Podcasts about money monday

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood was the day I was bucked off my pony, Macaroni. I was only six years old. We were in an arena where my mother was giving me my very first riding lessons.  Macaroni was stung by a bee, and she reacted by bucking. I couldn't hang on, and I landed hard on my back. It knocked the breath out of me. I gasped for air. Then, as I finally caught my breath, I started bawling at the shock of being involuntarily dismounted.  My mom caught the pony, led her back over to me, and gently told me to dust myself off and get back on. But by this time, I was sobbing the way kids do when they've cried so hard that they can't stop.  Failure is Just a Bruise I shook my head and refused to get back on the pony. My mother tried her best to calm me down and reason with me, but I still refused to get back on.  Then she took a different tactic and got tough. Her stern, direct tone of voice made it clear that she was not asking me to get back on the pony—she was telling me. That's what I remember the most because my mom had never talked to me like that before and has rarely ever used that tone and directness since.  “Get up, and get back on that pony now!” she admonished.  She was unmovable. Like Teflon. My tears and pleading made no difference. I knew I had no choice, so I stood up, shaking. Still trying to catch my breath, she helped me get back on the pony.  Right there in the riding ring, at six years old, I experienced one of the most pivotal lessons of my life. My mother taught me that failure is just a bruise, not a tattoo.  She wasn't being cruel; she was being protective—protective of my future self, the one who might otherwise have carried an irrational fear of horses, or an ingrained habit of backing down at the first taste of adversity into the rest of my life. She knew that if she had let me off the hook and let me walk away from that pony, there was a good chance that I'd never get back on again. That the fear I felt when I landed on my back in the sand would grow and gain a life of its own. That I would vow to never let the pain and embarrassment of falling off happen to me again, and with that, my brush with failure would become permanent.  Failure Can't Really Bite You The truth is, failure is usually a short-lived event. Yes, it's jarring, unexpected, and can momentarily knock the breath out of you. But it doesn't have to be the defining chapter of your story.  That's what my mother understood so well in that riding ring. She insisted that I face my fear, effectively telling me, “Hey, the worst part's over. Now that you've experienced fear and failure, get back on and prove to yourself you can handle it.”  Because once you push through that initial sting, you discover that the fear can't really bite you unless you give it teeth in your own mind.  When Failure Becomes Permanent For far too many people, though, the pain of failure does become permanent. Instead of allowing themselves a moment to dust off and try again, they walk away in defeat—often without fully grasping the long-term impact of that decision.  Rather than letting the bruise fade, they opt to memorialize failure in their minds, assigning it more meaning than it deserves. They replay the embarrassment and pain over and over, until it becomes an unspoken vow: “Never again.”  And in that single choice, a brief setback can morph into a defining moment in which they forfeit the chance to learn, grow, and eventually experience the sweetness of victory. Think about how this scenario plays out in everyday life. Maybe you dream of learning a new skill—painting, playing guitar, writing a book, starting a podcast—but in your first attempt, you falter or feel foolish. Rather than chalking it up to “beginner's missteps,” you decide: “I'm terrible at this; I'll never try again.” And that small bruise becomes a tattoo right there, on the spot. You miss out on the personal growth, the fun, and potentially incredible experiences you would have discovered if you'd simply dusted yourself off and tried again. Sales is a Tapestry of Failure In sales, this avoidance of failure is just as prevalent, if not more so, because the stakes often involve your income or your reputation at work.  One day, you run a sales call that goes terribly off the rails—the prospect is disinterested, you get flustered, or you stumble on a key question. You come away feeling embarrassed, incompetent, maybe even humiliated if it happened in front of your sales manager.  That single negative experience can color your perception of future calls. You avoid that type of call, that kind of prospect, or that particular approach. You remember that unpleasant feeling so vividly that you decide it's “safer” never to try again.  So many sales reps finally gain the courage to cold call a C-level executive at a high-value prospect. Then freeze when they get a hard objection, leaving them feeling small and insecure. Instead of analyzing what went wrong, adjusting their approach, and trying again, they vow, “I'm never calling anyone that high up again.”  And while that might spare them from momentary embarrassment and discomfort, the long-term consequences are enormous. Their pipeline shrinks and income tanks because they're playing it safe. And, ultimately, their career crashes because they're afraid to push outside of their comfort zone. Sales Failure: Where the Bruise Can Really Hurt Sales can be bruising. Each rejection takes a piece out of you and can feel like a blow to your self-worth. It's easy to internalize it. Over time, a string of “no's” can erode your confidence, making the idea of picking up the phone and calling prospects feel daunting. Our minds can often be drama queens. When something painful happens, we cling to that memory and replay it, each time piling on new layers of negativity—“I can't believe I said that,” “What was I thinking,” “I'm so stupid.” In reality, the prospect might barely remember it or might even respect your courage. But to you, it's all-consuming. But remember, a “no” in sales is rarely personal. Often, it's circumstantial—maybe the prospect is having a bad day, or their budget cycle doesn't align with your proposal, or they had a negative experience with a different vendor and brought that baggage with them into your presentation.  The more you detach your self-worth from the outcome, the less likely you are to see these “no's” as permanent markers of failure. Instead, you'll shift your mindset. You begin to view failure as data that you can use to gain insight into how to improve. You start to treat each rejection as a chance to refine your approach. Success Stories are Forged in Failure The true success stories in sales almost always come from people who learned to pick themselves up, analyze the failure, and adapt. They didn't let the fear of failure overshadow their potential for greatness.   The best salespeople—and frankly, the happiest people—know that failure is inevitable. Rather than avoiding it, they embrace it. They feel the pain just like anyone else, but recognize that bruises eventually fade. You just have to keep moving forward in order to heal. At the end of the day, resilience in the face of failure is a choice. It doesn't always feel like one, especially in the raw moments right after you've messed up, taken a big hit, or find yourself on your back in the dirt.  But as soon as you reclaim your power to stand up, brush off the dust, and climb back on—whether it's a literal or figurative pony—you'll find your perspective shifting. Failure no longer holds you hostage. It becomes a footnote in a broader story of your determination and personal growth. Failure is Only Final If You Make That Choice So, the next time you bomb a sales call, lose a deal you thought was a lock, get yelled at on a cold call, or face an embarrassing situation in front of your peers, remember: you get to choose. Will this be just a bruise, or will you sear it into your psyche, turning it into a tattoo of permanent self-doubt?  My challenge to you this week is when things go wrong, to look up and get up. Get back on the phone. Set another meeting. Propose the next big idea. Trust yourself to learn, adapt, and keep going. Will yourself to stop and make one more call.  Because failure is only final if you decide to never get back on that pony again. If you haven't grabbed our FREE guide, 25 Ways to Ask for an Appointment on a Cold Call, download it now at salesgravy.com/cold-calling-guide/.

SummaryBenjamin Lee shares practical strategies for financial stability, focusing on living one month ahead and naming emergency funds to improve financial mindset and security.Key TopicsLiving one month ahead in budgetingNaming and assigning purpose to emergency fundsUsing YNAB and podcast insights for financial planningBreaking the cycle of paycheck-to-paycheck livingTakeawaysStart funding your smallest account first to build momentum.Naming your emergency fund categories changes your financial mindset.Living one month ahead reduces financial stress and increases security.Break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle by gradually building a buffer.Psychological benefits of intentional money management.https://benjamin.bloghttps://icandopodcast.com

The Supreme Court struck down President Trump's tariffs on Friday. And the PCE (personal consumption expenditures) came in at 3%, signaling higher inflation than expected. Sounds like it's a Money Monday and Evan Taylor, Uniersity of Arizona associate economics professor, joins us to talk about all the most pressing money stories facing you. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're at a networking event and someone corners you. For the next ten minutes, they talk nonstop about their vacation, their dog, their new car. You're not having a conversation. You're trapped in their monologue. You're annoyed. You tune out. You start looking for the exit. That's exactly how your prospects feel when you make yourself the star of the conversation. What Is Sales Main Character Syndrome? Sales main character syndrome is when you position yourself as the hero instead of your prospect. You see it everywhere: On the phone: You launch into a five-minute pitch about your company history before asking a single question. In email: You send giant blocks of text about features without mentioning their actual problems. On LinkedIn: Your connect request immediately hits them with "Here's my product, here's my calendar link, let's meet." No matter the channel, it all leads back to the same place: your product, your company, your agenda. Prospects don't care about your product yet. They care about their problems, their goals, and what's at stake in their world. When you make it all about you, you trigger resistance. Buyers feel sold to instead of collaborated with. And that leads to ghosting, objections, and stalled deals. Nobody wants to sit through a feature dump. People need relevance. They want to feel heard and know you actually get them. The Real Cost of Sales Main Character Syndrome Sales main character syndrome has consequences that will wreck your quota. Prospects disengage. When you focus on yourself and your product instead of the buyer and their needs, they tune out. Calls feel like lectures. Emails read like brochures. Messages get deleted without a response. Lose their attention, and you've lost your shot. You miss the real opportunities. By making the interaction about yourself, you fail to ask the right questions. You don't hear what's actually going on in their world. You can't identify the true pain points, the real goals, or what's actually motivating them. So you pitch solutions that don't align with what they need. You waste discovery time chasing the wrong problems. Destroy trust before it's built. Your prospects stop seeing you as a helpful guide. Instead, you're just another salesperson pushing a product. Without trust, everything gets harder and long-term relationships become impossible. The cost is too high. So how do you flip the script? The Mindset Shift: From Hero to Trusted Guide Your job is to be a trusted guide, not the hero. Think Yoda, not Luke Skywalker. Your prospect is the hero of their own story. They're the ones facing the challenge, making the decision, and living with the outcome.  When prospects feel like the main character, they engage more. They open up. They trust you. And trust moves deals forward. Here's a simple three-step framework you can use in every conversation. Step #1: Change Your "I" to "Why" Stop starting conversations with: "I want to show you..." "I'd love to introduce..." "I think you'll like..." Your buyers don't care about your "I." They care about their “why.” Why should this matter to them? Why is it relevant right now? Why does it solve a problem they're actually facing? Lead with "why," and the focus shifts from your agenda to their reality. You'll stop sounding like a salesperson and start being seen as someone who understands their world. Before: "I'd love to show you our new platform and walk you through all the features we've built." After: “Companies in your industry are losing 20% of their pipeline to manual data entry errors. Here's how to fix that." One is about you. The other is about them. Step #2: Define What You Solve, Not What You Sell Most salespeople can rattle off what they sell. A platform. A service. A software solution. That's not what your buyer cares about. Buyers don't wake up thinking, "I need a new vendor today." They wake up thinking, "I need to fix this problem that's making my life harder." When you define the problem you solve instead of the product you sell, you build immediate value. You position yourself as a partner in their success, not just another pitch in their inbox. Product-focused: "We're a sales engagement platform with email sequencing, call tracking, and analytics." Problem-focused: "We help sales teams stop losing deals to slow follow-up and inconsistent outreach." Stop leading with what you sell and start leading with what you solve. Conversations convert faster when prospects see themselves in the problem you're addressing. Step #3: Listen to Hear, Not to Respond The biggest mistake in sales? Listening just long enough to jump in with your answer. Most reps wait for their turn to talk. They're mentally preparing the pitch while the buyer is still speaking. It feels efficient. It's actually ineffective. Listening to hear means shutting up long enough to understand. You catch the nuance. You pick up on the emotion. You uncover the hidden pain points that competitors miss because they're too busy pitching. Slow down. Tune in. Let your buyer feel heard. That's when trust starts to build and when real opportunity opens up. Your Challenge: Put It Into Practice This Week The shift from sales main character syndrome to trusted guide isn't complicated. But it does require awareness and intention. You have to catch yourself when you're about to launch into your standard pitch. Pause and ask, "Am I making this about me or about them?" Your prospect is the hero. Your job is to guide them to success. Make it about them. Lead with relevance. Listen deeply. Watch what happens when you get this right. Because the most successful salespeople aren't trying to be impressive. They're trying to be useful. Make your prospect the main character in every conversation. Do it consistently, and you won't have to chase attention. You'll earn it. -- Stop getting tuned out. Download the Free ACED Buyer Style Playbook and learn how to speak your buyer's language.

Natioanlly, inflation has cooled to 2.4%. But other factors are making the Valley a more expensive travel destination. It's Money Monday, and Evan Taylor, associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona joins the show to discuss the latest economic topics. 

Looking for the best NBA picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, February 9, 2026? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

Will President Trump's recently launched TrumpRx reduce the cost of generic drugs? And what insight does the recent data on job stagnation give on the economy? Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, Evan Taylor joined the show for Money Monday to discuss. 

