to work with you. The Power of “No” Not every opportunity deserves your time. Amateurs say yes to every opportunity and demo request. Top performers say no. Qualify hard; disqualify fast. The hours you spend chasing a dead deal are hours you could invest in finding a stronger one. Being busy with the wrong opportunities makes you broke. Saying no to the wrong leads frees you up to say yes to the right ones. Your Action Plan To Go From “Just Busy” To Productive Breaking the cycle of wasted sales activity requires intention and discipline. Here's how to start: Step 1: The Activity Audit For one week, track everything you do—calls, emails, meetings, busywork. At the end of the week, review your log and ask: Which of these activities directly moved a deal forward or created new pipeline? Most of what you thought was productive won't make the cu...

Here's a question that'll flip your understanding of cultural intelligence in sales upside down: How do you win over a room full of skeptical Spanish teenagers when you're the obvious American outsider who barely speaks their language? That's exactly what Spencer Birmingham from Arkansas faced when he called into Ask Jeb. Fresh out of college with a marketing degree and an internship at International Paper under his belt, Spencer was heading to Spain for eight months as a language teaching assistant. His challenge? Figure out how to connect with Spanish students and "sell" them on American culture and the English language. What started as a simple question about gaining cultural perspective turned into a must-listen discussion of the universal principles of influence—principles that work whether you're closing deals in boardrooms or winning over teenagers in Spanish classrooms. The Universal Language of Human Connection Spencer had already absorbed one of the key lessons from Sales EQ—the brown paper bag of bread story about understanding what matters to your prospect. But he was struggling to see how those principles would translate across cultural and language barriers. Here's the breakthrough: The five core decisions people make before they buy into you—Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me? Do I trust and believe you?—are universal. They transcend language, culture, and geography. Whether you're selling software to executives in Atlanta or teaching English to teenagers in Madrid, every human being makes these same emotional decisions before they'll open their hearts and minds to your message. The Listening Advantage That Trumps Language Barriers Most teachers (and salespeople) make the same fatal mistake: They walk in talking. They assume their job is to deliver information, share knowledge, and demonstrate expertise. Wrong approach. The secret weapon that works in every culture? Start by listening. Instead of walking into that Spanish classroom and immediately launching into English lessons, what if Spencer started by asking questions: "Tell me something about yourself that not many people know. What are your biggest challenges with English? Why do you want to learn this language?" This approach leverages what we know about human psychology in complex sales: When you listen first, you accomplish three critical things simultaneously. First, you demonstrate likability through genuine interest. Second, you prove you're actually listening—the foundation of all trust. Third, you make people feel important, which is the most insatiable human need. Speaking Their Language (Even When You Don't) Here's where it gets fascinating. Spencer worried about the language barrier, but that's actually his biggest opportunity. The language that matters most isn't Spanish or English—it's the language of being a teenager in Spain. It's the language of their challenges, their dreams, their world. When Spencer takes what they share about themselves and incorporates it into his lessons, suddenly he's not the outsider trying to force American culture on them. He becomes the person who gets them. "Remember when you told me about your soccer tournament? Let's practice describing that experience in English." Suddenly, English isn't a foreign concept—it's a tool for expressing what matters to them. This mirrors exactly what happens in complex sales. The most successful salespeople don't speak the language of their product features—they speak the language of their prospect's business challenges, industry pressures, and personal goals. The Power of Making People Feel Heard There's a reason why building trust through active listening is foundational to every sales methodology: It's the fastest way to move from outsider to trusted advisor. Spanish teenagers, like buyers everywhere, are drowning in noise. Everyone's talking at them—parents, teachers, social media.

