Sales Gravy: PowerPrinciples

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast Jeb Blount and Carole Mahoney, author of the hit new book Buyer First, underscore the importance of putting buyers first and aligning with the buyer's journey. They dive into the power of empathy, the art of listening, and innovative ways of selling that prioritize the buyer's needs and experiences to increase closing ratios.
Human Centric, Buyer First Selling
In the whirlwind of today's sales scene, there's a fresh, more human approach taking center stage. It's all about walking in step with the buyer's journey, tuning into empathy, mastering the art of listening, and flipping the script on traditional selling to truly put the buyer's needs first.
Navigating The Buyer's Journey
Picture the buyer's journey not as a straight shot from point A to B, but more like a winding road, complete with twists, turns, and the occasional backtrack. It's a ride through awareness, consideration, and finally, decision.

For sales folks looking to really connect, it's about getting the map to this journey, understanding the lay of the land at each stage, and customizing their pitch to meet the buyer right where they are. It's less about sealing the deal and more about being a trusted guide, helping the buyer navigate their options to find the perfect fit for their needs.

This shift towards empathy doesn't just feel good; it makes solid business sense, too. It transforms the buyer-seller dynamic into a partnership built on trust, paving the way for not just a one-off sale but a lasting relationship.
Empathy: The Soul of Sales Today
At the heart of putting buyers first is empathy. It's about seeing the world through the buyer's eyes, feeling their pain points, and genuinely wanting to help. This human connection is what sets apart the modern sales pro in a sea of information overload. By showing real care for the buyer's challenges and goals, salespeople can break through the noise, offering not just a product, but a solution that truly resonates.

But don't mistake empathy for mere niceness. It's a strategic ace, giving salespeople the insight to tailor their messages and solutions in a way that truly hits home for the buyer.

Listening is Key
Listening – really listening – is where the magic happens. It's about tuning in with all senses, catching not just the words but the emotions and unspoken needs behind them. This deep dive into the buyer's world uncovers golden nuggets of insight, enabling sales pros to craft responses and solutions that are as unique as the buyer's own story.

Today's buyer is savvy, connected, and expects more. They want interactions that are relevant, personal, and respectful. To sell more, adopt strategies that put the buyer's experience front and center.

This pivot to a buyer-centric approach heralds a new chapter in sales, one where understanding, empathy, and genuine connection are give you a competitive edge. As the world continues to evolve, those who embrace a buyer first mindset are set to not just survive but thrive, building relationships that last and driving success that's both sustainable and fulfilling.

Learn why more than 50,000 sales professionals and sales teams get the tools, tactics, and techniques to sell more on Sales Gravy University

On this must-listen episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount sits down with Ryan Taft. Ryan is the author of the hit new sales book Story Getter.

Jeb and Ryan explore how buying is an emotional experience and sales pros that ask questions that get the story “why” behind the buyer’s “what” sell more. They dive into how curiosity and empathy are pivotal for transforming your sales approach.
Curiosity Is the Fuel of Story Getters
Top sales professionals understanding the human element. They have mastered the subtle art of connecting with people and leverage natural curiosity to get people to open up and share their stories.

Curiosity is the unsung hero in the sales process. It's about getting below the surface. This isn't about interrogating; it's about engaging in a conversation that uncovers deeper needs and desires. When a salesperson is genuinely curious, they ask questions that go beyond the standard script. It's about understanding the customer's journey, their challenges, and what they truly value.

Story Getters understand that curiosity is a gateway to understanding their business needs, challenges, and even apprehensions. It's a step towards a solution that's not just a product but a tailored answer to their unique problem.

Empathy is More Than Just a Buzzword
Empathy in sales is about connecting on a human level. It's about seeing the world from the customer's perspective, feeling what they feel. This emotional intelligence allows salespeople to build a rapport that goes beyond the transactional. When customers feel understood, they are more open to listening and engaging.

Consider a situation where a customer is afraid of making a decision. An empathetic response involves recognizing their fear, validating their feelings, and then collaboratively finding a way to move forward. This approach not only addresses the immediate concern but also strengthens the long-term relationship.
The Art of Balancing Curiosity and Empathy
Mastering the balance between curiosity and empathy is crucial. It's about asking the right questions and then genuinely listening to the answers. This balance creates a dialogue where the customer feels valued, understood, and want to share their story.

For instance, a salesperson might ask, "How does this challenge affect you personally?" This question shows that you're not just interested in selling a product but are invested in understanding their feeling. Listening actively to their response, and showing understanding, builds a deeper emotional connection.
Implementing Curiosity and Empathy in Your Sales Strategy
Integrating Story Getting into your sales strategy involves a shift in mindset. It's about moving from a selling mindset to a helping mindset. Adopting a curious and empathetic approach to sales conversations along with more effective questions, will give you a clear competitive edge.

Furthermore, this approach can lead to better problem-solving. Understanding the customer's needs and challenges, through their stories, allows for more tailored solutions, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Remember, people don't just buy products or services; they buy experiences and relationships. By putting the human back into sales, we can redefine success in this ever-evolving field.

Learn the art of selling on Sales Gravy University, the world's most powerful sales training engine.

In the latest episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, we had the privilege of diving deep into the world of prospecting and sales with Kristin Andree from the Andree Group. Hosted by Sales Gravy Master Trainer Jessica Stokes, this episode offers a treasure trove of strategies, tips, and personal anecdotes that are essential for anyone looking for innovative ways to scale their sales career or business.

This episode is a blend of practical advice, innovative techniques, and motivational insights that can transform your approach to sales and client relationships. So, tune in, take notes, and embark on your journey to sales excellence.
The Bedrock of Sales Success: Truly Understanding Your Audience
Let's take a deeper dive into this enlightening conversation between Jessica and Kristin on Innovative Prospecting for Scaling Your Business and Sales Career. This episode is not just a discussion; it's a masterclass in understanding, engaging, and growing in the complex world of sales.

Kristin Andre begins by unraveling the essence of sales - understanding your target market. Her approach is straightforward yet profound: “Know your people, find your people, love them hard.”

This mantra goes beyond the surface, urging sales professionals to dive deep into the psyche of their target market. It's about empathy, understanding their needs, and aligning your solutions to meet those needs effectively.
Segmenting Your Market: A Strategic Approach
Expanding on knowing your audience, Kristin highlights the importance of market segmentation. By identifying niche markets and tailoring your approach to each segment, sales professionals can enhance their effectiveness. This targeted approach ensures that your message resonates more deeply with each unique group within your broader audience.

Innovative Prospecting: Leveraging Modern Tools for Maximum Impact
In today's digital-first world, Kristin emphasizes the need to think outside the traditional prospecting box. Using podcasts, social media, and content creation, salespeople can reach a wider audience and establish themselves as thought leaders in their field. This section of the podcast offers a goldmine of ideas for digital prospecting, including leveraging LinkedIn for networking and content distribution.
Crafting Engaging Content: A Key to Digital Prospecting
Kristin talks about the power of creating engaging, value-driven content. She delves into strategies for developing content that not only attracts attention but also establishes credibility and trust. This includes tips on understanding what resonates with your audience and how to consistently deliver content that keeps them engaged and interested.
The Art of Client Engagement: Beyond the Transaction
Kristin's perspective on client engagement is a refreshing take on building lasting relationships. She advocates for a personal touch in client interactions, suggesting thoughtful gifting strategies and meaningful communication that demonstrate genuine care. This section provides practical tips on how to transform client interactions from transactional to relational.
Building Lasting Relationships: The Long-Term Approach
Expanding on client engagement, Kristin discusses the importance of a long-term approach to building client relationships. This includes understanding client needs over time, being responsive to changes, and consistently delivering value beyond the initial sale. She shares personal anecdotes and examples that illustrate the power of long-term relationship building.
Personal Growth: The Intersection of Self-Awareness and Sales Success
Kristin's insights on personal growth highlight the importance of self-awareness in sales. She talks about the need to recognize and play to your strengths while seeking opportunities for growth and improvement. This part of the podcast includes actionable advice on personal development strategies that can enhance your sales performance.

Sales professionals are constantly seeking new strategies to enhance their performance and edge out the competition. Interestingly, one crucial aspect that often gets overlooked is physical sales fitness.

On this game changing episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount discusses how physical fitness impact sales success with online fitness coach Josh Hulsebosch.

Sales is a demanding profession that requires both mental and physical stamina. We need to be able to think on our feet, manage emotions, think creatively, and solve problems. This requires a tremendous amount of mental energy. Energy that is not there when you are in poor physical shape.
How Physical Fitness Can Drive Sales Success
The podcast kicks off by addressing the undeniable impact of physical appearance in the sales industry. It underscores that first impressions are vital and that a fit appearance can project a positive image of discipline, dedication, and energy.

Salespeople who maintain a healthy and fit physique can significantly influence client perceptions and decisions, often leading to more favorable outcomes in sales interactions.

Energy Levels and Stamina
A major highlight of the discussion is the correlation between physical fitness and energy levels. The speakers share personal anecdotes and scientific evidence to illustrate how regular physical activity can boost stamina and endurance. This is particularly beneficial for sales professionals who often face long hours, extensive travel, and high-pressure situations.

By staying physically fit, salespeople can maintain high energy levels throughout their demanding schedules, ensuring they are always at the top of their game.
Stress Management
The conversation then shifts to the topic of stress management, a critical aspect for any salesperson. The speakers discuss how the high-pressure environment of sales can lead to significant stress, affecting both mental and physical health.

They advocate for physical fitness as a powerful tool for stress relief, noting that exercise can significantly reduce anxiety and improve mental clarity. Josh and Jeb offer practical tips on incorporating regular physical activity into one's routine to manage stress effectively.
Health and Reduced Sick Days
Further into the podcast, the focus turns to the health benefits of physical fitness, particularly its impact on immunity and overall well-being. Jeb and Josh discuss how staying fit can lead to fewer sick days, ensuring continuous engagement in sales activities and client interactions. They highlight that consistent performance is key in sales, and maintaining good health is essential to achieving this consistency.
Confidence and Self-Esteem
An interesting segment of the podcast explores the relationship between physical fitness, confidence, and self-esteem. Feeling good about one's body can lead to a more confident and assertive presence, which is incredibly valuable in sales contexts. They share stories of how their fitness journeys have positively influenced their professional interactions and sales outcomes.
Cognitive Benefits of Improved Sales Fitness
The podcast also touches on the cognitive benefits of regular physical activity, including improved memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills. The speakers provide evidence from various studies and personal experiences to illustrate how fitness can enhance cognitive function, leading to better decision-making and more effective sales strategies.
Building Rapport and Relationships
An engaging part of the discussion revolves around using fitness as a tool to build rapport with clients. The speakers share how sharing fitness tips or experiences can serve as an excellent conversation starter or bonding activity, especially with clients who value health and wellness. They emphasize that building strong relationships is fundamental in sales, and fitness can be a unique and effective way to connect with clients on a de...

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, LinkedIn Guru Brynne Tillman shares her best tips and secrets for how to Sell More with LinkedIn. This episode is a goldmine for sales professionals seeking to harness the power of digital tools in their sales strategies.

Brynne Tillman’s approach to digital sales is both innovative and practical. Her ability to simplify complex concepts and relate them to everyday sales scenarios makes her advice incredibly valuable.
Revolutionizing Sales with AI and Technology
Brynne emphasized how AI and technological advancements are reshaping the sales landscape. She discussed how these tools can help salespeople understand and predict customer behavior, automate routine tasks, and personalize their sales approaches. For instance, she mentioned the use of AI in analyzing customer interaction data to identify potential leads and opportunities.
Practical Tips for LinkedIn and Digital Sales Success
A highlight of the episode was Brynne’s take on social selling. She stressed the importance of using platforms like LinkedIn not just as a sales tool but as a means to build genuine, long-lasting relationships. She shared anecdotes of how creating valuable content and engaging authentically with one’s network can lead to trust-building, which is crucial for successful sales.

Practical Strategies to Sell More on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has evolved from a mere professional networking site to a robust platform where the art of selling can be refined and executed with precision. It's a treasure trove for salespeople who know how to tap into its potential. As Brynne eloquently put it, "LinkedIn is a goldmine for those willing to dig deeper."
Building a Magnetic LinkedIn Profile
The journey on LinkedIn begins with your profile. It's your digital handshake, the first impression you make on potential clients. Brynne emphasized the need for a client-centric profile. She said, "Your profile shouldn’t be a resume; it should be a resource."

This means crafting a profile that speaks directly to your target audience, addressing their pain points, and offering solutions. Use a professional headshot, craft a compelling headline, and ensure every section of your profile showcases your expertise and the value you can bring to your clients.
Content is King
On LinkedIn, content reigns supreme. Sharing valuable content positions you as a thought leader and helps build trust with your network. But it's not just about posting for the sake of it. The content needs to resonate with your audience.

Brynne suggested a mix of original and curated content that addresses the latest trends, challenges, and solutions in your industry. Regularly posting articles, insights, and even engaging in thoughtful discussions on relevant posts can significantly increase your visibility and credibility.
Engagement: The Key to Building Relationships
LinkedIn is not just a platform to broadcast your achievements and content; it's a community. Engaging with your network's content is just as important as posting your own. Brynne advised, "Like, comment, and share. Engage genuinely and consistently." This engagement should be thoughtful and add value, showing that you are not just there to sell, but to be a part of the conversation.
Leveraging LinkedIn for Sales Prospecting
The true power of LinkedIn for sales professionals lies in its ability to find and connect with potential clients. Brynne shared several tactics for effective prospecting.

Advanced search features, alumni networks, and joining relevant groups can help you identify and connect with potential leads. But the key is in the approach. She recommended personalizing connection requests and messages, avoiding the hard sell, and focusing on building a relationship first.

The blend of Brynne’s expert insights, practical strategies, and real-world success stories make it an invaluable resource for sales professionals eager to adapt and succeed in the digit...

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, I dive into part two of my conversation with sales leadership expert Mike Weinberg on what new sales managers need to do to get off to a successful start. The information in this episode is so good that you'll want to listen twice and take good notes.
Navigating the Challenges of Being a New Sales Manager
The episode kicks off with an engaging story from Jeb Blount about his early days in sales leadership. Thrust into a managerial role at just 23 years old due to an unexpected incident, Jeb shares rapid rise to responsibility highlights the often-unpredictable path to sales leadership and the importance of adaptability and quick learning in such roles.

A key highlight of Jeb’s story is the impact of mentorship on his career. He credits Mary Gardner, the Area Vice President of his group, for fundamentally shaping his approach to sales leadership. Mary’s emphasis on coaching and her advice on being observant and patient offers timeless wisdom for new sales managers.
Core Principles for New Sales Managers
Mike Weinberg stresses the importance of 'keeping your mouth shut and your ears open' as a new leader. This approach is not about being passive but rather about being strategically observant, identifying opportunities for improvement, and understanding team dynamics before jumping into action.

One of the critical roles of a sales manager is to coach rather than directly involve oneself in every sale. This part of the discussion sheds light on the common mistake new managers make - trying to be the hero in every sales call, which ultimately hampers the development of their team.

Mike and Jeb discuss the balance between personal sales contributions and the development of the team. The insight here is clear: sales leadership is less about personal selling skills and more about elevating the capabilities of the team.

Challenges in Sales Leadership
Many sales leaders are overwhelmed with non-sales-related tasks, preventing them from focusing on key activities like coaching, mentoring, and strategy development.

The discussion underscores the need for support from higher management. Often, new sales leaders are not given clear priorities, leading to misaligned efforts and burnout. It is crucial for executives to understand and support the primary role of sales managers - revenue generation.
Key Takeaways for New Sales Managers
New sales leaders must prioritize coaching, adaptability, and team development over individual sales achievements. The journey of a sales leader is unique and challenging, but with the right approach and support, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Remember, as a new sales manager, your success lies in how well you can elevate your team, not just your personal sales achievements. So listen, observe, coach, and lead your team to new heights.

Getting off to a good start in your first 90 days as a new sales manager is crucial. The key to success is knowing where to start, where to focus, and what to avoid.

In this brilliant, must watch Expert Voice, sales leadership expert and bestselling author Mike Weinberg shares seven keys to success for new sales managers. Watch Now

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, I sit down with Mike Weinberg for Part One of our conversation on the state of the Sales Profession, sales leadership, and getting started as a new sales manager.

This conversation was a special treat because Mike is such an important and trusted voice within the sales profession and it is rare that Mike and I can find the time to get together.
Embracing the Fundamentals: Getting Started as a New Sales Manager in a Rapidly Changing World
As we work to sell more in the face of constant change, the wisdom of industry veterans like Mike Weinberg stands out as a beacon, guiding us through the evolving landscape of customer relationships, technology, sales strategies, and sales leadership. His insights, derived from decades of experience, provide a roadmap for both aspiring and seasoned sales manager in navigating the complex and often misunderstood profession of sales.
Understanding the Core of Sales
The art of selling, despite technological advancements and evolving methodologies, remains fundamentally anchored in human interaction and relationships. Weinberg underscores that the crux of effective selling lies in understanding and addressing customer needs, clear communication, and building trust. These timeless principles are the bedrock upon which successful sales strategies are built, regardless of the industry or market dynamics.

The Evolution of Sales Training and Leadership
Sales training and leadership have undergone significant transformation over the years. Weinberg points out a critical gap in many organizations - the transition from being a top-performing salesperson to an effective sales manager. This shift requires not only a change in skills but also a fundamental shift in mindset.

Sales Management is about nurturing and developing talent, fostering a culture of accountability, and leading by example. It's about guiding teams through challenges and inspiring them to achieve collective success.
Technology: A Tool, Not a Replacement
In our tech-driven age, there's a growing tendency to rely heavily on technology for sales processes. While technology undoubtedly offers efficiency and data-driven insights, Weinberg cautions against allowing it to overshadow the human element.

Automation and AI are tools to enhance, not replace, the personal touch that is central to building and maintaining customer relationships. The challenge for modern sales professionals is to integrate technology into their strategies without losing the essence of personal connection.
Debunking the Myths of Social Selling
Social selling has been touted as a revolutionary approach in the digital era. However, Weinberg challenges this notion, arguing that while it is a valuable component of a broader strategy, it is not a standalone solution. The effectiveness of traditional methods like phone calls and face-to-face meetings remains significant. Social selling should complement, not replace, these time-tested techniques.
Navigating Crises in Sales Management
Leading a sales team through periods of crisis requires more than just strategic acumen. It demands adaptability, empathy, and clear communication. Weinberg emphasizes the importance of maintaining team morale and productivity during such times. Sales leaders must be beacons of stability and clarity, guiding their teams through uncertainty with a steady hand and an empathetic approach.
Personal Growth and Future Trends
Weinberg’s journey also highlights the importance of personal growth and adaptation in a rapidly changing industry. The future of sales lies in balancing technological advancements with the irreplaceable human elements. As AI and machine learning continue to shape the landscape, sales professionals and leaders must remain agile, constantly learning and evolving to integrate new tools and techniques without losing sight of the fundamental human connections that drive sales.
Master the Fundamentals

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Will Frattini, Head of Enterprise Revenue & Growth at Zoominfo, take on account management and account expansion selling. You'll learn why a focused and intentional account management strategy is essential for net revenue retention and account expansion.
Why Account Management Matters
In sales, closing deals and prospecting often steal the spotlight from account management and customer retention. Yet, account retention and expansion are essential for sustainable business growth.

Account management is vital because retaining an existing customer is often more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. As such, focusing on account management can significantly impact a company's bottom line.
Best Practices in Account Management
One of the most critical aspects of effective account management is maintaining regular communication with clients. This doesn't mean only reaching out when it's time to renew a contract. Regular check-ins, updates on new offerings, and discussions about the client's evolving needs can make them feel valued and understood.

To effectively manage and expand accounts, it's crucial to have a deep understanding of the client's business and objectives. This knowledge allows account managers to align their offerings with the client's goals and present solutions that genuinely resonate with their needs.

Successful account management often involves collaboration with customer success and support teams. These teams play a critical role in ensuring that the client is successfully using the product or service and achieving their desired outcomes. Their insights can be invaluable for account managers looking to deepen client relationships.
Account Expansion Selling
Once a strong relationship is established, account managers can identify opportunities for expansion. This could mean introducing new products or services, expanding into different departments within the client's organization, or simply ensuring that the client is fully utilizing the existing solutions. Account expansion is not just about selling more; it's about deepening the relationship and providing more value.

Account expansion selling involves a range of strategies, including cross-selling and upselling, but it goes beyond these tactics. It’s about understanding the evolving needs of your clients and adapting your offerings to meet those needs over time. The goal is to become an indispensable partner rather than just another vendor.

The cost of selling to an existing customer is typically lower, and the probability of success is higher because of the established relationship and trust.

Long-term client relationships fostered through account expansion often result in more predictable and stable revenue streams. Clients who have grown with your business are more likely to remain loyal and less sensitive to price changes or market fluctuations.
How to Excel in Account Expansion Selling
Deep Understanding of Client Needs: The first step is to have a thorough understanding of your clients' businesses, challenges, and goals. This understanding allows you to identify opportunities where your products or services can add value.

Regular Communication and Relationship Building: Regular, meaningful communication is key. This involves not just checking in on service delivery but also discussing industry trends, sharing insights, and becoming a trusted advisor.

Tailored Solutions and Personalized Experiences: Offer solutions that are tailored to your client’s specific needs. Personalization in your offerings demonstrates that you understand and value their unique challenges and goals.

Leveraging Data and Analytics: Use data and analytics to gain insights into client behavior, preferences, and potential needs. This information can guide your approach to offering relevant products or services.

Collaboration Across Teams: Successful account expansion often requires collab...

In the competitive world of sales, adopting the right mindset is crucial for success. On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount spends time with Dre Baldwin, a former professional basketball player in the NBA turned business guru to discuss why sales professionals who adopt a pro athlete mindset have greater success.
Journey from the Court to the Boardroom
Dre's journey from the basketball court to the boardroom offers invaluable lessons for sales professionals. His story is a testament to perseverance and adaptability.

Transitioning from scoring points in the NBA to scoring wins in business, Dre has demonstrated how the principles of sports excellence can be effectively applied to sales. His philosophy revolves around four pillars: discipline, confidence, mental toughness, and personal initiative.
The Four Pillars of Success
1. Discipline: The Foundation of Success At the core of Dre's philosophy is discipline. In sales, as in sports, consistent effort and a structured approach are non-negotiable. Dre emphasizes that discipline isn't about forcing oneself to work but about creating a structure that naturally fosters productivity. For sales professionals, this means meticulously planning your day, prioritizing tasks, and sticking to a routine that aligns with your goals.

2. Confidence: More Than Just a Feeling Confidence, as Dre describes, is about boldly presenting oneself authentically. It's not about faking it till you make it, but about genuinely believing in your abilities and value. For a salesperson, this means trusting in your product, your approach, and your capacity to deliver solutions that genuinely benefit your clients.

3. Mental Toughness: Staying Resilient Amid Challenges Dre's third pillar, mental toughness, is about maintaining discipline and confidence, even when results aren't immediately visible. In sales, rejection and setbacks are part of the journey. Developing mental toughness means not getting overly discouraged by a lost sale or overly elated by a big win. It's about finding an emotional equilibrium that allows you to stay focused and effective.

4. Personal Initiative: The Drive to Take Action The final piece of the puzzle is personal initiative – the willingness to take charge and make things happen. Dre's story of proactively reaching out to agents to kickstart his basketball career exemplifies this. In sales, it translates to not waiting for opportunities but creating them through proactive outreach and seizing the moment.

Applying the Pro-Athlete Mindset to Sales
Adopting a pro-athlete mindset in sales means more than just being disciplined, confident, mentally tough, and proactive. It's about seeing each interaction, each pitch, and each deal as part of a larger journey towards mastery.

Just as athletes train relentlessly to perfect their craft, sales professionals must continuously hone their skills, adapt to new challenges, and remain committed to their personal and professional growth.

Drawing parallels between elite sports and sales, success is not just a matter of chance or natural talent. It's the result of a consistent, disciplined approach, much like the journey of a professional athlete.
The Foundation: Discipline and Confidence
Discipline in sales, as in sports, is about more than just hard work. It's about setting a routine, adhering to best practices, and staying committed even when the results aren't immediate.