Allworth Financial's Brian James talks Ai stocks, healthcare inflation and financial infidelity.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Smithervent, Money Monday with Brian James and KRC Cares with Chris Klug.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've got a champion. Someone inside the account who gets it. They love your solution, they're fighting for your proposal, and they're feeding you intelligence about the decision-making process. So you're golden, right? Wrong. One reorganization, one promotion, one departure, and your deal could vanish overnight. Research from LinkedIn Sales Solutions analyzed thousands of enterprise deals and found something most salespeople refuse to believe: sales teams that build relationships with multiple stakeholders inside an account are 34% more likely to win.  That's the difference between hitting quota and missing it. Between a banner year and a brutal one. Why Single-Threaded Deals Die On average, 4-7 people influence a complex B2B buying decision. Even if you nail the pitch, you're still just one voice in a conversation happening behind closed doors. A conversation where people you've never met are raising objections you'll never hear. Where priorities you don't know about are shifting the criteria.  Your champion can be dismissed as "the person who likes that vendor." But when you've got three advocates from different departments? Consensus wins deals. Your Champion Won't Stick Around One in five of the people you're counting on right now won't be in their role twelve months from now. They'll get promoted, reassigned, poached by a competitor, or laid off in the next restructuring. When that happens to your sole contact, your deal doesn't just stall. It dies. The new person in that role has zero relationship with you, zero context on your solution, and zero incentive to champion something their predecessor started. But if you've built what top performers call "account insulation"—relationships with two, three, or four people across different departments and levels—the web flexes when someone leaves. It doesn't break. Weak Ties Matter More Than You Think We're trained to go deep with our primary contact. Build trust. Understand their pain points. Tailor every message to their specific needs. That's not wrong. It's just incomplete. In complex selling scenarios, influence often spreads through what researchers call weak ties—the casual, adjacent connections that link clusters of strong relationships. These are your amplifiers. A brief introduction. A shared article. A helpful insight that makes someone in operations remember your name when your solution comes up in a meeting you're not in. These loose connections become the difference between a deal that stalls and one that scales. Think about how deals from referrals close. They close twice as fast as deals that start cold. Accounts with multiple contacts grow larger, stay longer, and refer more business. The pattern is clear. Get enough internal referrals, and you stop being the vendor someone works with. You become the partner everyone trusts. Five Mistakes That Keep You Single-Threaded Account multithreading fails most often before it ever really begins. Not because it is hard, but because salespeople sabotage it with impatience, poor judgment, or misplaced effort. If you recognize any of these behaviors, they are costing you leverage inside the account. Trying to build fifty superficial relationships instead of multiple deep, meaningful connections. Spray and pray doesn't work in prospecting, and it doesn't work in account multithreading. Asking for referrals before you've built credibility. You can't extract value before you've created it. Failing to nurture the relationships you've already initiated. You can't plant seeds and never water them. Ignoring the law of reciprocity. If you don't offer value first—business insights, useful data, relevant introductions—people won't feel any obligation to help you. You'll burn through goodwill and get nothing back. Wearing out your welcome. If you've reached out multiple times with relevant insights and gotten silence, that's a signal. Move on. How to Build Your Account Web With Multi-Threading Start by mapping the web of people connected to your account. Decision makers, influencers, skeptics, the quiet analysts whose opinions shape what the decision makers think. Write it down. Visualize the relationships you have, the ones you need, and the blank spaces in between. Then ask questions that open doors and show you recognize the decision is bigger than one person. "Who else on your team would have a point of view on this?" "Would it be helpful if I shared what other departments are doing with similar tools?" "Is there someone else who should see this?" Or use my favorite: "I need your advice on this." That phrase invokes reciprocity and dramatically increases the probability they'll give you the referral. When trust is formed, asking for a direct referral becomes an act of generosity rather than an intrusion. Frame it around value, not obligation. "Would you be willing to introduce me to your colleague in operations? I think she'd have an interesting take on what we're talking about." "If anyone else on your team might benefit from this, would you mind sharing my name?" People say yes far more often than you think when you ask this way. The Quiet Chorus That Closes Deals The more people who trust you, the faster and further your message travels inside the account. You've got accounts in your pipeline right now sitting on a single thread. One job change, and that deal you've been nursing for months vanishes overnight. Stop searching for the one perfect contact. Start building a small community inside every account. It's not a single voice that carries your deal through. It's three voices in three different departments saying the same thing about you when you're not in the room. Protect Your Pipeline with Discipline Account multithreading isn't complicated, but it requires discipline and a shift in how you approach relationship-building. If you're ready to protect your pipeline, increase your win rate by 34%, and build accounts that grow instead of churn, start mapping your key accounts today. Identify the blank spaces. Ask better questions. Build the web before you need it. Ready to close more deals? Explore Keith Lubner's courses on Sales Gravy University. 

You’ve got a champion. Someone inside the account who gets it. They love your solution, they’re fighting for your proposal, and they’re feeding you intelligence about the decision-making process. So you’re golden, right? Wrong. One reorganization, one promotion, one departure, and your deal could vanish overnight. Research from LinkedIn Sales Solutions analyzed thousands of enterprise deals and found something most salespeople refuse to believe: sales teams that build relationships with multiple stakeholders inside an account are 34% more likely to win.  That’s the difference between hitting quota and missing it. Between a banner year and a brutal one. Why Single-Threaded Deals Die On average, 4-7 people influence a complex B2B buying decision. Even if you nail the pitch, you’re still just one voice in a conversation happening behind closed doors. A conversation where people you’ve never met are raising objections you’ll never hear. Where priorities you don’t know about are shifting the criteria.  Your champion can be dismissed as “the person who likes that vendor.” But when you’ve got three advocates from different departments? Consensus wins deals. Your Champion Won’t Stick Around One in five of the people you’re counting on right now won’t be in their role twelve months from now. They’ll get promoted, reassigned, poached by a competitor, or laid off in the next restructuring. When that happens to your sole contact, your deal doesn’t just stall. It dies. The new person in that role has zero relationship with you, zero context on your solution, and zero incentive to champion something their predecessor started. But if you’ve built what top performers call “account insulation”—relationships with two, three, or four people across different departments and levels—the web flexes when someone leaves. It doesn’t break. Weak Ties Matter More Than You Think We’re trained to go deep with our primary contact. Build trust. Understand their pain points. Tailor every message to their specific needs. That’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete. In complex selling scenarios, influence often spreads through what researchers call weak ties—the casual, adjacent connections that link clusters of strong relationships. These are your amplifiers. A brief introduction. A shared article. A helpful insight that makes someone in operations remember your name when your solution comes up in a meeting you’re not in. These loose connections become the difference between a deal that stalls and one that scales. Think about how deals from referrals close. They close twice as fast as deals that start cold. Accounts with multiple contacts grow larger, stay longer, and refer more business. The pattern is clear. Get enough internal referrals, and you stop being the vendor someone works with. You become the partner everyone trusts. Five Mistakes That Keep You Single-Threaded Account multithreading fails most often before it ever really begins. Not because it is hard, but because salespeople sabotage it with impatience, poor judgment, or misplaced effort. If you recognize any of these behaviors, they are costing you leverage inside the account. Trying to build fifty superficial relationships instead of multiple deep, meaningful connections. Spray and pray doesn’t work in prospecting, and it doesn’t work in account multithreading. Asking for referrals before you’ve built credibility. You can’t extract value before you’ve created it. Failing to nurture the relationships you’ve already initiated. You can’t plant seeds and never water them. Ignoring the law of reciprocity. If you don’t offer value first—business insights, useful data, relevant introductions—people won’t feel any obligation to help you. You’ll burn through goodwill and get nothing back. Wearing out your welcome. If you’ve reached out multiple times with relevant insights and gotten silence, that’s a signal. Move on. How to Build Your Account Web With Multi-Threading Start by mapping the web of people connected to your account. Decision makers, influencers, skeptics, the quiet analysts whose opinions shape what the decision makers think. Write it down. Visualize the relationships you have, the ones you need, and the blank spaces in between. Then ask questions that open doors and show you recognize the decision is bigger than one person. “Who else on your team would have a point of view on this?” “Would it be helpful if I shared what other departments are doing with similar tools?” “Is there someone else who should see this?” Or use my favorite: “I need your advice on this.” That phrase invokes reciprocity and dramatically increases the probability they’ll give you the referral. When trust is formed, asking for a direct referral becomes an act of generosity rather than an intrusion. Frame it around value, not obligation. “Would you be willing to introduce me to your colleague in operations? I think she’d have an interesting take on what we’re talking about.” “If anyone else on your team might benefit from this, would you mind sharing my name?” People say yes far more often than you think when you ask this way. The Quiet Chorus That Closes Deals The more people who trust you, the faster and further your message travels inside the account. You’ve got accounts in your pipeline right now sitting on a single thread. One job change, and that deal you’ve been nursing for months vanishes overnight. Stop searching for the one perfect contact. Start building a small community inside every account. It’s not a single voice that carries your deal through. It’s three voices in three different departments saying the same thing about you when you’re not in the room. Protect Your Pipeline with Discipline Account multithreading isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline and a shift in how you approach relationship-building. If you’re ready to protect your pipeline, increase your win rate by 34%, and build accounts that grow instead of churn, start mapping your key accounts today. Identify the blank spaces. Ask better questions. Build the web before you need it. Ready to close more deals? Explore Keith Lubner’s courses on Sales Gravy University. 

On this first Monday of the second month of the year, it's time for a gut check. First, we need to check where we are against our new year goals. Next, we need to take stock of our first month's sales performance and make adjustments. We're just a little more than 30 days away from our New Year's intentions, resolutions, and goals. A month ago, we set out into the new year with hope and ambition that this year would be our best ever and that we'd make positive lasting changes in our lives. It's Easy to Slip Off the Track You'll remember that discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. But as time goes by and sticking with new habits gets more challenging, it's easy to forget what motivated us to make the changes in the first place. It's easy to let down our guard and go back to our comfort zone. The farther away we get from our intentions, the more likely it is that we allow our discipline to slip and get off track. It's just human nature. Small Slips in Discipline Can Add Up Quickly Let's say you kicked off the new year determined to have your best sales year ever, and you knew that meant filling your pipeline daily by getting Fanatical about Prospecting. But upon reflection, you realize that days have passed since you picked up the phone, knocked on a door, or talked with customers. You've been making excuses to avoid the very activities that move you closer to your goals. I'll admit that it happened to me just this past week. This month has been non-stop travel — 12 flights, 10 cities, 8 keynotes, 5 full days delivering training to sales teams. Toward the end of the week, I got tired, made excuses, and let my exercise and nutrition routine slide. This was something I promised myself I wouldn't do when the year started. I know that if I don't stop right now and recommit to my goals, then there is a good chance that I'll continue down this negative path — because it's easy. Revisit Your Goals and Resolutions This is exactly why NOW is a good time for a gut check and a look in the mirror. Pause and carve out time today to revisit your goals, resolutions, and intentions. Sit down and think about what you decided to achieve back in early January. Visualize what it was that motivated you. Picture what you want most and where you want to be at the end of this year. Go back and re-listen to the Money Monday episodes on building a personal business plan, reflection vs. regret, and why personal goals are essential for sales discipline. Then recommit to your goals. Remember the feelings you had when you set them, and make an intentional decision to get back on track. Evaluate Your First Month's Performance Against Your Sales Goals Next, step back and evaluate your first month's sales performance. As you do, you'll likely find one of three scenarios: You Crushed It – You had a killer month and blew your goals out of the water. You Were Average – You hit quota or did “okay,” but you know you're capable of much higher performance. You Bombed – You missed your number and ended the month worse than you hoped. Great Sales Month If You Crushed it, and you're at the top of the ranking report, fantastic, congratulations! But be very careful not to let off the gas. It's likely you worked very hard last month to achieve these results. There will be the temptation to take a breather. Trust me, if you do, this complacency will come back to bite you. Now is the time to recommit to doing the activity that fueled your success last month so you don't end up with a lackluster February and a disastrous March. In other words, you've set the foundation for a huge year, take advantage of what you have accomplished, and keep the pedal to the metal! Average Sales Month If you had an average or just OK month — maybe you hit quota, maybe you came close, but you know you've got more in the tank — then it's time for some honest self-reflection. Ask yourself: What held you back from greatness? What could you have done differently that would have resulted in higher sales productivity? Maybe you needed to prospect harder. Perhaps you could have pushed a little harder to close some of your pipeline opportunities. It could have been that your pipeline wasn't big enough from the start, and you ended up scrambling to make your numbers, but otherwise, you did everything right. It's okay, you haven't hurt yourself. You are still in a good position to have a great year. But you'll need to identify your performance gaps and plan to overcome them in February. This is a good time to sit down with your coach or mentor, break down your performance, and get guidance on where you can make tweaks and get better. If you don't have a coach and you want to talk with someone, go to https://salesgravy.com/coach to get help. Bad Sales Month If you bombed, if your month was downright awful, then you're going to need to move fast to make adjustments. Getting behind the eight ball at the beginning of the year is no fun. You don't want to chase your tail for the rest of the year. The key is taking positive action now. Rather than dwelling on the negatives — which is super easy to do — pull your head up and start breaking down what happened. Empty Pipe Did you have an empty pipeline, so you had nothing to close? That happens to a lot of salespeople in the first month of the year. Go back and listen to the How to Fix an Empty Pipeline Now Money Monday episode from a few weeks ago. Use that lesson to help you fix the problem. Closeable Opportunities that Pushed Were there closeable pipeline opportunities that simply pushed into this month? Make sure you're on top of them so they don't vanish for good. But also make sure you have the pipe to cover this month, so you're not solely depending on last month's leftovers. Shortcutting the Sales Process Is it possible that you might have been skipping steps in the sales process? This will often happen when you are in a desperate and stressed emotional state. This is a big clue that it is time to get back to the basics and fundamentals of selling— and get disciplined about following a proven sales process. This may be a very good time to take some courses on Sales Gravy University and read (or listen) to books like Sales EQ that can help you dial in your sales process. Recommit to Your Sales Goals We all slip. We all make mistakes. Discipline can waver, especially once the initial excitement of a new year fades. But you have the power to step back into your resolutions and do the daily work required to achieve your goals. Whether you crushed it, coasted, or crashed, the key to getting February off to a strong start is to recommit. Make the decision — say it out loud: “I'm going to be better in February than I was in January.” Need help setting winning Sales Goals? Check out our FREE Goal Planning Guide