In today's economy, being the account manager who keeps clients happy and renewals steady simply isn't enough. Every budget line item is under the microscope. Customers want proof of ROI, so you have to show measurable value while driving growth. Reva Pellerin, the #1 enterprise account manager at Vidyard, puts it bluntly: "If you simply renew your book of business at 100%, that's not your target. Your target is to grow the customer base." The best account managers aren't just order-takers. They're hunters—finding new opportunities, building pipeline, and actively selling within their own territory. They expand their influence before competitors slip in. So, how do you trade in your passive approach for a hunter's mindset?  The Three-Step Hunter's Playbook for Account Managers Top account managers share one thing in common: they work their accounts daily. They're intentional, consistent, and always looking for ways to help clients solve new problems. Here are three steps on how to adopt the same approach. 1. Prospect Your Own Accounts Prospecting isn't just for new business reps—your current accounts are the richest hunting grounds you have. You already have access and credibility; now you need to leverage them. Even a 30-minute weekly block can uncover new revenue. Map the organization: Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to map the client's company beyond your primary contacts. Look for new hires, promotions, or departures. A new executive often means new initiatives and budgets, creating a prime opening for you. Set alerts so you're the first to know. Search for adjacent pain points: Don't just focus on the problems your solution already solves. Talk to your contact and ask them about what other departments are struggling with. A simple question like, "I'm curious, what's the biggest challenge the operations team is facing this quarter?" can lead to an introduction to a new buyer and a new opportunity. Send targeted outreach: When you identify a new potential buyer, don't cold call them. Send a personalized email referencing your existing relationship with their colleague and the value you're already providing.  For example: "Hi [New Contact Name], your colleague [Existing Contact Name] and I have been working together to help their team achieve [Specific Result]. I wanted to see if the challenges you're facing in [Their Department] are similar, as we might be able to help." 2. Master the Expansion Sale Expansion sales aren't about pushing more products—they're about solving more of your customers' problems. The best account managers think like consultants: they uncover needs, tailor solutions, and connect them to strategic objectives. Ask penetrating questions: Instead of asking, "Do you need more licenses?" try asking questions that reveal a need. For example: "I know you're focused on improving efficiency. Where are your biggest bottlenecks, and what's the cost of those bottlenecks?" “What's the next big initiative you're planning?” “What are you under the most pressure to deliver this quarter?” Link to measurable outcomes. If your solution saves time, estimate the cost savings. If it improves output, quantify the gain.  Position the expansion as risk reduction. Many leaders will spend to avoid failure before they'll spend to chase success. Show how the additional product or service reduces operational risk, customer churn, or missed revenue. Collaborate with your champions. Work with your existing advocates inside the account to co-create the expansion pitch. They know how decisions get made internally, and they can help you frame the opportunity in language that resonates with leadership. 3. Leverage Your Success for Referrals Referrals are one of the most underused growth levers in account management. The key is asking at the right time—after you've delivered a clear, measurable win. Earn the right first. Advocacy follows impact.

Overcoming call reluctance starts with understanding why even seasoned sales pros freeze up when it's time to pick up the phone. They're paralyzed by one simple fear: interrupting a prospect's day. That's exactly what Kurt Roberts from Richmond, Virginia, brought to the table. Kurt's problem wasn't about not knowing what to say or how to pitch—it was the mental block around the very idea of interruption. He hated being interrupted by low-quality sales calls himself. And even though 99% of the time prospects were receptive to his message, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being pushy just by dialing the phone. Kurt's got the skills. He knows what to say. His prospects love him once they're talking. But every time he reaches for the phone, his stomach knots up. Sound familiar? If you've ever stared at your phone, finger hovering over the dial button, worried about being "that pushy salesperson," you're not alone. The Projection Trap: Why Your Empathy Is Working Against You Kurt's challenge is rooted in something I call projection—deciding for your customer how they'll feel before you've even spoken to them. If you have a high level of empathy (and many great salespeople do), you naturally put yourself in the other person's shoes. You think: "I wouldn't want to be interrupted, so they won't either." Here's the brutal truth: That empathy is killing your pipeline. Because you don't actually know if your call will be an annoyance or the best thing to happen to them today. I've bought plenty of products from salespeople who "interrupted" me, because their timing and message were right. That wouldn't have happened if they'd let their fear of bothering me keep them from picking up the phone. The One Thing That Makes Interruption Welcome Nobody likes to be interrupted. But if you are going to interrupt, make it worth their time. Think about it: Would you rather get a cold call from someone who clearly knows nothing about you, or from someone who's done their homework and has a relevant, valuable reason for reaching out? There are two ways to make your outreach relevant: 1. Personalized Messaging for High-Value Prospects Do your research on the specific individual. Learn about their company, role, and current challenges. Use that to craft a tailored message that connects your solution directly to their world. This is essential for high-value, niche, or executive-level prospects. 