Pro-athletes dedicate countless hours to training, understanding that each session builds towards a greater goal. Similarly, sales professionals must commit to their process, whether it's researching prospects, refining pitches, or analyzing feedback.

Confidence, an important key to sales success, stems from this disciplined approach. Just as athletes trust their training and abilities, sales professionals must believe in their strategies and skills. This confidence isn't about arrogance; it's a calm assurance that ...

This 90-Day Negativity Fast Will Change Your Life
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Anthony Iannarino discusses the importance of avoiding negativity and engaging in positive thinking. He suggests leaving phones behind to have meaningful conversations, consuming positive content, and practicing forgiveness to let go of anger and resentment. The goal is to focus on personal mental health and maintain a positive mindset, while acknowledging that some negative reactions are necessary in certain situations.
10 Strategies For Eliminating Negativity
In today's fast-paced and often negative world, it's important to actively work on cultivating a positive mindset. By adopting certain habits and perspectives, we can navigate through life's challenges with grace and find more joy and fulfillment along the way. Here are 10 powerful strategies to help you foster a positive mindset:
Disconnect to Connect
Leave your phone behind during conversations to fully engage with others and avoid distractions. This allows for more meaningful interactions and deeper connections.
Choose Balanced Sources
When consuming news, select balanced and reputable sources that provide accurate information without promoting divisiveness. Being well-informed is essential, but it's important to avoid getting caught up in the negativity often associated with certain news outlets.
Respect Diverse Opinions
Regardless of political beliefs, it is crucial to focus on understanding and respecting others. Recognize that people may have different perspectives, and instead of engaging in unnecessary arguments, aim for empathy and open-mindedness.
Happiness Over Winning
Prioritize happiness over winning arguments. Engaging in arguments that serve no purpose only leads to frustration and negativity. Choosing happiness and letting go of the need to prove oneself right can contribute to a more peaceful and fulfilling life.
Assume Positive Intent
Give people the benefit of the doubt and assume positive intent in their actions. It is easy to jump to negative conclusions, but assuming positive intent allows for more harmonious relationships and reduces unnecessary conflict.
Practice Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not for the benefit of the person who wronged you, but rather for your own mental health. Holding onto anger and resentment only eats away at you. Let go of grudges and find peace within yourself.
Surround Yourself With Positivity
Surround yourself with positive influences and consume uplifting content. Seek out individuals who radiate positivity and consume media that inspires and motivates you. This will cultivate a positive mindset and help counteract negativity.
Change Your Narrative
Challenge negative beliefs and narratives that contribute to negativity. Instead of assuming the worst in situations, consciously choose to focus on positive interpretations. By changing your beliefs, you can shift your mindset towards a more optimistic outlook.
Emotional Autonomy
Recognize that external events and actions do not have to dictate your own emotional state. Take responsibility for your reactions and choose to respond positively, even in challenging situations. Cultivating emotional autonomy empowers you to maintain a positive mindset regardless of external circumstances.
Positive Responses to Negative Events
Instead of reacting negatively to negative events, find positive ways to respond. Rather than letting anger consume you, find ways to reframe and reinterpret situations to maintain your own peace of mind. Responding with positivity can lead to better outcomes and a more fulfilling life.

By implementing these strategies into your daily life, you can cultivate a positive mindset that will not only benefit your own well-being but also positively impact those around you. Remember, fostering a positive mindset is a journey that requires consistent effort and practice.
Don't Take Our Word For It
The Negativity Fast offers a transformative app...

The Best Sales Leaders Share These 4 Traits
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Sales Gravy Senior Master Sales Trainer Brad Adams talks with Learnit CEO Damon Lembi about maintaining authenticity and integrity as a sales leader. They discuss the importance of doing the right thing, the four key traits for successful leadership (humility, curiosity, integrity, and courage), the significance of continuous learning and sharing knowledge with the team, and why organizations should invest in training and support for their leaders.

Damon's book, "The Learn It All Leader," focuses on leadership in times of rapid change. It provides his unique perspective on leadership, gained through his experiences in the corporate learning world.
Leading with integrity and making ethical choices, even in sales, starts with making a commitment to always doing the right thing.
There are four key traits for successful leadership: humility, curiosity, integrity, and courage. Each of these traits are specifically important for sales leaders and positively impact their teams.
It is critical for sales leaders to be curious and open-minded, as it helps them understand their team members' perspectives and provide effective guidance and support.
Leaders must always be seeking opportunities to learn and grow, in turn building a culture of continuous learning and development.
Organizations should invest in training and support for their leaders, ensuring they have the necessary skills to succeed. Consistent reinforcement and follow-up ensures the effectiveness of training initiatives.

Taking An All-In Approach to Leadership
Being a leader doesn't necessarily mean managing a large team. Each of us has the potential to be a leader in our own way. As an individual sales rep, you have the opportunity to be a leader within your team and also in your role as a parent. I want to emphasize that the term "leader" includes all of us.

Taking an all-in approach to leadership means giving your full effort and putting in 100% commitment. It's about giving your best in everything you do.

This concept also applies to sales. Sales is not a profession where you can casually say, "I'll give sales a try today" or "I'll make ten calls and see what happens." You need to be fully dedicated to sales or to your leadership role, or whatever it is you're doing. Even if you give your all and face failure, there are valuable learning opportunities that can benefit you in the future.

If you want to lead, influence, motivate, and guide others, you can't just dip your toe in. You have to be fully committed, and people will recognize and appreciate it. If you're not authentic and engaged, it will be a problem.
4 Traits Of Successful Sales Leaders
1. Humility:

Acknowledging Limitations: A humble sales leader recognizes their limitations and leverages the expertise of their team. It's about understanding that the collective knowledge of the team often surpasses individual understanding.
Embracing Collaboration: Encouraging open communication and collaboration among team members fosters an environment where ideas flow freely, leading to innovative sales strategies.

2. Curiosity:

Effective Questioning: Curiosity in sales involves asking probing questions to truly understand the client's needs and challenges. This curiosity leads to valuable insights that can be utilized to tailor solutions to meet the client's specific requirements.
Active Listening: Cultivating curiosity also means being an active listener. Sales leaders should encourage their teams to listen attentively, allowing them to grasp the nuances of client conversations and respond thoughtfully.

3. Integrity:

Doing the Right Thing: Sales leaders should emphasize ethical sales practices. This means being honest with clients, even if it means redirecting them to a different, more suitable solution. Long-term relationships are built on trust,

Silence Isn't Awkward— It's A Powerful Tool
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Keith Lubner, Sales Gravy Executive VP, and Jessica Stokes, Sales Gravy Master Sales Trainer, discuss strategies that leverage discomfort on sales calls to drive engaging conversations and achieve better outcomes. By intentionally using silence, sales professionals can prompt prospects to actively engage and lean into the conversation.

Preparation is key, and when executed correctly, this technique can inspire meaningful connections and foster a deeper understanding of customer needs. The goal is to strike a balance and avoid excessive discomfort, while still capturing attention and prompting thoughtful responses from your prospect.

This approach can be effective in both in-person and phone sales meetings, as long as the sales professional is both intentional and well-prepared.

Leveraging discomfort can drive engaging sales conversations, lead to more successful sales interactions, and yield better outcomes.
Introducing discomfort helps reset the typical cadence of sales meetings. Creating a brief moment of silence by taking a sip of water or a beverage, for example, prompts prospects to fill the void with their thoughts and opinions.
Sales professionals should aim to actively engage prospects and encourage them to share their perspectives.
Meaningful connections are fostered when prospects are given the opportunity to actively participate in the conversation and a deeper understanding of customer needs can be achieved through this approach.
Preparation is key to confidently employ this strategy. Sales professionals should have a list of well-thought-out questions ready to guide the conversation.

Discomfort Is A Misunderstood Emotional Response
We've all experienced that awkward silence during a call with a prospect. When faced with uncomfortable situations, it can trigger fear or avoidance. As sales professionals, what do we tend to do?

We want to fill the silence, right? Because it's uncomfortable. Our heart races a little faster, and our amygdala kicks in. We start blurting things out, talking over the prospect, and never really getting what we need from them or triggering their self-disclosure loop. This is where the power of discomfort comes into play.
Use Silence To Your Advantage
In those moments of silence, it's important to let the silence marinate a bit. As a sales professional, you need to be intentional about allowing the silence to exist. Both you and the prospect feel the anxieties of filling the void, but you don't want to win the race of who talks first. You want to sit back, listen more, and let them do the talking.

In the virtual world, with technology lags and transmission delays, it becomes even more challenging. When you ask a question, there's a pause before they even hear it. If you start answering the question without realizing this, you're speaking over them. This is
Give Your Prospect A Chance To Respond
To leverage the power of discomfort in virtual meetings, try this simple trick:

Have a cup of coffee or a bottle of water with you. Ask a question, then take a sip of your drink. This prevents you from talking while giving the prospect time to answer. When you create a lag by pausing after asking a question, it prompts the other person to respond.
Reframe Your Question
However, it's important not to wait too long and make it uncomfortable. If they don't answer in a reasonable amount of time, you can fill the silence by reframing the question and clarifying what you meant. Taking another sip of water can also signal that you expect a response. This discomfort can be used in a positive way to encourage conversation.
What To Do If Reframing Doesn’t Work
Again, this is the art of having a conversation too. At that point, you're not going to ask the question and reframe it yet again. Instead, you can say something like, "Let's table that for now.

Burnout Is 100% Preventable
In the world of sales, it's easy to lose sight of how our mental and physical health are connected. We're so focused on hitting our targets that we often ignore the signs of burnout until it's too late. Unfortunately, neglecting this balance can really take a toll on our overall well-being.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Jahmie Hilecher, founder of The Move Wellness, discuss the importance of prioritizing health and wellness to support productivity and success.

They emphasize the significance of making conscious choices about food and nutrition, as well as the impact of deep breathing on reducing stress and improving mental clarity. They also highlight the connections between physical and mental well-being and provide practical tips for incorporating healthy habits into daily routines.

Prioritizing health and wellness is crucial for supporting productivity and success. Our well-being directly affects our ability to perform at our best and achieve our goals.
Making conscious choices about food and nutrition can have a significant impact on energy levels and mental clarity. It is essential to nourish our bodies with wholesome and nutritious food that provides the necessary fuel for optimal performance.
Deep breathing exercises help reduce stress and improve focus during sales calls and meetings. Taking a moment to focus on our breath and engage in deep breathing exercises can help us manage stress and promote a calm and centered state of mind.
Physical and mental well-being are interconnected, and taking care of one supports the other. By engaging in regular physical activity, we not only improve our physical fitness but also support our mental health by reducing stress and promoting a positive mood.
Starting the day with stretching and movement can enhance overall well-being. Incorporating stretching and movement into our morning routine can help wake up our bodies and increase blood flow, leading to improved flexibility and overall well-being.
Taking intentional breaths throughout the day can bring a sense of presence. In the midst of a busy day, it is important to pause and take intentional breaths to bring ourselves back to the present moment. Focus on your breath and take deep, mindful breaths to increase oxygen flow to your brain.

Stopping Burnout In Its Tracks Begins With Awareness
It's only when we experience burnout that we realize we've overlooked our physical health and need to address it.

However, without a healthy body to support you, this mindset is not sustainable. Sleep is crucial not only for your physical well-being but also for your brain function. Certain systems in your body need time to restore and recharge, enabling you to achieve greater success in the long run.

Taking care of your basic needs, such as getting enough sleep, eating clean and healthy, taking proper breaks and rest throughout the day, having fun, and engaging in daily movement, is essential. It doesn't have to be lifting weights in the gym; any form of movement can enhance communication, clarity, and creativity in your brain. Prioritizing these aspects will ultimately support you in achieving your goals for a longer period and with greater strength.
Sales Professionals Are The Elite Athletes of The Business World
If we consider salespeople, especially top salespeople, from a different perspective, we can see that they possess crucial skills for modern selling.

However, your mental capacity to be creative and find solutions, as well as your ability to be a consultant, will always be limited by your physical capacity. Many people don't think about it this way. But when I talk about sales professionals being the elite athletes of the business world, I mean that you need both physical and mental strength.

When we think about mind, body, and spirit, we can see that the combination of the mind and body creates a flow.

Why Roleplay Should Be A Key Part of Your Sales Culture
In this podcast, Jeb Blount, Jeremy Olson, and Kristin Isaacson discuss the importance of role-playing in sales. They emphasize the need for leaders to create a culture of role-playing and accountability within their teams. They also highlight the benefits of roleplaying in helping salespeople improve their skills, gain empathy for the customer's perspective, and build confidence. They encourage individuals to find their preferred style of roleplaying and commit to regular practice, even if it feels uncomfortable at first.

Roleplaying in sales is a powerful tool that helps salespeople improve their skills, gain empathy for the customer's perspective, and build confidence. It allows them to practice and refine their sales techniques in a safe environment.
Leaders play a crucial role in creating a culture of roleplaying and accountability within their teams. By embracing and encouraging roleplaying, leaders can foster a collaborative and growth-oriented atmosphere that drives individual and team improvement.
Consistency and commitment are key to successful roleplaying. It should be a regular part of the sales process, rather than a one-time activity. Salespeople should make a commitment to practice regularly, even if it feels uncomfortable at first.
Roleplaying exposes weaknesses and areas for improvement. By simulating different scenarios, salespeople can identify their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to focus on areas that need development and enhancing their overall performance.
Constructive feedback and coaching are essential for growth in roleplaying. Salespeople should seek feedback from their leaders, peers, or even trusted individuals outside the team. This feedback helps them identify areas for improvement and refine their approach.

Creating a Culture of Role-Playing
One key takeaway from this podcast episode is the role of leaders in fostering a culture of role-playing within their teams. By encouraging and embracing roleplaying exercises, leaders can establish an environment where individuals feel safe to practice and refine their sales techniques. This culture of accountability sets the stage for continuous growth and improvement.
Benefits of Role-Playing
Roleplaying allows salespeople to step into the shoes of their customers, understand their perspective, and develop empathy. By simulating real-life scenarios, sales professionals gain insight into the challenges and concerns their customers may face. This understanding enables them to ask the right questions, provide tailored solutions, and build stronger relationships.

Moreover, roleplaying serves as a platform for salespeople to enhance their skills and build confidence. Through practice and repetition, they can refine their pitch, overcome objections, and improve their overall sales performance. Roleplaying provides a controlled environment where individuals can experiment, receive feedback, and make necessary adjustments.
The Role of Consistency
Consistency is a vital component of effective roleplaying. Just as athletes train regularly to maintain peak performance, salespeople must commit to regular practice. Consistent roleplaying ensures that skills remain sharp, and individuals continue to grow. It is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process that drives continuous improvement.
Unifying the Team
Roleplaying has a unifying effect on sales teams. It establishes a shared language, understanding, and approach to sales. By engaging in roleplaying exercises together, team members develop a collaborative mindset and foster a sense of camaraderie. This collaborative atmosphere promotes knowledge-sharing, peer feedback, and mutual support, leading to a stronger, more cohesive team.
Overcoming Discomfort and Embracing Growth
While role-playing may initially feel uncomfortable, it is crucial to overcome this discomfort to reap its benefits fully.

Sales Presentation Skills That Get You To "Yes" Faster
In this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount talks to renowned sales experts Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz about their “Go For No” approach to embracing rejection in sales. They discuss how the fear of “no” sabotages sales presentations and what salespeople can do to deliver more successful and engaging presentations that get them to “yes”.

The fear of failure and rejection can sabotage sales presentations and affect performance.
Embracing rejection and understanding its value can lead to more successful sales presentations. The "Go for No" strategy involves intentionally increasing failure rate and using each "no" as valuable data for growth.
Preparation and structure are essential in delivering compelling sales presentations. Improvisation in sales presentations can come across as unprofessional or unprepared. Don't just show up and throw up.
Storytelling is a powerful tool to engage the audience and connect with them on a deeper level. Sharing stories about overcoming challenges and how your solution helped can capture attention and emotions.
Losing your place or stumbling over words during a presentation is common, but maintaining composure and smoothly continuing is key.
Well-prepared presentations instill confidence in the salesperson and engage the audience more effectively. But it's important to bring passion and authenticity to sales presentations rather than striving for perfection.

The Fear Of “No” Derails Sales Presentations
In the dynamic world of sales, where each presentation is an opportunity to forge valuable connections and secure vital deals, a formidable adversary often lurks in the shadows—the fear of failure and rejection. It's a sentiment that frequently courses through the veins of salespeople, affecting their confidence and ultimately their performance. This fear, while entirely human, can become an insidious obstacle to delivering compelling sales presentations.

But here's the paradox: it's precisely this fear, when understood and harnessed, that can catapult a salesperson from mediocrity to mastery. This podcast delves into the heart of this challenge, exploring why salespeople often grapple with the fear of rejection and failure, how it affects their ability to engage their audience, and most importantly, why embracing this fear can be a game-changer in the competitive world of sales.
What Is “Go For No” All About?
The concept of "Go for No" is about intentionally increasing your failure rate and intentionally hearing "no" more often. The idea behind this is that when you embrace rejection, it paves the way for more "yeses" to come.

However, this doesn't mean that you should simply keep hearing "no" without making any improvements or using the feedback from those rejections. It's important to treat each "no" as valuable data for growth. For instance, you can set goals based on the number of "no" responses you aim to receive, and actively seek out opportunities to hear "no."
Don't Show Up and Throw Up
In the world of sales presentations, there's a phrase that often rings true: "Don't show up and throw up." It's a cautionary mantra that reminds salespeople of the importance of preparation and structure in their interactions with potential clients. Showing up unprepared, with no more than a vague idea of what to say, can lead to a meandering and unconvincing pitch. Instead, successful sales presentations require careful planning.

Salespeople should have their notes ready to go, create a basic outline for the conversation, and prepare specific talking points. While improvisation might seem like a way to appear more "natural," it often results in coming across as unprofessional or unprepared. A well-prepared presentation not only instills confidence in the salesperson but also engages the audience more effectively.

And the truth is, when people speak without preparation,

Delivering A Next-Level Customer Experience
In this Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount talks to Clare Dorrian, SugarCRM's CMO, about putting people first, building human connections, and prioritizing the customer experience in a saturated market.

Clare shares expert insights on outbound prospecting, multi-channel engagement, and building a strong sales culture.

Their conversation covers a range of topics, including the evolution of sales and marketing, the role of relationships in modern selling, and driving pipeline growth through real connection.

In a highly competitive market, differentiation is key. Sales organizations should prioritize customer service and engagement as a means to drive pipeline growth and set themselves apart from competitors.
Outbound prospecting is essential for building pipeline and requires a team effort, with every member of the organization contributing to pipeline growth.
Building a strong sales culture means aligning goals and KPIs across departments, and promoting a team sport mentality that encourages collaboration and communication.
By identifying customer challenges and demonstrating how a recommended product or solution can help solve them, sales professionals can build trust and create value for their customers.
Sales professionals must leverage multichannel, multilayer engagement for reaching decision-making committees.
Salespeople can deliver a next-level buying experience by meeting customers where they are and understanding their communication preferences.
Companies can differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market by prioritizing people, building strong relationships, and providing value to customers.
When sales organizations focus on the customer experience, build a strong sales culture, and promote collaboration and communication across departments, they can drive pipeline growth and set themselves up for long-term success.

Sales And Marketing Are Human Endeavors
Maintaining a focus on human relationships is a differentiating factor for sales organizations, especially in a world where technology seems to be pushing us further away from personal connection.

From a marketing standpoint, this emphasis on connection can be leveraged to generate leads and get more opportunities.

Ultimately, success in your sales organization depends on having the right people who not only understand what your product or service is designed to do, but also know its boundaries. In fact, this expertise is exactly what allows smaller sales forces to be nimble, show more appreciation for customers, and differentiate from their Goliath competitors.

This philosophy should be ingrained in your culture from top to bottom, from the way you recruit to the way you collaborate.

This focus on people is an important differentiator in marketing and go-to-market strategies, but when it is a key part of your DNA, competitors take notice.
Make It Easy For The Customer To Do Business With You
In terms of customer experience, It's not just about believing that the customer is always right, but rather prioritizing the customer above all else. This mentality should extend to sales professionals as well. It's important to remember that a prospect is not yet a customer, but their emotional experience during their journey with you is a consistent predictor of outcomes more so than any other variable.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a sales pitch? We all have at some point in our lifetime.

But which pitches do you remember? You probably remember the ones where the salespeople had an emotional connection with you.

Of course, the price had to be right and the product had to fit your requirements. But what made the difference was when the experience was memorable, and these memories accumulate over time.

It should be easy and enjoyable for people to do business with you. Each time a customer interacts with your organization,

A Great Modern Seller Leverages These 5 Skills
In this podcast, Jeb Blount and Amy Franko discuss the importance of modern sellers having strong business acumen and an ownership mindset. They emphasize the value of being able to provide insight to executives based on knowledge of their organization, rather than regurgitating information that can be found online. They also discuss the importance of discipline and habits in maintaining success as a salesperson, especially when working from home. Finally, they touch on the rebirth of field sales and the importance of building strong relationships with leadership.

Instead of simply regurgitating information that can be found online, sellers must have a deep knowledge of their clients' organizations in order to provide business insights that are truly valuable.
Ask provocative questions that create awareness of potential problems or opportunities within the organization.
Build strong relationships with leadership and even going as far as getting into the "bowels" of the organization to get a better understanding of what's happening.
Modern sellers must also have an ownership, or entrepreneur, mindset. They should look at their sales territory as a business, and make decisions based on the top and bottom line as well as weigh risks and opportunities.
Discipline and habits are also crucial for maintaining success as a modern seller. For instance, you should build a strong plan, set goals, track your activities and metrics, and adapt to changes in the sales landscape.
Building strong relationships with leadership and being able to adapt to changes in the sales landscape.

What Differentiates A Modern Seller?
The truth is that there are core basic activities that every salesperson must perform.

Modern sellers have elevated these skills, honing the craft of selling to rise above their competitors and sell differently - and better.

When Amy was doing research for her new book, The Modern Seller, she noticed a particular set of skills that stood out from the rest in terms of indicators of success for salespeople. There are the "everyday skills" of prospecting, presenting, negotiating, and closing. Then there are five skills that modern sellers consistently do better than others, and are clear differentiators.

Agility
Entrepreneurship
Holistic Sales Territory and Pipeline Management
Strategic Relationship Building
Ambassadorship

Through Amy’s career and observations, she has found that mastering these five skills is key to standing out as a top seller. Whether you are an individual seller or a leader building these skills in yourself or your team, these are skills that you should prioritize for the future.
Modern Sellers Are Masters Of Business Acumen
One of the biggest challenges for sellers today is the level of business acumen that they are expected to have. It's not just about having a feature-benefit-price conversation anymore. Instead, sellers must study the client's business and industry to have more in-depth, business-oriented conversations.

Modern sellers need to display a level of business acumen that other sellers may not possess, or they may need to focus on improving these skills. Ultimately, a modern seller is someone who truly differentiates themselves and stands out for their clients.

The best sellers out there cannot be separated from their product or service because they are a crucial factor in the equation of their client's success.

Business acumen is essential to connect with clients and demonstrate the value of your services or products in addressing their individual and unique business challenges, issues, and opportunities.

In longer cycle sales, where the complexity is higher, simply providing a standardized proposal deck is not be enough to stand out. Instead, you need to be able to build a bullet proof business case that clearly demonstrates ROI. This requires the ability to show the actual outc...

If You Don't Take Action, You Won't Get Results
In this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and David Newman, author of Do It! Marketing and Do It! Selling, discuss exactly how to connect and engage with decision makers and avoid the "middle management trap". One of the most effective approaches that salespeople can leverage to close bigger deals is using interviews as a sales strategy to gather intelligence, build relationships, and connect with high-level decision makers. Through asking penetrating questions and providing valuable resources, consultants and salespeople can establish themselves as experts and earn the right to have pivotal conversations with their top prospects.