On this first Monday of the second month of the year, it's time for a gut check. First, we need to check where we are against our new year goals. Next, we need to take stock of our first month’s sales performance and make adjustments. We're just a little more than 30 days away from our New Year’s intentions, resolutions, and goals. A month ago, we set out into the new year with hope and ambition that this year would be our best ever and that we'd make positive lasting changes in our lives. It's Easy to Slip Off the Track You'll remember that discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. But as time goes by and sticking with new habits gets more challenging, it's easy to forget what motivated us to make the changes in the first place. It's easy to let down our guard and go back to our comfort zone. The farther away we get from our intentions, the more likely it is that we allow our discipline to slip and get off track. It's just human nature. Small Slips in Discipline Can Add Up Quickly Let's say you kicked off the new year determined to have your best sales year ever, and you knew that meant filling your pipeline daily by getting Fanatical about Prospecting. But upon reflection, you realize that days have passed since you picked up the phone, knocked on a door, or talked with customers. You've been making excuses to avoid the very activities that move you closer to your goals. I'll admit that it happened to me just this past week. This month has been non-stop travel — 12 flights, 10 cities, 8 keynotes, 5 full days delivering training to sales teams. Toward the end of the week, I got tired, made excuses, and let my exercise and nutrition routine slide. This was something I promised myself I wouldn't do when the year started. I know that if I don't stop right now and recommit to my goals, then there is a good chance that I'll continue down this negative path — because it's easy. Revisit Your Goals and Resolutions This is exactly why NOW is a good time for a gut check and a look in the mirror. Pause and carve out time today to revisit your goals, resolutions, and intentions. Sit down and think about what you decided to achieve back in early January. Visualize what it was that motivated you. Picture what you want most and where you want to be at the end of this year. Go back and re-listen to the Money Monday episodes on building a personal business plan, reflection vs. regret, and why personal goals are essential for sales discipline. Then recommit to your goals. Remember the feelings you had when you set them, and make an intentional decision to get back on track. Evaluate Your First Month's Performance Against Your Sales Goals Next, step back and evaluate your first month's sales performance. As you do, you'll likely find one of three scenarios: You Crushed It – You had a killer month and blew your goals out of the water. You Were Average – You hit quota or did “okay,” but you know you're capable of much higher performance. You Bombed – You missed your number and ended the month worse than you hoped. Great Sales Month If You Crushed it, and you're at the top of the ranking report, fantastic, congratulations! But be very careful not to let off the gas. It's likely you worked very hard last month to achieve these results. There will be the temptation to take a breather. Trust me, if you do, this complacency will come back to bite you. Now is the time to recommit to doing the activity that fueled your success last month so you don't end up with a lackluster February and a disastrous March. In other words, you've set the foundation for a huge year, take advantage of what you have accomplished, and keep the pedal to the metal! Average Sales Month If you had an average or just OK month — maybe you hit quota, maybe you came close, but you know you've got more in the tank — then it's time for some honest self-reflection. Ask yourself: What held you back from greatness? What could you have done differently that would have resulted in higher sales productivity? Maybe you needed to prospect harder. Perhaps you could have pushed a little harder to close some of your pipeline opportunities. It could have been that your pipeline wasn't big enough from the start, and you ended up scrambling to make your numbers, but otherwise you did everything right. It's okay, you haven't hurt yourself. You are still in a good position to have a great year. But you'll need to identify your performance gaps and plan to overcome them in February. This is a good time to sit down with your coach or mentor, break down your performance, and get guidance on where you can make tweaks and get better. If you don't have a coach and you want to talk with someone, go to https://salesgravy.com/coach to get help. Bad Sales Month If you bombed, if your month was downright awful, then you're going to need to move fast to make adjustments. Getting behind the eight ball at the beginning of the year is no fun. You don't want to chase your tail for the rest of the year. The key is taking positive action now. Rather than dwelling on the negatives — which is super easy to do — pull your head up and start breaking down what happened. Empty Pipe Did you have an empty pipeline, so you had nothing to close? That happens to a lot of salespeople in the first month of the year. Go back and listen to the How to Fix an Empty Pipeline Now Money Monday episode from a few weeks ago. Use that lesson to help you fix the problem. Closeable Opportunities that Pushed Were there closeable pipeline opportunities that simply pushed into this month? Make sure you're on top of them so they don't vanish for good. But also make sure you have the pipe to cover this month, so you're not solely depending on last month's leftovers. Shortcutting the Sales Process Is it possible that you might have been skipping steps in the sales process? This will often happen when you are in a desperate and stressed emotional state. This is a big clue that it is time to get back to the basics and fundamentals of selling— and get disciplined about following a proven sales process. This may be a very good time to take some courses on Sales Gravy University and read (or listen) to books like Sales EQ that can help you dial in your sales process. Recommit to Your Sales Goals We all slip. We all make mistakes. Discipline can waver, especially once the initial excitement of a new year fades. But you have the power to step back into your resolutions and do the daily work required to achieve your goals. Whether you crushed it, coasted, or crashed, the key to getting February off to a strong start is to recommit. Make the decision — say it out loud: “I'm going to be better in February than I was in January.” Need help setting winning Sales Goals? Check out our FREE Goal Planning Guide

Looking for the best NBA picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, February 2, 2026? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

President Trump has announced Kevin Warsh be the next Federal Reserve Chair, replacing Jerome Powell at the conclusion of his term. And the latest jobs report data showed jobs in Arizona as being stable. To talk about these money stories on Money Monday is Evan Taylor, associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm not sure if you noticed this, but there is a massive gap between what salespeople and leaders know and what they actually do. I’ve written 18 books and trained hundreds of thousands of salespeople. I can’t tell you how many times someone comes up to me and says, “Jeb, I read Fanatical Prospecting. Great book. But that stuff doesn’t work for me.” Or they’ll say, “I tried that objection handling technique you taught, but it didn’t work, so I went back to what I was doing before.” Here’s what they don't understand: The problem isn’t the technique. The problem is that they gave up too soon. The brutal truth is that most people fail to implement what they learn.  The Skate Park Lesson A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling for business, working with one of my clients' sales teams. One afternoon, I decided I needed some exercise, so I went for a walk. Along the way, I came across a skate park where kids were riding their skateboards and doing tricks. There was a bench nearby, so I sat down to watch for a while. Close to me was a group of young guys, probably 13 or 14 years old. They were huddled around a phone watching a YouTube video of someone doing a particular trick on their skateboard. They watched it, talked about it, and then one of them threw his skateboard down and attempted the trick. He immediately fell off and failed. The next kid tried, and he failed. Then the next one and the next one. All of them failed to do the trick.  So what did they do? They went back and watched the YouTube video again. Then they threw down their boards and crashed and burned, but this time, slightly less dramatically than the first time. They repeated this process over and over. Watch the video. Try the trick. Fail. Watch again. Try again. Fail a little less badly. Until finally, one of them nailed it. When he landed the trick, they all erupted. Clapping, fist pumping, and cheering. And once one kid got it, the rest of them started getting it too. They practiced until they had the trick nailed down, then went back to YouTube to find another trick to learn. At that point, I got up and headed back to my hotel. But as I was walking, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d just witnessed. Too Often, We Give Up too Soon How often do we do the exact opposite in business and sales? We read a book, watch a video, listen to a podcast. We hear about a technique or concept that sounds really good. And we think, “Yeah, I’m going to try that.” So we give it one shot. Maybe two if we’re feeling ambitious. And when it doesn’t work perfectly the first time, we say, “Well, this doesn’t work for me,” and we give up and never try it again. Or worse, we read the book, feel really good about the concept, then put the book down and never even attempt it at all because we've already convinced ourselves it wouldn’t work for us before we even tried. But here’s the thing: Those kids at the skate park didn’t look at that trick and say, “This looks hard, it probably won’t work for me.” They looked at it and said, “We’re going to figure this out.” They understood something that most adults have forgotten: Just because you read about something or see someone else do it, doesn’t mean you’re going to master it on the first try. The Homemade Yogurt Failure Paradigm  As I was walking back from the skate park, this lesson reminded me of something that had happened to me over the holidays. I’d seen something in my news feed about making homemade yogurt. It looked interesting, so I bought some milk, studied the recipe, and made an attempt. And I failed. My concoction didn’t turn into yogurt at all. My immediate reaction was, “Well, this isn’t going to work; it must be a bad recipe.” I gave up after one failed attempt. But after watching those kids at the skatepark, I realized the giving-up-too-soon trap I'd fallen into. So when I got home from my trip, I went back, reread the recipe, walked back through my steps to figure out what went wrong, and tried again. This time it worked, and I actually made yogurt. The recipe wasn’t the problem. My execution was the problem. And I only figured that out by trying again. The Human Overconfidence Fallacy  Here’s the lesson: We are all susceptible to this human fallacy of believing that we can read something, watch something, or hear something once and then immediately do it perfectly. When it doesn’t work the first time (or even the second time), we conclude that the technique is flawed, or it won't work for us, or our situation is unique and different. But the truth is, we gave up too soon, before we gave the technique a fair shot. That’s just being human. We’re wired for overconfidence, instant gratification, and immediate results. When we don’t get them, we move on. Why This Matters in Sales  Let me bring this back to sales, because this pattern will absolutely kill your results. You read a book on prospecting, learn a new cold calling technique, watch a sales training video on objection handling, or attend a conference or training and learn new ideas. Then you try it. Maybe it feels awkward, or the prospect reacts differently than you expected. Maybe you stumble over the words, or you get shut down and rejected. So you conclude it doesn’t work, and you go back to what you were doing before, which, by the way, wasn’t working either. That’s why you were looking for something new in the first place. Here’s what you’re missing: Sales is and always has been a numbers game. Statistics and the law of averages matter. Even the best techniques don’t work 100% of the time. You have to use them enough times to see the patterns and to understand what’s working and what needs adjustment. The Iteration Process Those kids at the skate park weren’t just repeating the same failed attempt over and over. They were iterating. They’d try the trick, fail, and then make a small adjustment. They’d watch the video again, notice something they missed the first time, and then talk to each other about what went wrong and what to try differently. That’s the process: Try, fail, learn, adjust, try again. But most people skip the “learn and adjust” part. They just try, fail, and quit. Let me give you a sales example. Say you’re trying a new prospecting email template. You send it to ten prospects and get no responses. The try-fail-quit people conclude the template doesn’t work. But a try-fail-learn-adjust-try again high performer would ask:  Did I send it to the right prospects?  Was my subject line compelling?  Was the timing right?  Did my call to action make sense?  Should I test a different version? They’d iterate and test different variables until they figured out what worked. That’s what separates top performers from everyone else. They don’t give up after one attempt. Instead, they iterate until they succeed. The Success Leaves Clues Principle Here’s something else those kids understood: If someone else is doing something successfully, that means it’s possible. When they watched that YouTube video, they didn’t say, “Well, that guy is just naturally talented.” They said, “If he can do it, we can figure out how to do it too.” This is the “success leaves clues” principle. If someone else is making something work, that’s proof it can work. Your job is to master their patterns and believe that you can make it work too. When you read a book like Fanatical Prospecting, and you see examples of people who built massive pipelines using these techniques, that’s not fiction. Those are real people who learned how to execute these strategies. When you watch a training video and see someone handle an objection smoothly, that’s not magic. It is someone who practiced that response dozens or hundreds of times until it became natural. The clues and evidence are there. The only question is: Are you willing to put in the practice and endure the failures until you get there yourself? The Practice Paradox Here’s the paradox that trips people up: The techniques that work best often feel the most awkward at first. That’s because they’re different from what you’ve been doing, and anything different feels uncomfortable. For example, when I teach salespeople to slow down and use silence in negotiations, they hate it. It feels unnatural. They want to fill the silence with words. But the ones who push through that discomfort and practice using silence close bigger deals at better margins. When I teach salespeople to ask for referrals using a specific framework, they feel like they’re being pushy or scripted. But the ones who practice the framework until it becomes conversational generate more referrals than they ever thought possible. The discomfort is temporary. The results are permanent. But you have to get through the discomfort in order to get to the results. 5 Keys to Mastering New Sales Skills So, how do you actually implement what you learn? Here’s what I recommend: First, commit to practicing any new technique at least twenty times before you decide if it works. Not once. Not twice. Twenty times minimum. That’s how long it takes to get past the awkwardness and start seeing results. Second, track your results. Don’t rely on your feelings about whether something is working. Write down what happened each time you tried the technique. Look for patterns and notice what’s improving. Third, iterate. If something isn’t working after multiple attempts, don’t just abandon it. Adjust it. What needs to change? What variable can you test differently? Fourth, find someone who’s making it work and learn from them. If you’re struggling with a technique that others are using successfully, reach out to them. Ask questions. Watch how they do it. Fifth, be patient with yourself. You’re not going to master anything instantly. Give yourself permission to be bad at something new while you’re trying to master it. Your Homework this Week Here’s what I want you to do this week: Pick one technique you learned recently – from a book, a podcast, a training – and commit to trying it at least twenty times this week. Track what happens each time. Notice what’s working and what’s not, make small adjustments, and keep at it. Because here’s the truth: The techniques work. But you must put in the work before they will work for you.   Those kids at the skate park didn’t give up after the first fall. They kept going until they nailed the trick. That’s what separates winners from everyone else. Not talent, luck, or some magical gift. Just the willingness to try, fail, learn, adjust, and try again until you get it right. And remember, when it’s time to go home, make one more call. Because that one more call is one more rep, one more attempt to get better, and one more step toward mastering your craft.   One way to become a stronger sales professional and leader is the OutBound Conference. OutBound is the biggest, baddest sales and leadership training conference on the planet. At Outbound, you'll learn from the world's top sales and leadership experts and network with other high performers just like you. To reserve your tickets, go to OutboundConference.com 

I'm not sure if you noticed this, but there is a massive gap between what salespeople and leaders know and what they actually do. I've written 18 books and trained hundreds of thousands of salespeople. I can't tell you how many times someone comes up to me and says, "Jeb, I read Fanatical Prospecting. Great book. But that stuff doesn't work for me." Or they'll say, "I tried that objection handling technique you taught, but it didn't work, so I went back to what I was doing before." Here's what they don't understand: The problem isn't the technique. The problem is that they gave up too soon. The brutal truth is that most people fail to implement what they learn.  The Skate Park Lesson A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling for business, working with one of my clients' sales teams. One afternoon, I decided I needed some exercise, so I went for a walk. Along the way, I came across a skate park where kids were riding their skateboards and doing tricks. There was a bench nearby, so I sat down to watch for a while. Close to me was a group of young guys, probably 13 or 14 years old. They were huddled around a phone watching a YouTube video of someone doing a particular trick on their skateboard. They watched it, talked about it, and then one of them threw his skateboard down and attempted the trick. He immediately fell off and failed. The next kid tried, and he failed. Then the next one and the next one. All of them failed to do the trick.  So what did they do? They went back and watched the YouTube video again. Then they threw down their boards and crashed and burned, but this time, slightly less dramatically than the first time. They repeated this process over and over. Watch the video. Try the trick. Fail. Watch again. Try again. Fail a little less badly. Until finally, one of them nailed it. When he landed the trick, they all erupted. Clapping, fist pumping, and cheering. And once one kid got it, the rest of them started getting it too. They practiced until they had the trick nailed down, then went back to YouTube to find another trick to learn. At that point, I got up and headed back to my hotel. But as I was walking, I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd just witnessed. Too Often, We Give Up too Soon How often do we do the exact opposite in business and sales? We read a book, watch a video, listen to a podcast. We hear about a technique or concept that sounds really good. And we think, "Yeah, I'm going to try that." So we give it one shot. Maybe two if we're feeling ambitious. And when it doesn't work perfectly the first time, we say, "Well, this doesn't work for me," and we give up and never try it again. Or worse, we read the book, feel really good about the concept, then put the book down and never even attempt it at all because we've already convinced ourselves it wouldn't work for us before we even tried. But here's the thing: Those kids at the skate park didn't look at that trick and say, "This looks hard, it probably won't work for me." They looked at it and said, "We're going to figure this out." They understood something that most adults have forgotten: Just because you read about something or see someone else do it, doesn't mean you're going to master it on the first try. The Homemade Yogurt Failure Paradigm  As I was walking back from the skate park, this lesson reminded me of something that had happened to me over the holidays. I'd seen something in my news feed about making homemade yogurt. It looked interesting, so I bought some milk, studied the recipe, and made an attempt. And I failed. My concoction didn't turn into yogurt at all. My immediate reaction was, "Well, this isn't going to work; it must be a bad recipe." I gave up after one failed attempt. But after watching those kids at the skatepark, I realized the giving-up-too-soon trap I'd fallen into. So when I got home from my trip, I went back, reread the recipe, walked back through my steps to figure out what went wrong, and tried again. This time it worked, and I actually made yogurt. The recipe wasn't the problem. My execution was the problem. And I only figured that out by trying again. The Human Overconfidence Fallacy  Here's the lesson: We are all susceptible to this human fallacy of believing that we can read something, watch something, or hear something once and then immediately do it perfectly. When it doesn't work the first time (or even the second time), we conclude that the technique is flawed, or it won't work for us, or our situation is unique and different. But the truth is, we gave up too soon, before we gave the technique a fair shot. That's just being human. We're wired for overconfidence, instant gratification, and immediate results. When we don't get them, we move on. Why This Matters in Sales  Let me bring this back to sales, because this pattern will absolutely kill your results. You read a book on prospecting, learn a new cold calling technique, watch a sales training video on objection handling, or attend a conference or training and learn new ideas. Then you try it. Maybe it feels awkward, or the prospect reacts differently than you expected. Maybe you stumble over the words, or you get shut down and rejected. So you conclude it doesn't work, and you go back to what you were doing before, which, by the way, wasn't working either. That's why you were looking for something new in the first place. Here's what you're missing: Sales is and always has been a numbers game. Statistics and the law of averages matter. Even the best techniques don't work 100% of the time. You have to use them enough times to see the patterns and to understand what's working and what needs adjustment. The Iteration Process Those kids at the skate park weren't just repeating the same failed attempt over and over. They were iterating. They'd try the trick, fail, and then make a small adjustment. They'd watch the video again, notice something they missed the first time, and then talk to each other about what went wrong and what to try differently. That's the process: Try, fail, learn, adjust, try again. But most people skip the "learn and adjust" part. They just try, fail, and quit. Let me give you a sales example. Say you're trying a new prospecting email template. You send it to ten prospects and get no responses. The try-fail-quit people conclude the template doesn't work. But a try-fail-learn-adjust-try again high performer would ask:  Did I send it to the right prospects?  Was my subject line compelling?  Was the timing right?  Did my call to action make sense?  Should I test a different version? They'd iterate and test different variables until they figured out what worked. That's what separates top performers from everyone else. They don't give up after one attempt. Instead, they iterate until they succeed. The Success Leaves Clues Principle Here's something else those kids understood: If someone else is doing something successfully, that means it's possible. When they watched that YouTube video, they didn't say, "Well, that guy is just naturally talented." They said, "If he can do it, we can figure out how to do it too." This is the "success leaves clues" principle. If someone else is making something work, that's proof it can work. Your job is to master their patterns and believe that you can make it work too. When you read a book like Fanatical Prospecting, and you see examples of people who built massive pipelines using these techniques, that's not fiction. Those are real people who learned how to execute these strategies. When you watch a training video and see someone handle an objection smoothly, that's not magic. It is someone who practiced that response dozens or hundreds of times until it became natural. The clues and evidence are there. The only question is: Are you willing to put in the practice and endure the failures until you get there yourself? The Practice Paradox Here's the paradox that trips people up: The techniques that work best often feel the most awkward at first. That's because they're different from what you've been doing, and anything different feels uncomfortable. For example, when I teach salespeople to slow down and use silence in negotiations, they hate it. It feels unnatural. They want to fill the silence with words. But the ones who push through that discomfort and practice using silence close bigger deals at better margins. When I teach salespeople to ask for referrals using a specific framework, they feel like they're being pushy or scripted. But the ones who practice the framework until it becomes conversational generate more referrals than they ever thought possible. The discomfort is temporary. The results are permanent. But you have to get through the discomfort in order to get to the results. 5 Keys to Mastering New Sales Skills So, how do you actually implement what you learn? Here's what I recommend: First, commit to practicing any new technique at least twenty times before you decide if it works. Not once. Not twice. Twenty times minimum. That's how long it takes to get past the awkwardness and start seeing results. Second, track your results. Don't rely on your feelings about whether something is working. Write down what happened each time you tried the technique. Look for patterns and notice what's improving. Third, iterate. If something isn't working after multiple attempts, don't just abandon it. Adjust it. What needs to change? What variable can you test differently? Fourth, find someone who's making it work and learn from them. If you're struggling with a technique that others are using successfully, reach out to them. Ask questions. Watch how they do it. Fifth, be patient with yourself. You're not going to master anything instantly.

SummaryIn this conversation, Benjamin Lee emphasizes the critical importance of life insurance for everyone, regardless of their family situation. He discusses the inevitability of death and the need for financial preparedness to ease the burden on loved ones left behind. Lee encourages listeners to consider life insurance early in life, highlighting the benefits of term life insurance and the importance of having a clear plan in place for family members. He shares personal anecdotes to illustrate the emotional and financial challenges that arise when families are unprepared for the loss of a loved one.Chapters00:00 The Importance of Life Insurance03:09 Planning for the Inevitable06:28 Choosing the Right PolicyBooks, Blogs, Newsletter: https://benjaminlee.blogI Can Do Podcast: https://icandopodcast.comYoutube: https://youtube.com/@icandopodcast?si=ySAZYikhpfO-ujom

The P.C.E. (the Personal Consumption Expeditures) showed inflation in November being at 2.8%. And President Trump has expressed that credit card interest rates shoud be capped at 10%. How will the credit card companies respond? Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, Evan Taylor, joined Arizona's Morning News for Money Monday where he breaks down your burning questions on everything money. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever gone into a closing meeting, a sales presentation, or even a prospecting call with total confidence? That mindset and feeling that everything’s going to go your way, that nothing can go wrong, that you’re absolutely going to win? I’ve been there. I know you have too. It’s one of the greatest feelings ever. But let’s juxtapose that against going into a meeting feeling insecure, where your focus is on everything that could go wrong versus everything that could go right. And then, as soon as something does go wrong, everything starts to spiral downward. There is absolutely nothing that can make or break a deal like confidence. In this Sales Gravy podcast episode, we’re going to explore exactly where confidence comes from, why it matters so much in sales, and most importantly, what you can do to build the unshakeable confidence that closes deals. The Insecurity Death Spiral Recently, I learned a profound lesson about confidence. I was invited to play golf with a group of businesspeople in Florida. Beautiful day, sunshine, great course. It should have been perfect. Except I’m not a very good golfer. And these guys? They were good. Really good. The kind of golfers who carry single-digit handicaps and talk about their swing plane like it’s a science project. So I’m standing on the first tee, watching them stripe their drives straight down the middle, and I can feel it happening. That little voice in my head starts whispering: “You don’t belong here. You’re going to embarrass yourself. Everyone’s going to see how bad you are.” I started strong enough. Made it through the first couple of holes without humiliating myself. But then I hit a bad shot. Then another. And instead of shaking it off like I normally would, I started fixating on those bad shots. That’s when the downward spiral began. Every swing became an exercise in anxiety. I was so focused on not messing up that I couldn’t help but mess up. My mechanics fell apart. My rhythm disappeared. By the end of the round, I had played one of the worst games of golf in my life. Not because I suddenly forgot how to swing a club, but because I let insecurity take over. Now, I managed to keep a smile on my face. We were playing golf in the Florida sunshine, after all. But inside, I was frustrated because I knew what had happened. I let my insecurity about being the weakest player in the group sabotage my entire game. And here’s what hit me on the plane home: That’s exactly what I see happen in sales all the time. One moment of uncertainty, one unexpected challenge, and suddenly, a salesperson who is perfectly capable starts spiraling. Their confidence evaporates. And with it goes their ability to perform. Why Confidence Matters in Sales In sales, there is nothing that sells like confidence. Nothing. Buyers lean into confidence. They’re attracted to it. They trust it. And because of emotional contagion—your ability to transfer your emotions to another person—you basically take your confidence and hand it to the buyer, who then gains more confidence in you. Think about it. When you walk into a meeting radiating confidence, the buyer thinks, “This person knows what they’re doing. They believe in what they’re selling. I can trust them.” But when you walk in feeling insecure, the buyer picks up on that too. They start thinking, “Why is this person nervous? What aren’t they telling me? Maybe this isn’t the right solution.” In sales, because we can’t always control the playing field and because we don’t always feel like we should be where we are—especially when we’re dealing with the C-suite or high-level decision makers, when we’re in super competitive situations, or when we don’t really know what we’re talking about—one thing that goes wrong can create a cascade of other problems, creating a downward insecurity spiral that is real and deadly. The Ultimate Source of Confidence So the question is: Where does confidence come from? Where do you get it? Well, confidence by its very nature comes from the inside. It’s a mindset. It’s something that you believe, just like insecurity is a mindset that comes from the inside. Confidence is mostly created by certainty. When you feel certain that you can control the outcome, you feel more confident. When you’re in situations that feel familiar, or you’re talking about a product, your service, or some part of your offering that you totally understand, you feel more confident. When you’ve executed the sales process perfectly and built deep relationships with your customers, you feel more confident that they’re going to buy from you. When you’ve practiced your presentation multiple times and know it by rote, you feel more confident. By the way, the same thing works in reverse. Uncertainty begets insecurity. When you walk into a situation, and you feel uncertain—and this happens to a lot of brand-new salespeople who don’t know what to say or feel like they don’t really understand the product offering, their industry, or their customer’s business—it creates a level of insecurity. So the answer, if we want to be more confident, is to create more certainty. Certainty Creates Confidence Let me give you an example from my horrible, awful, terrible round of golf. In the middle of that terrible round, I got desperate for anything that would give me confidence. So I started playing entire holes with my 7-iron because that was the one club I felt I was certain I could hit. Except for putting, I would hit the 7-iron off the tee, on the fairway, and chip with it around the green. 150 yards at a time with my 7-iron, I could make it go straight down the fairway and hit the green. That certainty in that particular club helped me feel more confident, and my game actually improved when I stuck with what I knew worked. Now, in sales like golf, there is nothing you can be 100% certain about, simply because there are too many variables. We’re dealing with human beings, nasty competitors, and a shifting landscape. Even in accounts that are in our pipeline, things are always changing. So for us as sales professionals, there’s no absolute certainty. But there are ways you can boost certainty in order to gain more confidence. Four Ways to Create Certainty and Boost Confidence 1. Invest in Yourself Through Education If you get insecure when you’re talking about things in your industry or about your product that you don’t understand, then go educate yourself. Take the time to learn. Take classes. Go to your LMS and take e-learning. Read everything about your product. Become an expert—not just in your product, but in your industry. Also, learn about business. The more you can educate yourself about business, the more you gain business acumen, which makes you feel more confident in conversations with executives. When you know your stuff cold, understand your product inside and out, and can speak intelligently about your industry and your customer’s business challenges, uncertainty evaporates, and with it, goes insecurity. 2. Plan Every Single Call Winging it is wickedly stupid on sales calls because when you wing it, you create uncertainty. So sit down and think about every single call. What am I going to do? What questions am I going to ask? What’s my objective for being there? What am I going to close for at the end (targeted next step)? Build a plan, write it down, and review it in advance of your meeting. Planning creates certainty. 3. Murder Board Your Big Meetings Along with planning comes the concept of murder boarding, red teaming, or scenario playing. Murder boarding creates certainty around handling the unexpected. Especially in large presentations and closing calls, you need to start pulling the thread on everything that could possibly go wrong. Every objection you could get. Every pushback. Every hard question. Think about the different stakeholders who are going to be around the table, and the types of questions they’re going to ask, and the potential things they may say. Then find somebody on your team or somebody in your household to role-play all those scenarios with. I’ve found that nothing gives me more confidence in big sales meetings than murder boarding. Because when I get into those situations—especially with objections or negotiations that can be super intimidating—the more I role-play those things, the better I am at them and the easier they are to deal with. In fact, they’re far less difficult in real life than they were in the role-playing. 4. Keep a Full Pipeline This is powerful: There’s nothing that makes you more confident than being able to sell like you don’t have to sell. When you are fanatical about prospecting and build a full pipeline, it gives you lots of options. You know you can walk away from anything. You’re detached from the outcome. When it doesn’t make a difference if you win or lose, you gain immense confidence, which is why a full pipeline is the ultimate confidence builder. With Confidence, Mindset Matters When it comes to confidence, mindset matters. If you are obsessed with how you might fail or what you might do wrong, there’s a tendency to get the thing you’re focused on. It’s called target obsession. Whatever we focus on, we tend to attract and move toward. So be careful what you’re focused on. One of the things I do—and I know this is kind of weird, but it works—is before I walk into a sales meeting, I look into the mirror and tell myself, “I’m a great salesperson.” I actually say the words out loud. It’s a little bit cheesy. But by saying those words, changing my body language, pushing my shoulders up, my chin out—the power pose, as some would say—that actually begins to change my mindset and makes me feel more confident. Add to that eating well, getting plenty of sleep (sleep really does wonders for your confidence), exercising, and making sure, before you go into a big presentation, that you’re not going in on an empty stomach. How to Overcome Insecurity in the Moment I sell every single day, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what it’s like to walk into a meeting with a prospect or customer and feel insecure. It happens to me still. But here’s the thing: I’m very careful not to let people see me sweat because insecurity and sales make a poor mixture. Because emotions are contagious and people have a tendency to respond in kind, I want to avoid transferring my insecurity to them, causing them to feel uncertain about me. So I’m very careful with my body language, eye contact, voice inflection, and how fast I speak. One tactic I use when I feel insecure is to slow down, pause, and ask a question. This gives me a moment to regain my composure and manage my body language. Build Confidence with Knowledge, Planning, Practice, and Pipeline Confidence isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build through preparation, knowledge, practice, and a full pipeline. The good news is that all of these things are within your control. You can choose to educate yourself, to plan, practice, and prospect. Here’s what I want you to do this week: First, identify your gaps. Where do you feel uncertain in your sales process? Is it product knowledge? Industry knowledge? Objection handling? Closing? Write it down. Second, create a learning plan. For each gap you identified, create a specific plan to fill it. What books will you read? What training will you take? Who will you shadow or learn from? Third, plan your next three calls. Don’t wing another call this week. Sit down and plan your next three sales conversations. Write out your objectives, your questions, and your close. Fourth, murder board your biggest opportunity. If you’ve got a major presentation or closing call coming up, spend an hour this week role-playing every possible scenario with a colleague. Fifth, evaluate your pipeline. Is it full enough that you can sell without desperation? If not, block time this week for serious prospecting. This is how you build the kind of unshakeable confidence that buyers respond to, competitors fear, and that feels so good. And remember, when it’s time to go home, and you’re tired and worn out, always stop and make one more call. Because that one more call gives you the confidence that you can walk in any door, anytime, stand toe to toe with any buyer, and have a winning sales conversation. Over a million sales professionals and sales teams have become more confident prospectors with the Fanatical Prospecting system. Learn more here.

Have you ever gone into a closing meeting, a sales presentation, or even a prospecting call with total confidence? That mindset and feeling that everything's going to go your way, that nothing can go wrong, that you're absolutely going to win? I've been there. I know you have too. It's one of the greatest feelings ever. But let's juxtapose that against going into a meeting feeling insecure, where your focus is on everything that could go wrong versus everything that could go right. And then, as soon as something does go wrong, everything starts to spiral downward. There is absolutely nothing that can make or break a deal like confidence. In this Sales Gravy podcast episode, we're going to explore exactly where confidence comes from, why it matters so much in sales, and most importantly, what you can do to build the unshakeable confidence that closes deals. The Insecurity Death Spiral Recently, I learned a profound lesson about confidence. I was invited to play golf with a group of businesspeople in Florida. Beautiful day, sunshine, great course. It should have been perfect. Except I'm not a very good golfer. And these guys? They were good. Really good. The kind of golfers who carry single-digit handicaps and talk about their swing plane like it's a science project. So I'm standing on the first tee, watching them stripe their drives straight down the middle, and I can feel it happening. That little voice in my head starts whispering: "You don't belong here. You're going to embarrass yourself. Everyone's going to see how bad you are." I started strong enough. Made it through the first couple of holes without humiliating myself. But then I hit a bad shot. Then another. And instead of shaking it off like I normally would, I started fixating on those bad shots. That's when the downward spiral began. Every swing became an exercise in anxiety. I was so focused on not messing up that I couldn't help but mess up. My mechanics fell apart. My rhythm disappeared. By the end of the round, I had played one of the worst games of golf in my life. Not because I suddenly forgot how to swing a club, but because I let insecurity take over. Now, I managed to keep a smile on my face. We were playing golf in the Florida sunshine, after all. But inside, I was frustrated because I knew what had happened. I let my insecurity about being the weakest player in the group sabotage my entire game. And here's what hit me on the plane home: That's exactly what I see happen in sales all the time. One moment of uncertainty, one unexpected challenge, and suddenly, a salesperson who is perfectly capable starts spiraling. Their confidence evaporates. And with it goes their ability to perform. Why Confidence Matters in Sales In sales, there is nothing that sells like confidence. Nothing. Buyers lean into confidence. They're attracted to it. They trust it. And because of emotional contagion—your ability to transfer your emotions to another person—you basically take your confidence and hand it to the buyer, who then gains more confidence in you. Think about it. When you walk into a meeting radiating confidence, the buyer thinks, "This person knows what they're doing. They believe in what they're selling. I can trust them." But when you walk in feeling insecure, the buyer picks up on that too. They start thinking, "Why is this person nervous? What aren't they telling me? Maybe this isn't the right solution." In sales, because we can't always control the playing field and because we don't always feel like we should be where we are—especially when we're dealing with the C-suite or high-level decision makers, when we're in super competitive situations, or when we don't really know what we're talking about—one thing that goes wrong can create a cascade of other problems, creating a downward insecurity spiral that is real and deadly. The Ultimate Source of Confidence So the question is: Where does confidence come from? Where do you get it? Well, confidence by its very nature comes from the inside. It's a mindset. It's something that you believe, just like insecurity is a mindset that comes from the inside. Confidence is mostly created by certainty. When you feel certain that you can control the outcome, you feel more confident. When you're in situations that feel familiar, or you're talking about a product, your service, or some part of your offering that you totally understand, you feel more confident. When you've executed the sales process perfectly and built deep relationships with your customers, you feel more confident that they're going to buy from you. When you've practiced your presentation multiple times and know it by rote, you feel more confident. By the way, the same thing works in reverse. Uncertainty begets insecurity. When you walk into a situation, and you feel uncertain—and this happens to a lot of brand-new salespeople who don't know what to say or feel like they don't really understand the product offering, their industry, or their customer's business—it creates a level of insecurity. So the answer, if we want to be more confident, is to create more certainty. Certainty Creates Confidence Let me give you an example from my horrible, awful, terrible round of golf. In the middle of that terrible round, I got desperate for anything that would give me confidence. So I started playing entire holes with my 7-iron because that was the one club I felt I was certain I could hit. Except for putting, I would hit the 7-iron off the tee, on the fairway, and chip with it around the green. 150 yards at a time with my 7-iron, I could make it go straight down the fairway and hit the green. That certainty in that particular club helped me feel more confident, and my game actually improved when I stuck with what I knew worked. Now, in sales like golf, there is nothing you can be 100% certain about, simply because there are too many variables. We're dealing with human beings, nasty competitors, and a shifting landscape. Even in accounts that are in our pipeline, things are always changing. So for us as sales professionals, there's no absolute certainty. But there are ways you can boost certainty in order to gain more confidence. Four Ways to Create Certainty and Boost Confidence 1. Invest in Yourself Through Education If you get insecure when you're talking about things in your industry or about your product that you don't understand, then go educate yourself. Take the time to learn. Take classes. Go to your LMS and take e-learning. Read everything about your product. Become an expert—not just in your product, but in your industry. Also, learn about business. The more you can educate yourself about business, the more you gain business acumen, which makes you feel more confident in conversations with executives. When you know your stuff cold, understand your product inside and out, and can speak intelligently about your industry and your customer's business challenges, uncertainty evaporates, and with it, goes insecurity. 2. Plan Every Single Call Winging it is wickedly stupid on sales calls because when you wing it, you create uncertainty. So sit down and think about every single call. What am I going to do? What questions am I going to ask? What's my objective for being there? What am I going to close for at the end (targeted next step)? Build a plan, write it down, and review it in advance of your meeting. Planning creates certainty. 3. Murder Board Your Big Meetings Along with planning comes the concept of murder boarding, red teaming, or scenario playing. Murder boarding creates certainty around handling the unexpected. Especially in large presentations and closing calls, you need to start pulling the thread on everything that could possibly go wrong. Every objection you could get. Every pushback. Every hard question. Think about the different stakeholders who are going to be around the table, and the types of questions they're going to ask, and the potential things they may say. Then find somebody on your team or somebody in your household to role-play all those scenarios with. I've found that nothing gives me more confidence in big sales meetings than murder boarding. Because when I get into those situations—especially with objections or negotiations that can be super intimidating—the more I role-play those things, the better I am at them and the easier they are to deal with. In fact, they're far less difficult in real life than they were in the role-playing. 4. Keep a Full Pipeline This is powerful: There's nothing that makes you more confident than being able to sell like you don't have to sell. When you are fanatical about prospecting and build a full pipeline, it gives you lots of options. You know you can walk away from anything. You're detached from the outcome. When it doesn't make a difference if you win or lose, you gain immense confidence, which is why a full pipeline is the ultimate confidence builder. With Confidence, Mindset Matters When it comes to confidence, mindset matters. If you are obsessed with how you might fail or what you might do wrong, there's a tendency to get the thing you're focused on. It's called target obsession. Whatever we focus on, we tend to attract and move toward. So be careful what you're focused on. One of the things I do—and I know this is kind of weird, but it works—is before I walk into a sales meeting, I look into the mirror and tell myself, "I'm a great salesperson." I actually say the words out loud. It's a little bit cheesy. But by saying those words, changing my body language, pushing my shoulders up, my chin out—the power pose, as some would say—that actually begins to change my mindset and makes me feel more confident. Add to that eating well,

Looking for the best NBA picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, January 19, 2025? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

SummaryIn this episode of Money Monday, Benjamin Lee reflects on the significance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and shares insights from two impactful articles about financial literacy and the experiences of professional athletes. The first article discusses Tim Duncan's experience of losing $20 million due to betrayal by a financial advisor, emphasizing the importance of trust and financial knowledge. Duncan's story serves as a cautionary tale about the necessity of being vigilant with one's finances, regardless of wealth. Lee highlights key takeaways from Duncan's experience, including the need for basic financial literacy and the importance of having a cash reserve.The second article focuses on Jeff Teague, who, despite earning a substantial income in the NBA, chose to live with his parents to maintain financial prudence. Teague's story illustrates the value of frugality and making wise financial decisions, even when faced with lucrative contracts. Lee concludes with a reminder that chasing money does not guarantee happiness, urging listeners to consider the broader implications of their financial choices. Overall, the episode emphasizes the importance of financial awareness and the lessons that can be learned from the experiences of others.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Martin Luther King Jr. Day Reflection00:58 Tim Duncan's Financial Betrayal06:58 Jeff Teague's Frugal Living ChoicesBooks, Blogs, Newsletter, Merch https://benjaminlee.blogI Can Do Podcast: https://icandopodcast.comYoutube: Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Martin Luther King Jr. Day Reflection 00:58 Tim Duncan's Financial Betrayal 06:58 Jeff Teague's Frugal Living Choices

You declined another prospecting block today, didn't you? That internal meeting popped up. Someone needed "just five minutes." Your CRM screamed for attention. Before you knew it, another day passed without a single cold call, without one new connection request, without moving the needle on your pipeline. But hey, at least your calendar looked impressively full. Here's what nobody wants to admit: your jam-packed calendar isn't proof that you're too busy to prospect. It's proof you've made prospecting optional. And optional activities don't close deals or pay commissions. The Meeting Excuse Is Killing Your Pipeline Sales professionals love to point at their calendars as evidence of why they can't prospect. Look at all these internal meetings. See how packed my schedule is. How could I possibly find time for outbound activity? The real question is: when did you last decline an internal meeting to protect your prospecting time? Most salespeople never have. They treat every meeting invitation as a welcome escape from the discomfort of cold outreach. It's the perfect alibi when your manager asks about pipeline activity. But your calendar tells the truth about your priorities. If time blocking for prospecting isn't on it, prospecting isn't actually a priority. And if prospecting isn't a priority, why exactly are you in sales? You Don't Need Hours—You Need 15 Minutes The biggest lie salespeople tell themselves is that prospecting requires massive blocks of uninterrupted time. Two hours minimum. Otherwise, why bother starting? This is the same mental trap that keeps people from reading, exercising, or learning new skills. They convince themselves that 15 minutes isn't enough to matter, so they do nothing instead. Consider this: reading for 15 minutes daily gets you through 20-25 books per year. Walking for 15 minutes adds nearly a mile to your day. Fifteen minutes of focused prospecting can generate six to ten cold calls, dozens of personalized connection requests, or several high-impact video messages to ghosting prospects. The power isn't in the duration, but in consistent, focused execution of time blocking for sales activities. The 15-Minute Power Block Rules These 3 rules are requirements if you want your time blocking strategy to actually work. Rule 1: Single-task only.  Your 15-minute prospecting block is for prospecting. Not prospecting while monitoring email. Not prospecting between Slack messages. Just prospecting. If you spend three minutes calling and twelve minutes scrolling Instagram, you didn't prospect for 15 minutes. Rule 2: Everything else can wait. Yes, that includes your boss. You will not lose a customer or your job because you ignored email for 15 minutes. Responding at the end of your block is still professional. Think about it—if you were sitting face-to-face with your top client, would you stop mid-conversation to check email? Treat your power blocks with the same respect. Rule 3: Protect the block like your commission depends on it. Because it does. Top performers don't ask permission to prospect. They schedule it, block it, and defend it against every interruption. The coworker who needs "just a minute" can wait sixteen minutes. What Actually Happens in 15 Minutes Specificity kills procrastination. You're more likely to execute when you know exactly what you're doing during your time blocking windows. Eight to fifteen cold calls fit comfortably in 15 minutes. That's enough to connect with two or three decision-makers if you're efficient. Send ten to fifteen LinkedIn connection requests to stakeholders outside your network. Write and mail three handwritten notes to accounts you closed this month. Record personalized video messages for three prospects who've gone dark. None of these activities requires elaborate preparation or perfect conditions. They require you to show up for 15 minutes and do the work. That's it. Schedule Your Priorities or Someone Else Will Stephen Covey said the key isn't prioritizing your schedule, but scheduling your priorities. Most salespeople do the opposite—they let their calendars fill with whatever lands there first, then wonder why revenue-generating work never happens. Your calendar should reflect your income goals. If hitting quota requires consistent prospecting, your calendar should show consistent prospecting blocks. If building relationships with key accounts matters, those touchpoints should be scheduled. When you schedule your sales priorities first, everything else fits around them. When you don't, everything else crowds them out entirely. Look at your calendar right now. How many prospecting blocks do you see this week? If the answer is zero, you've just identified why your pipeline feels thin. How to Apply Time Blocking Starting Now Open your calendar and block three 15-minute windows for prospecting tomorrow. Morning, midday, and late afternoon. Label them "Prospecting Power Block" and set them as busy. Before each block, decide on one specific activity: cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, video messages, or handwritten notes. Don't try to do multiple things. Pick one and execute for the full 15 minutes. Close your email, silence your phone. For 15 minutes, nothing else exists except the activity you committed to. When the timer ends, return to everything else. Track your blocks for one week. Count how many you actually protected versus how many got sacrificed to "urgent" requests. This data will reveal whether you're serious about prospecting or just pretending to be. Make Time or Make Excuses—You Can't Do Both Top performers don't wait for the perfect time to prospect. They don't need two-hour windows or complete silence or ideal conditions. They make the time, even when it's just 15 minutes. Especially when it's just 15 minutes. That 15-minute window you're dismissing as too small? It could be the first conversation with your biggest account next quarter. It could be the connection that leads to your highest commission check. It could be the breakthrough that turns a struggling month into a record-breaker. But only if you actually protect it. Only if you treat time blocking for prospecting as non-negotiable. Only if you stop letting your calendar lie to you about why you're not doing the work. Your pipeline doesn't care how busy you looked today. It cares about the calls you made, the emails you sent, and the relationships you built. Fifteen focused minutes at a time. Stop letting busy work crowd out revenue-generating activities. Download our free Time Audit Log to identify exactly where your selling time is going and reclaim hours each week for actual prospecting. Track your activities for just three days and discover what's really eating your calendar.

You declined another prospecting block today, didn't you? That internal meeting popped up. Someone needed "just five minutes." Your CRM screamed for attention. Before you knew it, another day passed without a single cold call, without one new connection request, without moving the needle on your pipeline. But hey, at least your calendar looked impressively full. Here's what nobody wants to admit: your jam-packed calendar isn't proof that you're too busy to prospect. It's proof you've made prospecting optional. And optional activities don't close deals or pay commissions. The Meeting Excuse Is Killing Your Pipeline Sales professionals love to point at their calendars as evidence of why they can't prospect. Look at all these internal meetings. See how packed my schedule is. How could I possibly find time for outbound activity? The real question is: when did you last decline an internal meeting to protect your prospecting time? Most salespeople never have. They treat every meeting invitation as a welcome escape from the discomfort of cold outreach. It's the perfect alibi when your manager asks about pipeline activity. But your calendar tells the truth about your priorities. If time blocking for prospecting isn't on it, prospecting isn't actually a priority. And if prospecting isn't a priority, why exactly are you in sales? You Don't Need Hours—You Need 15 Minutes The biggest lie salespeople tell themselves is that prospecting requires massive blocks of uninterrupted time. Two hours minimum. Otherwise, why bother starting? This is the same mental trap that keeps people from reading, exercising, or learning new skills. They convince themselves that 15 minutes isn't enough to matter, so they do nothing instead. Consider this: reading for 15 minutes daily gets you through 20-25 books per year. Walking for 15 minutes adds nearly a mile to your day. Fifteen minutes of focused prospecting can generate six to ten cold calls, dozens of personalized connection requests, or several high-impact video messages to ghosting prospects. The power isn't in the duration, but in consistent, focused execution of time blocking for sales activities. The 15-Minute Power Block Rules These 3 rules are requirements if you want your time blocking strategy to actually work. Rule 1: Single-task only.  Your 15-minute prospecting block is for prospecting. Not prospecting while monitoring email. Not prospecting between Slack messages. Just prospecting. If you spend three minutes calling and twelve minutes scrolling Instagram, you didn't prospect for 15 minutes. Rule 2: Everything else can wait. Yes, that includes your boss. You will not lose a customer or your job because you ignored email for 15 minutes. Responding at the end of your block is still professional. Think about it—if you were sitting face-to-face with your top client, would you stop mid-conversation to check email? Treat your power blocks with the same respect. Rule 3: Protect the block like your commission depends on it. Because it does. Top performers don't ask permission to prospect. They schedule it, block it, and defend it against every interruption. The coworker who needs "just a minute" can wait sixteen minutes. What Actually Happens in 15 Minutes Specificity kills procrastination. You're more likely to execute when you know exactly what you're doing during your time blocking windows. Eight to fifteen cold calls fit comfortably in 15 minutes. That's enough to connect with two or three decision-makers if you're efficient. Send ten to fifteen LinkedIn connection requests to stakeholders outside your network. Write and mail three handwritten notes to accounts you closed this month. Record personalized video messages for three prospects who've gone dark. None of these activities requires elaborate preparation or perfect conditions. They require you to show up for 15 minutes and do the work. That's it. Schedule Your Priorities or Someone Else Will Stephen Covey said the key isn't prioritizing your schedule, but scheduling your priorities. Most salespeople do the opposite—they let their calendars fill with whatever lands there first, then wonder why revenue-generating work never happens. Your calendar should reflect your income goals. If hitting quota requires consistent prospecting, your calendar should show consistent prospecting blocks. If building relationships with key accounts matters, those touchpoints should be scheduled. When you schedule your sales priorities first, everything else fits around them. When you don't, everything else crowds them out entirely. Look at your calendar right now. How many prospecting blocks do you see this week? If the answer is zero, you've just identified why your pipeline feels thin. How to Apply Time Blocking Starting Now Open your calendar and block three 15-minute windows for prospecting tomorrow. Morning, midday, and late afternoon. Label them "Prospecting Power Block" and set them as busy. Before each block, decide on one specific activity: cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, video messages, or handwritten notes. Don't try to do multiple things. Pick one and execute for the full 15 minutes. Close your email, silence your phone. For 15 minutes, nothing else exists except the activity you committed to. When the timer ends, return to everything else. Track your blocks for one week. Count how many you actually protected versus how many got sacrificed to "urgent" requests. This data will reveal whether you're serious about prospecting or just pretending to be. Make Time or Make Excuses—You Can't Do Both Top performers don't wait for the perfect time to prospect. They don't need two-hour windows or complete silence or ideal conditions. They make the time, even when it's just 15 minutes. Especially when it's just 15 minutes. That 15-minute window you're dismissing as too small? It could be the first conversation with your biggest account next quarter. It could be the connection that leads to your highest commission check. It could be the breakthrough that turns a struggling month into a record-breaker. But only if you actually protect it. Only if you treat time blocking for prospecting as non-negotiable. Only if you stop letting your calendar lie to you about why you're not doing the work. Your pipeline doesn't care how busy you looked today. It cares about the calls you made, the emails you sent, and the relationships you built. Fifteen focused minutes at a time. Stop letting busy work crowd out revenue-generating activities. Download our free Time Audit Log to identify exactly where your selling time is going and reclaim hours each week for actual prospecting. Track your activities for just three days and discover what's really eating your calendar.

Looking for the best NBA picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, January 12, 2025? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

SummaryIn this episode of Money Monday, Benjamin Lee discusses key insights from Morgan Housel's book, 'The Psychology of Money.' He emphasizes the difference between getting wealthy and staying wealthy, highlighting the importance of a survival mindset in financial success. Benjamin shares practical advice on planning for uncertainty and the significance of having a margin of safety in financial decisions. The conversation encourages listeners to adopt a balanced approach to wealth management, combining optimism with a healthy dose of caution.TakeawaysThere's a difference between getting wealthy and staying wealthy.Staying wealthy requires a combination of frugality and paranoia.Money success can be summarized as survival.Planning is essential, but expect the unexpected.Room for error is crucial in financial planning.A barbell personality balances optimism and caution.Compounding works best when you can sustain good returns.Emergency funds are vital for financial stability.Financial plans should embrace uncertainty.Wealth management is about holding onto what you have.Chapters00:00 The Psychology of Money: An Introduction00:50 Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy03:44 The Survival Mindset in Finance07:29 Planning for Uncertainty and Margin of SafetyBlogs, Books, Newsletter: https://benjaminlee.bloghttps://biblebenjaminlee.comYoutube: https://youtube.com/@icandopodcast?si=U6AMkwyhNtBRJJRX

Unlock the secrets to turning distressed properties into profitable investments!

The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4% from the revised 4.5% we saw in november, its the first decline since June.  How will this benefit employers? Evan Taylor, Associate Economics Professor at the Universty of Arizona joined the show for Money Monday to discuss.   

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This Money Monday Sales Gravy podcast episode is special because it kicks off our 20th season! It's hard to believe that we've been producing the Sales Gravy continuously for 20 years. Over the last 20 years, thanks to you—our incredible audience—we've consistently ranked as the #1 most listened to sales podcast in markets all over the world. I remember my first podcast episode all those years ago, produced with a microphone I bought at Guitar Center and recorded under a blanket for sound suppression. Today, we produce our podcast in professional studios at Sales Gravy and have a full production team on staff to ensure we are giving you the highest quality sound possible.  What hasn't changed is my unwavering focus on making the complex simple by cutting through the noise, eliminating the fluff, and giving you the basics and fundamentals that actually work in the real world. We've got a ton of new episodes and bonus content coming your way, so be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and listen every week.  Sales Professionals Must Have Goals to be Successful Your personal goals are the aspirations that drive you, inspire you, and push you through the tough days. These goals are essential to helping you maintain sales discipline throughout your sales year. When developing personal goals, I break them down into three buckets: To-Have Goals These are the things you want to acquire or buy. Whether it's a house, a new car, or building up your savings, to-have goals are about acquiring something that enhances your life. To-Be Goals These are about evolving into the person you want to become. Maybe you want to be a sales manager, or if you're a manager, you want to be a director or VP of sales. You might want to go back to school for a degree or an MBA. Or you want to be a better spouse, a better leader, or a better peer. Maybe you want to be a President's club winner or be recognized as an expert in your industry—whatever it is, to-be goals help you level up as a person and a professional. To-Do Goals These are experience goals. Think about experiences that create lifelong memories—maybe you want to travel somewhere special or take on a meaningful project or hobby you've always dreamed about. Four Reasons Why Goals Matter in Sales Number one, goals massively increase the likelihood that you'll actually achieve the things you want. Speaking your goal out loud, writing it down, and being intentional about it has a powerful psychological effect. Number two, goals make life meaningful. It's unbelievably fulfilling to look back and see what you accomplished—how far you've come over the course of a year, five years, or a decade. Number three, we work in a tough, competitive profession, and it's just plain satisfying to put your commission checks, bonuses, and hard-won earnings toward something that improves your life or the lives of the people you love. But the biggest reason to set goals—especially in sales—is that the sales profession is hard work and it can be brutal.  It's loaded with rejection. At every turn, we face potential “nos,” whether it's prospecting calls, asking for next steps, pushing to level up to a decision-maker, or closing the deal. We even face internal rejection when we try to sell a complex deal internally to our own company or get approval for special pricing. Rejection is everywhere, and the fear of rejection—or avoiding it—is the number one reason salespeople fail to perform. Add to that the grind: making call after call, stuffing data into the CRM, pushing through proposals, handling endless follow-ups, and selling becomes tedious, hard, rejection-dense work. For this reason, it requires discipline to stay on track and keep grinding day after day and month after month over the course of the sales year. But here's the rub: discipline can wane, especially if we're not hyper-focused on a bigger prize. Goals Give You the Discipline to Do the Hard Things I want you to pay attention to this next part because understanding the real definition of discipline is critical.  Discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. Human nature wants easy. We'd rather that customers call us than have to chase them. We'd rather deals close themselves than invest hours into multi-step follow-ups. We don't want to face that “no.” But success in sales is paid for in advance, with facing rejection and hard work. Therefore, if you don't have a clear, compelling reason—something you want most—it's easy to cave in and take the easy route instead of doing what really needs to be done. This is the reason why having a strong set of personal goals is crucial for sales professionals. You need that powerful “why” to keep grinding when the going gets tough. When the pipeline's not as full as you'd like or you're hitting roadblocks, you need something more important than convenience to drag you back into the fight. A Tactical System for Setting Winning Goals Let's jump into the tactics for actually doing this. If you've gone through any kind of SMART goal-setting course, some of this may sound familiar. But these basics are timeless and indispensable. To set effective goals, you need to ask and answer five basic questions: What Do You Want? Sounds simple, but for a lot of us, it's not. We're so busy scrolling through social media, bingeing on TikTok, or juggling daily distractions that we never pause to ask, “What do I really want from my life?” So step one is to get specific. Define it. When Do You Want It? Because we're talking about next year's personal goals, let's keep them within a 12-month horizon. But any truly effective goal requires a deadline or target date—otherwise, it's just a pipe dream. When you have a hard date, it creates urgency and focus. Is It Attainable? Be honest with yourself. If all your goals are ridiculously ambitious, you'll burn out or give up once it's clear you're not making meaningful progress. Stretch goals are great—big, hairy, audacious goals will push you—but balance those with goals you can realistically achieve. How Bad Do You Want It? This is the ultimate question. If your goal doesn't fire you up, if it's not something you'd move mountains to achieve, you won't push through the tough days. Remember, discipline means sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. If the desire isn't there, the sacrifices won't be made. How Are You Going to Get There? These are your steps to success—your system, your process, your roadmap. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, you don't rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. The idea is simple: if you have a crystal-clear process for what you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly, you'll keep moving toward the goal—even when life gets hectic. This is where your personal business plan and your personal goals intersect. For instance, if your to-do or to-have goal requires additional income—maybe you need a bigger commission check to afford that new pool or a bucket-list vacation—then you have to hit your sales targets. This means building a discipline system that ensures you're prospecting enough, qualifying enough opportunities, following up diligently, and negotiating effectively. Without a system and personal business plan, you are more likely to get random results. Stop Now and Build Your Goal Sheet Sit in silence. Turn off the noise, get away from distractions, and grab a notebook and pen. Write down what you want, when you want it, if it's attainable, how badly you want it, and how you plan to get there. Sketch it all out—just let the ideas flow. Once you've got it all down, build a formal goal sheet. Yes, I'm talking about physically writing it out. There's tremendous power in seeing your goals in black and white, or printing them out and pinning them above your desk. Countless studies show that written goals are far more likely to be realized than goals that just bounce around in your head. This goal sheet is your personal roadmap—put it into your personal business plan so everything stays in one place. Learn how to set winning goals and build your personal Goal Sheet in Jeb Blount's comprehensive course: The Essentials of Setting Winning Goals

This Money Monday Sales Gravy podcast episode is special because it kicks off our 20th season! It's hard to believe that we've been producing the Sales Gravy continuously for 20 years. Over the last 20 years, thanks to you—our incredible audience—we've consistently ranked as the #1 most listened to sales podcast in markets all over the world. I remember my first podcast episode all those years ago, produced with a microphone I bought at Guitar Center and recorded under a blanket for sound suppression. Today, we produce our podcast in professional studios at Sales Gravy and have a full production team on staff to ensure we are giving you the highest quality sound possible.  What hasn't changed is my unwavering focus on making the complex simple by cutting through the noise, eliminating the fluff, and giving you the basics and fundamentals that actually work in the real world. We've got a ton of new episodes and bonus content coming your way, so be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and listen every week.  Sales Professionals Must Have Goals to be Successful Your personal goals are the aspirations that drive you, inspire you, and push you through the tough days. These goals are essential to helping you maintain sales discipline throughout your sales year. When developing personal goals, I break them down into three buckets: To-Have Goals These are the things you want to acquire or buy. Whether it's a house, a new car, or building up your savings, to-have goals are about acquiring something that enhances your life. To-Be Goals These are about evolving into the person you want to become. Maybe you want to be a sales manager, or if you're a manager, you want to be a director or VP of sales. You might want to go back to school for a degree or an MBA. Or you want to be a better spouse, a better leader, or a better peer. Maybe you want to be a President's club winner or be recognized as an expert in your industry—whatever it is, to-be goals help you level up as a person and a professional. To-Do Goals These are experience goals. Think about experiences that create lifelong memories—maybe you want to travel somewhere special or take on a meaningful project or hobby you've always dreamed about. Four Reasons Why Goals Matter in Sales Number one, goals massively increase the likelihood that you'll actually achieve the things you want. Speaking your goal out loud, writing it down, and being intentional about it has a powerful psychological effect. Number two, goals make life meaningful. It's unbelievably fulfilling to look back and see what you accomplished—how far you've come over the course of a year, five years, or a decade. Number three, we work in a tough, competitive profession, and it's just plain satisfying to put your commission checks, bonuses, and hard-won earnings toward something that improves your life or the lives of the people you love. But the biggest reason to set goals—especially in sales—is that the sales profession is hard work and it can be brutal.  It's loaded with rejection. At every turn, we face potential “nos,” whether it's prospecting calls, asking for next steps, pushing to level up to a decision-maker, or closing the deal. We even face internal rejection when we try to sell a complex deal internally to our own company or get approval for special pricing. Rejection is everywhere, and the fear of rejection—or avoiding it—is the number one reason salespeople fail to perform. Add to that the grind: making call after call, stuffing data into the CRM, pushing through proposals, handling endless follow-ups, and selling becomes tedious, hard, rejection-dense work. For this reason, it requires discipline to stay on track and keep grinding day after day and month after month over the course of the sales year. But here's the rub: discipline can wane, especially if we're not hyper-focused on a bigger prize. Goals Give You the Discipline to Do the Hard Things I want you to pay attention to this next part because understanding the real definition of discipline is critical.  Discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. Human nature wants easy. We'd rather that customers call us than have to chase them. We'd rather deals close themselves than invest hours into multi-step follow-ups. We don't want to face that “no.” But success in sales is paid for in advance, with facing rejection and hard work. Therefore, if you don't have a clear, compelling reason—something you want most—it's easy to cave in and take the easy route instead of doing what really needs to be done. This is the reason why having a strong set of personal goals is crucial for sales professionals. You need that powerful “why” to keep grinding when the going gets tough. When the pipeline's not as full as you'd like or you're hitting roadblocks, you need something more important than convenience to drag you back into the fight. A Tactical System for Setting Winning Goals Let's jump into the tactics for actually doing this. If you've gone through any kind of SMART goal-setting course, some of this may sound familiar. But these basics are timeless and indispensable. To set effective goals, you need to ask and answer five basic questions: What Do You Want? Sounds simple, but for a lot of us, it's not. We're so busy scrolling through social media, bingeing on TikTok, or juggling daily distractions that we never pause to ask, “What do I really want from my life?” So step one is to get specific. Define it. When Do You Want It? Because we're talking about next year's personal goals, let's keep them within a 12-month horizon. But any truly effective goal requires a deadline or target date—otherwise, it's just a pipe dream. When you have a hard date, it creates urgency and focus. Is It Attainable? Be honest with yourself. If all your goals are ridiculously ambitious, you'll burn out or give up once it's clear you're not making meaningful progress. Stretch goals are great—big, hairy, audacious goals will push you—but balance those with goals you can realistically achieve. How Bad Do You Want It? This is the ultimate question. If your goal doesn't fire you up, if it's not something you'd move mountains to achieve, you won't push through the tough days. Remember, discipline means sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. If the desire isn't there, the sacrifices won't be made. How Are You Going to Get There? These are your steps to success—your system, your process, your roadmap. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, you don't rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. The idea is simple: if you have a crystal-clear process for what you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly, you'll keep moving toward the goal—even when life gets hectic. This is where your personal business plan and your personal goals intersect. For instance, if your to-do or to-have goal requires additional income—maybe you need a bigger commission check to afford that new pool or a bucket-list vacation—then you have to hit your sales targets. This means building a discipline system that ensures you're prospecting enough, qualifying enough opportunities, following up diligently, and negotiating effectively. Without a system and personal business plan, you are more likely to get random results. Stop Now and Build Your Goal Sheet Sit in silence. Turn off the noise, get away from distractions, and grab a notebook and pen. Write down what you want, when you want it, if it's attainable, how bad you want it, and how you plan to get there. Sketch it all out—just let the ideas flow. Once you've got it all down, build a formal goal sheet. Yes, I'm talking about physically writing it out. There's tremendous power in seeing your goals in black and white, or printing them out and pinning them above your desk. Countless studies show that written goals are far more likely to be realized than goals that just bounce around in your head. This goal sheet is your personal roadmap—put it into your personal business plan so everything stays in one place. Learn how to set winning goals and build your personal Goal Sheet in Jeb Blount's comprehensive course: The Essentials of Setting Winning Goals

Looking for the best NBA, picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, January 5, 2025? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

SummaryIn this episode, Benjamin Lee discusses the key themes from 'The Psychology of Money' by Morgan Housel, focusing on the psychological aspects of money management, the evolution of work and retirement, and the importance of financial literacy. He emphasizes that many financial tools and concepts are relatively new, leading to a lack of experience in managing money effectively. The conversation highlights the need for a shift in mindset regarding money, saving, and spending, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own financial narratives and behaviors.TakeawaysMoney is often not how much we make, but what we do with it.The psychology of money plays a crucial role in financial decisions.Retirement as a concept is relatively new in history.Many people struggle with saving due to psychological barriers.Education and financial literacy are essential for better money management.Impulse shopping can lead to financial troubles.Understanding one's own money narrative is important.Work is a blessing and should be viewed positively.New financial tools can be overwhelming for many.Budgeting can help individuals realize they have enough money. Chapters00:00 Introduction to Money Psychology03:15 Historical Context of Work and Retirement06:12 Education and Financial Decisions09:33 The Psychology of Money Management

Unlock the secrets to turning distressed properties into profitable investments!

2025 was a strong year for the national economy and Arizona's economy alike. Can we expect the same market strength in 2026? It's Money Monday and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona's Evan Taylor joins the show to discuss all things money. 

Is your sales strategy built around how buyers should behave—or how they actually behave? Imagine walking into a store and seeing a shirt for $50. Fine. Unremarkable. You might buy it, you might not. Now imagine seeing that same shirt with a tag that reads: $100 NOW $50. Suddenly, you're interested. You found a deal. You beat the system. You're a hero. Same price. Same shirt. Completely different emotional response. That psychological gap between logic and emotion cost JCPenney roughly $1 billion and offers one of the most important lessons in sales psychology you'll ever learn: people don't buy with logic—they buy with emotion and justify with logic later. The Fair and Square Disaster In 2012, JCPenney hired Ron Johnson as CEO. Johnson was a retail rock star, the architect behind Apple Store's legendary success. He walked into JCPenney and saw chaos: endless coupons, manufactured "original prices," and constant sales cycles. His solution? Kill it all. Johnson launched "Fair and Square"—a radically transparent pricing model. No games. No coupons. No inflated prices marked down. Just one everyday low price on everything. That $100 shirt marked down to $50? Now it was simply $50. Honest. Logical. Clean. The market's response was brutal. Within one year, sales dropped 25%. The company lost nearly $1 billion. Stock price went into freefall. Johnson was fired. What Johnson Got Wrong About Sales Psychology Johnson made a catastrophic assumption: he believed customers were rational economic actors who would reward transparency and honesty. He was dead wrong. For decades, JCPenney's customers had been playing a game. They clipped coupons, timed sales, scrutinized flyers, and planned shopping trips around promotions. The weekly coupon wasn't just a discount—it was a ritual. Their insider advantage, their badge of savvy shopping honor. Johnson stripped away their emotional satisfaction and replaced it with sterile efficiency. Without the "$100 now $50" comparison, the flat $50 price lost all psychological weight. No thrill. No victory. No story to share. Same price. Different feeling. The Sales Psychology Principle You're Ignoring Loss aversion is twice as powerful as gain motivation. Your prospects don't just want to gain something—they want to feel like they won, like they're in control, like they made a smart decision that will impress their boss. When you strip away their buying process, when you force them into your "more efficient" workflow without their input, they don't see the gain. They experience loss. You've taken away their control, their ritual, their power, their role as the hero. In sales, that feeling is deadly. Your Customers Have Rituals Too Think about your best accounts. What do they actually value? It's probably not your features or your ROI calculator. It's the rep they've worked with for years. It's the quarterly business review they rely on. It's the reporting cadence that makes them look good internally. It's the buying process that lets them feel competent and in control. That's their ritual. When you try to "streamline" their process, when you push them toward a different point of contact, when you change the reporting structure they trust—you're doing exactly what Ron Johnson did. You're selling logic when they're buying a feeling. Stop Leading With Features and Benefits Most salespeople lose deals before they even start because they lead with logical arguments: "Our platform reduces processing time by 40%." "We integrate with 200+ systems." "Our customer support response time is under 2 hours." All logical. All true. All useless if your buyer doesn't feel something first. Your prospect doesn't wake up excited about efficiency gains. They wake up stressed about looking good in front of their VP, avoiding mistakes, and maintaining control of their budget. Research is clear: emotional decisions get made first, then logic comes in to justify them. Your job isn't to build a logical case. Your job is to help your buyer feel like a hero, then give them the logical ammunition to defend that emotional decision internally. How to Apply This Starting Today Identify Their Rituals Watch how your customers actually operate. Do they need three stakeholders in every meeting? Do they always loop in procurement at a specific stage? Do they have a preferred communication cadence? Don't fight it. Work with it. Their process is their psychological anchor for stability. Frame the Win They Can Own Frame your solution so the customer feels in control and gets the credit. Instead of: "Our platform will solve your problem." Try: “This approach could help you demonstrate a 30% cost reduction in Q2—giving your team clear wins to share with leadership.” Make them the hero of their own story. Highlight Emotional Outcomes, Not Just Logical Ones Don't just talk about what your product does. Talk about how it makes them feel. "You'll have complete visibility so you're never caught off guard in executive meetings." "Your team will finally have the data they need to look proactive instead of reactive." "You'll be the person who solved the problem everyone else said was impossible." Guide, Don't Force Lead your prospects toward better outcomes without stripping away their sense of control. Instead of forcing a complete switch to your system, collaborate on how your solution enhances their existing trusted process. Make them feel like a collaborator, not a passenger. The Takeaway Ron Johnson wasn't wrong that consumers should prefer transparent, honest pricing. He wasn't wrong that the coupon game was exhausting and complicated. He was wrong about what people actually buy. They buy feelings. Control. Victory. Status. The story they tell themselves about being smart. Your prospects are no different. They're not buying your SaaS platform, your consulting services, or your enterprise solution. They're buying the feeling of being competent, in control, and successful. The difference between average salespeople and top performers isn't product knowledge or work ethic. It's understanding the sales psychology behind how buyers actually make decisions. When you appeal to emotion first and back it up with logic second, you stop losing deals to “no decision” and start winning consistently. Because at the end of the day, sales isn't about having the best product. It's about making your customer feel like they made the best decision. Ready to master buyer psychology and close more deals? Download the ACED Buyer Style Playbook and discover how to match your sales approach to the four core buyer personalities. Stop selling logic. Start selling the way your customers actually buy.

Is your sales strategy built around how buyers should behave—or how they actually behave? Imagine walking into a store and seeing a shirt for $50. Fine. Unremarkable. You might buy it, you might not. Now imagine seeing that same shirt with a tag that reads: $100 NOW $50. Suddenly, you're interested. You found a deal. You beat the system. You're a hero. Same price. Same shirt. Completely different emotional response. That psychological gap between logic and emotion cost JCPenney roughly $1 billion and offers one of the most important lessons in sales psychology you'll ever learn: people don't buy with logic—they buy with emotion and justify with logic later. The Fair and Square Disaster In 2012, JCPenney hired Ron Johnson as CEO. Johnson was a retail rock star, the architect behind Apple Store's legendary success. He walked into JCPenney and saw chaos: endless coupons, manufactured "original prices," and constant sales cycles. His solution? Kill it all. Johnson launched "Fair and Square"—a radically transparent pricing model. No games. No coupons. No inflated prices marked down. Just one everyday low price on everything. That $100 shirt marked down to $50? Now it was simply $50. Honest. Logical. Clean. The market's response was brutal. Within one year, sales dropped 25%. The company lost nearly $1 billion. Stock price went into freefall. Johnson was fired. What Johnson Got Wrong About Sales Psychology Johnson made a catastrophic assumption: he believed customers were rational economic actors who would reward transparency and honesty. He was dead wrong. For decades, JCPenney's customers had been playing a game. They clipped coupons, timed sales, scrutinized flyers, and planned shopping trips around promotions. The weekly coupon wasn't just a discount—it was a ritual. Their insider advantage, their badge of savvy shopping honor. Johnson stripped away their emotional satisfaction and replaced it with sterile efficiency. Without the "$100 now $50" comparison, the flat $50 price lost all psychological weight. No thrill. No victory. No story to share. Same price. Different feeling. The Sales Psychology Principle You're Ignoring Loss aversion is twice as powerful as gain motivation. Your prospects don't just want to gain something—they want to feel like they won, like they're in control, like they made a smart decision that will impress their boss. When you strip away their buying process, when you force them into your "more efficient" workflow without their input, they don't see the gain. They experience loss. You've taken away their control, their ritual, their power, their role as the hero. In sales, that feeling is deadly. Your Customers Have Rituals Too Think about your best accounts. What do they actually value? It's probably not your features or your ROI calculator. It's the rep they've worked with for years. It's the quarterly business review they rely on. It's the reporting cadence that makes them look good internally. It's the buying process that lets them feel competent and in control. That's their ritual. When you try to "streamline" their process, when you push them toward a different point of contact, when you change the reporting structure they trust—you're doing exactly what Ron Johnson did. You're selling logic when they're buying a feeling. Stop Leading With Features and Benefits Most salespeople lose deals before they even start because they lead with logical arguments: "Our platform reduces processing time by 40%." "We integrate with 200+ systems." "Our customer support response time is under 2 hours." All logical. All true. All useless if your buyer doesn't feel something first. Your prospect doesn't wake up excited about efficiency gains. They wake up stressed about looking good in front of their VP, avoiding mistakes, and maintaining control of their budget. Research is clear: emotional decisions get made first, then logic comes in to justify them. Your job isn't to build a logical case. Your job is to help your buyer feel like a hero, then give them the logical ammunition to defend that emotional decision internally. How to Apply This Starting Today Identify Their Rituals Watch how your customers actually operate. Do they need three stakeholders in every meeting? Do they always loop in procurement at a specific stage? Do they have a preferred communication cadence? Don't fight it. Work with it. Their process is their psychological anchor for stability. Frame the Win They Can Own Frame your solution so the customer feels in control and gets the credit. Instead of: "Our platform will solve your problem." Try: “This approach could help you demonstrate a 30% cost reduction in Q2—giving your team clear wins to share with leadership.” Make them the hero of their own story. Highlight Emotional Outcomes, Not Just Logical Ones Don't just talk about what your product does. Talk about how it makes them feel. "You'll have complete visibility so you're never caught off guard in executive meetings." "Your team will finally have the data they need to look proactive instead of reactive." "You'll be the person who solved the problem everyone else said was impossible." Guide, Don't Force Lead your prospects toward better outcomes without stripping away their sense of control. Instead of forcing a complete switch to your system, collaborate on how your solution enhances their existing trusted process. Make them feel like a collaborator, not a passenger. The Takeaway Ron Johnson wasn't wrong that consumers should prefer transparent, honest pricing. He wasn't wrong that the coupon game was exhausting and complicated. He was wrong about what people actually buy. They buy feelings. Control. Victory. Status. The story they tell themselves about being smart. Your prospects are no different. They're not buying your SaaS platform, your consulting services, or your enterprise solution. They're buying the feeling of being competent, in control, and successful. The difference between average salespeople and top performers isn't product knowledge or work ethic. It's understanding the sales psychology behind how buyers actually make decisions. When you appeal to emotion first and back it up with logic second, you stop losing deals to “no decision” and start winning consistently. Because at the end of the day, sales isn't about having the best product. It's about making your customer feel like they made the best decision. Ready to master buyer psychology and close more deals? Download the ACED Buyer Style Playbook and discover how to match your sales approach to the four core buyer personalities. Stop selling logic. Start selling the way your customers actually buy.

Looking for the best NBA, CFB & NFL picks, predictions, and betting tips for Monday, December 29, 2025? Tune in to Profit Picks with expert handicappers Hakeem "Skee" Profit and Rob Veno as they preview today's biggest matchups with sharp insights and actionable advice.

While regret anchors you to past failures, reflection acts as a catalyst for future sales growth. This article and Sales Gravy Money Monday Podcast episode explores how to break the "if-only" loop and provides a step-by-step year-end debrief to help you extract lessons from your wins and losses, ensuring you start the new year with clarity and a proven system for success. Explore: How to get out of your regret loop The power of reflection How reflection creates awareness A system for achieving your sales goals 7 Steps to year-end sales reflection Ways to Look Back at Your Sales Year For me, the last two weeks of the year have always been the chance to pause, take a break from the grind of selling, and really think about what happened over the past year—the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you are anything like me and do the same, there are two ways to look back on your last twelve months. You can do so with regret or reflection. These two opposing lenses are vastly different in the way they affect your view of where you've been and where you are going. The Trouble With Regret Let's start by unpacking regret. Some of you are already feeling regret about goals you missed, deals you lost, opportunities that slipped through your fingers, or the people in your life you may have let down. Regret is that feeling you get when you look back on something you did (or didn't do) and wish you could change it. In many ways, regret is similar to worry, except it's focused on the past instead of the future. Worry is about what might happen; regret is about what already happened. That's a big distinction. Although you can turn worry into action and change the future, you cannot rewrite the past. No amount of regret changes history. All it does is create a feedback loop in your mind where you keep reliving your mistakes, misses, and failures over and over again. Why Sales Professionals Get Stuck in a Regret Loop I've observed so many people get stuck in this endless loop of regret. They keep lamenting, "If only I had . . ." "made that call.” “handled that prospect differently.” “taken that chance.” “been there or done that.” Those “if onlys” can paralyze you. They sap your energy, crush your confidence, and keep you from moving forward. On one hand, regret can push you to change—you don't want to feel that kind of pain again, so you work hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. On the other hand, regret can become a debilitating emotion that drags you into an exhausting and useless mental loop of “would've, could've, should've.” But no matter how many times you complete that loop, it doesn't change the outcome. It becomes an emotional anchor that weighs you down as you start the new year. The Power of Reflection Reflection, on the other hand, is entirely different—and far more productive. When you reflect, you detach from your emotions with objectivity to look at your entire body of work from the past year. You're asking the questions, “What went well? What didn't go so well? What did I learn?” You consider the wins that made you proud and the moments you'd rather forget. You figure out why you won so you can repeat those winning behaviors. You extract value from the lessons of failure. Reflection isn't about punishing yourself for what went wrong. It's about gaining clarity on why it went wrong—and what you can do about it next time. How Reflection Creates Awareness Reflection also helps you find gratitude in unexpected places. Maybe there's a hidden lesson in overcoming an obstacle, or perhaps you gained a new perspective because a challenging person came into your life. It's important to realize that each decision you made over the past year shaped your present circumstances. But you are not defined by these circumstances, only by how you respond to them. Reflection creates awareness. Where there is awareness, there is the potential for change. Awareness is like the sun; anything it touches has a tendency to transform. The bottom line is that reflection is about learning, growing, and transforming. Regret is stagnation. Why Reflection Matters at Year-End The reason I'm talking about the impact of reflection as we close out this year is because, for most of us, the slate really does feel clean come January 1st. In the sales world, we get a brand-new quota and brand-new targets. There's an air of possibility as we think: “This year is going to be different. “This year, I'm going to crush my numbers.” “Hit my income targets.” “Make it to President's club.” “Get a promotion.” “Finally, close that dream account I've been chasing.” But if you don't take a moment to reflect on what worked and what didn't, you're likely to find yourself repeating the same missteps. Reflection is like an internal debrief—a chance to say, “Here's what happened, here's why, and here's how I'm going to fix it.” Why Clarity Arises From Reflection Let me give you a personal example. A the beginning of last year, I set a goal for my sales training company, Sales Gravy. This was a big, bold, visionary goal that would transform our organization and ultimately double our sales. I proudly and confidently told my team that it was going to happen. And then, in an embarrassing crash and burn, I failed miserably. Certainly, I could have stewed in regret, beating myself up and allowing my self-talk to run wild about how I fell short. But that would have been a waste of time and energy. Instead, I chose reflection. I asked myself, “What happened and why didn't I achieve this goal?” As I mulled over those questions, the answers came more clearly than I expected. One of the biggest insights I gained was that I'd set this big goal, but didn't establish a system or plan to make it happen. You see, a goal without a system is basically just a wish—as they say, “hope is not a strategy.” Build a System that Supports Your Goals If, for example, you set a goal to prospect a hundred potential customers per week, but you haven't built a disciplined daily routine, built targeted lists, set aside specific times for calls, and created accountability checkpoints, it's not going to stick. Life will get in the way. Sooner or later, your big, bold goal gets overshadowed by a million other tasks. Without a system for achieving the goal, you quickly succumb to discipline fatigue. This is exactly why reflection can be your best friend at year's end. It allows you to own your failures without letting them define you, and it helps you leverage your successes by pinpointing what you did right. Regret says: “You messed up. You'll never fix this. It's too late.” Reflection says: “You messed up. Now let's find out why, learn from it, and do better next time.” How to Conduct a Year-End Sales Reflection To turn past performance into future growth, follow this 7-step systematic reflection process: Seek Silence: Carve out 30 minutes in a quiet environment without digital distractions to ensure deep focus. Audit the Timeline: Mentally journey through the year, month-by-month, starting from January, to recall specific goals and market conditions. Celebrate Wins: Identify specific deals and relationships that succeeded. Recognize the personal milestones that boosted your confidence. Isolate Winning Behaviors: Determine the exact habits and mindsets that led to your successes so you can turn them into repeatable systems. Analyze Failures Objectively: Pinpoint the goals that stayed out of reach. Ask "Why?" to uncover the root cause of the miss without self-judgment. Build Systems, Not Just Goals: Replace "hope-based" strategies with disciplined routines, targeted lists, and accountability checkpoints. Practice Gratitude: Identify the "silver linings" and lessons learned from challenges to maintain an optimistic outlook for the new sales season. Here's the big takeaway: Regret is the enemy of progress; Reflection is the catalyst for growth. Get your New Year off to a winning start with Jeb Blount's popular on-demand course: The Essentials of Setting Winning Goals

While regret anchors you to past failures, reflection acts as a catalyst for future sales growth. This article and Sales Gravy Money Monday Podcast episode explores how to break the "if-only" loop and provides a step-by-step year-end debrief to help you extract lessons from your wins and losses, ensuring you start the new year with clarity and a proven system for success.   Explore: How to get out of your regret loop The power of reflection How reflection creates awareness A system for achieving your sales goals 7 Steps to year-end sales reflection Ways to Look Back at Your Sales Year For me, the last two weeks of the year have always been the chance to pause, take a break from the grind of selling, and really think about what happened over the past year—the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you are anything like me and do the same, there are two ways to look back on your last twelve months. You can do so with regret or reflection. These two opposing lenses are vastly different in the way they affect your view of where you've been and where you are going. The Trouble With Regret Let's start by unpacking regret. Some of you are already feeling regret about goals you missed, deals you lost, opportunities that slipped through your fingers, or the people in your life you may have let down. Regret is that feeling you get when you look back on something you did (or didn't do) and wish you could change it. In many ways, regret is similar to worry, except it's focused on the past instead of the future. Worry is about what might happen; regret is about what already happened. That's a big distinction. Although you can turn worry into action and change the future, you cannot rewrite the past. No amount of regret changes history. All it does is create a feedback loop in your mind where you keep reliving your mistakes, misses, and failures over and over again. Why Sales Professionals Get Stuck in a Regret Loop I've observed so many people get stuck in this endless loop of regret. They keep lamenting, "If only I had . . ." "made that call.” “handled that prospect differently.” “taken that chance.” “been there or done that.” Those “if onlys” can paralyze you. They sap your energy, crush your confidence, and keep you from moving forward. On one hand, regret can push you to change—you don't want to feel that kind of pain again, so you work hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. On the other hand, regret can become a debilitating emotion that drags you into an exhausting and useless mental loop of “would've, could've, should've.” But no matter how many times you complete that loop, it doesn't change the outcome. It becomes an emotional anchor that weighs you down as you start the new year. The Power of Reflection Reflection, on the other hand, is entirely different—and far more productive. When you reflect, you detach from your emotions with objectivity to look at your entire body of work from the past year. You're asking the questions, “What went well? What didn't go so well? What did I learn?” You consider the wins that made you proud and the moments you'd rather forget. You figure out why you won so you can repeat those winning behaviors. You extract value from the lessons of failure. Reflection isn't about punishing yourself for what went wrong. It's about gaining clarity on why it went wrong—and what you can do about it next time. How Reflection Creates Awareness Reflection also helps you find gratitude in unexpected places. Maybe there's a hidden lesson in overcoming an obstacle, or perhaps you gained a new perspective because a challenging person came into your life. It's important to realize that each decision you made over the past year shaped your present circumstances. But you are not defined by these circumstances, only by how you respond to them. Reflection creates awareness. Where there is awareness, there is the potential for change. Awareness is like the sun; anything it touches has a tendency to transform. The bottom line is that reflection is about learning, growing, and transforming. Regret is stagnation. Why Reflection Matters at Year-End The reason I'm talking about the impact of reflection as we close out this year is because, for most of us, the slate really does feel clean come January 1st. In the sales world, we get a brand-new quota and brand-new targets. There's an air of possibility as we think: “This year is going to be different. “This year, I'm going to crush my numbers.” “Hit my income targets.” “Make it to President's club.” “Get a promotion.” “Finally, close that dream account I've been chasing.” But if you don't take a moment to reflect on what worked and what didn't, you're likely to find yourself repeating the same missteps. Reflection is like an internal debrief—a chance to say, “Here's what happened, here's why, and here's how I'm going to fix it.” Why Clarity Arises From Reflection Let me give you a personal example. A the beginning of last year, I set a goal for my sales training company, Sales Gravy. This was a big, bold, visionary goal that would transform our organization and ultimately double our sales. I proudly and confidently told my team that it was going to happen. And then, in an embarrassing crash and burn, I failed miserably. Certainly, I could have stewed in regret, beating myself up and allowing my self-talk to run wild about how I fell short. But that would have been a waste of time and energy. Instead, I chose reflection. I asked myself, “What happened and why didn't I achieve this goal?” As I mulled over those questions, the answers came more clearly than I expected. One of the biggest insights I gained was that I'd set this big goal, but didn't establish a system or plan to make it happen. You see, a goal without a system is basically just a wish—as they say, “hope is not a strategy.” Build a System that Supports Your Goals If, for example, you set a goal to prospect a hundred potential customers per week, but you haven't built a disciplined daily routine, built targeted lists, set aside specific times for calls, and created accountability checkpoints, it's not going to stick. Life will get in the way. Sooner or later, your big, bold goal gets overshadowed by a million other tasks. Without a system for achieving the goal, you quickly succumb to discipline fatigue. This is exactly why reflection can be your best friend at year's end. It allows you to own your failures without letting them define you, and it helps you leverage your successes by pinpointing what you did right. Regret says: “You messed up. You'll never fix this. It's too late.” Reflection says: “You messed up. Now let's find out why, learn from it, and do better next time.” How to Conduct a Year-End Sales Reflection To turn past performance into future growth, follow this 7-step systematic reflection process: Seek Silence: Carve out 30 minutes in a quiet environment without digital distractions to ensure deep focus. Audit the Timeline: Mentally journey through the year, month-by-month, starting from January, to recall specific goals and market conditions. Celebrate Wins: Identify specific deals and relationships that succeeded. Recognize the personal milestones that boosted your confidence. Isolate Winning Behaviors: Determine the exact habits and mindsets that led to your successes so you can turn them into repeatable systems. Analyze Failures Objectively: Pinpoint the goals that stayed out of reach. Ask "Why?" to uncover the root cause of the miss without self-judgment. Build Systems, Not Just Goals: Replace "hope-based" strategies with disciplined routines, targeted lists, and accountability checkpoints. Practice Gratitude: Identify the "silver linings" and lessons learned from challenges to maintain an optimistic outlook for the new sales season. Here's the big takeaway: Regret is the enemy of progress; Reflection is the catalyst for growth. Get your New Year off to a winning start with Jeb Blount's popular on-demand course: The Essentials of Setting Winning Goals  

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