2. Targeted Messaging for Scaled Outreach Build messaging that resonates with a clearly defined group—people who share the same role, industry, geography, or problem set. It's not as specific as personalized outreach, but it's still relevant to most people in your target list. Test it. If your calls fall flat, adjust the message until it clicks. Stop Confusing Prep Work with Prospecting Here's where most salespeople sabotage themselves: They spend their "prospecting time" researching LinkedIn profiles and crafting the perfect email instead of actually dialing. Let me be clear: Research is not prospecting. Building messaging is not prospecting. Prospecting is picking up the phone and interrupting people. Everything else is prep work. Block separate time for building your targeted or personalized messaging. Then protect your prospecting time like your mortgage payment depends on it—because it does. From Pushy to Helpful: Reframing Interruption Kurt's empathy makes him a sales rockstar once he's in conversation. But he was letting his concern for prospects' feelings rob them of the chance to work with him. That's not empathy—that's selfish. The shift is simple but not easy: You're not interrupting to take from them, you're interrupting to help them. You've earned the right to interrupt because you've done the work to make your outreach relevant. Missing a chance to help them because you didn't call? That's the real loss. 5-Step Action Plan to Crush Call Reluctance If you're struggling like Kurt,

In 1960, two brothers scraped together $900 and bought a failing pizzeria in Michigan, launching what would become a cautionary tale about sales incentive programs gone wrong. Within months, one brother traded his half of the business for a beat-up Volkswagen, leaving Tom Monaghan alone with his ambitions. By 1965, with three stores under his belt, Tom faced a naming crisis. He couldn't legally keep using the original name, DomiNick's, so an employee suggested "Domino's." The logo? Three dots, one for each store. Tom figured he'd add a new dot for every location. After opening store number five, he wisely reconsidered that plan. Because what happened next wasn't just growth—it was an explosion that would teach sales leaders everywhere a crucial lesson about the double-edged sword of powerful incentives. How One Sales Incentive Program Nearly Destroyed a Billion-Dollar Company Here's what America looked like in the early 1980s: Microwave ovens were revolutionizing kitchens, Federal Express was making overnight delivery an expectation, and Americans weren't just eating faster—they were living faster. Domino's fit perfectly into this new rhythm, but Tom Monaghan wanted more. In a move that bordered on dangerous, he made a promise so simple it would define the company for decades: "Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes or It's Free." It wasn't just about pizza. It was about certainty. And America bought it—literally. Within a year, sales exploded. From 200 stores in 1978 to over 2,500 by 1985. Over 5,000 by 1989. Every store became a speed factory with slimmed-down menus, cookie-cutter layouts, and drivers who might as well have been sitting behind the wheel with engines already running. Competitors couldn't keep up. But here's the brutal truth about speed: you don't see the danger until it's too late. The Hidden Dangers of Performance-Based Compensation Here's what every sales leader needs to understand: Powerful sales incentives, pushed too far, create unintended consequences that can destroy company culture. This principle, that when metrics become targets, they cease to be good metrics, would prove devastatingly true for Domino's. At first, the cracks were small. A delivery driver rolling a stop sign here, a speeding ticket there. But this wasn't a system built to reward patience—it was built to reward speed at any cost. Inside Domino's stores, the pressure wasn't subtle. Drivers were expected to race the clock. If they missed the 30-minute mark, some franchises made them pay for the order out of their own pockets. The message was clear: make it fast, or make it up yourself. Rolling stops became running red lights. Neighborhood shortcuts turned into risky maneuvers through heavy traffic. What customers didn't see—and what Domino's executives refused to acknowledge—was that they'd created a ticking time bomb. Speed wasn't just a business model anymore; it had become a way of life that determined every employee's behavior, and smart sales leaders understand this connection between incentives and culture. By the late 1980s, insurance companies raised Domino's premiums by 15-20 percent. Reports surfaced of accidents tied to delivery drivers rushing to meet the 30-minute window. Then came the story that changed everything: A Domino's driver in St. Louis ran a red light, colliding with another vehicle. Inside that car was Jean Kinder, whose life was permanently changed. The jury awarded her $78 million in punitive damages. In 1993, Domino's officially ended the 30-minute guarantee in the United States. Here's what most sales leaders get wrong about incentives: they don't just shape what people do—they shape who people become. Sound familiar? It should. Because this same pattern plays out in sales organizations every single day. 5 Warning Signs Your Sales Incentives Are Backfiring Take Wells Fargo's aggressive cross-selling goals in the mid-2010s. Supervisors told bankers to open more accounts,

The transition from closer to coach is where most new sales leaders struggle. You've put in the work, made the calls, and closed the deals. Your numbers speak for themselves. You were the rainmaker. The top dog. The one everyone pointed to as the example of what a salesperson should be. Finally, you've earned the promotion you've been chasing: Sales Manager. The very habits that made you successful as a top-performing rep (moving fast, working independently, and ignoring administrative tasks) can work against you in a leadership role. Your win column is no longer personal; it's team-wide. As Kyle Jager, founder of Vendi Consulting, states in this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, “If you're transitioning from a sales or individual contributor into a leadership role, you probably are great at sales. But now you have to become a great leader. And that takes time. It takes practice, but it also takes some learning.” Why Most New Sales Leaders Fail Most new sales leaders crash and burn within their first 18 months. Not because they can't sell, but because no one ever taught them how to lead. They walk into the role thinking it's just sales, but with a nicer title and better commission overrides. So they default to what they know: chasing deals, staying in the weeds, and trying to be the hero. But leadership isn't about closing deals. It's about developing people. And if you don't make that shift fast, your team won't follow—and your results will suffer. Stop Being the Hero: Your New Job Description As an individual contributor, you were the hero of your own story. Pipeline looking thin? Hit the phones harder. Deal stalling? Jump in and save it. Commission check light? Work more hours. As a sales leader, your job is to make others the heroes of their stories.  