Strategic planning and research are paramount for sales and marketing professionals, including targeting a specific market, establishing credibility, using interviews as a prospecting channel, and planning for the future.
Target a specific market instead of trying to target everyone. Determine where to publish, speak, network, post, and participate in blogs, portals, forums, and communities to reach this audience.
Establish credibility in one industry before expanding into others. This requires deep-dive research on market forces, disruption, and compliance regulations. When you track where the money is going, you can prepare for unexpected events and pivot when necessary.
Using interviews as a prospecting channel to gather intelligence, build relationships, and connect with high-level decision makers. focusing on providing value rather than seeking approval or sounding smart during conversations with economic buyers.
To plan for the future, dedicate time to strategic planning based on research, conversations, and feedback from past clients. It's important to always have a plan B in place and be ready to shift gears and change direction when necessary.
By focusing on specific markets, establishing credibility, and using interviews as a prospecting channel, professionals can connect with high-level decision makers and achieve their business goals.

To Sell, You Have to Take Action
As a sales professional, you face a simple choice.

Stay put or go out and do something. Believing that "if you build it, they will come" is a fallacy.

Planning is essential, but without conversations, it won't lead to success. It's time to take action and start having those conversations.

Shake hands and create familiarity with your voice, face, and message. This way, when people see you, they will recognize you and remember your message. This is where serendipity happens.

The key message of David's new book, Do It! Selling is that without action, there will be no results. Leads do not come out of the blue. Sometimes these leads may seem serendipitous, but they actually result from the actions you take to create an environment conducive to generating leads.

If you consistently put in effort, the universe has a way of rewarding you, but it won't reward you for simply waiting for success to come to you. Waiting around for leads to come to you is a reactive approach.

Instead, you need to be proactive and actively seek fresh targets on a regular basis.
The 3 PR Game Plan: Personalized, Professional, Public Relations
For those who are a bit reluctant to sell, David presents a new definition for sales: 'Are you sending enough invitations to a conversation with enough of the right people about how you can help them?' This conversation may not always lead to a commercial relationship, but results in an introduction or referral.

Sometimes, the person may not be the right fit at the moment, but they may come back in the future with an opportunity to work together. Therefore, it's important to put fresh prospects on your radar daily by sending enough invitations to a conversation with real people whom you can help, with the intention of opening a conversation and seeing where it goes.

Enter the Three P. R. Game Plan,

Mastermind Group Incredible Asks Jeb Blount Their Toughest Sales Questions
In this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Mastermind Group Incredible asks Jeb Blount their real-life questions as he provides solutions to overcome their toughest sales challenges. Some of their questions include: standing out in a final round interview process, targeting and selling into larger accounts, losing to a competitor, and ways to contact hard-to-reach stakeholders on LinkedIn. Whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, sales professional, you'll take away powerful strategies to advance your career, grow your business, or land your dream account.

Small companies lose customers because they take them for granted and don't address their concerns.
To win big deals, put a wedge between the incumbent vendor and the customer and look for issues that can be addressed.
Personalized service and attention are selling points for small companies managing accounts with larger competitors.
The hardest thing to do when scaling a business is moving from where you are to the next place.
To get big accounts, create a list of 10-25 dream accounts and target them specifically.
When using LinkedIn, sending a voice message or using Vidyard for video messages can be effective.
Layering on other parts of a messaging sequence, such as phone calls or handwritten notes, can increase effectiveness.
Chat GPT can be a useful tool for writing proposals and creating sales messages, but it can also degrade the quality of written communication if used lazily.

Q: How Do I Stand Out In The Final Round Of The Interview Process?
To leave a lasting impression during a presentation in your final round of interviews, use a strategic approach. A useful tactic is to speak last, also known as the availability bias.

In a final presentation interview, demonstrating ROI is crucial, especially in today's economy. Use a business case to showcase the value you bring. Start by discussing what you discovered during the discovery phase, the problems you faced, and the future state after your program is implemented. Highlight values that are important to individual stakeholders, like personal outcomes and emotional outcomes such as peace of mind and trust in the vendor. Be sure to make your case using business language, not just marketing brochures, and support it with math.

To provide a value framework, follow these steps: articulate the problem you discovered, make a recommendation to solve it, and describe the outcomes your recommendation will generate in terms of measurable business outcomes, personal outcomes, and emotional outcomes. Use the audience's language and be specific. By following this structure, you'll help the audience absorb information more effectively.
Q: How Do I start Targeting Larger Accounts?
Scaling up into larger businesses can be overwhelming, but the first step is to take action. While hitting singles may be easier, it's important to pursue bigger opportunities to gain experience selling larger deals.

However, it's also important to not overlook the value of smaller deals and to have a consistent pipeline of singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. This helps de-risk your pipeline and income while providing opportunities for growth and a bigger income.

To reduce risk in your pipeline, it's crucial to have strong qualifying mechanisms and a solid understanding of a potential client's fit with your company. Identifying decision-making roles and stakeholders is also essential.

When pursuing a deal, it's important to build an unassailable business case for why your company is the right choice. This involves mapping out every detail and identifying potential challenges and solutions.

Finally, use murder boarding to identify potential obstacles and develop strategies to overcome them. By the time of the final presentation, you should feel confident that the client has already made the decision to do busin...

Curiosity Is Your Key To Effective Cold Calling
On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Ulysses Price, filling in for Jeb Blount, interviews Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell is a software service that helps salespeople initiate conversations with prospects. Beall explains how market dominance and the humble cold call are connected. His prospecting philosophy requires the salesperson to build trust and demonstrate curiosity, master the first few seconds of the conversation to create emotional buy-in, and avoid triggering psychological reactance. By breaking down the conversation and practicing each part in training, sales reps can improve their skills and conduct more successful sales conversations.

Chris Beall connected the dots between market dominance and the potential impact of a humble cold call.
Calibrated callers are comfortable using a psychological framework, playful curiosity, and confidence to create a clean read from potential customers and insist on a meeting.
The seven-second rule is a technique for building trust in a cold call by demonstrating tactical empathy and competence to solve the problem of the caller being an interruption.
The risk of B2B sales is a career risk, not a financial risk. B2B salespeople are necessary because buyers risk their careers when making buying decisions.
Salespeople must gain the trust of potential customers to become the expert and be on their side.
Sales reps must be able to make a clean read of a potential customer, understand their needs and interests, and provide value.
Handle objections in a delicate and curious manner, stick to your guns, and position yourself as an expert to establish trust quickly.

Gain Your Prospect's Trust In Seven Seconds
Cold calling is still one of the most effective ways of reaching potential customers, but it can be a daunting task for many salespeople, especially when you don't know where to start.

To start a conversation, we need to gain someone's trust. Without trust, they won't listen to us, and we won't get far. When we make a cold call, the person we're speaking with only wants to end the conversation while keeping their self-image intact. If they didn't care about their self-image, they would just hang up. So we have a small window of opportunity to gain their trust— just seven seconds.

In those seven seconds is to help the other party see that we see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy. Secondly, we need to demonstrate to them that we're competent in solving a problem they have right now. Their problem could be me, but I can always offer to go away in exchange for something.

You want them to listen to you, so you make that offer. For example, you might open the call with a statement like:

"I know I'm an interruption. Can I take 27 seconds to tell you why I called?"

By saying this, you're self-indicting right at the beginning. That's what the other party is already thinking about you. You beat them to the punch. As a seller, it's essential to establish trust with your audience, especially in B2B sales. Eventually, they have to trust you more than they trust themselves and view you as the expert. This is why the first seven seconds are crucial in establishing trust with your audience. Do it wisely, and they will trust you forever, but try selling to them, and you'll lose their trust in an instant.

Then comes the pitch:

"We've made a breakthrough that eliminates the waste and frustration that hinder your best sales reps from being effective on the phone. My call today is to request 15 minutes of your time to share this with you. Do you have your calendar handy?"

Sounds easy, right? But it's not. The waste is economic, and the frustration is emotional. That's because frustration triggers the part of our brain that causes us to lash out. Be careful not to trigger anger and instead, use a tone of voice that shows you understand what frustration mean...

Building and Leading a Successful Sales Team
On this episode of the podcast, Allison Walsh, Vice President of Business Development and Branding for Advanced Recovery Systems, a national behavioral healthcare company, discusses her experience in building and leading a successful sales team. Starting as the second employee of the company, she has been instrumental in its growth to a team of a thousand and counting. The organization offers inpatient substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and a mental wellness application called Nobu. Walsh shares insights on the importance of trust, relationships, and professional development in nurturing and retaining sales talent, as well as the challenges and opportunities of pivoting to virtual selling during the pandemic.

Allison shares her experience of nurturing and developing sales talent, and her journey as a young leader managing more experienced team members.
Trust, relationships, and professional development are instrumental in nurturing and retaining sales talent.
Focus on personal and professional development instead of financial incentives. Showing extreme compassion and support for your team pays off in the long run for both company culture and retention.
Create other career pathways for people to develop personally and professionally, even if they don't want the responsibility of managing humans.
Motions that leaders do to create relationship and trust with their people are the same behaviors that salespeople can emulate to build relationship and trust with their prospects.
Allison shares how her organization pivoted to virtual selling during the pandemic and invested in video technology to communicate with their partners for a blended approach to sales.
Discover the power of seeing, valuing, and hearing every employee and looking at the world from the perspective of "everybody matters."

Sales Training Is An Investment In YOU
In this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount is joined by Sarah Browner, the Global Sales Enablement Manager at Adobe. If you are a sales leader, sales enablement professional, or training facilitator, you will want to tune in for their conversation about keeping learners engaged and using feedback to improve enablement initiatives.

As for salespeople, you’ll find out why it’s critical to continue advancing your skills and investing in yourself throughout your sales career.

Sales enablement is a critical investment for companies looking to increase sales.
Sales skills, particularly soft skills, are perishable and need to be continuously developed.
Taking advantage of free training opportunities is crucial for personal and professional development.
Learning is never wasted, and even reviewing familiar concepts can provide new perspectives.
Leaders and trainers should give learners options and ask for feedback to keep them engaged.
Meeting learners where they are means providing information in a modality that works best for them.

Increase Skills to Increase Sales
As part of Sarah’s role, she is responsible for curating enablement for over 2000 individual contributing sales reps for Adobe, globally. She either finds or creates the information that their sales reps need to perform their jobs more effectively.

Adobe, like hundreds of other companies that we work with at Sales Gravy, invest in sales enablement and training for one simple reason— to increase sales, sellers need to continually increase their skillset.
Why Invest In Sales Enablement?
Sales training and enablement isn’t just for new hires. Salespeople must not only master the basics and fundamentals of selling, but in order to see continued success and growth, it is crucial that they advance their skills— long after the onboarding process has concluded.

One of the frustrations that sales enablement leaders face is hearing dissent from salespeople who think they know everything and don't need to learn more.

This way of thinking is dangerous. Sales as a profession is changing constantly, especially with the never-ending advances in technology.

To make your number and stay ahead, you need to be adept with these new technologies and always be looking for opportunities to expand your knowledge when it comes to your product, your competition, and the selling tools at your disposal.
There Is No Unused Learning
You might be instructed or advised to join a team-wide training session or read a book as part of a team book club. And you might think, “There’s nothing new here.”

The truth is, this cynicism is holding you back. Almost everything we learn, everything that's presented to us, someone has already thought of.

The important part of taking in information, even if it’s something you knew already, is the chance to reconfigure your thinking. In sales, we apply the fundamental basics of how we interact with people, from soft skills to how we develop our products, to different contexts and circumstances.

Products, services, and software change, and we must learn to navigate those changes out of necessity. In training, you might learn a concept or hear a practical piece of advice you’ve heard before, but you can get a new perspective on existing knowledge because it’s presented or applied in a different context.

Learning is never wasted.
Never Turn Down Free Training
Your company likely provides training opportunities, so it's wise to take advantage of them.

Workshops, even virtual ones, are delivered in a live format and watching a recording won't provide the same benefit. Attending training sessions live or in person allows you to learn from your coworkers, share ideas, and expand your way of thinking.

Investing in your education and training is important, because it makes a difference. At Sales Gravy University, we have 30,000 users,

Emotional Intelligence Is A Sales Superpower
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount sits down with Robin Hills, a business psychologist and expert in emotional intelligence from the UK.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to combine thinking and feelings to make good decisions and build high-quality relationships.
Emotional resilience is essential in sales, and it involves understanding and managing your own emotions to influence the emotions of others.
Mental resilience is also important in sales, and it involves having a clear vision of what you want to achieve, being flexible and adaptable, and having a support network.
Emotional resilience involves having a clear understanding of realistic optimism, which means having a clear vision of what you want to achieve, what outcomes you are looking for, and understanding that there is meaning in what you're doing.
It's important to have a support network of people you can turn to for help, and to establish a relationship of trust with your manager.
It's important to interrupt negative self-talk and replace it with something positive, such as listening to a podcast or reading a book.
Complaining can turn a support group into a negative space, and it's important to have constructive conversations and avoid cynicism.

Emotional intelligence is a concept that Daniel Goleman launched and popularized approximately 30 years ago.

Robin began his career in sales in the 1980s and has been selling consistently ever since. Although he no longer holds the title of salesperson, he proudly wore that badge for well over a quarter of a century.

Today, Robin's company Ei4Change (Emotional Intelligence 4 Change) coaches and trains individuals and organizations on emotional intelligence, positive psychology, and neuroscience in the workplace.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to combine your thinking with your feelings in order to build high-quality relationships and make authentic decisions. While it is a simple concept, it can be difficult to execute, particularly in situations with intense emotions or pressure.

Relationships and decision-making play a crucial role in this process. It is essential to have high-quality relationships with people you can turn to and say, "Hey, I'm having a bad day. Can we talk about something other than work? Or do something together that can take my mind off things and help me get back to it tomorrow?" This allows you to step away from the situation and take a break.

Salespeople, in general, are mentally resilient and must demonstrate high levels of emotional intelligence in order to be effective.

Field-based salespeople, who may not work in an office, often need to motivate themselves and have an inner drive to sell to their clients.

Salespeople handle a lot from customers and clients, and have good and bad days like everyone else. Emotional intelligence in sales involves understanding and managing your own emotions to influence the emotions of others.
You Choose How You React to Your Emotions
Emotions are a natural reaction to our environment, and we cannot control their occurrence. However, we can choose how we respond to them.

Emotions prepare our body mentally and physically for events, and the intensity of emotions compounds with each event. At a certain point, emotions can become so intense that making a simple, effective choice becomes difficult.

Experiencing fear, for example, is not something that we can control or prevent.

In such moments, we are faced with a choice: do we react irrationally to our fear and potentially put ourselves in danger, or do we use the presence of our emotions as information to assist us in productive, clear decision-making?

We can choose to become immobilized, paralyzed, or act out in self-destructive ways. and we can choose to handle our emotions, turn them into something constructive,

Great Sales Messaging Isn't Rocket Science
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jim Karrh, Ph.D. and Jeb Blount discuss the essentials of sales messaging, how poor communication skills damage your brand, the stories we tell ourselves and our prospective customers, and what the advent of automation tools like Chat GPT means for salespeople. You’ll learn how to translate marketing messages into effective sales conversations, whether in person, virtually, or over the phone.

Prioritize positioning and lead the conversation to close more deals
CMOs and marketing teams must take ownership of the writing that their salespeople produce. This can be accomplished by incorporating writing development into sales training and coaching efforts
Use empathy and insight to connect with prospects and ensure that you establish trust at the beginning of the sales conversation.
Focus on the buyer's problem and the urgency behind it, rather than just promoting the product's features and benefits. Then, simplify messaging to get customers to say yes and move forward.
Create a framework and sequence for conversations, especially in discovery and closing conversations.
Use automation tools like Chat GPT to improve written communication, but remember that authenticity is key and phony, robotic messaging won't close deals.

Strategic Messaging Is Crucial For Any Sales or Marketing Organization
In today's market, it's increasingly difficult to find and take full advantage of precious sales opportunities. That's why it's so important to prioritize positioning and lead the conversation to close more deals.

At the University of Alabama, Jim Karrh, Ph.D. teaches coursework around innovative marketing and sales messaging. His curriculum is informed by his background in B2B consulting and his previous experience as a CMO for a private company.

During his time as a CMO, Jim became frustrated with the sales team's inability to effectively communicate the brand’s core messaging to both their direct sales team and independent distributors.

This experience led Jim to focus on bridging the gap between marketing and sales in his consulting work with B2B sales teams. Now, Jim uses his understanding of communication and psychology to help improve the practical day-to-day realities of salespeople and sales leaders.
Writing Ability Is Key For Clear Communication
Salespeople, even those with a college education, often face challenges with writing. If you're a leader and observe this trend within your organization, rest assured you're not alone. Nonetheless, writing and communication skills hold immense value and should be seamlessly integrated into your sales training and coaching efforts.

It's common for individuals to believe they lack writing ability, but in roles like sales, management, or leadership, writing is an essential skill—and usually an untapped secret weapon.

Writing compels you to structure your ideas coherently, enhancing focus on essential aspects, connecting concepts, establishing sequence, refining structure, and avoiding unnecessary wordiness. This process instills discipline, thereby fostering improved thinking and communication. Sadly, it's a rare skill and discipline in today's professional landscape.

The importance of writing extends beyond mere formality; it reflects our value as professionals. Throughout the selling process and in the eyes of customers, how we sound and come across in writing can significantly influence judgments.

Teams often need to revisit this aspect as people may not possess the ability to write naturally due to a lack of prior teaching or experience. By addressing this deficit and incorporating writing development into training, individuals can unlock their full potential as effective communicators and salespeople.
Poor Written And Verbal Communication Is Killing Your Brand And Your Bottom Line
If you're a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO),

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Sales Mastermind Group "Awesome" asks Jeb Blount sales questions. If you've ever had a question you wanted to ask Jeb then you'll love this episode. It's free flowing, insightful, and informative.
There is so much to learn from this episode including:

- How to get more prospecting done in less time.

- Building targeted prospecting lists and leveraging social proof to get engagement.

- Keys to building better prospecting lists.

- How to be more confident with your messaging.

- How to be more consistent with Fanatical Prospecting Sequences.
The sales lessons you'll learn in this episode are so powerful that you'll want to listen to it multiple times and share it with your entire team.
Mastermind Groups: A Powerful Way to Start Selling and Leading Better
A Mastermind Group is a peer-to-peer mentoring group where individuals come together to help each other solve their problems and improve their lives or businesses.

Mastermind Groups are powerful tools for personal and professional growth. They can foster a sense of community and connection, help members overcome challenges, and facilitate significant progress towards their goals.

The concept was popularized by Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book "Think and Grow Rich" who believed that the collective intelligence of a group is far greater than the sum of its parts.

The members of a Mastermind Group are typically successful individuals who are motivated and dedicated to achieving their goals. They meet regularly (either in-person or virtually) to discuss their challenges, set goals, brainstorm ideas, and offer each other advice and support.

In a Mastermind Group, the focus is on collaboration, growth, and mutual support. Each member benefits from the wisdom, experiences, and perspectives of the others. This dynamic leads to fresh insights, new ideas, and powerful motivation. Participants can hold each other accountable for their goals, offer encouragement, and provide honest and constructive feedback.

A Mastermind Group can be focused on various topics, such as prospecting, time management, large account strategies, proposal and presentation skills, account management and retention, and more. They can be informal and self-organized or facilitated by a professional coach or mentor.

Sales Gravy Mastermind Groups are an excellent way to improve your sales skills, become a more effective leader, or solve problems. Our masterminds are facilitated by a Master Sales Trainer and include additional training resources to build on group discussions.
7 Reasons You Should Consider Joining a Mastermind Group

Knowledge Sharing: Mastermind groups can offer a wealth of shared experiences and insights. The diverse backgrounds and skill sets of the group can provide different perspectives on sales techniques, strategies, and approaches.
Networking Opportunities: Mastermind groups often bring together professionals from various industries, offering the opportunity to build a strong professional network. These relationships can lead to business partnerships, referrals, or other collaboration opportunities that can help grow your sales.
Problem Solving: You can bring your sales challenges to the group, and together, brainstorm and strategize solutions. The collective intelligence and creativity of the group can help you solve problems faster and more effectively than you might alone.
Accountability: Setting goals is easy, but maintaining momentum and staying accountable can be challenging. In a mastermind group, members help hold each other accountable, which can be very motivating and contribute to better sales results.
Emotional Support and Motivation: Sales can be a tough job with frequent rejections and setbacks. Being a part of a supportive group of peers who understand the challenges can provide emotional support, boost morale, and motivate you to keep going even during difficult times.

When They Say No: Overcoming Rejection And Shifting Your Mindset

Introduces Andrea and Richard's new book, When They Say No, and provides valuable insights on overcoming rejection in sales.
The fear of rejection has evolutionary roots, but it can be reframed to reach positive sales outcomes.
Breaking the negative thought spiral that follows rejection is crucial and should be given due importance.
The opening phase in sales, though often overlooked, holds significant value in establishing rapport and understanding customer needs.
Learn practical strategies to effectively handle rejection and rewire the mindset for success.
Salespeople should endeavor to embrace rejection as an opportunity for growth and relationship-building.
When salespeople overcome the fear of rejection, they achieve lasting sales success.

Your Fear of "No" Is Holding You Back
Are you tired of feeling defeated by rejection in sales and find yourself avoiding potential opportunities because the fear of hearing "no" holds you back? It's time to shift your mindset and embrace rejection as a stepping stone to success.

In this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, renowned sales experts Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz share valuable insights from their book When They Say No that will revolutionize your sales approach.

The Power of Reframing Rejection
Our fear of rejection is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history.

Throughout human evolution, being accepted by the tribe was crucial for survival. Rejection meant being cast out and left to fend for oneself, facing increased vulnerability to predators and the loss of the collective support and resources provided by the group.

Our brains developed a powerful instinct to avoid rejection at all costs.

However, the good news is that we possess the ability to hack our brains and change our perception of rejection. Instead of automatically equating rejection with death or social isolation, we can actively reframe our thoughts.

By recognizing that rejection in the modern world does not carry the same life-or-death consequences, we can replace our negative thoughts with more productive ones.

We can remind ourselves that rejection is often subjective and influenced by various factors beyond our control. With this shift in perspective, we can approach rejection as a valuable learning experience, an opportunity to grow and improve rather than a definitive judgment of our worth.
Breaking the Cycle of Negative Thoughts
Salespeople, in particular, are often vulnerable to a dangerous spiral of negative thoughts following rejection. When faced with a rejection, it is easy to get caught in a downward spiral of worry, anxiety, and self-doubt.

This negative cycle not only hampers our emotional well-being but also impairs our effectiveness in sales. The more we dwell on negative outcomes, the more our confidence wavers, and the less persuasive and motivated we become.

Recognizing this pattern is crucial for breaking free from its grasp. By actively reframing our thoughts, we can disrupt the negative cycle and redirect our focus towards positive outcomes.

Instead of dwelling on what went wrong or personalizing the rejection, we can shift our attention to the lessons learned, the potential for improvement, and the possibilities of future success.

It is essential to understand that rejection is not solely a psychological problem but also a physiological one. The fear of rejection triggers stress responses in our bodies, which further perpetuate the negative thought patterns.

By recognizing this physiological aspect and consciously choosing to reframe our thoughts, we can liberate ourselves from the chains of fear and propel ourselves towards success in sales and beyond.
The Power of the Opening Phase
The opening phase of the sales process is an aspect often overlooked in sales literature. Selling goes beyond pitching product features and freebies.

Moving From A Culture of Efficiency to A Culture of Effectiveness

Acting and improv skills are similar to soft skills in sales— leading with empathy and understanding your audience and your customer is paramount.
Sales leaders need to build a strong sales culture and eliminate mediocrity, which starts with the willingness to invite, embrace, and accept feedback.
Synchronous conversations are making a comeback. Whether you get coffee with a prospect in your own town or fly to your prospect's city to close a deal, face-to-face interactions are invaluable.
Sales isn't an easy profession, and leaders should be honest and transparent with their teams about the work required to close deals.
Efficiency does not equal effectiveness. Sales technology should focus on making people better, not just faster.
Sales organizations need to adapt to changes in the market and rethink what's working and what's not.

In this podcast, Mike Cabot and Jeb Blount discuss the challenges of sales in the current climate, including the impact of technology and the need for emotional intelligence when dealing with analytical stakeholders. They also emphasize the importance of celebrating small victories and providing feedback to improve performance.

Sales Is Like Acting— Empathy Is Essential
As a child, Mike Cabot and his sister starred in a local cable television show for seven years. Later on, Cabot gained acting experience both in theater and through featuring in commercials.