That means: Your success is now measured by your team's results, not yours. You're only as good as the people you lead. You have to develop people, not just manage numbers. Your weakest performer deserves as much attention as your top gun. You become a multiplier. One great salesperson affects one quota. One great sales leader affects ten quotas, twenty quotas, or more. The Five Non-Negotiable Disciplines of Being a New Sales Leader 1. Master the Art of Sales Coaching Coaching is not cheerleading. It's not motivational speeches or rah-rah meetings. Real sales coaching is the systematic development of specific skills through observation, feedback, and practice. You cannot coach what you cannot see. Get in the field with your people. Listen to their calls. Watch their presentations. Most new sales leaders avoid this because it's time-intensive and uncomfortable.  Establish a consistent coaching cadence. Hold weekly one-on-ones to dig into deals, metrics, and skills.  Remember: your goal is not to create mini-versions of yourself. As a new sales leader, your goal is to help each salesperson become the best version of themselves. 2. Build and Maintain Pipeline Discipline As an individual contributor, you managed one pipeline. Now you're responsible for multiple pipelines, and pipeline discipline becomes exponentially more critical. Implement non-negotiable pipeline reviews. Weekly pipeline meetings should be sacred time where every opportunity gets analyzed. Teach your team to be ruthless about pipeline hygiene. Dead deals must be purged. Stalled opportunities need action plans or elimination. Every deal in the pipeline should have a clear next step, decision-maker involvement, and a realistic close timeline. Most importantly, never let your team's pipeline run thin. When pipeline gets weak, panic sets in, and desperate salespeople make desperate decisions.  3. Become a Hiring Machine Your success depends entirely on having the right people on your team. This means you must become obsessed with recruiting and hiring A-players. Stop hiring people you like and start hiring people who can sell.

Here's a question that'll drive you absolutely crazy: How do you sell professional services without giving away everything for free? That's the burning question from Laura and Adam, attorneys who are struggling with the classic professional services dilemma. Their intake team and attorneys want to showcase their expertise by giving away everything for free during sales conversations. Meanwhile, they're also trying to figure out what kind of salesperson they need to hire to sell high-value legal services effectively. If you're nodding your head right now, you're not alone. This is the most common trap I see professional service providers fall into, and it's bleeding them dry while their competitors who keep their mouths shut are crushing them in conversion rates. The Professor Problem: Why Being Smart Is Making You Broke Laura nailed it when she described their current approach as "professorial." They show their talents and knowledge, thinking, "How can they not want to hire us because we're so brilliant?" But here's the brutal, kick-you-in-the-gut truth: The more you teach on sales calls, the lower your closing ratio becomes. Period. No exceptions. The less information you give, the higher your closing ratio goes. This isn't just theory—it's what I've learned from years of training consultants and professional service providers. When practitioners get on sales calls, it's incredibly hard not to show all our cards or teach people during the conversation. But you're not running a free consultation. You're running a sales process. Why Information Is Your Leverage—Not Your Gift Here's what Laura and Adam's team needs to understand: Information is your leverage. Are you going to give your leverage away for free? The key is teaching your intake team how to ask questions and bring the person through a process. You're connecting with prospects, learning about them, getting them talking about their fears, helping them articulate what they want, and then building a quick value bridge to why they should sign with your firm. Then—and only then—do you ask for the commitment. When prospects start fishing for free legal advice, you shut it down fast with this exact response: "That's a really, really good question. And that's exactly why we need to get you booked with an attorney so that you can sit down with a professional who can walk you through that strategy. Let's go ahead and get you signed up." The High-Stakes Hire: What to Look for in Professional Services Salespeople When you're selling high-value services instead of products, you need a special type of salesperson. Here are the three make-or-break qualities that will determine whether your hire is a rockstar or a disaster: They Need to Be Street Smart - Not book-smart—street-smart. They need to think on their feet because you've got different types of people coming to you with different cases. If someone is used to just following a script, they're not the right person for you. High Emotional Intelligence with Outcome Drive - This is the tricky balance. They need high emotional intelligence to quickly connect with people and build relationships. But they also need enough outcome drive to ask for the commitment and not let people off the hook. You're essentially running a one-call close. A person comes in, you take them through the journey, and then you ask them to make a commitment. If they don't commit on that call, your chances of signing them as a client go down exponentially over time. The Goldilocks Zone - If you hire someone too far on the outcome-driven side, they'll be pushy schmucks who pressure people, strongarm prospects, and destroy your reputation. You'll end up with buyers' remorse and angry clients. If you hire someone too relationship-driven with too much empathy, they'll have great conversations and make wonderful friends—but they won't convert anybody into customers.