In his sales career, he has been able to leverage the improv skills he learned from acting at an early age to connect, engage in deep listening, and show empathy to prospects and clients.

The job of a sales professional isn't just to sell a product or service, it's to help people. And in order to truly help people, great sales professionals have to be great empathizers.

The same can be said for actors. To tell a story convincingly, an actor must take on the character's persona. She must step into their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Otherwise, it's not authentic.

Empathy is a critical skill for sales professionals, and acting is an excellent way to hone this skill by putting yourself in someone else's shoes.

This is what sets the best salespeople apart. They can quickly and easily see the world through someone else's eyes and adjust their messaging, style, and strategy accordingly.
The Show Must Go On
Often, people make excuses for why they can't sell, such as a lack of leads or poor marketing. As sales professionals, we must deliver for the audience in front of us, no matter what. Embracing this idea is crucial in building a strong sales culture.

Mastering the same soft skills that improv actors use is critical because you must listen not only with your ears, but also with your eyes and intuition. On stage, if you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't know how to respond when something gets thrown back at you.
Dealing With Analytical Stakeholders
Buyers use emotions to make decisions. Tap into their emotions and stories to meet their needs.

Engaging with analytical stakeholders in sales requires a thoughtful and empathetic approach. Understanding the different levels and roles within the stakeholder groups is crucial, as each individual has unique concerns and priorities.

While these stakeholders are analytical by nature, it's important to recognize that emotions play a significant role in their decision-making process.

By tapping into their emotional needs and sharing relevant stories, sales professionals can connect with them on a deeper level and demonstrate how their product or service can help solve their problems.

Building trust and showing the value of saving time or avoiding negative outcomes are key strategies for engaging with these stakeholders.

Salespeople often encounter challenges when engaging with analytical stakeholders.

Human Connection Is Irreplaceable

Dress appropriately for the situation and audience— it's the little things that close the sale.
Do research on who you're trying to sell to and a personalized follow-up email after a demo or meeting that adds value to the conversation. Video messages following a meeting are a unique way to stay in front of your prospect and show them you truly care about helping them solve their business challenges.
Use handwritten notes to show appreciation and make your communication more human. Taking the time to write a note to your prospect demonstrates your commitment to professionalism and helps built trust.
Taking a personalized and phone first sales approach still matters, especially in a world taken over by AI.
Leverage checklists to remember and systematize important tasks. Even surgeons and pilots use checklists to make sure that details don't fall through the cracks.
Sales is a contact sport. Leaders should train, drill, and reinforce the basics and fundamentals with their sales team every single day.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount and Will Yarbrough, VP of Sales at Fleetio, discuss what it means to be a human seller in the age of robots.

Jeb and Will dive into the importance of having organic conversations versus over-engineering the sales process. In this conversation, you'll learn the value of a good first impression, how to maintain engagement with a prospect following a demo, and why being coachable is a strength in sales.

Selling In A Tough Industry Takes Grit— And Emotional Intelligence
Industry experience— especially when selling to blue-collar workers out in the field who are more accustomed to turning wrenches than punching buttons on an app — can be a strength or a weakness for new sales professionals.

Most sales organizations seek individuals who are good communicators, curious, and confident, but also have enough industry knowledge to be credible.

And while industry knowledge is important is sales, the ability to deal with people is crucial.

People with industry experience tend to want everything to be perfect before they can close a deal. As a result, they may take longer to ramp up in a sales organization than those without as much experience, but they can still be taught the right questions to ask.

New sales professionals who don't have much industry experience will be successful if they know how to ask the right questions, find opportunities for ROI, and learn how to close deals in the process.

Taking a more human approach to selling means that experience pales in comparison to the importance of heart and mindset.
The Sales Process Is Overcomplicated
Too many sales organizations are guilty of over-engineering the selling process. The most important thing to remember is that you're a human being having a conversation with another human being. Here are a few ways to simplify the sales process (that don't require the help of a robot).
Professionalism Builds Trust
Buying is an emotional and deeply human experience. In order to close sales and maintain positive customer relationships, you need to keep in mind that prospects buy the person before they buy the product.

The little things matter. It's not about the outcome, but the steps that you take to get to that outcome.

So if you choose not to wear a collared shirt on virtual calls, you put on a hat, decide not to shave, or don't take care in making sure your video presence and audio quality are top-notch, you are taking a series of small risks.

And those risks can greatly impact the velocity of the sale, getting the sale, or the trust that you build with your prospect.

Present yourself in a professional manner, including your appearance, lighting, audio, and video quality. These details may seem small, but they can have a big impact on the trust and velocity of the sale. Remember, the little things matter.
The Humble Checklist

Art Munin, Ph.D. from Liaison International is the guest on this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, hosted by Sales Gravy Master Trainer, Gina Trimarco. They discussed Munin's transition into a sales career.
Munin debunked the myth that one must choose a lifelong career straight out of college, highlighting that more individuals are transitioning into different career paths, such as sales, later in life.
Sales is presented as an exciting, dynamic career with opportunities for personal growth, financial success, and professional satisfaction.
Various reasons for transitioning into sales later in life are discussed, including dissatisfaction with previous jobs, the desire for higher income, and the allure of competition inherent in sales.
Professionals transitioning from non-sales careers bring valuable transferable skills. Examples include communication and people skills from educators, technical expertise from engineers, and analytical skills from financial professionals.
The transition into sales can be challenging, particularly for those with no direct experience. Adapting to the performance-driven nature of sales and mastering Sales Specific Emotional Intelligence are key.
It's possible to transition into a sales career later in life and thrive with the right mindset, transferable skills, and a willingness to learn and adapt.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Art Munin, Ph.D. from Liaison International joins guest host Gina Trimarco, Sales Gravy Master Trainer and Director of Coaching Programs, to discuss how he made the transition into a career in sales.

You'll love the story of how Art talked his way onto the podcast by serenading Gina with a Bon Jovi tune.

This episode is a must-listen for people who are interested in exploring new horizons and sales leaders who may be neglecting non-traditional talent in their recruitment strategies.
Debunking Career Myths
There's a myth that continues to pervade the corporate landscape: you need to pick your lifelong career fresh out of college and stick to it. However, the modern work environment paints a more varied picture, with more people transitioning into entirely different career paths well into their professional lives. One such transition that's gaining traction is the move into sales from non-sales careers.
Sales is Exciting
Sales is an exciting career, brimming with potential for personal growth, financial success, and professional satisfaction. It offers a dynamic work environment where no two days are alike.

It is also a role where direct, tangible outcomes (like meeting quotas or securing contracts) can lead to immediate rewards.

Furthermore, the advent of technology has made it possible for salespeople to work from diverse locations, offering both flexibility and freedom.

Why Transition Later in Life?
There are various reasons why people choose to transition into sales later in life. Some find their previous jobs unfulfilling or stagnant, some are driven by the desire for higher income potential, and others are enticed by the challenge and competitive spirit inherent in sales.

Moreover, many skills acquired in other professions - such as communication, problem-solving, and relationship building - are directly transferrable to sales roles.
Transferrable Skills from Non-Sales Careers
Regardless of their previous career path, professionals transitioning into sales bring a wealth of transferable skills.

For example, educators have exceptional communication and people skills, which are vital for engaging clients and building relationships. Likewise, engineers or technicians might have the technical expertise that's invaluable for sales in the tech sector. Professionals from financial or consulting backgrounds bring analytical and problem-solving skills, enabling them to understand a customer's needs and craft appropriate solutions.

Building on these existing skills,

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount (Sales Gravy CEO and author of Sales EQ) and Graham Hooper (CEO of Ellison Technologies) discuss the keys to leading your sales team in uncertain times. You'll learn how to succeed in volatile economic times by effectively handling decision deferment objections and conducting thorough research during the discovery phase of the sales process.
Key Takeaways:

Salespeople can successfully navigate the transition from a red hot market to a stagnant down market, but it requires grit, discipline, and creativity.
In uncertain economic times and a world increasingly influenced by the power of AI, sales-specific emotional intelligence and human-to-human communication are the most important skills a salesperson can have when establishing trust and building relationships with buyers.
Conducting effective, deep discovery and handling buying decision deferment objections will give salespeople a competitive edge in any economic climate.

Transitioning From A Red Hot Market To A Stagnant Down Market
Many salespeople today are struggling to make the transition from taking advantage of a red hot market to navigating the doldrums of volatile economic times. Some sectors, like real estate, are experiencing the brunt of these changes in the market, where other sectors, like defense are seeing more profit.

Economic swings are cyclical and always will be, but especially in the last twenty four months, sales organizations are moving to a more traditional kind of selling.

Salespeople who know how to get creative, grind it out, and prioritize the fundamentals will see the most success in times like these. However, it’s not easy to make that mindset shift and truly rise to the moment.
The One Thing That Will Always Guarantee Your Success in Sales
For the individual salesperson, the most important thing that you can have in your arsenal to make it out on top in volatile economic times is not above-average intellect or a winning personality— it’s grit.

This is this ability to dig deep and take your career, your future, and your life into your own hands when things are difficult and it seems like there is very little in your control.

Getting up, getting yourself ready for the day, protecting your time and your energy, and making sure that you are putting yourself in front of the right people at the right time with the right message.
Nothing Compares to Real Human Connection
Another strength that will set you apart from other salespeople and allow you to break through the noise and truly connect with the right customers is sales-specific emotional intelligence— Sales EQ.

Salespeople aren’t the only ones experiencing tough times. Real human connection matters today more than ever. You must have the ability to see eye to eye with your customers, meet them where they are, and make them comfortable enough to open up and share their toughest business challenges.

When you connect the dots between their biggest problems and how you can help solve them, you build the foundation for trust and create lasting business relationships as a result. Conducting deep discovery is the key to helping your customers close the gaps and see positive change from your solutions.
The Only Communication You Can Trust is Human-to-Human
In today's world, human-to-human communication is the only trustworthy form of communication. With more AI tools and services than any one person could take full advantage of, it's not secret that we rely heavily on automation to maintain productivity and be maximally effective.

The downside of this is that written communication can easily be created and distributed by AI, which is often seen as inauthentic or untrustworthy.

So has the role of the salesperson changed in the expanding world of automatic and artificial intelligence? The short answer is yes. The rise and mass adoption of automation has certainly changed the value and responsibility of sal...

On this special episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Sales Gravy Senior Master Sales Trainer Brad Adams and bestselling author of Coffee's for Closers, Tony Morris, dive into the art of great discovery, how to ask questions that build rapport and create engagement, and why better questions set the groundwork for better results.

Podcast Takeaways

The ability to listen actively and conduct effective discovery is the most important skill for salespeople.
Authentic engagement is a direct result of great discovery, which is not possible without deep and active listening.
Autopilot is the reason why many salespeople struggle to ask the right questions during the discovery call.
Before every discovery call, salespeople should establish a clear desired outcome, create a list of criteria to frame questions, and prepare to lead prospects through the process.
There are five questions that salespeople should ask in every discovery call, including tag on questions, statement questions, replay questions, clarification questions, and future questions.
By seeing the world through customers' eyes, salespeople can achieve authentic engagement and effective discovery.

Great Discovery Is A Sales Superpower
The two biggest priorities for salespeople are building pipeline through prospecting and discovery. Not expert negotiation, perfect presentation skills, or even closing.

Those steps are integral to the sales process, but not as fundamentally critical as getting in front of as many potential clients as possible, and authentically engaging with as many of them as you can.

Authentic engagement is the result of great discovery, and you can't conduct bulletproof discovery without deep and active listening.
The Biggest Mistake You Can Make In Sales
Listening is one of the most vital skills that a salesperson can hone and develop.

Failure to really listen to your prospect, especially on a discovery call, only sets you up to make more mistakes later on in the sales process, causing you to risk jeopardizing the opportunity.

In discovery conversations, if you're talking more than your prospect, you are reducing your likelihood of effectively connecting with and engaging them.

Don't just listen to respond, listen to learn.

Additionally, it's difficult to do effective discovery without the right questions, and without listening to your prospect, you will ask terrible questions.

If there's one thing that will doom an opportunity before it even picks up speed is wasting your and your prospect's time on the wrong questions.

Derailing the focus of the conversation with surface level questions, or misinterpreting your prospect's answers because you're too busy thinking of a response to actually listen, will only make your job harder and your prospect feel ignored.

Autopilot Is Killing Your Discovery Process
One of the reasons that many salespeople struggle to ask the right questions during the discovery call is that they run on autopilot.

This is a serious problem because instead of approaching the discovery call with proper preparation, confidence, and awareness, they ask questions without thinking about what they're asking.

And as we know, asking bad questions will reap poor results.

Luckily, the solution to this is preparing before every discovery call. Here are three steps you can take before your next conversation to ensure that you are ready to conduct great discovery.
Establish a clear desired outcome.
What are you aiming towards? Is it to set up a demo, meeting, presentation, or is it to make a sale? Have a clear, defined outcome for the conversation, before you even get started. This will help you to get the most value out of the conversation while staying on the right track.
Create a list of criteria to frame your questions.
What are the key criteria you need to know by the end of the conversation in order to set the deal up for success? Before a call,

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount sits down with celebrity chef and entrepreneur Vera Stewart, to learn how persistence and a "never take no for an answer" mindset helped her build a business empire.
Southern Home Cook Turned Nationally Recognized Celebrity Chef
Vera’s entrepreneurial journey started back in her undergrad days, baking cakes and pies for her chemistry professor just to get a passing grade. After graduating from the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) she taught school for four years before starting her family and becoming a stay at home mom.

But Vera missed the sense of self-reliance that having an income brought her, and started a catering business out of her home kitchen in Cartersville, Georgia.

The rest of the story is legendary as she leveraged luck, chance meetings, relentless persistence, and an infectious competitive spirit to build a business empire and nationally known brand in hospitality and cooking.
Taking Risks Creates Opportunity for Success
As her business grew, Vera took advantage of opportunities as they arose. What some might have considered a risk, Vera saw as an area of potential.

From catering the governor's luncheon, to appearing on Food Network, starting her own TV show, and writing amazing cookbooks, Vera always rose to the challenge, took advantage of every opportunity, and never took no for an answer.

She was able to climb to the next level again and again at different points in her story because she held on to a simple, but powerful mantra: “All they can do is say no.”
The VeryVera Show Origin Story
Through a stroke of luck and the willingness to say yes in the face of uncertainty, Vera landed a spot on Throwdown With Bobby Flay. It was a pivot point that changed everything.

Following her appearance with Bobby Flay, a local Augusta, Georgia TV station offered to let Vera record six episodes for her own show. It was an instant hit and she wanted more.

When she was told that it would take five years to get syndicated, Vera was undaunted. She approached a station in Savannah, GA with a pitch to syndicate her new show.
Value First
Vera pitched her show to WSAV, with a crucial mindset—she led with value and focused on what was in it for them. She demonstrated exactly how she could help them sell more advertising.

This is how The VeryVera Show landed its first syndicated market. Today, The VeryVera Show is in 40 markets with over 300 episodes to date and has never had a station cancel.

Resilience. Tenacity. Adversity.
Vera's entrepreneurial journey is as inspiring as it is informative. What we can learn from her story is that resilience, tenacity, and the willingness to face adversity are invaluable to paving the way to a successful business or career.

Sales is a unique profession that affords salespeople the opportunity to essentially work as an entrepreneur within an organization to earn commission.

In many respects, you are your own boss, call your own shots, and have an incredibly high earning potential compared to other lines of work. The only way to take advantage of that potential is to overcome obstacles, take risks, deal with rejection, and not take no for an answer.

Sales professionals who adopt an entrepreneurial mindset can leverage their skills, knowledge, and experience to achieve remarkable success. Entrepreneurs are known for their ability to innovate, take risks, and seize opportunities, and salespeople who embody these traits can excel in their careers. Here are five ways that salespeople can harness an entrepreneurial mindset to be successful.
5 Ways Salespeople Can Harness An Entrepreneurial Spirit to Advance Their Career
Approach Your Career With A Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the belief that one's abilities can be developed through hard work and dedication. Salespeople who have a growth mindset are more likely to see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow.

On this fun episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount is joined by the incredible social media influencer and successful real estate agent, Alexander Zakharin. Jeb and Alexander discuss that when the going gets tough in the real estate market, the toughest real estate agents get fanatical about prospecting.
Alexander Zakharin's Inspiring Real Estate Journey
Alexander Zakharin is a New York City real estate guru and a force on TikTok. He emigrated from Russia to the United States in 2017 with a dream to live and work in the greatest city in the world.

When he had visited NYC a few years before, it was love at first sight as he rode a greyhound bus all the way from Chicago into Midtown West. Drawn to the skyscrapers and beautiful buildings he would later rent and sell, Zakharin took the leap after attending college in the UK and moving back to Russia for work.

He arrived in the states without a job or a plan and stumbled into real estate by pure chance— with no real estate experience. He had a background in oil and gas that provided him some sales experience, but he’d never sold real estate. He jokes that his first real estate transaction was renting out his apartment in St. Petersburg the day before he left Russia.

Through a personal connection who rented apartments in Manhattan, Zakharin got an interview as a real estate agent. He then leveraged Fanatical Prospecting, grit, hard work and social media to climb the brutal real estate ladder in New York City.

Since then, Zakharin has sold over 31 million dollars in real estate proving that anything is possible when you set your mind to it. His astronomical success illustrates how the power of relentless prospecting combined with savvy social media strategies have become keys to success in the real estate market, no matter the economic conditions.
It Pays To Have An Entrepreneurial Mindset
Real estate is a highly competitive industry that is constantly influenced by market fluctuations. As a real estate agent, you are essentially your own boss, which means that you have the freedom to control your own earning potential.

This is ultimately what draws so many people into real estate, but it requires a significant mindset shift. You are responsible for your own success and income. In order to thrive in the real estate industry, you must be self-motivated and highly disciplined with a love for competition.

As a real estate agent, you work for yourself, and you are a self-employed entity. You earn exactly what you work for, and it’s up to you to make it happen. This was one of the main reasons that Zakharin saw early success in real estate and decided to stay on that path.

However, it’s important to remember that this success doesn’t come easily. Real estate agents must put in the time and effort to build their network, find leads, and close deals.
What It Takes To Be Great In Real Estate
Overwhelmingly, your ticket to success, regardless of what business or vertical you’re in (especially if it’s a service business), is meeting people and making connections. The more you focus on the human side of sales or service, the faster you close deals and the longer you hold onto relationships.
High performing professionals understand the value of building networks. Likewise, in real estate, the most successful agents are those who focus on the human aspect of their work and prioritize personal connections with potential clients.
Zakharin explains that the most successful new agents aren't the one with the fanciest Excel sheets or the perfect messaging, they're the ones who aren't afraid to call up people in their network and say, "By the way, I'm doing real estate now. If you're looking to rent or buy, reach out to me."
Having conversations with people helps any professional gain practical knowledge and experience through learning by doing. There is no substitute for having real conversations with people and maintaining that personal connection is the key t...

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (People Follow You) sits down with Leigh Cantrell and Rob Matura who are Regional Vice Presidents at Cigna to discuss the keys to leading multi-generational sales teams. It's a fascinating conversation in which you'll learn about the challenges and rewards of building sales teams from diverse age groups.
Challenges With Leading Multi-Generational Sales Team
Leading a multi-generational sales team can be challenging. The differences in values, work styles, communication preferences, and technological competencies will stretch you as a leader. These challenges include:

Different work values: Different generations may have varying work ethics and priorities, making it difficult to align everyone towards common goals.
Communication differences: Younger generations may prefer digital communication, while older generations may prefer face-to-face or phone conversations.
Technological competency: Younger generations may be more familiar with technology and digital tools, while older generations may require additional training and support.
Different learning styles: Different generations may have different preferences for how they learn and receive information, making it challenging to provide training and development opportunities that accommodate everyone.
Resistance to change: Some team members may resist new technologies, processes, or ways of working that are introduced to the team.

To effectively lead a multi-generational sales team, you must adapt to these differences and foster collaboration, communication, and teamwork across generations.

The Strengths of Multi-Generational Sales Teams
The good news is that multi-generational sales teams bring a diverse range of skills, perspectives, and experiences to the table. This leads to numerous strengths over teams that lack this level of diversity.

Diversity of ideas: Team members from different generations can bring unique perspectives, experiences, and creative approaches to problem-solving and decision-making.
Range of skills: Different generations bring different skill sets and competencies to the table, such as expertise in different technologies or a deep understanding of traditional sales techniques.
Mentorship: Older team members can provide mentorship to younger team members, while younger team members can bring help their older team members embrace new ideas and tech.
Flexibility: A multi-generational sales team can be more flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions, customer needs, and technological innovations.
Increased customer understanding: Team members from different generations can help the team better understand and connect with customers from different age groups and backgrounds.

By leveraging the strengths of multi-generational sales teams, you will quickly increase sales and deliver better numbers.
Seven Keys to Leading and Coaching Multi-Generational Sales Teams
Leading a multi-generational sales team requires understanding and accommodating the differences and unique strengths of each generation. It can be rewarding, but it's not easy.

Here are a few tips to effectively lead a multi-generational sales team:

Communicate effectively: Use clear, concise, and consistent communication to ensure everyone understands their role, goals, and expectations.
Provide opportunities for development: Offer ongoing training and professional development opportunities to help your team grow and meet their career aspirations.
Foster a positive work environment: Encourage collaboration, teamwork, and open communication, and celebrate the successes of your team.
Flexibility in work styles: Recognize and accommodate different work styles, preferences, and technological needs of each generation.
Embrace diversity: Recognize and respect the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of each team member.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, we are switching things up to take on a very important topic— Chronic Lyme Disease.

Jeb Blount (Sales Gravy) and Fred Diamond, co-founder of the Institute for Excellence in Sales (IES) discuss Fred's latest book, Love, Hope, Lyme and his personal journey supporting a loved one with Chronic Lyme Disease.

You'll learn what Lyme Disease is, the devastating effects that Chronic Lyme Disease has on hundreds of thousands of people each year, why prevention is key, and how you can support anyone in your life who is battling a chronic illness.
Living With Someone Who Has Chronic Lyme Disease
Living with a loved one who has Chronic Lyme Disease can be emotionally and mentally challenging, as the condition can cause a wide range of symptoms that can affect the person's physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Your loved one may experience depression, anxiety, and irritability as a result of their condition.

Fred discusses how important it is to be supportive, patience, and understanding. He explains that everyone's experience with Chronic Lyme Disease is different, so it's important to be flexible and open to different approaches to treatment and care.

One of the most difficult aspects of living with someone who has Chronic Lyme Disease is dealing with the person's ongoing fatigue and pain. These symptoms can make it difficult for the person to perform daily tasks and can also affect their mood and ability to socialize.

But, as Fred says, where there is love, there is hope.

What is Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is an infectious disease caused by a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. It is primarily spread through the bite of infected black-legged ticks, also known as deer ticks. The black-legged tick is found in wooded, brushy, and grassy areas, and when it bites, it can transmit the bacteria to the person.

The most common early symptoms of Lyme disease include fever, fatigue, headache, muscle and joint pain, and a bull's-eye rash. The rash, called erythema migraines (EM), usually appears at the site of the tick bite and can expand to become a large red area.
Chronic Lyme Disease
Chronic Lyme disease, also known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), is a condition that can occur after a person has been treated for an initial infection with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

People with PTLDS may continue to experience symptoms, such as fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulties, long after the bacteria have been cleared from their body. Fred explains that this is why it is difficult and frustrating for people who are living with Chronic Lyme disease to get physicians and loved ones to believe them.

The cause of PTLDS is not fully understood, but it is thought that it may be related to ongoing inflammation or damage to tissues caused by the initial infection. Some researchers also believe that the bacteria may persist in the body, despite treatment, and continue to cause symptoms.
Lyme Disease Symptoms
The symptoms of Lyme disease can vary widely and may be different for each person. The most common symptoms include:

Erythema migrans (EM) rash: A bull's-eye rash that appears at the site of the tick bite, usually within 3 to 30 days after the tick bite. The rash can expand to become a large red area and may or may not be itchy or painful.
Flu-like symptoms: fever, chills, fatigue, headache, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes.
Neurological symptoms: difficulty concentrating, memory problems, and headaches. Some people may also experience facial palsy, which is a temporary weakness or drooping of the facial muscles.
Cardiovascular symptoms: irregular heartbeats, or chest pain.
Arthritis: joint pain and swelling, especially in the knees.
Bell's palsy: It is a sudden weakness or paralysis of the muscles on one side of the face.

Symptoms of Lyme disease can appear in stages.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Colleen Stanley discuss the importance of Reality Testing sales pipeline opportunities. **Please note that this episode was recorded in a restaurant in Milan Italy. The content quality is excellent. The sound quality not so much.

Reality testing sales pipeline opportunities is an important step in ensuring the success of your sales efforts and the effective use of your time. It's important to regularly check the accuracy of your assumptions about the viability of the deals in your pipeline against hard evidence that those deals are advancing in line with your sales process.

Reality testing is described as the ability to see things as they are, rather than what you would like them to be. You cannot afford to waste time with pipeline opportunities that you won't win. Nor can you spend time with stakeholders who can't or won't buy.

For sellers, the greatest waste of time is spending it with the wrong prospect. As we move into a period of market volatility, it is critical for self-professionals to get real about what's in their pipeline.
The Problem With Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves paying more attention to information that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving less attention to information that contradicts those beliefs. It is the human tendency to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear.

With sales pipeline opportunities, confirmation bias can lead salespeople to interpret new information in a way that fits with their preexisting views, even if that interpretation is not necessarily accurate. It's the act of putting on rose colored lenses.

For example: When a buyer says, "I might be interested." It is interpreted to mean, "I absolutely want to do business with you."

Confirmation bias can have a number of negative effects. It causes salespeople to hold onto false beliefs, make flawed decisions, have clouded judgement, and to be more resistant to pushback from leaders during pipeline reviews.

Awareness is the key to overcoming this natural human bias. This, in fact is what reality testing is all about - considering a diversity of viewpoints from your leaders and team members along with actively testing and challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.
Empty Pipeline Lead Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias and false beliefs about sales pipeline opportunities run rampant on sales floors. Just sit in a pipeline review for ten minutes and you'll hear salespeople using all manner of excuses to justify deals that will never close. This is why most sales pipelines are little more than pipe dreams and sales teams consistently miss forecasts.

The culprit, in most cases though, is simple: Empty pipelines.

When salespeople are consistently prospecting and keeping their pipe full, they are much more in tune with reality. When an opportunity is not advancing they quickly run a reality test and if it doesn't meet their win probability standards, they'll walk away.

In other words, a full pipeline begets clear judgement.

On the other hand, salespeople with empty pipelines are desperate. They are consumed with confirmation bias. They hold on to loser deals and waste inordinate amounts of time working opportunities that will never close.

Therefore, the easiest way to get good at reality testing your pipeline opportunities is to start prospecting and keep your pipeline full.
Focus on Winnable Deals
This may be a blinding flash of the obvious but if you want to sell more, spend your time with and invest resources in deals that will close. Desperate sales reps have a bad tendency to ignore win probability and scratch lottery tickets.

High-performing sales professionals are consistency reality testing on every deal to gauge win probability. When WP drops below a comfortable threshold, they walk away and focus their time and attention on winnable d...

In today's world there are few barriers to career change. Top sales talent can walk out of your door to another career opportunity at any time. This puts more pressure on sales leaders than ever before to foster a sales culture and team environment that compels people to stay.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount (People Follow You) sits down with Helen Fanucci author of the brand new book, Love Your Team, to discuss what sales leaders must do to retain talent build and stronger teams through human connection.

In this wide ranging discussion on modern sales leadership you'll learn:

The language of sales coaching
Why sales leadership is personal
What you really get paid for as a sales leader
Tactics for 1-2-1 meetings
How to approach turn-around situations
How to prepare for a future sales leadership role
What to do when you meet your team for the first time
And much more . . .

In her new book, Helen writes that the hybrid work revolution has made sales management the most pivotal role in the innovation economy. Pivotal means that your team's performance rest squarely on your shoulders. To be successful you must be adept at both implementing and executing a system of sales management AND winning the hearts of your sellers.

Hiring the right salespeople is a huge challenge for sales leaders. This is why we developed the Sales Managers Ultimate Interview Guide. This FREE 25 page guide walks you through a step-by-step process for hiring your next sales superstar: https://salesgravy.com/ultimate-sales-interview-guide/

They say you can't make more time. On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, I challenge you to consider how you can make more time through improvements in sales productivity and reinventing the way that you work.

I want you to take a moment and think back to the early days of the pandemic. You were likely working at home because everything was locked down.

Then fast forward a couple of months to the summer of 2020. Sales teams were hitting all time records. Many individual sales professionals were selling more and earning more than ever before.

The secret to their success? They were suddenly more productive.

Sellers were getting more done, in less time, with better outcomes because all of the distractions that typically took them away from high impact sales activities were gone.
The Three Choices
Each moment of your sales day you make one of three choices about time. You can do:

Trivial things like watch cat videos.
Important things like entering data into the CRM or responding to e-mail.
Impactful things that generate revenue growth.

The most impactful thing you can do is put new opportunities into the pipeline and then advance those opportunities through the pipeline. If you're an account manager, you make an impact by expanding and retaining your accounts.
Impact = Productivity
The equation for productivity is: Efficiency + Effectiveness = Productivity

Simply put, the key to productivity is getting more done, in less time, with better outcomes. That's how you win in sales. It is also the key to making more time in your life for the things that really matter.
Time Leakers
I'm always shocked by just how much time sales professionals waste. For example, a recent study demonstrated that salespeople leak two to three hours each day from distractions - little things like looking down at their phone when it buzzes, beeps, or the screen lights up.

At one point in my career, I was the number one sales professional in my company with a high six-figure income to show for it. I was able to accomplish this by working hard for about 10 hours a week because I allowed no leakage of time. I sold more more, in less time than my peers who wasted an extraordinary amount of time on superfluous activities. This afforded me time to invest with my family and in other pursuits.

If you take an honest look at your own day, you're likely leaking time everywhere.

When I'm working with sales professionals on productivity improvement initiatives, I'll often break their day apart into blocks and demonstrate how they can get their normal eight to ten hours of work accomplished in five to six hours through time blocking, attention control, and work compression.

Veterans who have a good handle on their territories and pipeline, can do their job in about four hours a day once they learn how to compress work into short sprints.
Trade Productivity For More Time
One of the big things that we learned during the pandemic is the importance of making more quality time in our lives for family, friends, and ourselves.

Yet, now that the pandemic has ended, the workplace is quickly snapping back from the days of work from home productivity to trading time for money. In other words, the boss or the company dictates an "8 hour day" or "5 day work week" and therefore we expand our work into those constructs regardless of how long it actually takes to get the work done.

In sales, at least in field sales, you have much more autonomy with how you manage your time than most employees. Because of this, you have the unique luxury to break free from the time for money handcuffs and begin trading productivity for more time.

If you make the choice to become disciplined with time and your sales day, so that you accomplish more impactful work, in less time with greater outcomes, you'll quickly make time to do the fun things in your life that really matter.
Protect Your Career

Economic winter is coming. Storm clouds are brewing. And with it is going to be a recession. On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount discusses why you need to prepare right now for the economic storm.
This Time Will Be Different
This recession will be different than anything we've recently experienced because we'll also be dealing with inflation. There will be the potential for the long slog of stagflation in some some economies.

We are still going to have some supply chain issues and interest rates are going to be crazy. If you need to borrow money, it will be painful.

There will be poverty and hunger. People who can't afford the cost of energy will be shivering in the cold. In the midst of this economic downturn and disruption we'll be dealing with war and the potential for a nuclear confrontation.

All you need to do is look at your news feed and it's frightening.
Get Right With Reality
If you are a sales professional, the big question is what should you do to prepare for the storm right now?

Helping you to prepare is one of the key reasons I wrote my new book Selling In A Crisis.

Sales professionals are always on the leading edge of the economy. We are going to get hit hardest by the economic storm and we're the ones that are going lead the world out of this mess.

The most important thing you can do is to be right now. Focus on what you can control in the present. You've got to get right with reality and reality is, winter is coming.
This Ain't Easy Street
It is not going to be easy. A few months ago your phone's ringing off the hook today. Today, nobody is going to call you.

Therefore, you are going to need to start hunting to find the money that's still moving. And there's always money moving. But it's going to be a tough grind to find it.

Look around. Half the people that you work with right now won't be here when we get to the end of this economic downturn. They won't be willing to step up to the plate and do the hard work.

This ain't easy street. That's why you have to get right with reality. Right now and prepare to work harder. Start With Right Now Actions
What can you do right now to:

get your mindset right?
get connected to reality?
let go of your need to find Easy Street?
protect your income, family and career?
invest in yourself?
improve your sales skills?

Rather than worrying, focus on the three things you can control. Your actions, reactions, and mindset.

In Selling In A Crisis Jeb gives you 55 easy to consume tips, techniques, and tactics that are time-tested and proven to help you stay on top when everything and everyone else is down.

Recession. Inflation. Stagflation. Stockmarket Free Fall. Energy Crisis. Supply Chain Crisis. Political Divisiveness.War.

We are living and selling in a time of deep volatility. It is more challenging to close business, objections are harsher, and qualified buyers are becoming more scarce.

On this special episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount delivers a powerful message about what it takes to outsell this crisis. You'll learn why it pays to think like a squirrel, why rainmakers are already digging for ponies, and why you need to get right with reality and put your swimsuit on.

Right now you have to be better than you ever were before, get back to the fundamental and basics, and stay out of buckets with crabs. In this podcast you'll learn the truth about winning and selling in a crisis.

In Selling In A Crisis Jeb gives you 55 easy to consume tips, techniques, and tactics that are time-tested and proven to help you stay on top when everything and everyone else is down. Read the first three chapters, FREE.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Jennifer Smith, CEO of Scribe, give you tips and tactics for working smarter, dealing with repetitive tasks that slow you down, and getting more done in less time with better outcomes.

You must protect your prime selling time at all costs. Time is your most precious resource. You cannot make more, add more, or find more. Do not allow it to be diluted by non-sales activities.

Time is the great equalizer. Every person on earth has exactly 24 hours each day. No more. The choices you make about how you invest your time, directly correlates to the sales outcomes you deliver.

Only 6 to 8 hours each day are available for sales activities, that is, prospecting, advancing pipeline opportunities, and closing. Your daily mission is to squeeze as much selling out of these Golden Hours as possible. Sales professionals who protect their prime selling time–the Golden Hours–will get ahead, stay ahead, and win while others lose.

Your most pressing challenge is keeping non-sales activities from interfering with your Golden Hours. This includes interruptions from customers who use you their Chief Problem Solver. When you make it easier for customers to help themselves, you'll get more time back in your sales day for selling. Jennifer Smith is on a mission to help you protect your Golden Hours.

Try SCRIBE for free at: https://scribe.how/salesgravy with Promo Code - SALESGRAVY

Ever wondered how you can get the attention of that elusive prospect you've been chasing? You know the one. The big fish that is your ticket to President's club a huge commission check.

You know how to sell - that's your job, after all - but getting CEOs and other VIPs to call you back is the tricky part. So what if that impossible-to-reach person weren't so impossible to reach after all?

Hall of fame-nominated marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke discovered that he could get past traditional gatekeepers and reach those elusive executives by thinking outside the box and using personalized approaches that he calls "contact campaigns".

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Fanatical Prospecting author Jeb Blount and Stu discuss creative ways to get meetings with anyone. You'll learn that the secret is about being creative, thinking out of the box, demonstrating authenticity and sincerity, and having a little fun along the way.

Get more meeting with effective Prospecting Sequences. Download our free how to guide here: https://salesgravy.com/seven-steps-prospecting-sequence-guide/

If you want to succeed at any job, make yourself invaluable. Go the extra mile; make them never be able to imagine what life without you there would be like. - Ross Mathews
Selling in a crisis is tough. Losing your job during an economic downturn is worse. Now more than ever, you need your income. If you lose your job, there is a much higher probability that you will take a pay cut when you land your next one or end up in a role or company that you dislike.
No Mercy for Anchors
The good news for you and sales professionals everywhere is that most organizations and their leaders are smart. They understand that in volatile times like this, they need productive salespeople more than ever. Businesses cannot survive without a steady stream of new sales and loyal customers.

The optimum word here is productive. In a recession, everything and everyone will be examined for its value. If you drain resources rather than generating sales and profits, you are gone. There is no mercy for anchors when the ship is sinking.
How to Get Fired in a Crisis:

Failure to prospect
Low activity and productivity
Lose customers
Mediocre performance
Poor time management and organization
Wasting resources
Coasting along
Quiet quitting
Making excuses
Surprising the boss with bad news
Complaining
Being difficult to work with

The bottom line is, when your leadership team is faced with making decisions about sales force reductions, the dead wood gets cut first. Therefore you need to be indispensable to your boss and organization.
Excellence is a Choice
Mediocrity, just like excellence, is a choice. Therefore, the most effective way to protect your job is to make the decision to be excellent. Here’s how you become indispensable and advance your career in a crisis:

Get back to the basics
Be fanatical about prospecting and fill your pipeline
Sell better
Retain your customers
Contribute and be a team player
Volunteer for projects and always offer to lend a hand
Look for ways to add value
Consistently ask the boss how you can help
Come in early and stay late
Give more effort
Mentor struggling team members
Contribute in team meetings
Attack the day with drive and optimism
Be a beacon of light with your positive attitude
Go the extra mile

Change your way of thinking about work. Devote yourself to your company’s survival. Make a commitment to prove your worth to your boss, company, prospects, and customers every day. Be and become a person that your organization cannot live without.
Going the Extra Mile
Going the extra mile is powerful in a world where mediocrity is the norm and most people won’t. These things may seem small, but in today’s world the majority of your competition fails in these obvious areas:

Showing up early for meetings and being prepared
Following up
Checking spelling and grammar on your emails and written documents
Always looking, acting, and dressing like a professional
Volunteering for special projects
Coming in early and staying late
Keeping your word
Doing more than is required
Really listening to your prospects and looking for ways to solve their problems–regardless of the impact on your commission check
Taking personal responsibility to ensure that your support team follows through on their obligations
Telling the truth when you’ve made a mistake or cannot come through on a promise
Constantly looking for ways to add value and do more
A commitment to excellence in everything you do–even when no one is looking
Being persistent and relentless
Blocking your time and wading through a massive amount of rejection to find people who will buy from you
At the end of the day, when you are exhausted, frustrated, and ready to quit, willing yourself to make one more call

There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. When you are there, you will stand out and your career will flourish.

Putting Aside Time Every Day to Prospect Will Keep Your Pipeline Full
Kaizen is a theory that developed in Japan after World War II and revived the country, their spirit, and their commerce. It’s similar to what we call “feeding the pipeline,” and involves the art of cumulative prospecting. If you set aside time every day for prospecting, you will find a steady flow of success and less stress!
I recently posted a podcast of my discussion with Kristin Austin, where we talked about the importance of perseverance in life and sales and how you can apply the same theory of continuously moving forward to finding satisfaction and success in both.

Japan was in ruins after World War II, and the nation had the task of cleaning up the devastation and overcoming the hopelessness and helplessness that had taken hold. A movement developed that is now a part of their national ideation to this day. It’s called “Kaizen,” and is similar to what Kristin and I discussed.
What is Kaizen?
Kaizen in Japanese means “a change for continuous improvement.” In this case, it’s a business philosophy rooted in making small progress every day to improve your life and find success. Kaizen is based on the idea that it isn’t so much about the grand changes and ideas that we have; change is found in the small steps that add up to large-scale and lasting habits that lead to success.

After hitting rock bottom, the Japanese realized that thinking about the gravity of the destruction and what they had to do to overcome it could become paralyzing. The same is true of sales. The enormity of hitting quota, closing a big sale, and feeding the pipeline can be overwhelming. This can put many salespeople in a state of paralysis where they miss the methodical and gradual steps to get there.
Why the Kaizen Theory is the Key to Cumulative Prospecting
After Kristin was in an accident that permanently altered her life, she had the choice to either give up and retire, or take small steps to get back to her career, pick up the business she had built, and do what she loved again. It initially seemed like a daunting task, so she took minuscule steps, as she called them. One was picking up the Fanatical Prospecting book to gain inspiration.

Then every day, she would do one small thing that would bring her closer to her goal. She didn’t try to set the world on fire; she set out to make one small daily improvement toward rebuilding her life. Kristin emphasized, "If you are moving in the right direction even slightly, you are moving, which differs from being paralyzed."
Kaizen and the Pipeline
In the podcast, we also discussed the notion of “feeding the pipeline.” The mistake I often see salespeople make is that they fill the pipeline by prospecting up front, but once the sales start coming in, they stop feeding it.

They’re on a roll, so they aren’t paying attention to the fact that their pipeline is emptying. And when they do notice, they recognize that nothing is coming down the pipeline because it has gone dry. That puts them in a situation where they become desperate and focus on closing the sale, rather than solving the problems that their clients are having and making an improvement in their lives.
Keeping Your Pipeline Flowing with the Philosophy of Kaizen
So the key to being successful in prospecting is not letting your pipeline run dry. Let’s face it: not many people enjoy cold-calling others and asking them to buy something they may or may not want. However, that’s not what pipelining is.

Filling your pipeline means seeking out those people who not only need your product or service; it means finding the people who would most benefit from what you’re offering. When you change your mindset from closing to helping, you increase your satisfaction, decrease your stress, and stop feeling the weight of paralyzing stress.

By taking one small and continuous step every day, or putting aside time to prospect for just one hour a day,

“Life is short. Hug the people that you love and make sure that they know you love them without hesitation. Anything can happen to anyone, at any time. We all live with this concept that we are safe if we can control everything, but sometimes the Universe has different plans. That applies to sales too. Sometimes you think you have a sale in the bag and it all falls apart without anything that you have done. You have to roll with it and keep on keeping on." - Kristen Austin
When Kristin Austin was hit by a car, her world fell apart. On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast she shares how she climbed out of a deep hole to resurrect her business and life, one prospecting call at a time.

There is no doubt that we all find ourselves hitting roadblocks that seem impossible to overcome. If you are in that situation, Kristin's story is sure to inspire you to take action and get past whatever is holding you back. You'll learn how to get back up when life knocks you down.
Life Knocks Kristen Down
Kristin Austin was hit by a vehicle in May 2018. After regaining consciousness, she began two-years of recovery. This required her to rebuild her life from the ground up.

Kristin owned a business for over ten years that was rooted in marketing and sales; she was a university instructor, a wife, and a mother - and suddenly it all stopped. She was forced to put things in place to keep her business running in her absence and focus on the basics of relearning how to be Kristin.
Kristen Gets Back Up
Forced to stay home and slow her pace, she decided to go back to the basics. Her mission was to get out of her own head and figure out how to get back to the life she left behind out of necessity.

The Fanatical Prospecting Book awakened her spirit because it put her back into a mindset of figuring out a plan about what she had to do, how she was going to do it, and how to get back out there. Throughout her life, Kristin was a salesperson, starting early as a child selling watermelon on Bondi Beach, and moving on to ultimately being a pharmaceutical rep.

The message from Fanatical Prospecting that inspired Kristin was, “If you do the work, the sales gods will reward you.” Once she read that phrase, she immediately got onto LinkedIn and posted about it. And the same day, people responded by coming out of the woodwork to inspire her with words of encouragement to get back up and do what she did best: SELL.
The More You Prospecting, The Luckier You Get
At her lowest, Kristen stuck in her house recovering, feeling worthless, insecure, and shut down. Then the pandemic presented a surprise opportunity when Kristin took over as head of sales with a new company.

There was still the negative self-talk and insecurity. She focused an important lesson from Fanatical Prospecting: “The more you prospect, the luckier you get.” This inspired her to keep moving forward.

Some days were really hard, and others were like shooting fish in a barrel - but above all, she was back in the game and this gave her life purpose.
Put in the Work
Kristen's story teaches us that when life knocks you down, you can get back up. You just have to put in the work. We can all become paralyzed with fear, negativity, and hopelessness - but the trick is to move forward. Kristin, even at her lowest, found the faith to know that if you continue trudging ahead, things will change.

"Nothing happens until you move. Nothing happens until someone sells something. The big lesson I learned is that you have to do something. If what you are currently doing isn’t working, then do something else. Don’t keep doing the same old thing."

When Kristin hit rock-bottom, she turned to Sales Gravy University, knowing that it might be a small step to go back to the basics, but it was a step nonetheless. If things weren’t converting on a daily basis, she had to take a breath and not freak out. Kristin developed the faith to believe that as long as she was moving forward,

Are you willing to do whatever it takes to reach your goals and dreams, build your business, climb the sales leaderboard at your company, or bounce back from failure?

Lot's of people have dreams but few actually grind it out and turn those dreams into reality. The good news is that you can defy the odds to get everything that you want in business and in life if you are willing to do whatever it takes.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Brandon Bornancin dive into what it really means to be willing to do what ever it takes.

No matter who you are or where you come from, your education, or your network, you can create the life you want and build the business you’ve only dreamed about.

Brandon's journey is all the proof you need.

He graduated college flat broke. He started a business that was an epic failure. Then he turned it all around – before he was 30 – closing over $100 million in sales for Google and IBM and founding two multimillion-dollar companies, the second named “LinkedIn’s Top 50 Startups.”

How did he do it? By doing Whatever It Takes.

Listen above or watch the video below:

Download a free chapter of Jeb Blount's brand new book Selling the Price Increase here: https://salesgravy.com/selling-the-price-increase-free/

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast Jeb Blount, Jr sits down with author Andy Paul to discuss what it means to Sell Without Selling Out. Together they discuss why it is so important to make selling more human.

You'll learn that persuasion is not a sales skill. Instead it is a blunt instrument of last resort that sellers use when they don’t know how to influence the choices buyers make.

Get a leg up on your sales career with our free sales training resources. Check them out here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

Video messaging is hot and it is a core component of effective prospecting sequences because it works! At Sales Gravy we love using video messages to grab the attention of prospects.

Our favorite tool for sending those messages is Vidyard. That's why we were thrilled when Vidyard CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Litt agreed to sit down with Jeb Blount, Jr. on the Sales Gravy Podcast to discuss the future of video messaging.

If you are the kind of person that likes to be on the leading edge of sales technology and techniques, you will love this episode!

On this Sales Gravy podcast episode, Jeb Blount and Daniel Disney discuss the real secrets to becoming a LinkedIn selling machine. You'll learn the keys to to filling your pipeline with qualified opportunities, building your personal brand, improving your closing ratios, and increasing your income.

Why You Should Use LinkedIn’s Marketing Power
LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools ever created for sales professionals. It ranks right up there with the car, telephone, and the internet.

Leveraging LinkedIn gives you the ability to connect with and learn more about prospects and customers than at any other time in history. Sales professionals who master LinkedIn quickly rise to the top of the ranking report.

LinkedIn offers a huge opportunity for salespeople, but it isn’t easy and not everyone was born with the skills to use it. Salespeople need to learn and practice using LinkedIn. It isn’t something that you can jump into headfirst and be successful.

As salespeople, you tend to automatically sell, but with LinkedIn, you have to take a step back from your regular habits. It is all about the long game and building relationships, not quick sales.
You Have To Find The Balance Between Your Professional Persona And The Personal You
Another problem that most salespeople have when using LinkedIn is that they have a hard time finding a balance.

We are so used to using social media in our personal lives that when we have to use LinkedIn professionally, it feels strange and can become a balancing act between being our professional self and staying social.

When you get it, however, it is a very powerful tool.

LinkedIn is about nuance and building familiarity to create awareness for your product, and it is also a direct message tool.
People Have Different Preferences For Receiving Messages That Resonate
One thing to remember is that people have different preferences when it comes to engaging. Some like the phone, some like email, while some don’t have the time to talk and others have full email boxes.

LinkedIn is a different way to reach someone to start a conversation, so in some respects, it can be a pirate’s way in – but only if you use it effectively.

The key is reaching the prospect with the right message at the right time, and that often takes sequencing your communication so that it is cumulative and encompassing.

When you think about the numerous ways that we now communicate, you can’t just use one channel, be it email, telephone, instant messaging, or snail mail. You have to be the master of all of them and master using LinkedIn’s marketing power.

If you only choose one silo, then statistically you are going to miss prospects. And if you do, you miss building familiarity through a channel and the cumulative effect.