If you're only showing up in one place, you're not showing up at all, which is why top sales reps are making multi-channel prospecting a priority and leveraging LinkedIn to get ahead.  "The reality of buying and selling is that everyone has different preferences, and as a salesperson, we need to use as many tools as possible. If you are only making calls or sending emails, you're missing [prospects] that don't answer calls or reply to emails," says Daniel Disney, one of the world's leading social selling experts and founder of The Daily Sales. In today's sales landscape, understanding and navigating the "Prospecting Maze" is no longer optional—it's essential. The Prospecting Maze: Why Single-Channel Fails The modern buyer isn't linear. They don't follow a step-by-step funnel. Instead, they're zig-zagging across digital touchpoints: social feeds, emails, websites, calls, review sites, podcasts, webinars, and peer referrals. A prospect might first see your company mentioned in a LinkedIn comment, hear about you from a colleague, get a cold call later that week, and convert after reading third-party reviews.  This is where multi-channel outreach gives you a powerful edge. And in the world of B2B, LinkedIn often becomes your competitive advantage. Why Using LinkedIn in Your Multi-Channel Prospecting Works Among your core outreach tools—phone, email, social—LinkedIn stands out. It doesn't replace cold calling. It reinforces it. Used strategically, it extends your credibility, warms up cold conversations, and drives responses other channels can't. Here's what makes LinkedIn a powerhouse in your multi-channel approach: Professional Credibility: A strong LinkedIn presence builds instant trust. Prospects see who you are, what you've done, and how you show up in your industry. Deep Prospect Insights: LinkedIn offers unmatched visibility into a buyer's job history, interests, content, and network. That context powers personalization that cuts through the noise. Soft-Touch Engagement: You don't have to push. LinkedIn allows you to comment, share, and message in a way that builds rapport, without asking for time or commitment right away. Message Amplification: Your posts and interactions can reach 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. That passive visibility compounds your prospecting efforts. The LINK Framework: Your Multi-Channel Prospecting System You don't need to spend hours scrolling LinkedIn. In fact, you can see results in just 15 focused minutes a day — if you have a plan. That's where the LINK Framework comes in. It's a repeatable system for integrating LinkedIn with your outreach strategy and making every touchpoint count. L – Leverage LinkedIn for Insight Your first call sets the tone. Before you pick up the phone, use LinkedIn to gather quick intelligence such as your prospect's role, recent posts, company news, and shared connections. Example Cold Call Opener: “Hi [Prospect Name], this is [Your Name] with [Your Company]. I'm calling because I saw [Your Company] recently [published an article on X / celebrated a milestone / hired new talent], and it made me think about how other leaders in [their industry] are grappling with [specific problem that your solution solves].” I – Integrate Channels with Purpose Don't silo your outreach. Each touch should build on the last, referencing LinkedIn in your emails, following up calls with connections, and weaving consistent messaging across every interaction. Example Touch Pattern: Touch 1: Phone call + voicemail Touch 2: Immediately after your call, send a LinkedIn connection request Touch 3: Email referencing LinkedIn or voicemail Touch 4: Comment on their recent post or share a relevant industry article Touch 5: Second phone call Touch 6: LinkedIn message with relevant insight or asset N – Nurture Through Engagement Your prospects see who shows up. Stay in their world by regularly interacting with their content.