Success lies not in one over the other; it is about using all the tools and being persistent in an authentic way.
Persistence Is The Key To Building A Certain Amount Of Reciprocity
Persistence is a mental skill for people, and it demonstrates that you care about them and believe that you have the solution to help them.

Also, when you are persistent on a genuine level of obligations, you develop a certain amount of reciprocity.

When someone does something nice for you, and you are in the right place at the right time, you are likely to gain their business. You have to blend and sequence all the channels that you have to reach your prospect, which involves cumulative messaging.

People have so many different ways of communicating that you need to hit them from every angle you have at your disposal. Using LinkedIn’s marketing power comprehensively can help you achieve that!
Consistency Adds Cumulative Layers Of Messaging
The key to LinkedIn is consistency. If you walk into a conference room and you stand in the corner and don’t say a word, you aren’t going to make any connections.

If you walk in, however, and you strike up conversations with people,

The buyers in procurement are professionally trained to negotiate. Salespeople not so much. This can put you at a huge disadvantage when you are forced to negotiate with them. But not anymore.

On this fascinating Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Jeb Blount who is the author of the sales negotiating book INKED and Mike Landers an ex-procurement buyer turned sales trainer teach you the secrets to playing to win, when negotiating with procurement.

You'll learn the keys to mastering the sales negotiating chessboard and going toe to toe with professional buyers who are paid to extract maximum concessions from you.

Want more tips on effective sales negotiation? Then download our free training guide on the Seven Rules of Sales Negotiation here: https://salesgravy.com/7-rules-sales-negotiation-guide/

On this special episode of the Sales Gravy podcast you'll step into the shoes of a Senior Vice President of Sales. Jeb Blount, Jr. (A.K.A. JBJ) interviews Ammon Woods who is the Senior Vice President of Sales for Shred-It and Communication Solutions at Stericycle.

If you love sales and sales origin stories you'll enjoy this wide ranging interview on the keys to high-performance in sales. If you aspire to rise to the upper echelons in your organization, this episode will give you a peak behind the curtain into what it's like lead a large, national sales team.

Looking for more free resources to help you boost your sales career? We've got them here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (author of Selling the Price Increase) and Donald C. Kelly (host of the Sales Evangelist podcast) discuss how to approach customers with price increases. You'll learn techniques, tactics, and strategies for crafting price increase messages, planning price increase conversations, and compelling customers to accept price increases without losing their business.

At Sales Gravy we are constantly adding free sales training resources to our growing library of downloads. Check them out here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

Most sales organizations and sales enablement teams are actively seeking ways to ramp salespeople up fast on new sales technology.

Likewise, many sales leaders and executives have experienced the frustration of investing in Sales Tech only to see it go unused by their sellers. If you've been there, you know that it's a huge waste of money when sales teams fail to adopt sales tools.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount, Sr (Author of Fanatical Prospecting) and Sean Adams (Head of Sales for iorad), discuss how to ramp salespeople up fast on new sales technology and the keys to teaching salespeople how leverage sales technology to become more productive.

At Sales Gravy we are constantly adding free sales training resources to our growing library of downloads. Check them out here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

“God, when I cross the truth, give me the awareness to receive it the consciousness to recognize it the presence to personalize it the patience to preserve it and the courage to live it.” ― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

The number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline. The number one reason for an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect every day, every day, every day.

This is the truth. A brutal, universal, and undeniable truth. But, of course, the truth, as the saying goes, is like poetry and everyone effing hates poetry.

A few weeks back, my 24-year-old son was delivering a telephone prospecting workshop to a group of sales development reps (SDRs) who were all about his age. Early in the training, one of the reps pointed out that my mega-bestselling book Fanatical Prospecting, “Was written a while back.” And asked, “Is it even relevant anymore?”

The young, always eager for the next bright, shiny thing and ready to chunk any ideas perceived to be “old.” That’s always been true from one generation to the other.
ANY EXCUSE NOT TO PROSPECT
What is also true though is that sales reps of all generations, for at least the past 125 years, have been willing to make any excuse, and I mean any excuse, to avoid the grind and pain of prospecting. And that’s exactly what this young man was seeking to do.

He wanted my son to let him off the hook. To say that prospecting was old-school, that the marketing department should deliver hot leads on a silver platter and that he could while away the sales day sending asynchronous, automated email spam to prospects on his company’s sales engagement platform and call that prospecting.

Mostly, he wanted validation that “that the telephone didn’t work anymore” and he could avoid talking to people.

My son responded, “What do you think has changed in the past six years?”

The young SRD shot back, “Well, nobody answers the phone anymore.”

At that, my son pulled up his prospecting list for the day, showed it to the group, and said, “Ok, let’s test your hypothesis.” Then, he began dialing, right in front of the SDRs.

In the first fifteen dials, he spoke to four decision makers and set two appointments. Then turned to the group and asked, “Any more questions?”

Cased closed. As Elvis Presley said so aptly, “The truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”
YOU CANNOT BE DELUSIONAL AND SUCCESSFUL AT THE SAME TIME
Of course, there are loud voices, mostly on social media outlets, who shout that cold calling is dead, the telephone is dead, sales is dead, and one form or another of prospecting is dead – depending on which way the wind is blowing that day.

Still others shout loudly from their “holier than thou” mountain top that robots and AI should take the place of people for sales prospecting activity. They argue that allowing these bots to spam stupid humans via email, text, and direct messaging is the secret to all present and future sales success.

It isn’t. People hate robots and spammers. Put these two annoyances together and it only serves to turn prospects off and teach them to ignore generic, mindless robot messages.

“Being loud,” says Mark Homer, in Uncommon Sense, “doesn’t increase the value or validity of their opinion. In fact, often by the very nature of being the loudest, those opinions are typically the furthest from reality.”

The young sales rep in the story above is among the multitudes of sales professionals who are susceptible to these messages that pander to their fear and discomfort with interrupting strangers with prospecting activity.

On a perpetual trip to delusionville and burdened by confirmation bias, sales professionals who believe that they can avoid prospecting seek out any information or excuse that contravenes the truth and gives them an easy way out.

But you cannot be delusional and successful in sales at the same time.

The results are predictable.

During the holiday season, sales professionals face a host of difficult challenges. The holidays offer a perfect excuse not to go out and prospect new business. It is harder to close deals in December and create urgency with pipeline opportunities, let alone engage and get meetings with new prospects.

And now more than ever, it's critical to have proper time discipline to reach your goals and crush your number as the end of the year approaches, while also setting yourself up to have a robust Q1 pipeline in the new year.

In this conversation between Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) and Anthony Iannarino (Eat Their Lunch), they break down exactly how to deal with these end of year roadblocks and truly outsell the holidays.

You'll learn how to sell more and still have fun over the holidays!

You get specific tips, tactics, and techniques for compelling buyers to act, prospecting, time management, and keeping your pipeline full so you start the new year strong.

Jeb and Anthony will also teach you how to:

Target high potential prospects who have an urgency to buy now— maybe they have left over budget or are looking for year-end specials for products or services
Create urgency with pipeline opportunities by using the emotional and business outcome value equation
Build your Q1 pipeline with targeted lists and daily outbound prospecting
Develop a daily battle rhythm with high intensity activity sprints and time blocking strategies

Also find out:

How much is too much when it comes to holiday promotions and marketing offers.

Listen to the podcast or watch the video HERE.

You may also want to read: Why Holiday Parties Can Make or Break Your Sales Career

This is another episode of #AskJeb where Jeb answers a question, from Justin, a sales leader based in Dallas. Justin asked: "What's the best predictive indicator of a person becoming a sales champion."

Sales Champions Are Optimists
This is a question that sales leaders all across the globe grapple with because they all want to hire sales champions and build sales champions. The answer is relatively simple, and it's based on studies that have come from numerous places. It comes down to optimism. Salespeople who have a higher degree of optimism tend to become champions, and for good reason.

Salespeople face a lot of defeat, a lot of rejection, and so many things can go wrong in sales that salespeople who wallow in that defeat have a tendency to crash and burn pretty quickly.
Sales Champs Forget Failure Fast
However, the salespeople who forget rejection fast or forget failure fast and see the next yes, the next opportunity around the corner— those are the salespeople who are more likely to be more mentally resilient. They have a stronger ability to make a shift or be more agile.

They're the ones that when things go wrong, rather than saying, "Why me? Why is this happening to me?" they're more likely to say, "What am I supposed to learn from this failure? What am I supposed to learn from this defeat?" Therefore, they continue to grow and improve over time.
So How Do You Find Salespeople Like That?
The key is in your interview process. During the interview, you're looking for that glimmer of optimism. You need to ask questions about what they have done in the past when they faced defeat. Have them give you a specific situation where they failed and what they did next.
Create A Winning Atmosphere
As a leader, you want to hire people who have a high degree of optimism, but you also want to build that optimism by creating an atmosphere that people want to be in.

That's a winning atmosphere that rewards people for the good work that they do by patting them on the back and doesn't beat them up for the things that they do wrong.

Instead, it coaches them when they do things that don't work out to get better or to learn from that.

Through your coaching and through your leadership, you want to build an environment where you're fostering and nurturing that optimism because optimism is the greatest predictor of a person becoming a sales champion.

Take your prospecting campaigns to the next level, get into more doors, build deeper relationships, and close more deals with the techniques in our FREE guide, The Seven Steps To Building Effective Prospecting Sequences.

It's How You Sell That Matters Most
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount Jr. and Larry Levine, author of Selling From the Heart, discuss why how you sell is often more important than what you sell.

Larry and JBJ break down why sales professionals who demonstrate authenticity and empathy gain a clear competitive advantage and what it really means to sell from the heart.
Watch the Video


On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount, Jr makes his debut with discussion about leveraging the telephone with Alex Goldfayn who is author of the new book, Pick Up The Phone and Sell.

In this insightful conversation, JBJ and Alex make the case that you should pick up the phone and sell because picking up the phone proactively can help you quickly double your sales.

Listen above or watch the video below:

Take your first course for FREE on Sales Gravy University with coupon code FREECOURSE.

This hard-hitting and thought provoking episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast features a deep conversation on the state of sales leadership.

Jeb Blount, author of People Follow You and Frank Cespedes, a Harvard Business school professor and author of the new book Sales Management That Works, discuss modern sales leadership challenges in a world that never stops changing.

With so much data coming at sales leaders these days, the failure to separate fact from hype, can create faulty assumptions leading to poor decisions.

Cespedes makes the point that leaders, at all levels, who embrace data while executing the tired and true fundamentals of sales management are better positioned to accelerate sales productivity and capture marketshare.

Listen to more episodes of the Sales Gravy Podcast

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount who is the author of People Follow You, sits down with Wanda Wallace, author of You Can't Know it All.

In this power-packed conversation Wanda and Jeb discuss why exceptional leaders don't need to have all of the answers.

Instead, top leaders focus on making themselves obsolete through coaching and developing a team of experts who know how to get the job done.

There is so much truth about leadership to unpack in this episode that you'll likely want to listen to it again and again.

Check out Jeb's Zip Line trip that was arranged by Blueboard:

Brett asks Jeb, "I made 40 prospecting calls and couldn't get anyone to pick up the phone. How to I get people to answer the telephone when I call?"

On this Ask Jeb episode, Fanatical Prospecting author Jeb Blount gives Brett three reasons why he is struggling to get people to answer his cold calls and what to do about it.

Listen above or watch the video below.

Pro Tip: Play this at your next weekly sales meeting.

Got a question you want to ask Jeb just text it to 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

In sales, deals are often won or lost on how well you engage stakeholder's in sales conversations.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount sits down with AJ and Johnny, hosts of The Art of Charm podcast, discuss tips and techniques for building rapport and conducting engaging sales conversations that motivate stakeholders to do business with you and close the deal.

Discover over 1000 hours of sales training courses from the world top experts on Sales Gravy University

If more sales reps would do this one thing (hint: talk to people) their sales would instantly increase.

On this short, powerful episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount answers a fan question while dropping a major sales truth bomb!

Listen above or watch the video below.

Pro Tip: Play this at your next weekly sales meeting.

Got a question for Jeb just text it to 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast Jeb Blount and Bernie Weiss explore how to Ace It in Sales with lessons learned from selling radio advertising on the streets of New York City and the Bronx.

They take on heavy metal selling, cold calling in New York City , how to sell more by becoming an expert in industry categories, why routines matter, and how a sales career makes you a better leader.

Bernie Weiss is the President of iHeart Media New York, a lifelong student of the sales profession, and the author of the new book called Ace It!. This was one of our favorite interviews this season because Bernie is a top level executives who truly understands the value of the sales profession.

Each year, on July 4th, I reflect on the blessing to have been born in a country where anything is possible and anyone, no matter economic background, heritage, culture, race, gender, sexuality, or religion has the opportunity to succeed. This is the reason why so many people around the world dream of coming here.

Is America a perfect place? Of course not! We are a country wedded in paradox.

We fight bitterly amongst ourselves but quickly come together when there are threats or tragedy at home and abroad.

We are materialistic, yet generous when others need help.

Even though we celebrate a level playing field of one person one vote, we allow special interests on all sides to dilute the power of those votes.

There is racism, prejudice, poverty, and exclusion.

Though each person has equal opportunity to succeed, we don’t all start at the same place with the same resources.

Though we celebrate those who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps we willingly provide hand-outs to others who claim that they are victims and take advantage of the system.

In America where opportunity abounds, there is not and will never be a level playing field.

The brutal reality is that life is not fair in America. Bad things happen to good people. Bad people sometimes win.

There is defeat, failure, and plenty of roadblocks.

There are poor people and rich people.

Some people have to work harder than others to get ahead because they were born into unfortunate circumstances, dangerous neighborhoods, non-existent parents, poor schools, poverty, or are immigrants held back by language and cultural barriers.

Some believe the government uses taxation to penalize the success of those who have worked hard to make something of their lives. Others think that not everyone is paying their fair share.

Some people give, some people take.

Some people work hard and become phenomenally successful while others whine about their circumstances.

If you live in America there are myriad external forces beyond your control. There will always be obstacles in your way. There will always be something or someone to complain about.

However, when you allow these external forces to control your actions and thoughts you hand over control of your life to the government, the company, the boss, your heritage, your circumstances, the whims and opinions of others, and to your own internal voice that keeps telling you that bullshit story about “what you can’t do.”
But what if today you stood up and declared:
“Starting today I will not depend on, wait on, or hope for luck, the lottery, the company, fate, or the government to help me change my life! I will take responsibility. I will set my own course. I will make my own success. I will take action. I will persist. I will find lessons in setbacks. I will look forward not backward. I will turn haters into motivators. I will be empowered by my circumstances not impeded by them. I can achieve whatever I want and nothing can hold me back. I own my future. This is my Independence Day!”

True freedom is accepting and believing that you and you alone must be responsible for your life. This is how you take back control. This is how you reach your dreams. This is the spirit and foundation on which this great country was built.

This is REAL independence. Make this your Independence Day!

Listen to more Sales Gravy Podcast episodes HERE

What does emotional intelligence have to do with sales leadership?

According to Colleen Stanley, who is the author of the hit new book Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership, a high EQ matters a lot. In fact, it is the real secret to building a high-performance sales team.

On this Sales Gravy podcast episode, Jeb Blount, the author of Sales EQ, and Colleen use stories of failure, successes, and personal experiences to illustrate why EQ is so important and how to apply it as a sales leader.

Download your FREE leaders guide to Sales Incentive Programs from Blueboard HERE

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Cherilynn Castleman, author of What's in the C.A.R.D.S., discuss sales team diversity, why women are better at sales than men, the power of empathy, and key things you need to know about selling in a post-pandemic world. You'll love this conversation and you'll especially want to pay attention to Cherilynn's 4Fs!

Before you jump on your next virtual sales call, download our FREE Video Sales Call Checklist

OUCH! The internal sale was more challenging than closing the actual deal!

A brutal truth about B2B sales is that the internal sale (the sale after the sale) is often more challenging than the external sale (getting your prospect to sign the deal). Many sales professionals struggle with the internal sale because they don't understand how to get past those organizational hurdles.

On this powerful episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Victor Antonio take you step-by-step through the behavioral and mindset shifts you must make in order to master the internal sale. You'll learn immediate techniques and tactics for getting your deals embraced and approved by your organization.

TEXT JEB: We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

If you are tired of being tired, you'll love this Sales Gravy Podcast episode.

Jeb Blount and Rachel Pitts (Women Your Mother Warned You About) offer tips for staying fit. For sales professionals, to out wit and out perform your competitors, you need to be physically fit because mental energy is limited by your physical energy.

Jeb and Rachel focus on the golden triangle of fitness: Sleep, Nutrition, and Motion

We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss the power of mapping and uncovering sales process pivot points.

You will learn how these pivot points help bend win probability in your favor and offer important clues for when it may be time to walk away from a deal.

Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling
Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy
Listen to Part Three - Sales is a Process

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss intentional empathy discuss and it is a meta-skill in complex sales.

Empathy is the key to stepping into your buyer's shoes, understanding their situation, and building relationships.

Yet, the best salespeople are naturally less empathetic and more self-centered. Therefore, to be more effective at closing complex sales, they must focus on and leverage intentional empathy.

Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling
Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process

Becoming Other-Focused
Jeb: The statistics and scientific data tell us that salespeople who are more self-centered over time, have a tendency to do better than people who are more empathetic. Now there's a reason for that.

That exists in sales, and even as a business owner, you need to be a little bit self-centered because you have to put all your effort into your business. How do we, as naturally self-centered people, shift into becoming other-focused?
Really Get To Know Your Prospect
Diane: If you believe that being interested in other people is how you're going to get to a goal, and that goal is to have really great business with people and companies you really like and can really help, you naturally want to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Long-term, that's going to be what's best for your business and best for you.

So then if you say, “The only way I'm going to know whether this is a relationship I should enter into is by learning about them. So I just have to make that happen.” Your focus has to be on discovery, investigation, archeology, whatever you want to call it, so that I can learn as much about them— not just about the problem they're having that I could solve— but about them, how they work, their philosophies, their values, etc.

Those things are all part of being in a business relationship. The more I know, the more I'm going to be able to identify how I can help them. And then I can shine because I'm going to be able to point it out to them. I'm really able to say, “This is what I heard, this is how we can help.”

It's hard to have objections when I really heard what you said and I’m matching everything that you told me. Then we're both walking down the same road. I think it comes down to really understanding what you want and the way to get there is by knowing as much as you possibly can about your prospect.
The Best Objection In Sales
Jeb: Yesterday, I was doing a training with a group of veteran salespeople and we were talking about objections. And one of the things I said to them is, “The best objection that you get is the one that never shows up.” And it doesn't show up because you did all the work up front and you got to know them.

As you got to know them, either the objections got on the table or the objections just went away and it's often when you go, “Hello, wanna buy?” you know, that's when the objections go up. So I think what you said about making sure that you're doing all of that homework is really important.

You're doing sales archeology and understanding them and as you pull all of that information in, you're matching your recommendations to what they see as both their success criteria and their evaluation criteria for doing business with you. And when you match it up, there's no objection. It just makes sense to do business together for both of you.
Build Trust And Show Up As A Professional
Diane: If it doesn't match up, it doesn't match up. So you say, “Listen, I'm not the best resource for you. Let me point you towards somebody who is.” And there's no weird conversation, but this is also why the salesperson has to ask a lot of questions and questions that are uncomfortable like the budget question or the decision-making question.

There are ways of asking those questions so that you just continue to build trust and show up as a professional.

This Sales Gravy Podcast episode is part one of Jeb Blount's (Virtual Selling) conversation with Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) about why for business owners, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals success in selling and business growth really isn't about "selling." Instead, when you focus on solving problems, that's when the real magic happens.

Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy
Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process

We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

Why Did You Choose To Write This Book?
Diane: The book is called Succeed Without Selling: The More You Think About Selling The Less You'll Sell. I decided to write it because so many salespeople and small business owners are, in my estimation, behaving badly because they are so focused on selling that they're not getting what they want. They're not getting the results that they want and it's frustrating.

And so I thought, this is what I teach when I do sales training. What if I could put it into a book and just tell them everything about sales mindset? You know, what happens when you do this, but what happens when you do that, with scripts and, and templates in the back of the book.

If I can just give them everything, hopefully, a bell will go off in their head and they'll start doing things differently and achieve better results.
So Why Does Being Successful in Sales Have Nothing To Do With Selling?
Diane: When salespeople are selling, they are thinking about themselves. They're thinking about the fact that they have to hit quota, that they have to get revenue, that they have to do all of these things. Their mindset is, “I need to convince you that you need what I have to sell. I have to be eloquent enough and say the right things. I have to be persuasive.”

They do it at networking events, they do it when they're in a sales meeting, they do it all the time. And the truth is that when salespeople behave that way, they don't get the sale because they're not listening. They're not matching what they have to what that person needs. They're not hearing what the situation is.

So that's why I say that it's not about selling. It's about solving, right? It's about connecting and making sure that it's a good fit because that's how you get long-term business relationships that serve your business for decades.
Sales Is Not About Selling, It's About Solving
Jeb: I totally agree with you. Not that long ago, I was doing training out in Oregon and one of the people in my class was an ex CIA agent. I was teaching some concepts out of Sales EQ around human influence frameworks.

And he grabbed me and said, “What's the difference between what you're teaching and what we were doing as CIA agents? Essentially, when we were bringing people in, we were using the same frameworks you're teaching to get people to turn over information or rat out someone else. And I said, “The human brain works the way the human brain works."

For example, if you listen to someone, it makes them like you more. It's just how we operate. And if they like you more and you listen to them, they're more likely to give you something because you made them feel good. I mean, that's just basic influence frameworks, but what you said is exactly how I explained it to him.

I said, “In your line of work, you were using these influence frameworks to manipulate people into giving you what you wanted. And in my line of work, I help people, and I solve problems."
"I'm Not The Right Fit For You"
Jeb: The very last thing I want to do is sell someone something, or do something for someone that they don't want or don't need. And that doesn't mean that I couldn't because I'm pretty good at influencing people and persuading people. I could certainly do that.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount focuses on brokeness and the two common mindsets of highly successful people and how to grow from adversity.

This past week I stumbled on this quote passage from Vance Havner.

God uses broken things: broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength and broken people to do great things.

We have all been broken in some way, no matter what your path, no matter where you came from, no matter where you started, no matter where you finished, no matter how rich you are, how poor you are, everyone at some level has been broken.

That's good news because as human beings, brokeness binds us together. It's the one thing that we all have in common.

When we have faced that adversity and we have grown from it, is a story that we can tell other people. It's something we have that's part of us that we can share, and we can help other people with.

One of the things I've noticed recently is that there are a lot of people out there that are doing everything possible to avoid being broken, avoid adversity, and avoid even being bent.

They avoid pain and they shy away from obstacles. This is a mistake because adversity - being broken - is our greatest teacher. It is through the crucible of adversity that we become stronger.
Transformation
Sometimes we're so broken that it transforms us. It changes us. We come back from that deep pain, different than who we were before.

Sometimes it opens up our eyes so that we can truly see. Other times it opens up our heart so that we can truly feel and love. That's the power of brokenness.

God uses broken things.
The Two Most Important Mindsets
I've had the privilege of traveling to every continent on the globe except Antarctica. Along the way I've met some incredible people from all walks of life. What I've learned about successful people, is that ultimately they share two mindsets in common.

First, they believe that there is a higher power in their lives that put them on Earth for a purpose, and they're supposed to fulfill that purpose. In other words, they believe that they're supposed to be successful in their walk in life.

The second thing they believe is that everything happens for a reason. This is the strongest of the two because this mindset gives you strength. This mindset frees you from the chains of victimhood.

This mindset that everything happens for a reason, allows you to learn from being broken.

Learn from adversity, learn from pain, learn from the bad things that are going to happen to you; and trust me, bad things are going to happen to you. You will be broken again and again and again.
The Choice
What successful people realize is that this is just part of walking through life and you have a choice about how you view this brokenness.

If it makes you a victim, you learn nothing. It holds you down, holds you back, and leads to misery and suffering.

On the other hand, if you believe that God (or your personal higher power) uses broken things on purpose, then you ask to most uplifting question: "What am I supposed to learn from this?"

Sometimes what you learn is that you were broken because you were on the wrong path and that you need to get back to your purpose. In other situations, it's a signal that you need to make a quick course correction. What you were doing wasn't working. Try something new.

Sometimes being broken gets you fired up. It's becomes the fuel and the motivation to get back up, dust yourself off, and run back into the game.

God uses broken things, broken soul to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength and broken people to do great things.

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) answers a listener's question about how to effectively balance prospecting for new logos with serving and managing existing accounts.
Balance Prospecting and Account Management
Maggie is a member of my insider group, and she asked me a pretty important question about how to balance prospecting and account management.
“I'm a top salesperson, and I want to stay on top. But one of the things about my job is that I have to manage and service my existing accounts, and I have to go out and look for new logos and new opportunities. And the more business that I sell, the harder it is for me to prospect to go find new opportunities so that I can sell more."
If in your sales job, you have to go hunt new accounts and you have to manage the accounts that you go out and close, then Maggie's question makes a lot of sense. It's hard to be a hunter and a zookeeper at the same time.

Going out, prospecting, facing rejection, knocking on doors, picking up the phone, and calling people is completely different than servicing your accounts, upselling, cross-selling, and retaining the business that you have.

This is one of the key reasons why people struggle to balance prospecting with account management.
Prospecting Sucks
The truth is, in most cases, you struggle to strike a balance because prospecting sucks and you don't want to do it. It's a whole lot easier to call up an existing account, solve their problems, do customer service, and upsell and cross-sell with people that already know you than it is to pick up the phone and call an invisible stranger.

It's a whole lot easier to call a friend than to call someone that will probably reject you, because that's what happens in prospecting. You get a lot of rejection. So you say that you struggle with balance, but the reason that you're struggling is that you don't have any balance. You spend all of your time managing accounts and none of your time prospecting.

Next, you procrastinate and put off prospecting. You find every excuse not to prospect. Having an account base gives you really good excuses not to prospect, so you don't. The need to prospect and the need to fill up your pipeline begins to add up.
You Can't Do All of Your Prospecting At Once
Your sales manager is saying, “Hey, you have to go find me some new business,” and you're not making the commissions that you want to make. There's a lot of pressure on you. So suddenly you're faced with, “Oh my goodness gracious, I have to prospect.” Then you try to pile all of your prospecting into one day.

Desperately, you try to do it all at one time. That's when you start to run into big problems because you have the demands of your existing account base and you have to prospect. And nobody wants to spend an entire day prospecting because as I said earlier, prospecting sucks. Suddenly, you're overwhelmed with this big old pile of prospecting that you have to do.

So you don't prospect. Instead, you go back to account management, which makes the problem worse. Because you're overwhelmed and stressed out, you feel out of balance.

You start looking for an easy button solution to a problem that, if you're honest with yourself, you created. Not because of your workload, but because you were avoiding prospecting in the first place.
Prospect Every Single Day
The key is that you need to prospect a little bit every day. And when you do a little bit of prospecting every single day, you begin to take advantage of the cumulative impact of all those little bits of activity.

Breaking up your prospecting activity into little bits that you do every single day also makes it easier. It's a lot more palatable to do the things that you don't want to do in small chunks than to save it all up and do it at one time.

The first thing you want to do is begin blocking time out for prospecting. That means that it needs to be on your calendar.

On my final Coronavirus talk, I discuss what happens post-pandemic, the power of blending, and what you need to do right now to now to future-proof your sales career.
The Pipe Is Life
A year ago, I made the first coronavirus talk about outbound prospecting. No matter when, where, or how as a salesperson, your number one job is to go out and fill up the pipeline. A lot of people were asking questions at the outset of the coronavirus about whether or not they should prospect at all.

And if we take a look at the last year, the salespeople who kept the pipeline full, crushed it, and salespeople across all industries had the year of their life because they kept prospecting. Salespeople who were prospecting by foot and in-person moved to the telephone. People that were using the telephone found that because they were working at home and not driving as much, they could double up on their prospecting compared to the year before.

A year ago, prospecting consistently was the most important thing that you could do. And today, it is still the most important thing that you can do because the pipe is life. The number one reason why people fail in sales is that they fail to prospect. It's just that simple.

We've been through a lot this year. But as we start looking to the future, as salespeople we've got to think, “How do we future-proof ourselves?”
There's A Whole New Playing Field In Sales
The one thing that is absolutely true about the last year is that we compressed about 10 years’ worth of innovation into a period of about 12 months. Salespeople everywhere woke up to a new playing field.

This playing field was being driven primarily by buyers because buyers had changed. The new playing field was, “I'm not going in person, I'm going to be on a video. I've got to learn how to leverage an omnichannel approach for connecting with my customers and moving deals through my pipeline.”

What top sales professionals discovered over the last year is something called blending.
How To Win With Blending
Blending is choosing the communication channel at any given point in the sales process that gives you the highest probability of achieving your sales outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. This is the formula for the future: choosing the communication channel that gives you the highest probability of getting the outcome that you desire, at any given place in the sales process, with any given customer, at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money.

Essentially, it’s efficiency + effectiveness = productivity. It’s that simple. So as you start thinking about future-proofing yourself, the number one thing you have to do is start mastering every single communication channel, whether it's direct messaging, the phone, video, email, snail mail, you name it.

It's the ability to use every possible way to connect with someone. Even with social media or smoke signals if you have to. Mastering all of those channels so that you gain a competitive edge. You can meet your buyers where they are and blend these different communication channels so that you can have more conversations with people.
We Can Talk To More People In Less Time
If you just go back to what I said earlier, a year ago, I talked about prospecting because one of the truths about sales is that the more people you talk with, the more you're going to sell. But because we have all these different channels to use, now it makes sense that we can talk to more people in less time, which puts more in the pipeline. That means that we're going to sell a lot more in the long run.

This is future-proofing. Sadly, over the last year, I've noticed that there are two basic types of salespeople. There are wishbones and there are rainmakers. The wishbones are the folks that were hoping and wishing that things would go back to the way they were. There are people right now looking at the end of the pandemic, which is in front of us and it's going to end very soon,

On this fun Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Sales Gravy Master Trainer Gina Trimarco and Account Executive Jeb Blount Jr discuss how they learned to love selling. From cold calling, to losing deals, and all of the challenges in between, you'll love the story of how a young college grad finds his way in the sale profession.

We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount is joined by the Women Your Mother Warned You About - Gina Trimarco & Rachel Pitts.

We get behind the scenes with the WYMWYA podcast, learn how Gina and Rachel almost broke up, the value of getting a coach, and why when you are coachable, other people will invest in helping you reach your goals.

We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

Sales teams that read together, succeed together. Download our FREE Virtual Selling Book Club Guide for a complete kit for starting and running a book club for your sales team.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast Jeb Blount and Keith Lubner explore sales messaging tactics for closing bigger deals. From stories to images to stepping into your buyer's shoes, these tried and true techniques will help you both grab and hold your buyer's attention and rise above your competition.

There is no doubt that developing powerful sales messaging is one of the most challenging skill sets for modern sales professionals. Jeb and Keith break the process of down in a way that makes it easy to begin crafting sales messages that resonate.

We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode - we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

How to celebrate success during the pandemic? Salespeople and their leaders are asking this question.

This season, the pandemic has canceled President's Club and moved Sales Kickoffs from physical meetings to virtual. Its left many sales professionals feeling that the work they did to reach the top is anti-climatic and empty.

In this Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Jeb Blount and Victor Antonio discuss the keys to celebrating success and staying motivated this year and beyond.

We want to hear from you. What are you doing this year to celebrate success, reward yourself, and stay motivated? Send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT.
Jeb: Celebrating Victories, Big and Small
We are here in studio blue with the great Victor Antonio, who I believe is one of the greatest orators of our generation. His presence on stage excites me. It's incredible, it's engaging, and his stories are real. The path that Victor took to get to where he is today is inspiring. You came up from poverty and you've built an empire since then.

I want to talk about some of the issues that people are dealing with today in that context. We're in the third wave of the pandemic right now, and I'm hearing stories of salespeople who just feel down. One of the people in my insider group sent me a text message and it broke my heart.

She's like, “I worked all year long. I put everything into getting to President's Club, and then we had our virtual sales kick-off. I saw my name on a bullet point on a slide and it was just completely anti-climatic. How do I celebrate this? How do I tell my family and friends that I had this victory in my life?” It hurt me because I know how that feels.

I loved to walk on stage and get a trophy, I lived for that as a salesperson. In fact, I told my sales manager, “I don't care about the money. I want to win. I want the trophy.” So in this world, I thought there was no better person than you to have a conversation with. What can salespeople do to celebrate their victories, both big and small?
Victor: Don’t Let Others Determine Your Value
It's interesting to me that people want that external validation. A trophy is an inanimate object, you know what I mean? The real victory comes from looking at everything you've done. Take a moment to reflect and say, “Look at what I did!” and walk on your own mental stage. We all want recognition.

We all want our successes to be meaningful. But if I just nailed that year, my biggest trophy was always the check. That was my trophy. For people who need that external validation, why do you need it? Why depend on somebody else’s appreciation of you to determine your value? Appreciate it. Live in that space, man.
Jeb: Trophies Are The Past, Live in The Present
One of the things that I've always lived by is that when you're in second place, your job is to take first place. When you're in first place, you're competing with yourself.

The problem with getting good is that you get in first place, you win the trophy, and you forget who you're competing with. You forget that your job is to put the accelerator on instead of getting complacent. Looking at your trophies is living in the past. There are basically three places that you can live at any given time. You can live in the past. You can live in the present. You can live in the future.

The only place that's real is the present right now, the future hasn't been written, and the past doesn't exist anymore. It's just something that happened. One of the problems that we face when we’re struggling to motivate ourselves or feel that recognition is that we're living in the wrong place. We need to spend more time in the present than these other places.
Victor: The Thrill of the Journey
I want to challenge your perception of your success a little. I think your joy really comes in the process of getting to the next level. It has nothing to do with actually reaching the next level.

Coronavirus is Testing Mental Resilience
The Coronavirus third wave is putting a strain on the mental resilience of sales professionals and impacting performance.
From New Possibilities to Managing Mental Resilience
The last time I came to you with the coronavirus talk was back in July. Back then we were talking about new possibilities— about how going through a crucible of adversity helps you lift the chains of limitations off of yourself so that you can see that anything is possible if you make the choice to persevere.

I come to you now in January, during the third wave of the coronavirus, because I’m noticing a big problem. Salespeople are beginning to wear out. In some cases, it's depression and loneliness. In other cases, it's waiting and hoping for this to all be over and constantly having your hopes dashed.

All of this stress and anxiety combine to put you in a situation where you just don't feel very good about life. In sales, if you don't feel good about life, it's going to be really, really hard to feel good about selling.
Mental and Physical Drain
The net result is that many people just feel mentally and physically drained. In sales, you need a great deal of mental resilience because you often face so much rejection. The job is hard. And now, you have to work twice as hard to accomplish your sales goals.

In this environment, you need a great deal of intellectual acuity in order to outwit your competitors. Mental acuity requires a great deal of physical stamina. Likewise, mental resilience is directly impacted by physical resilience.

If you're allowing those days when you just feel depressed to take you down with them, then it's going to be a lot harder to to to gain the physical stamina that you need.
A Challenge to Focus on You
So my challenge to you on this Coronavirus Talk is to go look in the mirror:

Are you taking care of yourself?
Drinking too much?
Eating too much or the wrong things?
Getting enough exercise?
Are you doing things to your body that make it harder for you to recover mentally?

If the answer is yes, resolve to make changes. Reach deep down inside of yourself and find the discipline.

Before I made these changes, I didn't feel good, didn't really look good, and I wasn't performing at my very best. Flip forward a couple of months, with a real focus and discipline on taking care of my physical health, and I'm in a much better place.

I've got so much more energy and feel much more equipped to handle the disappointments, stress, and anxiety that come along with this horrible pandemic.
Take Action
So take action now. Start eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising. Do this and I promise you that you will not only get through this, but you'll also put yourself in a position to win on the other side.

I want to hear from you. What are you doing to keep yourself mentally and physically fit during this pandemic? Send me a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT.
More Coronavirus Talk Episodes:

Prospecting Coronavirus Talk #1
Excuses Coronavirus Talk #2
The Gift of Time Coronavirus Talk #3
Confusion Coronavirus Talk #4
Fear and Worry Coronavirus Talk #5
On Mourning Coronavirus Talk #6
Gratitude Coronavirus Talk #7
On New Possibilities #8

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Matthew Pollard (The Introverts Edge to Networking) take on networking for introverts.

One of the biggest myths about networking is that to be an effective networker you need to have the “gift-of-gab" and be an outgoing self-promoter. The truth is, it's just the opposite. In fact, introverts often make the best networkers. You just need a plan, system, and authenticity.

On this paradigm-shifting podcast episode, you learn tips and tactics for leveraging your innate introvert superpowers to target prospects and influencers, engage in networking conversations, and turn networking into a repeatable system that helps you build your business and pipeline.

Join Jeb Blount's Insider Group. Text "insider" to 1-706-397-4599 or HERE

Matthew: The Inspiration Behind The Introvert’s Edge to Networking
A lot of people don't like networking and I think it's because they don't understand what networking really is. They go to networking events and they see these people that do transactional networking. They have these surface-level conversations with people and they walk out with all these business cards without having a real conversation with anyone.

The cards sit on their desk and they think, “If they call me, then I'll work with them.” And of course, they never do. So they had this mindset that networking just doesn't work. People need to be more strategic when they’re networking. Secondly, networking doesn't just take place in a networking room.

People assume you have to be face to face because it doesn't work virtually. And now people are realizing they can actually sell more if they stay at home. Networking is the same way. Most people don't even know how to articulate the value of what they offer in three minutes when someone is politely listening.

What chance do they have when someone gives them half a second online?
Jeb: What to Do With That Stack of Business Cards
I was working with a group of CPAs who were going to networking events, but they weren't really getting anything out of them. When I asked about their process, they said, “We talk to people, collect their business cards, and then we come back and wait for them to call us.”

I asked why they don’t call them, and they said, “Well, we do call them, but sometimes we'll call them like three or four weeks later. We don’t want to bother them right after the networking event.” This is not hard. Why don't you try calling them 24 hours after the networking event? Because they're probably going to remember you right away. They won’t remember you in a month from now.

The advice I gave them was this: The next networking event you go to, when you get their business card, write down something about the person on the back of the business card. As I walk away, I go to my LinkedIn app on my phone and I send them a connection request.

The probability that they accept my request goes up exponentially. They also gave me a business card that usually has their cell phone number on it. So I send them a text message that says, “It was so nice meeting you, thank you so much for the conversation. I'll give you a call tomorrow.”

And then I call them the next day. If you do that, appointments go up exponentially. We followed up with this group a couple of weeks later, and sure enough, it was working for them. Suddenly they were meeting people, calling them, and getting meetings.

What’s your take on starting conversations, following up, and making connections online?
Matthew: Follow-Up Doesn’t Have To Be Awkward
If I take a sales mindset, maybe with people on social media, after I walking out of the room means that we are starting to foster that relationship. I'll connect with them on LinkedIn. Depending on your relationship, why not connect with them on Facebook? Check them out on Instagram.

One of the things I tell people is to look people up on LinkedIn beforehand who you kno...

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast Jeb Blount (People Follow You) and Kristie Jones discuss the trials and tribulations of building and sustaining a sales accountability culture. You'll learn that without accountability your sales team will generate inconsistent results and devolve into the wild, wild west.
Kristie: How I Developed My Passion for Creating a Sales Accountability Culture
I actually started in SaaS sales leadership back in 2000. As I progressed through my career, I started to work for some VC-backed companies, and I got that VC-backed startup bug. Accountability is so critical when you're dealing with people who have given you money and expect a return on the investment. Early-stage startups and fast-growing startups are all about urgency and results. I was working as a VP of Sales and it was clear that those environments needed to have a sales accountability culture. We needed to create and maintain one.
In about 2016, I left the W2 world and started my own sales consultancy. I'm passionate about helping early-stage tech startups build their sales teams and formalize their process. I spend a ton of time doing executive coaching on accountability culture. I'm still walking into companies and talking to them about accountability culture after really not seeing it. That includes everything from not having firm quotas, to not dealing with “accountability dodgers”.

Jeb: Too Much Money, Not Enough Leadership
In some cases, there’s zero leadership, too much money, and people run wild. In other cases, you've just got a founder who is trying to put everything together. There's an inflection point where if you don't create some accountability, it's a disaster. What advice do you have for a business, no matter where they fit on that spectrum, for sales leaders or executives, to shift into an accountability culture?

Kristie: Expectations Are The Foundation Of A Sales Accountability Culture
It starts with setting expectations and putting those in writing. In the middle of this pandemic, it’s more important than ever. There's more uncertainty than ever before, which also means that sales reps need accountability more than ever before. They need to understand: “What will cause me to lose my job?” Everybody's worried about that. They need to understand the circumstances around that. A sales accountability culture starts during the interview process. During the interview process, I'm already starting to set expectations just by the behavioral-based interview questions that I'm asking to ensure that people will walk their talk and that people will fall on the sword when they need to.
During the start of COVID-19, I went back to all of my clients and former clients and wrote a little how-to menu and said, “You have to create accountability around the work schedule because the work schedule is not eight-to-five anymore. You have to understand what you can expect from them, even from a work schedule standpoint.” Also, expectations are a two-way street. As a leader, I can't just sit down with you and say, "Here are my expectations, let’s negotiate them and put them in writing." I also need to say, “Here's what you can expect from me.” And then, at the end of our expectations meeting, I ask, “What do you want me to do if you don't hold up your end of the bargain?” I let them set their own consequences.
Why would I wait until it's gone south on me, just to go back to fix it in a way that may not work for the rep? I hear everything from, “I need a gentle reminder,” to, “I need you to take me out to lunch, clearly something's going on and I need some one-on-one attention.” I hear a lot of different answers to that question, but I write those down on the document, too. And so it's so much easier for me to go to a rep who's not walking their talk and say, “We had this conversation and this is what we discussed. This is what you told me to do if you weren’t holding yourself accountable. I think we're at that place,

On this inspiring episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) talks to Brian Knox, owner and founder of B Knox Photography. This young entrepreneur leveraged Fanatical Prospecting to quickly ramp up his successful and fast-growing photography business that he started this year.

This conversation about sales and entrepreneurship is both educational and inspirational. Sales and the things that we do in sales matter, wherever we are in life. And we can all chase and achieve our dreams if we just make the decision to take action.

Listen all Sales Gravy Podcast episodes here.
Brian: Why I Started My Business
I was in corporate life from the time I graduated college in 2000, all the way up until 2020, and the last four jobs that I had in the corporate world were inside sales and customer service. Then between 2013 and 2015, I moved into more of a pure sales role where I was cold calling.

Our training was basically watching a guy do it for two days. Then they hand you a computer and a phone and you're kind of on your own. There wasn't a lot of sales training. That was when I first found your material, because I was honestly trying to ease the pain of, “How do I sit here for eight hours a day and drum up business?” I was averse to it.

Then, I moved into a sales coaching role with a local plumbing, air, and electric company where I was teaching their technicians some of the basics of sales psychology, and going out in the field, and helping them with their sales process.

After that, I was in development at Habitat for Humanity of Greenville, which was essentially a sales role. That's where I put into practice what I had learned in those first few years, and what I was teaching the guys on the field, in order to bring in donations for Habitat for Humanity. I finally left that job to start the photography business full-time in February of this year.
Brian: What Photography Means to Me
I got my first digital camera in 2004 or 2005. My dad was into photography. He didn't train me, but I was at least exposed to him having a camera. When I got my own digital camera, that kind of launched it for me. It was very simple to make art by just going out and clicking a shutter.

I did it as a hobby and on the side. I started picking up initial gigs, which were typically family. I chugged along making a little money for about ten years. But then I began to apply sales techniques to what was my side hustle, at that point. I started to get traction with that and then I went through six months of wrestling with the question, "Do I quit and go full time with this, or do I just kind of keep it as a side thing?"

I felt that it was more of a contribution to society and to the world to take my skill and talent and give that in the form of photography, as opposed to being in the sales trenches.
Jeb: On Entrepreneurial Journeys
I remember when I first started Sales Gravy 13 years ago, we were in the middle of the Great Recession and I had to make a pivot in my career. I decided that at that point in my life, I was either going to be an entrepreneur, or not.

I always wanted to run my own business. Because I was good at selling and great in the corporate world, there wasn't a lot of incentive until I found myself on the street trying to figure out what I was going to do.

But for about three years, I was constantly terrified that I was going to fail. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Like, am I going to make it, am I going to have to crawl back and beg for a job?

What was it like when you first started? And are you still in that place of, "Do I let go of what I'm used to"?
Brian: If You Try, You Can't Fail
It's gone really well this year, but I definitely have those same concerns. I also remember waking up in the middle of the night and wrestling with things like, "Well, what if it rains that whole next day? Then I can't do the outdoor construction shoot,

Sales Myth: You Have to Sell Yourself
Most of us, at one time or another in our careers, have heard some trainer or manager exclaim,

“You have to sell yourself.”
“If you want to get that job, son, you have to sell yourself.”
“The real key to sales is your ability to sell yourself.”
“If you want others to like you, you’ll have to sell yourself.”

The Sell Yourself Cliche
This philosophy is prevalent in business culture.

A while back, I was at an Ivy League University for a speech by a successful businessman to a group of MBA students from the top business schools in the world. The speaker was so well respected that when he walked into the room there was a hush.

The audience members were on the edge of their seats in anticipation.

And what was the message?

What was the secret of success that this revered businessman offered?

“Never forget how important it is in business to first sell yourself.”

The entire audience nodded in unison.

For this wise man and many others, the phrase sell yourself has become an easy-to-use cliche´. It just rolls off the tongue. Like the audience at the speech I attended, most people will nod their heads in agreement to the statement as if some prophet on a hill had just read it from stone tablets.
People Buy You for Their Reasons, Not Yours
Sales expert and bestselling author Jeffrey Gitomer teaches a simple philosophy, “People love to buy but they hate to be sold.”

In other words, most people prefer to buy on their terms. They do not want or appreciate a hard pitch or a features dump. They buy for their reasons not yours.

Yet daily salespeople across the globe, on the phone, video calls, email, social media, and in person, sell to their customers by dumping data, pushing their position, or simply trying to talk their way into a sale.

They sell themselves to anyone else they can get to stand still for more than five minutes.

But it does not work, because people like to buy, they don’t like to be sold.
When You Try to Sell Yourself You Push People Away
The harder you try to sell yourself to others, the more you push them away. A conversation where the other person tells you all about themselves, their accomplishments, and how great they are is a turnoff. It is a features dump.

Think about it, the most unlikeable human in the world is the person standing in front of you talking about themself.

You don’t walk away from that conversation thinking how much you would like to spend more time with them. Instead you think, “What a jerk,” or “How boring,” or “Wow, that guy is full of himself.”
We Love to Talk About Our Favorite Person
Still, we do love the opportunity to sell ourselves. Most of us, if given the opportunity, will talk for hours about our favorite person, oblivious to the negative impact it has on how we are viewed by others.

When pressed, experts who are quick to tell you to sell yourself, are unable to explain exactly how to do it. Sure, they will offer tips, but it's mostly hyperbole.

Here is the brutal truth: You cannot sell yourself to others; you have to get others to buy you on their terms.
You're Talking, They Aren't Buying
Even if you are preceded by a great reputation and others are anticipating meeting you, your attempts to sell yourself can backfire. I learned this lesson at a speech I gave to a large dinner group. One of the audience members was such a big fan of one of my books, that he lobbied the meeting organizer to be seated right next to me.

During dinner he asked me questions, and I talked and talked and talked—about me. A few days after the speech, I called the meeting organizer to follow up and offer my thanks. I thanked him for seating Daniel next to me and asked him if Daniel had had a good time.

He hesitated for a moment and finally said, “I’m telling you this because I like you; but Daniel did not come away with a very good opinion of you.” It was like being punched in the gut!

The Fine Art of Blending Text Messaging Into Your Account Management Process
I love blending text messaging into my account management process. As a communication tool, it’s fast, efficient, less formal than email, and allows for arm’s-length, nonintrusive, synchronous communication that still feels personal.

There are two reasons why blending text messaging into your account management process works:

It’s mobile. Text messaging is integrated into the mobile and wearable devices that are attached to us 24/7. These are the primary communications devices in our lives and businesses. Everyone has a mobile phone, and for Apple users, text is integrated across all devices and desktops.
It’s treated as a priority. One of the key reasons why text messages work so well is that most people feel compelled to read and/or respond to them immediately.

Text is a Versatile For Account Management
Text messaging is extremely versatile virtual communication channel. You can attach videos, images, voice messages, and links to articles and resources. And, when the person you are texting is not available, texting shifts from synchronous to asynchronous communication.

For account management and communicating with customers text messaging is a tremendous tool. It helps you nurture and maintain relationships, keeps customers updated, and allows you to quickly respond to concerns from anywhere.

It's for these reasons that text messaging is the perfect virtual communication channel to blend into your account management system and process. Text messages are an easy way to:

Check the pulse of your accounts
Show appreciation
Send account updates and data.
Send insight and educational resources.
Keep key contacts apprised of shipments and order information.
Be proactive with solving issues.
Send offers and specials.

The real key to blending text into your account management process is ensuring that your text messages are intentional, systematic, and part of an account management plan
The Truth About Why You Really Lose Accounts
A brutal truth is that most customers are lost because of neglect. Not prices, not products, not the economy, not aggressive competitors. Neglect!

Neglect happens slowly. It creeps up on customer relationships.

Salespeople delude themselves into believing that if their customers are not complaining, they must be happy. So, they spend all of their time putting out fires and dealing with squeaky wheels, all the while ignoring accounts that that don’t raise their hand.

Wrapped up in this warm blanket of delusion, salespeople swing the door open and invite competitors in.
Assume Every Account is At Risk
Aggressive competitors don’t miss an opportunity to displace salespeople who neglect their customers. When you fail to proactively anchor your customer relationships, those competitors slip through and encourage buyers to consider other options.

This is exactly why you must never lose sight of the long-term consequences of neglecting accounts.

Relationships matter and must be protected against an onslaught of competitors. You must not take any relationship for granted. Assume that every customer and every relationship is at risk.

I’m not saying this is easy. One of the hardest things to do is keep your fingers on the pulse of your customer base.

Quarterly business reviews and other formal meeting are time consuming. You probably have a large account base and you can’t possibly meet with everyone. Every single day you are putting out fires and dealing with immediate customer service issues.
Pay Attention to Your Accounts
The good news is the one secret to defending your accounts is completely in your control. Pay attention to them.

A simple, regular, inexpensive check-in by text message can make all the difference. It doesn’t need to be anything particularly special. You don’t need a reason to tell your customers that you appreciate them.

Sales Follow Up Superpowers
On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Jeff Shore (Follow Up and Close the Sale) discuss the two sales follow up superpowers: Speed and Personalization.

The brutal truth is that salespeople have a big problem with follow up and it is holding them back. The good news, is this is a problem that is easy to fix.

On this episode you'll actionable tips and tactics that will instantly improve your sales follow up skills.

BONUS: Download our FREE How to Manage Your B2B Sales Team From Home guide to get the scoop on how top sales leaders are getting more productivity from their remote sales teams.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) discuss the massive impact of small actions, done a little bit, every day. Listen to the other episodes in the series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Jeb – Does Faith Matter in Sales?
Alex, I've got a question for you about faith. This is not a religious question. It's a faith question.

You are very convincing human being. You say that sales can be done in 5 minutes a day. Talk to people, call old customers, run the system. It works.

So, I do it one day. Nothing happens. Then do it the next day and nothing happens. I do it the next day and still nothing happens. Then by the 4th day I'm like, “Alex told me to do this stuff, and I made these phone calls, but I didn't sell anything. So, I’m going back to sending emails because that’s easier.”

How important is faith in the system, over a long period of time, to actualizing the five-minute selling process?
Alex – On Faith in Yourself
Great question. Faith is a great word in sales. Faith in the system is really about faith in yourself.

This is important because, in sales we deal with failure and overcoming failure is the key to success.

Faith is continuing to do the right things even when they're not working as well as you would like, because they are still the right things.

In the book I have a two-week challenge: Give me 5-minutes a day for two weeks - that's 50 minutes over 10 days. That is just five proactive outbound prospecting calls a day.

If you do that for two weeks, you will find more open opportunities and more close opportunities. It’s just two weeks of faith and here is no way that you won't improve your sales position.
Jeb– On The Cumulative Impact of Small Actions
It's all about cumulative impact. The cumulative impact of small actions every day. Over time, these small actions add up to real numbers.

But this requires faith because you can't prospect for a day, you can't do follow up for a day, you can’t do anything for a day and expect everything to suddenly change. It just doesn't work that way. You've got to do a little bit every day and keep doing it over time.

Now let me give you the flip side of this question. What happens when it starts working?

Salespeople have a bad habit of quitting the things that are working. Let's just say that I give you the two weeks and then it starts working. Then suddenly my pipeline is a little bit bigger, the deals in my pipeline start to move. Suddenly people are actually spending time with me and we’re having conversations.

What happens then? I get busy and then I quit. How do I make sure that I don't stop doing what's working?
Alex – Staying On Track With Small Daily Actions
You're totally right. Salespeople are busy. They're not sitting around. Therefore, the answer is you must schedule proactive, outbound sales calls into your day.

Mark Twain said, “if you're gonna eat a frog, you might as well eat it first thing in the morning 'cause it's not gonna taste any better later in the day.”

Firstly, do it first thing in the morning - at 8:00 or 8:30 or at 9:00. By 10:00 o'clock you want to be long done with this.

Second, what do you do if you miss a day? The next day you come back to it and you get right back on track.

It's like if you have a bad eating day. I've been trying to lose some weight. Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. My wife and I went out to eat and celebrate 19-years. We had a gigantic meal, and a huge dessert. I ate like a jerk, but it was awesome - a fabulous meal.

So, my weight loss effort over? Am I done? Am I just going to give up and go back to the to the chips and the and the Donuts? nNo, I woke this morning and got back in the saddle.

The easy way to do this is to use a timer. Set it for five minutes. When the Clock is running, you're doing your proactive work. You're making your calls.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount’s (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) offer a simple strategy for overcoming your natural fear of rejection by breaking it into doable doses.
Jeb On Breaking the Fear of Rejection Into Doable Doses
Human beings fear rejection. We hate and avoid rejection at all costs. But, in Sales, your job is to go out and find rejection and bring it home.

However, when you break your fear of rejection into doable doses, it gets easier to handle because, over time, when you face a fear repeatedly, you gain obstacle immunity.
Alex On Using the Phone
Yesterday I had a video call set up with prospect. It was at the end of a long day of video calls. You know, where everybody is a little box on the screen, right? My brain was tired of being on camera, I just wanted to walk around with my phone - just put my feet up and not be on a camera.

In some cases, I feel like there's more dimension and depth to a phone call as compared to a video call.

If you can get good at the telephone you will put so much distance between yourself and the 95% of sales people who don't do well on the telephone, that they will never be able to catch up with you.

That's how important the telephone is right now.
Jeb On Blending
It’s about blending. Salespeople need to get used to the word blending because, blending is how we will be selling going forward. With Virtual Selling, it is about meeting the buyer where they are. You should use the communication channel that is right for the moment.

But salespeople are not having synchronous conversations – especially by phone – because they are afraid of being rejected.

This is exactly why I think your 5 Minute Selling System is powerful.

If you just do it a little bit every day – even five outbound calls per day – you reduce these fears to a small part of your day. But, as you start facing that fear, a little bit every day, it will get easier for you to handle the rejection.

And basically, what you start doing, is building a chain of days in a row where you're investing in conversations with customers.

Think about it, 30-days of five minutes a day talking to your customers. What happens to your pipeline? Your business? Your income?

What happens inside of you?
Alex On Asking More Often
In baseball, if you fail 70% of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame. For salespeople, if you're failing 80 to 90% of the time, you're doing damn good!

So, when we try to avoid every single no, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to get the yeses that make us successful.

The salespeople who get the most no's, the ones who get the most rejection, are the ones who are most successful. Because, they're the ones who are asking the most.

It's simple. If you get the most no's you get the most yeses.

Thomas Edison said that many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

So, if you've already been rejected eight times by this prospect, the ninth rejection is literally no worse. It's the same. There is no difference.
Jeb on High-Intensity Prospecting Sprints
I'm working with a group right now and we are running high-intensity prospecting sprints. We're doing 10-minute phone blocks.

It’s a simple cadence: 10-minutes, 10 dials, with a goal to set one appointment.

It's just so easy for people to rip off 10 dials. Leveraging this methodology allows them to get a whole lot prospecting done in a short period time with better outcomes.

Because we break rejection into doable doses (10-minutes at a time) it’s easier for them to remain motivated and focused.
On Accomplishment in Small Doses
And it makes you feel more confident and accomplished because you're having positive interactions! You’re going to feel better about yourself.

You connected with someone. You feel positive and that's a much better feeling than avoiding the p...

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount's (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) teach you how to eliminate cold calling by talking with people you already know.
Jeb: On Why Talking to People You Know Can Eliminate Cold Calling
“Welcome back to part two of my conversation with author Alex Goldfayn about 5 Minute Selling Skills. On this episode, we discuss one of the greatest sources of new pipeline opportunities.

It's the people that you already know. Talking with the people you know is an easy way to eliminate cold calling.”
Alex: On Planning Who You Will Call
"I feel like we don't call people because we don't know who to call, right? Unless you're using a CRM perfectly, it's not going to tell you who to call. It's a list of names and numbers.

At the beginning of the week for five minutes, write down who you're going to call that week. For example, customers that just made an order with you.

Right now, try thinking of five customers you haven't talked to in three months or more, you can't do it because you're not talking to them. They're not in your head.

Customers who used to buy from you but stopped are another group of people that's very difficult to think of because they don't call you to break up with you. They just go away. You know, they go away quietly, so we need to plan who to call.

And then we have the whole rest of the week to call a few each day. If you don't want to call them directly send a text or email to set up that phone call.

I think the only semi valuable use of email in the sales process job is to set up the phone call. Otherwise, it's nearly useless. In business to business, selling right and email is just slightly better than doing nothing at all.

Plan your calls and then write down what happens. What did you say? What did they say and then? What's the dollar amount associated with that interaction?

Because then once you fill that in, that becomes a goldmine that you can follow up on. The most successful people follow up a lot more than other people.

So, plan who to call and then track how those calls went and what was said and what the opportunity dollar value is. If you do those two things, each thing takes 5 minutes. The calls take 5 minutes. The things to say on the calls take 5 minutes.

How can you not grow if you're making hundreds of additional proactive communications a year?"
Jeb: On Eliminating Cold Calling By Talking With Inactive Customers
"It really is that simple.

Let’s start with customers that just aren't doing business with you anymore. To me, this is the gold mind of all gold mines.

When we're working with clients who want to accelerate growth, engaging inactive customers is almost always where we go first.

I had one client, for example, that had a half a million inactive customers in their database. We pulled the list and just picked up the phone and started calling them. We did exactly what you said Alex. All we did was call them up to say hello.

In one hour, we sold $1,000,000 in business.

Now most of that was to one business that was expanding rapidly. We got the owner on the phone and the he was ready to buy. He said he was just about to put out an RFP."
Alex: On the Rewards for Being Present
"It was so hard for me not to jump in in the middle of that, I had to really practice my silence technique there because I got excited by what you were saying.

You got that business sitting at that conference table because you were present and nobody else was. The guy even said I was just about to take his business somewhere else. But you're here, so I'm going to reward you with business

If you're the customer, you feel an obligation to a salesperson who makes the effort to pick up the phone and be present.

And, by the way, they. It wasn't like you were cold calling. I mean, it wasn't like there was somebody who didn't know you. They had a relationship with your business in the past....

On this Sales Gravy podcast episode Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) discuss why text messaging is not a substitute for talking with people.

This is Part One in our series on 5 Minute Selling - how to get a massive amount of sales activity done, a few minutes at a time.
Just Texting It In
On this episode Jeb tells the story of a lazy sales rep who lost his business that because he began "texting it in" rather than interacting by phone.
"A year earlier, text became his primary channel. Where we used to talk, now he never called. He was no longer blending texting into his account management process; texting had become his account management process.
If he had an upsell or special offer, he sent it via text. When it was time to restock, he sent a text.
Soon, I started to feel that he was taking me for granted, like he felt he no longer needed to make an effort in order to keep my business.
Sadly, for this account manager, one of his competitors called me. She invested in the relationship. I gave her a little of my business and she did a great job. As the business relationship bloomed, I gave her more and more of my business. Soon she had it all."

Text Messaging is Not a Substitute for Talking With People
This is the dark side of text messaging. It’s fast and easy, but it is not a substitute for talking with people and investing in relationships.

Interpersonal communication is a combination of words, voice tone, body language, and facial expression.

Since stakeholders cannot associate the words in your text messages with the context of your voice tone and facial expressions, they assign their own meaning, which can lead to miscommunication, or, in Jeb's case, resentment.

Virtual Selling Skills Training gives your sales team the tactics, tools, techniques, and strategies to remain relevant and competitive in the ever-changing environment of modern sales.

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Anthony Iannarino (Eat Their Lunch) get down and dirty about why salespeople need to adopt a phone first approach to outbound prospecting sequences.
Three Reasons Salespeople Default to Email for Outbound Prospecting
There is no tool in your sales arsenal that is more powerful than the phone. None. Yet sales professionals across the spectrum have abandoned the phone for spamming prospects with an endless stream of email.
Fear of the Phone
In many cases this destructive behavior has its origin in fear. These salespeople are afraid of rejection and therefore avoid talking to people. Email allows them to keep people at arms length.
Ignorance of the Power of the Phone in Outbound Prospecting
In other circumstances, it is a case of ignorance. Salespeople have been blasted with the false message that the "phone no longer works."

They've been lead to believe that the only way to effectively prospect is by email. Therefore, they stuff outbound prospecting sequences with spammy emails rather than leading with the phone first.
Leadership Failures
Finally, there is the failure of leadership. From sales managers to marketing organizations, salespeople are not being taught how to do outbound prospecting by phone or held accountable for talking to people.

Leaders, through their actions and inaction, encourage email first vs phone first outbound prospecting sequences. This results in thin pipelines and, in many cases, a negative impact to the company's brand.
Phone First Outbound Prospecting Sequences
The objective of outbound prospecting sequences is to improve the probability of engaging a prospect. For this reason, sequences deploy multiple communication channels and prospecting touches over set duration of time.

The key to effective outbound prospecting is talking to people. So, for best results, front load your outbound prospecting sequences with phone touches.

The phone is the easiest and fastest means of engaging in conversations with and setting appointments with high quality prospects. Therefore, to fill your pipeline faster, in less time, lead with a phone first approach on outbound prospecting sequences.

We created a new FREE guide to help you build better prospecting sequences called Seven Steps to Building Effective Prospecting Sequences

Mastering the "Yes - And" Sales Improv Framework
Ever been caught flatfooted when a buyer throws an unexpected objection at you? It turns out that improv can help you handle it and increase sales.
On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Gina Trimarco engage in a fun discussion on how to increase sales with improv. You'll learn how developing the same skills comedians and actors use on stage, can help you in front of buyers during sales conversations.

Improv is the art of off-the-cuff, un-scripted comedy in which the actors respond to cues from each other rather than reading from a set script. The most important keys to effective improv are listening, accepting, and leveraging the "yes-and" framework.
Sales improv helps you increase sales by:

Becoming more confident
Being present and in the moment
Building sales conversation organically
Asking better questions
Being a better listener
Keeping buyers engaged
Detaching from outcomes

During the podcast, Jeb and Gina demonstrate the "Yes-And" improv framework and Jeb fails miserably. The good news is the “yes-and” improv motion is easy to learn with practice. Mastering this framework is the key to increasing sales with improv.

Gina also shares her inspiring entrepreneurial story about how she built her sales improv training business. Gina combines street smarts and improv comedy skills with her experience in the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds to teach sales professionals improv techniques.

Starting a B2B Podcast is a Smart Virtual Selling Strategy
On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and James Carbary (Content-Based Networking) discuss how starting a B2B podcast can elevate your personal brand and build familiarity.
Familiarity Leads to Liking
In Sales, familiarity is powerful because familiarity leads to liking. When people are familiar with you, the more likely they'll be to engage on prospecting calls and feel comfortable with you on virtual sales calls.

Familiarity is virtual selling lubrication. It takes the friction out of virtual communication and makes everything easier. The lack of familiarity is why you get so many objections. When people don’t know you, it’s much harder for them to trust you.

To build familiarity, you must make a direct investment in improving the awareness of your name, expertise, and reputation. Starting a B2B podcast is such an investment and, one that will pay huge dividends.

The Virtual Selling Book
Virtual Selling is hot. Smoking hot! Because, to remain relevant and competitive sales professionals must learn how to engage prospects and close deals in a virtual environment.

This is exactly why you need my new book Virtual Selling.

In Virtual Selling I teach you exactly how to gain a powerful competitive edge and crush your competitors by leveraging virtual communication channels.

Don’t walk, don’t wait, don’t hesitate. Go get Virtual Selling now. It is a run-away best seller for one simple reason. The techniques, tactics, and skills I teach you in Virtual Selling work.

Open yourself up to new opportunities
It's difficult to see new possibilities during this crisis. It seems like we've been in this pandemic for years rather than months. Secretly, most of us have been living with the hope that the coronavirus pandemic would be over quickly and that we'd get back to normal.
With the new surge in cases, what is becoming clear is that everything has changed, that there is no going back, and that the only thing we can count on is new possibilities. In Coronavirus Talk #8, I discuss why it is important that you shift your mindset now so that you are looking though the windshield rather than in the rear view mirror.
Adapting to A New Reality
The last time I came to you with a Coronavirus talk, it was way back in April. We were talking about gratitude. And a lot's happened since April.

One of the things that happened to me was that I wrote an entire book, an 85,000 word book on Virtual Selling. And it's something that normally takes me 18 to 24 months. And I was able to focus my attention and get it done.

This is one of the lessons that I've learned during coronavirus. There are all these new possibilities, different things that we can do. And I've heard a lot of people, very smart people, talk about how, even though it seems a little bleak right now, this coronavirus pandemic is going to launch an entire new wave of innovation and it's making a lot of us think differently.

I think I told you in a previous talk that I was rethinking in fact, a lot of my values, and it's helped me, as a CEO, begin to transform my company, Sales Gravy, into a different company, and to grow faster.

The reason that I'm back, because I really wasn't planning on any more coronavirus talks, is because the coronavirus is back with a fury. We're seeing cases popping up everywhere. Now we're shutting things down again. There's a little bit of panic. I think we're looking at some stiff economic headwinds if we don't get this under control.
Everything Has Changed, Especially in Sales
And a lot of folks who were thinking that we were going to get back to normal are now faced with the truth, that there is not going to be a "back to normal." Everything has changed and it will continue to change.

And it's no different than what happened to us after 9/11. After 9/11, we were expecting things to go back to normal and they never really did. We've traveled again and we continued on with our lives, but security never changed in airports. And the way that we looked at the world, it was always jaded after that moment.

Now, I'm not saying that the coronavirus caused us to look at the world with a jaded view. I think it's going to, like I said, open up new possibilities. And I think for all of the folks who were holding on to the hope that we will go back to normal, I think right now you're getting a massive wake up call, in particular with salespeople.
Differentiate with Virtual Selling
Because if you're in sales, you know that everything has changed and it is not going back. If you want to be relevant, if you want to be competitive, if you want to differentiate, you have to learn how to sell differently, which means you have to adopt new tools, which means you have to become good at virtual selling, and you have to do it now. That is a fact.

Look, I'll admit that I was like a lot of folks. I believed that this would be over quickly. I wrote a book called Virtual Selling, expecting that it would have a short life cycle that it wouldn't live very long because people would get back to what we were doing before and back to normal.

And now you can see, as the cases have picked up and as we are really coming to grips with the fact that we're in this for the long haul, that the truth is, is virtual selling is the way that we're going to move forward.
Rise to the Occasion
But here's the good news-- and we're getting this in from everywhere across industries, the size of companies, in different countries,

Shifting Initial Sales Meetings From Face to Face to Video Calls
One of the most effective points in the sales process to leverage video sales calls and virtual selling skills is the initial meeting. The initial meeting is first step in the sales process. It is the appointment you (or your sales development rep) set during outbound prospecting or from an inbound lead.

The objective of the initial sales meeting (often the first step in the discovery process) is three-fold:

Make a great first impression and develop an early emotional connection with the stakeholder(s)
Fully qualify the opportunity to determine if it makes sense for you to move to the next step with the prospect.
Generate enough interest with the stakeholder(s) to motivate them to advance to the next step in the sales process.

Effective Initial Meetings
An effective initial meeting should be about 30 minutes in length and no more than sixty. Your primary goal is to close for the next meeting (based on the complexity and length of your sales cycle).

discovery
demo
presentation

In situations where the opportunity is not a good fit, poorly qualified, or the timing is wrong, you’ll want to walk away.

Sometimes the stakeholders will not have enough interest to move forward and won’t set the next meeting with you.

I disqualify between 30% and 50% of prospects on initial meetings and never move forward with the next step.

For example: If you conduct ten initial meetings over the course of a week, about half will advance to the next step. Depending on your closing ratio, 1-2 of those will move on to closed/won.

Of course, some delusional salespeople throw proposals at every prospect, regardless of qualification. This is a terrible drain on productivity and a waste of resources.
Video Sales Calls are More Efficient for Initial Meetings
A good field rep can handle no more than ten face to face, initial meetings per week and still have time for other important sales activities such as prospecting, discovery calls, follow-ups, and presentations.

Most reps never even get close to ten a week. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do more. Driving to initial meetings, and other sales calls eats up the day.

But, that all changes when sales reps cut out the windshield time and shift initial meetings from in-person to video.

There are four benefits to shifting initial meetings to video sales calls:

You’ll increase the number of initial meetings you can conduct a week, which increases the number of new opportunities advancing through your pipeline, which in turn increases the number of deals you close.
Because video sales calls tend to be shorter than in-person calls and you eliminate drive time, you immediately become more efficient.
You’ll face fewer prospecting objections. More prospects will agree to meet with you because a short video call (to determine if it makes sense to work together) is easier for them consume and lowers their risk of wasting time with you.
Reduced travel costs.

In Modern Sales, Speed Matters
For many field salespeople, the idea of conducting initial meetings via video, rather than in-person, seems un-imaginable. There is no doubt that in-person communication is more effective.

However, the efficiency you gain by shifting initial meetings to video sales calls more than makes up for not being there face to face. You’ll be able to conduct far more initial meetings, resulting in a bigger pipeline, and more sales.

The good news is video sales calls, are the closest facsimile to being there in person. Done well, they open the door to deeper relationships, understanding, emotional connections and trust.

In modern sales, speed matters. Blending virtual selling into your sales process makes you more agile. This allows you to move faster, become more productive, and shorten the sales cycle.

Learn more about virtual selling and improve your virtual sales skills with Je...

On part five of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss how sleep can help you deliver better sales presentations. You'll learn the same technique that Jeff uses to help athletes lock in practice, improve memory, and reach peak performance.
More Episodes of Sleep and Sales Performance

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Listen to Part Four of Sleep and Sales Performance

On part four of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the two laws of sleep.

Jeb and Jeff explore:

Sleep Debt
Circadian Rhythm
Sleep Procrastination
Techniques for battling insomnia

More Episodes of Sleep and Sales Performance

Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance
Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance
Listen to Part Three of Sleep and Sales Performance

In part three of this Sales Gravy podcast series, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the bad things that happen to you when you don't get enough sleep, and how sleep impacts sales performance.

Scientists have been studying sleep and health for over 100 years. They have proven that without enough sleep your health, motivation, passion, and cognitive abilities deteriorate. The good news is you can instantly feel and perform better by simply getting enough sleep.

Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance
Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance

On part two of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the impact of sleep on emotional intelligence and positive mindset.

You will be surprised to learn that the lack of sleep makes it more difficult:

to control your emotions
perceive the emotions of others
effectively manage sales meetings
build relationships

Jeff says that walking into a sales meeting without enough sleep is the same as going in drunk.

You'll learn that the sleep you get tonight is the beginning of your performance tomorrow.

Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance