Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

“You know, at the core of Working Genius, what it does is it allows us to avoid guilt and judgment—guilt about ourselves and judgment of others.” That’s Patrick Lencioni, bestselling author and organizational health expert, talking about his breakthrough Working Genius productivity framework on the Sales Gravy podcast. If you’re leading a sales team, this explains why high performers thrive in some roles and burn out in others. Right now, you probably have high performers who are miserable, rockstars who’ve lost their spark, and top reps who suddenly can’t hit quota. And you’re wondering—did you hire wrong, did someone lose their edge, or do you need to have “the conversation”? What if the problem isn’t the person at all?  The Real Reason Your Best People Are Struggling Not all work is created equal, and your sales reps aren’t wired to do all of it. Lencioni stumbled on this insight while reflecting on himself. He’d show up to work loving his job and the people he worked with, yet swing from energized to frustrated without understanding why.  His colleague asked, “Why are you like that?” Over a few hours, Lencioni and his team pinpointed six distinct types of work. Depending on which type you’re doing, you’re either energized or drained. Five years later, over 1.5 million people have taken the Working Genius assessment. Why? Most organizations force talented people into work that drains them, then blame them when they struggle. Most sales leaders hire a closer for their ability to seal deals, then wonder why they can’t prospect. They promote a quota-crusher into management, then watch them implode under administrative responsibilities. Or move an account manager into new business development and act shocked when performance tanks. The talent was there all along, but their positioning was wrong. Six Types of Work—and Why Most People Only Excel at Two Patrick Lencioni identified six distinct types of work that exist in every organization: Wonder (W): Spotting opportunities, asking big-picture questions Invention (I): Creating new solutions, processes, or systems Discernment (D): Evaluating ideas, figuring out what will work Galvanizing (G): Rallying the team, getting people moving Enablement (E): Supporting others, clearing obstacles, making things happen Tenacity (T): Following through, finishing tasks, closing deals Here’s what matters: most people are strong in two, competent in two, and are drained by the remaining two. And there are no good or bad geniuses. Your closer with natural Tenacity isn’t more valuable than your strategic thinker with Wonder and Discernment. Your rep who rallies the team (Galvanizing) isn’t better than the one who quietly enables everyone behind the scenes. Different geniuses are valuable in different ways. The goal is to build a team where all six are represented, and people work in their areas of strength. Force someone into work that drains them, and sales team performance tanks. Leave them in their genius zones, and energy and results skyrocket. Stop Judging Your People (And Yourself) You’ve probably got a rep right now who frustrates you. Maybe they’re brilliant in client meetings but terrible at following up. Maybe they generate incredible account strategies, but can’t stand the daily grind of outbound prospecting. Maybe they close deals but never update the CRM. Your first instinct is to judge them. “They’re not coachable.” “They don’t care about the details.” “They’re lazy.” Working Genius removes that judgment. It shows you that their struggle isn’t about character—it’s about wiring. A rep isn’t bad at follow-up because they don’t care. They’re bad at it because Tenacity isn’t their genius. A rep isn’t a bad team player because they don’t remove obstacles for others. Enablement isn’t their strength. And here’s the part most sales leaders miss: you need to stop judging yourself, too. You feel guilty that you hate certain parts of your job. You think you should be better at forecasting, or administrative work, or whatever drains you. But guilt about your own limitations makes you harder on your team. When you accept that you’re not built to excel at everything, you can extend that same grace to others. You stop punishing people for being human and start positioning them for success. Start With Self-Reflection Which activities give you energy? Which leave you drained? I’ll be honest about my own wake-up call. I travel over 300 nights a year, giving keynotes and working with clients. Last summer, I got to the point where I thought I was going to have a mental breakdown. Days stacked with short calls, client check-ins, alignment meetings, and podcasts. I was furious when I got to the office, and furious when I left because those days completely destroy my brain. I’m a wonderer and a thinker. I need space to ideate. Without that time, I can’t function. So I implemented a new rule: no more than two meetings per day. I understood my working genius and restructured my time. Once you see your own patterns, look at your team. Track what lights people up and what slows them down. Patterns emerge quickly. How to Apply Working Genius to Your Sales Team We had a team member at Sales Gravy who was noticeably unhappy. Not complaining out loud, just clearly not thriving. When we looked at what the job required versus their working genius profile, the answer was obvious. We had them doing work completely opposite of their natural abilities. Once we restructured their role to align with their strengths, everything changed. Here’s how you can apply it: Pair complementary geniuses. Big-picture thinkers need execution-focused partners. Strategic planners need implementers. Someone strong in Wonder and Invention but weak in Tenacity needs to work with someone who loves finishing and closing. Restructure roles around natural strengths. Don’t force people into weaknesses. Reassign or support tasks that drain them.  Be intentional with promotions. Top performers don’t automatically make good managers. Your best individual contributor may hate administrative work. Your best manager may dislike strategic planning. Know what fits before making moves. Have your team take the assessment. Get everyone’s working genius profile. Put it at their workstation. Use it in real-time during team meetings when you’re trying to figure out why something isn’t working. We do this at Sales Gravy, and it’s transformed how we work together.  The Bottom Line Your sales team isn’t broken, but your understanding of how they work might be. When you force talented people into roles that clash with their natural strengths, you get frustration, underperformance, and attrition. Then you blame the person and start hiring again.  Everyone has areas of frustration. Everyone faces work they aren’t naturally good at. Working Genius doesn’t let people avoid the draining tasks—but it helps you understand why some work feels impossible, build teams that complement each other, and stop punishing your people for being human. Stop judging that rep who struggles with CRM updates. Stop feeling guilty that you hate certain parts of your job. Start positioning people where their natural abilities can shine. Over 1.5 million people have discovered their working genius. Most of them wish they’d found it sooner. Visit workinggenius.com and take the assessment. Use coupon code GRAVY for 20% off. 

Here’s a question that hits every sales professional right in the gut: What do you do when your email prospecting tanks and you’re staring at response rates that are circling the drain? That’s the question Tara asked on a recent episode of Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast, and it’s one I hear constantly from SDRs, account executives, and even sales managers who’ve convinced themselves that cold calling is outdated. If you’re nodding along thinking email is the future and cold calling is dead, you need to wake up. Email efficiency is going down without bound, and if you’re not picking up the phone, you’re leaving money on the table. The Hard Truth About Email Prospecting Let me be blunt: Your email isn’t failing because the channel is broken. It’s failing because what you’re doing is terrible. Before you blame the medium, look in the mirror. Did people ignore your email because you sent them something genuinely personalized and valuable? Or did they ignore you because you followed up thirteen times in five days? Did they ghost you because your seven colleagues already called them that same day? The brutal reality is that most salespeople treat email like a spray-and-pray numbers game. They blast generic messages, add zero personalization, and then wonder why nobody responds. Meanwhile, they avoid the one thing that actually works: picking up the phone and having real conversations. Why Cold Calling Will Always Matter Cold calling isn’t going anywhere. It never has been, and it never will be. You want to know why? Because sales is a human business. People buy from people they trust, and you can’t build trust through automated emails that sound like they were written by AI. A phone call gives you something email never can: the ability to prove you’re a real human being who’s genuinely there to help, not just to pitch and sell. When you call someone and say, “Hey, I sent you an email last week with this case study because I saw you talked about this at the Outbound Conference,” you’re showing them you did your homework. You’re not just another robot in their inbox. Here’s a line I love: “Would I be the worst salesperson in the world if I didn’t also try to call you?” It’s honest, it’s human, and it cuts through the noise. You Don’t Know What to Say? Make the Calls The number one excuse I hear from salespeople: “I don’t know what to say.” Here’s my advice: Make one hundred calls and talk to people. They’ll teach you. You’re going to learn what not to say. You’re going to start seeing patterns in how your prospects think, what problems they face, and what language matters to them. This is how you develop business acumen that separates you from the pack. You can’t learn it behind a keyboard. I was in an alignment call today with a new client, and they said, “You totally understand us.” Why? Because last week I was with a business adjacent to their industry, learned their language, and pulled that knowledge into the next call. Use Tools to Compress Your Learning Curve Use tools like ZoomInfo to accelerate your learning curve. At Sales Gravy, we use it every day to find information about people, see what they’re doing on our website, and get intent signals that build our lists automatically. You can use these tools to learn the language of industries you’re breaking into. You can see company news, understand their challenges, and show up on calls sounding like you belong. But here’s the key: The tool doesn’t make the call for you. It gives you the ammunition. You still have to do the work. Be Strategic and Resourceful Here’s a strategy most salespeople are too lazy to try: If you’re having trouble getting through to a decision maker, call someone else in the company who’ll actually talk to you. Selling HR services? Call a sales rep. They’ll talk your ear off about the company and might even make an introduction. Try this: “Hey, I know you’re in sales. I’ve been trying to get hold of Joseph for nine months. Is there any way you could help me out?” That’s not being cheesy. That’s being resourceful. But you have to be genuine. You can’t just ask for something without building rapport. Your Action Plan If you’re struggling with email effectiveness: Pick up the damn phone. Stop making excuses about why cold calling doesn’t work. It works if you work it. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Introducing yourself to strangers will never be easy, but it’s the price of admission for being great at sales. Use data strategically. Build sequences that interweave multiple channels over 30, 60, 90 days. Email, phone, LinkedIn, video. Give yourself the best odds. Don’t oversell on the cold call. A little interest isn’t an invitation to vomit your pitch. Your job is to earn the next conversation. Make one more call. At the end of the day when you’re tired, make one more call. That’s where discipline separates winners from everyone else. The Bottom Line Email isn’t dead, but it’s not a magic bullet. Cold calling isn’t outdated. It’s the foundation of everything we do in sales. Stop hiding behind your keyboard. Stop blaming the tools. Stop making excuses. The shortest path to a meeting is through a real conversation. That’s how you build relationships, develop trust, and separate yourself from every other salesperson who’s too afraid to dial. Get outside your skin. Be genuine. Be there to help. And pick up the phone. Ready to take your prospecting skills to the next level? Join us at one of our upcoming Sales Gravy LIVE events where you’ll learn directly from top sales leaders and get hands-on coaching to transform your results.

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

“Buyers want a machine, a sales machine, not a mystery. If the sales machine only works because of the founder, it’s not that valuable. It’s actually quite risky.” Chris Spratling, founder of Chalkhill Blue Limited and author of The Exit Roadmap, shared this on a recent episode of the Sales Gravy podcast. He works with business owners preparing to sell their companies, helping them get operations, finances, and sales engines ready for new ownership. That insight cuts straight to the reason so many founder-led businesses hit a ceiling they can’t break through.  If you are a founder who still carries most of the revenue, or you have a founder-led sales team that depends on you to close critical deals, this is bigger than exit planning. It determines whether your business can grow beyond your personal capacity. The Golden Handcuffs Problem You built the business. You know the product better than anyone. You can sell it without thinking. That is exactly where the risk starts. When major clients only trust you, when your sales process lives in your head, when new reps struggle to replicate what comes naturally to you, you aren’t running a sales operation. You are running a one-person engine with a support team around it. Spratling calls this the “golden handcuffs.” It looks like success from the outside, but underneath, it creates dependency. Every time you step in to save a deal, you reinforce the idea that the business only works when you are involved. Most founders focus on how this affects valuation at exit. Fewer recognize the more immediate cost. That dependency limits how fast the company can grow right now. Where Founder-Led Sales Breaks Down The transition from founder-led sales to a functioning team is where momentum often stalls. You hire your first salesperson. They do well. Then a second. Then a third. Suddenly, deals slow down, messaging gets inconsistent, and you find yourself pulled back into conversations you thought you had delegated. They don’t sell the way you do. They miss cues you catch instinctively. They hesitate where you would push forward. So you jump in, coach through objections, and close deals yourself. What feels like instinct is actually a method you developed through hundreds of conversations. The problem isn’t that your team lacks talent, but that your approach has never been translated into something they can use without you standing next to them. As long as that stays true, scale will remain out of reach. Turning Intuition Into a Usable Process The hardest shift for founder-led teams is codifying what the founder does without thinking. You know which deals are worth pursuing. You know when to apply pressure and when to step back. You know how to redirect a conversation when resistance shows up. That knowledge is pattern recognition built over time, and it can be used to create a process. Start by defining how deals actually move through your pipeline. Not a generic framework pulled from a template, but the real stages your customers pass through, with clear criteria for each transition. What has to be true before a lead is qualified? What information must be present before a proposal goes out? Then look at discovery. What questions do you ask every time? What do you listen for before positioning your solution? Which objections show up consistently, and how do you respond when they do? The goal is to document the structure beneath the conversations so that someone else can navigate the same terrain with confidence. Why Your CRM Is Not Pulling Its Weight Most founder-led teams have a CRM, but they only use it to track contacts and deal size. However, a functioning, high-performing sales system treats the CRM as a learning tool. That means capturing more than surface-level data. It means recording what buyers actually say, why deals move forward, where they stall, and who influences the decision. When that information is tracked consistently, patterns become visible. You see which prospects convert fastest, which objections actually kill deals, and where momentum typically breaks down. That insight does more than improve forecasting. It gives you a concrete way to train new reps based on real deals you have closed, not abstract theory. Three Steps to Build a Sales Engine That Does Not Depend on You The objective isn’t to remove yourself from sales completely. It’s to make your involvement a choice rather than a requirement. Step 1: Define Clear Qualification Criteria Your team needs to know which leads are worth pursuing and which ones are a waste of time. If you’re constantly redirecting their focus, you haven’t defined “good fit” clearly enough. Get specific—industry, company size, buying triggers, decision-making structure.  Step 2: Create Documented Playbooks How do you handle discovery? What’s your approach to proposals? How do you navigate the closing process? Your team needs a framework they can adapt. Think decision trees, not scripts. “If they say X, then ask Y. If they push back on Z, here’s how to reframe it.” Step 3: Transfer Client Relationships If every major client relationship is tied to you personally, your business is fragile. Start introducing your team into those relationships now. Bring them to calls. Have them lead the follow-up. Shift trust from you as an individual to your company as a whole. What This Looks Like in Practice Record your next three sales conversations, with the customer’s permission. Review them carefully. Note the questions you asked, when you asked them, and how you responded to resistance. Identify what made you confident that the opportunity was real. Turn those insights into a simple framework your team can follow. Have them use it. Watch where it works and where it breaks. Refine based on what you see. Done consistently, this process creates a system new hires can step into within months. It won’t make them identical to you, but it will make them effective without constant rescue. The Real Test You will know your found-led sales team has scaled when you can step away for two weeks without monitoring email, chat messages, or “quick calls” with prospects. And when you come back, the pipeline has moved forward. If that thought terrifies you, you don’t have a sales team. You have an expensive support staff for your one-person operation. Building a sales operation that runs without you isn’t about making yourself irrelevant. It’s about making your business transferable and scalable, whether you’re planning an exit in three years or just trying to grow past your own capacity right now. Because at some point, your ability to personally close deals stops being your greatest asset and starts being your biggest bottleneck. The question is whether you’ll recognize that point before it costs you the next stage of growth. If you want to start turning founder intuition into a repeatable sales system, download our free Small Business Guide to Sales Training. It walks through the frameworks that help teams scale without depending on a single closer.

Here’s a question that’ll change how you think about this profession forever: What’s the one moment that reveals you’re built for sales success? For most people, that moment never comes. They stumble into sales, struggle with the stereotypes, and either quit or spend their entire career fighting against what they think selling is supposed to be. But for those of us who get it, there’s a moment of clarity so powerful it changes everything. Mine happened in high school when I was chasing a girl and ended up on the yearbook staff. Thirty days later, I handed over $3,800 in checks while everyone else struggled to hit their $300 quota. The Sales Crack Moment When Mr. Hall at Hall’s Hardware Store wrote me that first check for a yearbook ad after I had done little more than ask outright for the money, something clicked. This wasn’t complicated. Walk in, shake hands, present value, and people give you money. While my classmates were paralyzed by the same stereotypes you hear today (“I’m not a salesperson”), I was out there having conversations. That’s all prospecting really is. Talking to people. The gasp in that room when I revealed my numbers? That was better than the money. That was the competitive fire igniting. That was me realizing I could outwork, outsell, and out-earn anyone if I just committed to the process. The Discipline Problem Most Sellers Miss Here’s what nobody tells you about sales success: It’s not about talent. It’s not about charisma. It’s about ruthless execution of proven processes. By the time I was 21 or 22, I was making $300,000 in the early nineties. That’s equivalent to making close to a million today. Not because I was special, but because I understood something fundamental that most people never figure out: The more people you talk with, the more you sell. And here’s the beautiful part. There are lots of people to go talk with. The pipeline never runs dry if you’re willing to fill it. The Three Non-Negotiables for Modern Sellers The future of selling is blending. Not choosing between video and phone and in-person. Blending all of them based on one critical question: What communication channel gives me the highest probability of capturing my desired outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money? When I started selling, we had two channels. Maybe three if you count snail mail. Phone and in-person. That’s it. Today? You’ve got a dozen ways to connect. WhatsApp lets you text, call, and video chat almost instantly. The options are endless. But here’s where Gen Z sellers (and honestly, every generation) screw this up: They get single-siloed. “I’m only good at email.” “I only do video calls.” “I hate the phone.” That mindset is killing your income potential. You need to be good at everything. Master every channel. Because the channel doesn’t matter. The outcome does. Synchronous Beats Asynchronous Every Single Time Here’s the second non-negotiable to sales success: Stop hiding behind asynchronous communication. We do deals in a synchronous world. Real-time conversations. Phone calls. Video meetings. Face-to-face interactions. If you think you can close business through email threads and text messages, you’re delusional. Why? Because robots can write better emails than you can. AI can craft more persuasive text messages. But sales is the ultimate human career in the age of AI precisely because of the human connection required in synchronous conversations. Lead with phone calls. Get face-to-face when the deal size justifies it. Use video when it makes sense. But always, always prioritize real-time conversations over digital hide-and-seek. Ask Questions and Actually Listen The third non-negotiable is mastering the art of asking great questions and listening to the answers. People make five decisions before they buy from you: Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and my problems? Do I trust and believe you? Notice what’s not on that list? Your product features. Your company’s awards. Your clever sales pitch. They’re evaluating you. Your ability to connect. Your capacity to understand. Your commitment to making them feel important. And the only way to get five affirmative answers to those questions is through synchronous conversations where you ask intelligent questions and actually listen to what they’re telling you. The Make It Rain Principle When Mr. Rouse made me editor of the yearbook after I brought in $3,800, I learned something that shaped my entire career: When you can make it rain, you can get anything you want. That principle holds true whether you’re selling yearbook ads in high school or enterprise software to Fortune 500 companies. Revenue solves problems. Performance opens doors. Results create opportunities. Most people in sales stumble into it. They take the job because it was available. They stick with it because the money’s decent. But they never commit to mastering the craft. The question isn’t whether sales chooses you. The question is whether you choose sales. Whether you commit to being good at every communication channel. Whether you prioritize synchronous conversations over digital convenience. Whether you master the art of asking questions and listening. Those fundamentals never change. The technology evolves. The channels multiply. But the core truth remains: Talk to more people, in real time, with genuine curiosity about their problems, and you’ll make more money than you ever thought possible. That’s how you achieve sales success. That’s how you go from yearbook ads to seven figures. That’s how you make it rain. Want to master the fundamentals of prospecting and build your own rocket ship career? Join us at Sales Gravy LIVE: Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp. Two days of intensive training where you’ll learn the exact systems and processes that turn ordinary sellers into top performers.

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

“That chip on my shoulder made me less empathetic, more rushed, too eager to solve things too fast, and less thoughtful. That chip built me, but then it started to tear me down.” I said that recently in a conversation with Harriet Mellor of Your Sales Co, and it captures something every sales leader needs to understand.  I grew up in the sales training business. My dad literally wrote THE book on prospecting—several of them, actually. I worked at Paycom, Comcast, and various startups where I consistently crushed my numbers. But what I learned is that knowing the right techniques and getting your team to actually implement them are two completely different challenges. Sales training resistance is rarely about bad content. More often, it is about ego and pride standing in the way of growth. I had to recognize that in myself before I could address it in the people I lead. Why Your Top Performers Resist Training the Most When I was a rep, I was terrible at taking coaching. Not because I didn’t understand the concepts. I understood them better than most. But when someone tried to coach me, I tuned out. The problem was I’d already figured out a system that worked. I was hitting my numbers. Why would I mess with it? Think about learning golf. You chunk the ground twenty times, then suddenly you make contact. The ball doesn’t go straight or very far, but it goes. Someone tries to teach you proper form, your first thought is, “I already figured out how to hit the ball.” That’s where many top performers live. They’ve reached an equilibrium. Not peak performance, but functional competence. Training feels disruptive because it threatens what is currently working. They’re not resisting because they’re stubborn. They’re resisting because they have something to lose. What if they try something new and their numbers drop? They’d rather stay at 85% effectiveness than risk dropping to 60%, even if it means eventually reaching 120%. Two Ways Ego Hurts Performance Creates Rush Instead of Curiosity At Paycom, I carried a massive chip on my shoulder. I carried the same name as my dad. People knew who he was. I felt pressure to prove I belonged. So I rushed. I skipped discovery. I pushed toward proposals. I talked more than I listened. Every call felt like a test I needed to pass. You can hear this on your team’s calls. Reps who are trying to prove something move too fast. They stop asking questions. They perform instead of selling. That behavior is driven by ego, and it costs deals. Telling them to slow down will not fix it. You need to understand what they feel compelled to prove and why they associate speed with competence. Blocks From Actually Learning When I was carrying a quota, I thought I was a lifelong learner. I read every sales book. I listened to podcasts. I sat through hours of training sessions. But when it came to changing what I did on Monday morning, I defaulted right back to what I knew. I’d hear a new objection handling technique and think, “Yeah, I basically already do that.” I didn’t. But ego wouldn’t let me see the gap. Your salespeople are doing the same thing right now. They’re taking in your coaching but filtering it through their existing beliefs. They’re protecting the system that’s currently working. And they’re developing blind spots they can’t see. Watch for the reps who stop recording their calls because they “know what they sound like.” The ones who skip role play because it’s “not realistic.” The ones who tune out your coaching because you “don’t understand their territory.” Reps who do this aren’t trying to be difficult, but instead trying to protect their self-image instead of improving their performance. Why Your Team Listens to Outside Trainers But Not You One of the most frustrating parts of leadership is to preach a methodology for six months and nothing changes. Then an outside consultant shows up and says the exact same thing. Suddenly, everyone’s taking notes and engaged. I experienced this firsthand with my dad. He would offer advice, and I tuned out. Days later, I would hear the same message from someone else and think it was brilliant. It wasn’t about the message. It was about who was delivering it. When you try to coach your team, there’s history. There’s baggage. Maybe you’ve given conflicting directions before. Maybe they see you as “management” instead of someone who gets it. Maybe they just don’t like admitting to their boss that they need help. Outside trainers don’t carry that weight. They show up with a clean slate and credibility that’s granted just by being an outsider. The real question isn’t how to make your team listen to you. It is how to create an environment where learning feels safe, regardless of who delivers it. How to Break Through Sales Training Resistance Frame Training as Addition, Not Correction I stopped resisting coaching when my leaders stopped making me feel like I was doing things wrong. Instead of pointing out flaws, the best managers invited experimentation. Instead of “you need to improve your discovery process,” the best managers said, “try asking this question in your next three calls and see what happens.”  Position new techniques as tools to add to what’s already working, not corrections to what’s broken. Your team will actually try them. Make It Safe to Fail On the marketing team, I got my team members on sales calls. Yeah, marketers are making prospecting calls alongside me. It felt like a crazy concept until it started working. Importantly, I let them hear my wins and my mistakes so they knew I was in it with them the entire way. I wanted them to see me stumble over a question. Get flustered. Say the wrong thing. Then watch me debrief it and do better on the next call. When I started doing this, something shifted. My team stopped being afraid to try new things. If I could screw up a cold call and laugh about it, they could too. The tide turned when they asked to jump in with me and started booking appointments. The win unlocked a new level of understanding. These marketers suddenly believed that they could, instead of simply being told that they could. Your salespeople need to see you fail. Not in a performative way. In a real, vulnerable, “I’m still learning too” way. That’s when they’ll give themselves permission to be imperfect. And that’s when actual learning happens. Change One Small Thing at a Time I didn’t transform my sales approach overnight. The managers who got through to me asked me to change one thing every few weeks. One question to add to discovery. One way to handle a specific objection. After six months, I’d transformed my entire process. But I never had to risk everything at once. Pick one behavior for your team. Make it specific. Make it small. Give them three weeks to practice it. Then add something else. Stop trying to overhaul their entire approach in one training session. Let Them Experience the Win You can tell your team a technique works until you’re blue in the face. They won’t really believe you until they feel it themselves. My marketing team didn’t enjoy making calls at first. They were uncomfortable. They were bad at it. But then they got their first yes. That moment when someone on the other end of the phone said, “Yeah, let’s set up a time to talk”—everything changed. That lift in your chest when you close a deal? That high you get from hearing yes? You can’t explain that. Your people have to experience it. Stop trying to convince your team that new approaches work. Create low-risk situations where they can discover it themselves. Role-play early, followed by real calls together. Small wins. Repeat. When Ego Stops Being Their Engine Every salesperson reaches a moment when the traits that fueled early success start creating friction. The confidence that helped them pick up the phone becomes arrogance that stops them from listening. The drive that made them a top performer becomes anxiety that makes them rush. For me, that moment came when I realized that chip on my shoulder wasn’t serving me anymore. It had driven early success. Then it started tearing me down. I was less empathetic, more rushed, less thoughtful. Most salespeople never recognize that moment. They keep pushing the same way they always have, wondering why it’s getting harder to hit their numbers. Your role as a leader is to help them spot it. Not by calling it out directly—that triggers defensiveness—but by creating an environment where they feel safe enough to recognize it themselves. The best salespeople develop the ability to notice when pride is shielding them from feedback. They know when to trust instinct and when to slow down and listen. What to Do This Week Look at who is hitting their numbers while quietly resisting coaching. Those are rarely problem reps. They are people protecting what feels safe. Start with one person and one behavior. Keep the change small enough that it does not threaten their confidence. Model your own learning openly. When people see that improvement does not require perfection, they are more willing to try. I spent years proving I was good enough instead of getting better. Many salespeople do the same thing. Ego does not disappear with success. It just gets quieter. The leaders who drive sustained performance create environments where learning feels normal, progress is visible, and growth does not require losing face. If you are leading a small sales team, coaching resistance gets magnified. Download our Free Small Business Guide to Sales Training, which gives you a clear framework for building coachable habits, consistent execution, and sustainable performance without overwhelming your team.

Here’s a question that’ll make your head spin: You just inherited 50 neglected accounts, and your customers feel taken for granted. How do you reposition yourself as a high-value partner instead of just another transactional vendor who’s about to disappoint them? That’s the question posed by Scott Northway, and it’s one of the most common challenges I see in sales today. A new account manager takes over, inherits a book of business that’s been ignored, and now has to figure out how to rebuild relationships with customers who’ve been collecting dust. If you’re nodding your head right now, you’re not alone. Poor account management is quietly bleeding companies dry, and most leaders have no idea how much revenue they’re leaving on the table. The Brutal Truth About Why Customers Leave When we survey customers through our consulting projects with clients who are hemorrhaging accounts, here’s what we find: About 70 percent of the time, customers don’t leave because of price. They don’t leave because of product quality or service issues. They leave because they feel taken for granted. Let me give you a real example. I pay six figures annually for a software program that’s critical to my business. Every time my contract comes up for renewal, it’s like a circus. They fly people in. They wine and dine me. They promise the moon about how they’re going to support us and be our partner. Then once the contract is signed? Crickets. My account manager disappears for three years. If I don’t call them, they don’t call me. And here’s the thing: I actually like my account manager. I genuinely want to work with them. There are products I could buy, optimizations we could make, but I have to do all the work to make it happen. This is insane. And it’s costing companies millions. What Won’t Work: The Rookie Mistakes So you’ve inherited these neglected accounts. Here’s what you absolutely cannot do: Show up on their doorstep apropos of nothing and try to sell them something. If I’m an existing customer doing business with your company, and you show up trying to pitch me without acknowledging the elephant in the room, we’re probably done. It’s rude. It’s bad behavior. And it tells me you’re just like every other transactional vendor who doesn’t actually care about my business. The second mistake is spreading yourself too thin across all 50 accounts without any strategy. You’ll burn out, deliver mediocre service to everyone, and end up losing accounts you could have saved. The Human-to-Human Approach That Actually Works Here’s what does work: Be honest. Be human. Name the problem. Pick up the phone and say something like this: “Hey, I’m your new account manager. I recognize that no one’s contacted you in a while, and I’m sorry about that. I apologize. I’d like to do a fresh start. Would you give me the opportunity to get to know you better and learn about what’s important to you?” That’s it. Simple. Direct. Human. Now here’s the hard part: When you have that conversation, some customers are going to unload on you. If they really have felt taken for granted, they’re going to say some nasty things. They might complain about the last account manager. They might air grievances about problems that have been festering for months. And the most important thing you can do in that moment is shut up and listen. Don’t try to defend the past. Don’t talk over them. Don’t promise you’re going to be so much better than the last person. Just let them get it all off their chest. Let them talk it out, because people like people who listen to them. Then, if there’s something specific you can help them with, don’t make promises you can’t keep. Commit to one thing. Take care of that commitment. Honor it. Build trust slowly. That’s how you become a high-value partner through fanatical prospecting discipline applied to account management. The Smart Way to Triage 50 Accounts You can’t effectively manage 50 accounts with equal attention, so you need to segment fast. Use a simple A, B, C ranking by revenue and risk: A Accounts: Your largest customers or those at highest risk of churn. These get weekly or bi-weekly touchpoints. B Accounts: Solid mid-tier customers with growth potential. These get monthly check-ins. C Accounts: Smaller accounts that are stable. These get quarterly touchpoints. But here’s the secret weapon most account managers miss: Use AI and your CRM data to find the low-hanging fruit. Look for patterns like former buyers who’ve moved to new companies in your territory, customers who mentioned specific challenges in past conversations, or accounts showing signs of expansion readiness. One of the smartest things you can do is ask your AI tools: “Did anyone on this account ever mention their favorite sports team? Do they like to cook? What matters to them personally?” Those human details are gold for building real relationships in sales. The Retention Secret Nobody Talks About Here’s what kills me about account management: Retention is actually easy. If you’re just nice to people, for the most part, they’re going to be nice to you. It doesn’t take grand gestures. It takes consistency. A random text message: “Hey, just thinking about you. How’s everything going?” A quick video message once a quarter checking in. Remembering to ask how their kids’ soccer season went. Sending them an article relevant to their business with a note: “Saw this and thought of you.” Human beings at the core just want to be understood and they want to feel important, like they matter. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Your 30-60-90 Day Stabilization Plan If you’re inheriting neglected accounts, here’s your action plan: Days 1-30: Triage and stabilize. Reach out to every A account with your honest, human approach. Listen more than you talk. Identify immediate fires to put out. Days 31-60: Earn the right to advise. Deliver on your initial commitments. Start providing value without asking for anything in return. Build familiarity and trust through effective sales communication. Days 61-90: Focus on expansion. Now that you’ve proven yourself, you can start identifying opportunities to grow these accounts. But not before. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Build familiarity, then trust, then earn the opportunity to expand the business. The Bottom Line Stop treating your existing customers like an afterthought. They’re your easiest path to revenue growth, but only if you actually treat them like they matter. Account management isn’t complicated. It’s about being human, being consistent, and actually caring about the people who are already paying you money. So pick up the phone. Send that text. Schedule that coffee. Make the small investments in relationships that compound into massive retention and expansion wins. That’s how you turn neglected accounts into your most profitable relationships. That’s how you build a book of business that actually grows. And that’s how you stop losing customers you already have. Ready to master the prospecting and relationship-building skills that drive account growth? Join us at Sales Gravy Live: Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp in Atlanta, GA on March 10-11th. Two days of intensive training that will transform how you approach every customer conversation.

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

You are on slide 34 when the CFO’s phone buzzes. She glances down. The VP to her left is nodding, but you can tell he checked out ten minutes ago. You know this pitch cold. You have rehearsed it. You built the deck. You covered every feature, every capability, every objection. And still, you are dying up there. You spent weeks on this presentation. None of it matters because everyone in that room has already sat through the same pitch from three other vendors this month. “Pitching sucks,” says Danny Fontaine, author of Pitch, on an episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast. “It sucks for the people doing it because we get so stressed out, and we spend weeks doing mountains of work. Meanwhile, there is a whole audience who has just as bad of a time as us because they have to sit through an hour of 100 PowerPoint slides and they’re bored.” He is right. The audience suffers just as much. They sit through identical presentations, back to back, trying to remember which vendor said what. Both sides leave exhausted. No one wins. There is a better way. Effective sales pitch techniques don’t rely on slides. They create engagement, tell stories, and turn monologues into conversations that actually move deals forward. Why Traditional Pitches Fail The standard pitch follows the same predictable pattern. Company overview. Capabilities. Case studies. Pricing. Questions at the end. Every competitor uses the same structure. That means you are asking your prospect to choose between nearly identical presentations. When everything looks the same, decision makers default to price or familiarity. Your carefully crafted message gets lost in the noise. You are treating the pitch like a presentation when it should be a conversation. You are trying to inform when you should be persuading. Experience Beats Information In 1979, a small advertising agency called Allen Brady and Marsh (ABM) competed against industry giant Saatchi & Saatchi for the British Rail account. ABM’s founder, Peter Marsh, knew he couldn’t win by playing it safe. When the British Rail executives arrived for the pitch, no one answered the door. They rang the buzzer three times before it finally opened, with no one behind it. The receptionist ignored them while filing her nails. The waiting area was filthy. After a while of being dismissed, the chairman stood up to leave. That is when Marsh burst through the doors and said, “Gentlemen, you have just experienced what your customers go through every single day. Shall we see what we can do to put it right?” ABM won the account. And it worked because the executives didn’t just understand the problem. They felt it. Most sales pitches fail because they ask buyers to care before they are emotionally engaged. Information alone doesn’t create urgency—experience does. Start With Them, Not You Pitches always start the same: ‘Thanks for your time. Here’s our agenda. Let me tell you about our company.’ Your prospect stops listening after the first sentence. If you want engagement, start with a question. Ask what matters to them. Ask what would make the time valuable. Ask what problem they are trying to solve. Before you show a single slide, say something like, “Before we start, what would make this conversation worth your time today?” Or, “What is the biggest challenge you are facing with this right now?” Those questions do three things immediately. They show respect. They give you intelligence. And they turn the pitch into a conversation from the first minute. This works even better over Zoom, where attention is fragile and distractions are everywhere. When you ask early questions, you pull people in instead of competing with their inbox. Stories Create Memory The most powerful stories aren’t pulled from case studies. They come from real life. Every meaningful achievement involves obstacles. Those obstacles contain lessons. Those lessons connect directly to the challenges your prospects are facing. A story without relevance is just noise. A story with a clear lesson becomes a lever. A consultant once shared a story about buying a secondhand Lego set. She started building it, only to discover key pieces were missing. After hours of searching for replacements, she had to start over. When pitching a complex implementation, she said, “That taught me something. At the beginning of any project, we have to make sure all the pieces are in the bag.” That story worked because it made preparation tangible. It made risk visible. It connected emotionally and logically. If the story does not clearly support the point you are making, don’t tell it. Ask Before You Lose Them Most salespeople cling to their script even when they can see the room drifting away. They are afraid of losing control, so they keep talking. That is how you lose the deal. Don’t wait until the Q&A to ask questions. Sprinkle them throughout your pitch to keep your audience engaged and the conversation alive. Ask if you’re hitting the mark, what they want to explore deeper, and what matters most to them. When you ask questions, you aren’t giving up control. You are gaining it. The person asking the questions is always in control of the conversation. Emotion First, Logic Second Buyers like to believe they are rational. They are not. Emotion drives decisions. Logic justifies them. If you want someone to care, you have to make them feel something. Frustration. Relief. Possibility. Urgency. That is why the British Rail experience worked. Marsh didn’t argue that customer service was bad. He made them experience it. The feeling came first. The logic followed. Once a buyer is emotionally engaged, they start looking for reasons to say yes. They look for data to support the decision they already want to make. This is why information-first pitches fall flat. You are asking people to care before you have given them a reason to. Create the emotional connection first. Then give them the facts. When the Room Goes Cold Even the best sales pitch techniques don’t work every time. Sometimes the wrong people show up, there is a fire you didn’t know about, or your message just doesn’t land. When that happens, don’t push harder. Pivot. Call it out. Ask what would be more valuable. Acknowledge the moment instead of pretending it is not happening. That level of honesty builds trust. It shows you are there to solve a problem, not deliver a performance. Why This Matters Your prospect didn’t show up to be entertained or to be bored. When you give them an experience they didn’t expect, you separate yourself from every competitor running the same tired deck. You become memorable. You become relevant. You become human. The pitch that feels risky is usually the one that wins. The personal story. The direct question. The willingness to have a real conversation. Because the alternative is being forgotten the moment you leave the room, no matter how many slides you showed. Want to take your pitch from forgettable to unforgettable? Download the FREE A.C.E.D. Buyer Style Playbook, which shows you exactly how to read your buyers, adapt your approach, and turn every conversation into a deal-closing opportunity.

Here’s a question I get asked all the time: What’s the single biggest misconception holding salespeople back? That question came from a room full of college students at BYU-Idaho, ages 19 to 24, all exploring sales careers. And my answer is the same whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the game for decades. The biggest lie about selling is this: Good salespeople have the gift of gab. You know the stereotype. The smooth talker. The fast-talking closer. The person who can talk their way into or out of anything. We’ve all seen it in movies, TV shows, and plays like Death of a Salesman. It’s been around for a century, and it’s completely wrong. The Truth Top Performers Know Here’s what the best salespeople actually do: They listen. The greatest salespeople aren’t the best talkers. They’re the best listeners. They’re individuals who know how to ask the right questions and know how to ask questions in a way that create these aha moments for prospects and customers. They understand something fundamental that average performers miss: Closing happens in the discovery process, not at some magical point where you lay the hammer down and ask for a sale. Think about that for a second. The deal isn’t won when you deliver your polished presentation. It’s not won when you overcome the final objection. It’s won in those early conversations when you’re asking questions, uncovering pain, and building relationships. Why the Stereotype Persists The negative stereotype of salespeople has been pervasive in society for generations. Part of it’s because no one really likes to be sold. And there are salespeople who are bad. They talk at people instead of actually taking the time to listen. But here’s the reality: Lots of professions have negative stereotypes. Lawyers. Politicians. Salespeople aren’t the worst of them. And here’s the good side of that negative stereotype: Nobody wants to be in sales. So if you’re in sales, you’re making a whole lot more money than anybody else. That’s a good thing. The people who look at the profession of selling and say “I could never do that” or “I could never interrupt people or take that type of rejection” are the same people who will never experience the income, freedom, and impact that comes with being great at sales. The Power of Questions When you shift your mindset from talking to listening, everything changes. Instead of thinking about what you’re going to say next, you’re focused on what your prospect is telling you. You’re asking questions like: What’s driving this decision right now? What happens if you don’t solve this problem? Who else is involved in this decision? What does success look like for you? These aren’t manipulative tricks. They’re genuine attempts to understand your prospect’s world, their challenges, and their goals. And when you do that well, you create trust. You build relationships. You position yourself as a partner, not a vendor. The discovery questions you ask matter more than any pitch you could ever deliver. Handling objections starts with asking the right questions early in the process. Who’s Really in Control Here’s the truth: The person in control of the conversation is rarely the talker. In fact, it’s almost always the listener. If you want to move deals, stop performing and start discovering. Build your calls around three things: smart opening questions, deep follow-ups, and crisp advances to the next step. You’ll gain insights, not just air time. And insights are what close deals. Success in sales isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about being the most curious, the most engaged, and the most intentional about moving the sale forward. What You Need to Unlearn Right Now If you’ve been operating under the assumption that you need to be a great talker to succeed in sales, unlearn that immediately. Replace it with this truth: You need to be a great asker and an even better listener. Your job isn’t to convince people. Your job is to help people convince themselves by asking questions that lead them to their own conclusions. When prospects discover the solution themselves through your questioning, they own it. They believe it. And they buy. That’s the relationship you build through asking questions. That matters the most. The Bottom Line Stop trying to out-talk your prospects. Stop preparing 47-slide presentations. Stop thinking that your job is to educate and inform. Your job is to discover. To listen. To understand. To ask the questions that help your prospects see clearly what they need to do next. The best salespeople aren’t the smooth talkers. They’re the smart listeners who know that the power of the sale is in the questions they ask, not the words they say. If you master this one fundamental truth, you’ll close more deals than all the gift-of-gab salespeople combined. And you’ll build a career based on relationships, trust, and value instead of pressure, manipulation, and empty talk. That’s how you win in sales. That’s how you build lasting customer relationships. And that’s how you separate yourself from everyone else who’s still chasing the lie. Ready to Master the Art of Prospecting? Join us at Sales Gravy Live: Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp in Atlanta, GA on March 10-11th. Two days of intensive training where you’ll learn the proven systems and techniques that top performers use to fill their pipelines and crush their quotas. Stop guessing. Start prospecting like a pro. Register now at salesgravy.com/live.

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

Are your fitness goals realistic for the life of a busy sales professional? “I find that a lot of sales leaders I work with are operating at about 110% capacity. So when we’re talking about tackling health and fitness, we have to really understand what is going to be the few habits that are really easy to do and have the biggest bang for buck.” That’s Josh Hulsebosch, a fitness coach who specializes in working with sales professionals, speaking on the Sales Gravy podcast. His observation cuts straight to the real reason most January fitness resolutions fail: they’re trying to add more to an already overflowing plate. The typical sales professional is already drowning in competing priorities while operating at maximum capacity. When New Year’s hits, the instinct is to overhaul everything at once. New diet. New workout plan. New morning routine. That approach might work for people with open calendars and low pressure. For salespeople pushing through Q1 kickoffs, territory planning, and quota pressure, it is a fast track to burnout. The All-or-Nothing Trap Meet Steve. He’s an individual contributor who decided January 1st would mark his transformation. No more coffee. Five-mile runs every morning. Intermittent fasting. Four hours of cold calling daily because he just finished reading Fanatical Prospecting. Ten days in, Steve slept through his alarm, missed his workout, and ordered a triple-shot latte on the way to work. That emotional crash bled into his work. His prospecting activity dropped. His confidence dipped. His motivation evaporated under the weight of his own perfectionism. Steve’s mistake wasn’t lack of commitment. He turned ambitious goals into self-sabotage by refusing to acknowledge a simple truth: sustainable change requires starting where you are, not where you wish you were. Most sales professionals approach fitness goals like they approach pipeline building—more activity equals better results. But health doesn’t work like prospecting. You can’t brute force your way into better sleep or lower stress. The body requires a different strategy. The 110% Capacity Problem Sales is a cognitively demanding profession. You’re the quarterback of the business. Every day requires strategic thinking, relationship management, objection handling, and staying mentally sharp through rejection. When you’re already operating at 110% capacity, adding extreme fitness commitments creates another obligation you can’t meet, another source of stress, another thing to feel guilty about when you inevitably miss a workout or eat fast food between calls. The sales professionals who successfully improve their health identify which habits will support their performance, then build them into their existing routine. They do not chase trends. They focus on fundamentals. The Four Pillars of Health for Sales Professionals Fitness and health goals for sales professionals need to be realistic for people working at maximum capacity. You can’t afford to waste energy on complicated protocols or fitness fads. You need the fundamentals: exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress management. When these four pillars are strong, everything else becomes easier. Pillar One: Exercise The fitness industry wants you to believe you need intense workouts, complicated programs, and hours at the gym. For sales professionals, the single most effective exercise habit is walking 8,000 steps daily. This number is achievable for most people regardless of fitness level. It builds momentum without requiring a complete schedule overhaul. When you consistently hit 8,000 steps, you prove to yourself that you can follow through on a commitment without sacrificing your work performance. Movement improves cognitive function, reduces stress hormones, and helps with sleep quality—all critical for sales performance. Make it automatic. Take calls while walking. Park farther away from the office. Walk to get coffee instead of ordering delivery. Use a standing desk and pace during internal meetings. Build movement into what you are already doing rather than treating it as another task. Once 8,000 steps become effortless, you can layer in strength training or other activities. But walking is the foundation. It’s the one exercise habit that compounds without breaking you. Pillar Two: Nutrition Sales professionals tend to fall into two nutrition traps. The first is eating like garbage because they’re too busy to care. The second is attempting some extreme diet overhaul that lasts nine days before they’re back to their old patterns. The solution isn’t meal plans or macro tracking or cutting entire food groups. It’s having a system that works when you’re slammed. Start here: don’t skip meals. When you’re running between meetings and surviving on coffee, your blood sugar crashes. That kills your cognitive performance and drives you toward quick fixes that leave you feeling worse an hour later. Keep protein-rich foods accessible. Greek yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, protein bars that aren’t candy in disguise, rotisserie chicken, nuts. These don’t require cooking or planning. They stabilize your energy and keep you sharp during long stretches between meals. Meal prep doesn’t need to be complicated. Pick one day, cook a large batch of something simple—grilled chicken, ground turkey, rice, roasted vegetables—and portion it out. Now you have real food available when your schedule gets chaotic. Hydration matters more than most people realize. Dehydration mimics fatigue. Keep water at your desk. Drink it between calls. If you’re consuming coffee all day, match it with water. You’ll notice the difference in your afternoon energy levels. Pillar Three: Sleep Sleep deprivation destroys sales performance. You get paid to think. When you run on five or six hours of sleep, decision-making suffers. Decision-making suffers. Emotional regulation weakens. Your ability to read prospects and handle objections declines. You can’t always control how many hours you sleep, especially during high-pressure periods. But you can improve sleep quality. Start with a simple nighttime routine that signals to your body it’s time to wind down. Turn off screens thirty minutes before bed. Keep your bedroom cool. If your mind races when you lie down, acknowledge the thoughts without engaging with them. Notice they’re there, then redirect your focus to your breathing. If you wake up in the middle of the night with work thoughts, write them down or set a reminder for the next day. This closes the mental loop and allows your brain to let go. Pillar Four: Stress Management Sales is a pressure environment. Constant decision-making. Emotional labor. Rejection. Urgency. You move from call to meeting to fire drill to another call with almost no downtime. Over time, your nervous system stays stuck in high alert. That chronic stress does not just affect your mood. It impacts your sleep, your focus, your patience with prospects, and your ability to think clearly in complex conversations. If you do not manage it, it will manage you. Controlled breathing is one of the fastest ways to regulate your nervous system. Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. This is box breathing. You can do it between calls. Before a tough conversation. While waiting for a prospect to answer. It does not draw attention. It just brings your system back into balance. When stress is regulated, sleep improves. When sleep improves, thinking becomes clearer. Clearer thinking leads to better sales performance. It is a small habit. The impact compounds. Building Fitness Goals That Actually Stick If you’re surviving on five hours of sleep, start there. If you’re skipping meals and running on caffeine, fix your nutrition first. If you haven’t moved your body in weeks, commit to 8,000 steps. Don’t try to overhaul all four pillars simultaneously. That’s the all-or-nothing trap that killed Steve’s momentum in ten days. When you take care of your physical and mental health, you show up sharper for your prospects, your team, and your numbers. Your body is the vehicle for your career. You can’t hit quota consistently if you’re running on empty. Start with one pillar. Build one habit. Give it time to take root before you add the next one. That’s how you win in Q1 and beyond. If you are serious about building fitness habits that actually fit the realities of sales, go deeper with Josh Hulsebosch’s performance-focused courses on Sales Gravy University. His programs are built specifically for sales professionals who are operating at full capacity and still want to win on health, energy, and longevity.

Here’s a question that keeps salespeople up at night: How do you build a powerful personal brand without stepping on your company’s toes? That’s the question Taylor Deadrick asked me during a recent live event. Taylor works for Insperity (a fantastic company that handles all our HR and payroll at Sales Gravy, by the way), and she wanted to know how to establish her own brand while staying aligned with her employer. If you’ve ever felt this tension, you’re not alone. The fear of conflicting with your company’s brand holds too many salespeople back from building the authority they need to win more deals. Let me show you how to build a personal brand that actually amplifies your company’s message instead of competing with it. The Only Real Conflict You Need to Worry About Here’s the brutal truth: The only way you’ll conflict with your company’s brand is if you assert that your own opinion is that of your employer, or what you’re posting, saying, or writing conflicts with their core values, their marketing message, or the way they go to market. That’s it. That’s the line. If you start trying to speak for your company or post things that contradict their values, you’ve got a problem. But if everything you do supports those core values, you’re going to be just fine. Think about it this way: Your company hired you because you aligned with their mission. Now your job is to amplify that mission through your own authentic voice and expertise. The mistake most salespeople make is thinking their personal brand needs to be separate from or independent of their company. Wrong. Your personal brand should be the human face of your company’s value proposition. Your Personal Brand Is Bigger Than Your Logo Your personal brand isn’t just what you post on LinkedIn. It’s not your profile picture or your witty headline. Your personal brand is the confidence you show when you hop on a microphone and ask a tough question. It’s your smile and the way you treat people. It’s whether you’re kind, whether you invest in yourself, whether you show up with expertise that actually helps people solve problems. Your personal brand is the human being who walks into businesses every day and shows up for those businesses. That’s the most important part of your brand, and that’s the part that builds trust and causes people to buy you. Everything else (your LinkedIn posts, your content, your online presence) is just an extension of that core identity. Authority: The Secret Weapon of Personal Branding When I think about building a personal brand, I think about one word: authority. Authority is your expertise. It’s what you know that helps other people win. And here’s the beautiful thing: When you build authority in your space, you’re not competing with your company’s brand. You’re reinforcing it. Let’s use Taylor’s situation as an example. She works with small and medium-sized businesses, helping them grow by taking HR and payroll off their plate so they can focus on what matters. That’s exactly why we came to Insperity in the first place. If Taylor builds her authority around understanding the problems small business owners face, if she becomes known for helping companies break through growth barriers, if she consistently shares insights about the challenges her buyers deal with every single day, that authority doesn’t conflict with Insperity. It amplifies everything they stand for. When you focus on your expertise and how you help people, your personal brand becomes a magnet. You create leads. When prospects research you before a meeting, they see someone they actually want to talk to. You’re building trust before you ever shake hands. The Five S Framework for Building Authority In my book The LinkedIn Edge, I walk through what I call the Five S’s for building your personal brand, especially on LinkedIn. This framework keeps you aligned with your company while establishing your unique authority. The key is sending the right message to the marketplace about the expertise you bring, your authority in solving specific problems, and how you can help people win. When you focus there, everything else falls into place. Your content should showcase the patterns you’re seeing with your buyers, the problems you solve consistently, and simple frameworks they can use right away. That’s what creates familiarity. That’s what warms up the room before you ever make a call. Think of LinkedIn as your familiarity engine. When you show up consistently with practical insights, every outreach gets easier and every conversation becomes more productive. Know Your Company’s Social Media Policy Inside and Out Before you post a single piece of content, take a hard look at your company’s social media policy. Understand what they allow you to say and what they don’t. Know those boundaries cold. This isn’t about limiting yourself. It’s about operating with confidence. When you know exactly where the guardrails are, you can create boldly within them. Most companies have pretty straightforward policies: Don’t share confidential information, don’t speak on behalf of the company without authorization, and stay aligned with core values. Follow those rules, and you’ll be fine. The salespeople who get in trouble are the ones who never bothered to read the policy in the first place. Your Brand Is What You Do, Not Just What You Post Here’s what too many people forget: Your personal brand is built in the trenches, not just on social media. It’s built in every discovery call where you ask better questions than your competitors. It’s built in every proposal where you demonstrate that you truly understand your buyer’s world. It’s built in every follow-up where you add value instead of just checking in. The online stuff matters, but it only works if it’s backed up by real expertise and genuine care for your customers. You can’t fake authority. You earn it by doing the work, studying your industry, understanding your buyers, and your content. When you combine that real-world expertise with a consistent online presence, you become unstoppable. You’re not just another rep. You’re the person buyers want to work with. The Bottom Line Stop worrying about conflicting with your company’s brand. Instead, focus on amplifying it through your unique voice and expertise. Your personal brand should make your company look good. It should attract the right buyers. It should build trust before you ever pick up the phone. Stay aligned with your company’s core values. Know their social media policy. Focus your content on your specific expertise and the problems you solve. Show up consistently, both online and in person. That’s how you build a personal brand that becomes a magnet. That’s how you make every conversation easier and every deal more likely to close. And that’s how you become the salesperson everyone wants to buy from. Your brand is your authority. Now go build it. Want to learn the complete system for building authority on LinkedIn? Check out Jeb’s latest book, The LinkedIn Edge, where he breaks down the Five S framework and shows you exactly how to turn your LinkedIn profile into a lead-generating machine.

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

Do you plan to hit your sales goals, or just hope you will? You set goals in January. By March, they are forgotten. It’s because most salespeople confuse wanting something with planning for it.  “I want to close more deals this year.” That is not a goal. That is a wish. “I want to be better at prospecting.” Still not a goal. Just a vague intention that leads nowhere. Real sales goals require a system. Not motivation. Not inspiration. A repeatable process that turns big numbers into daily actions you can actually execute. This four-step sales goal planning system turns annual quotas into weekly, executable actions that salespeople can control and measure. Why Most Sales Goals Fail Before February Most salespeople treat goal-setting like a New Year’s resolution. They write something down, feel good about it for a week, then watch it disappear under the weight of quota pressure and full calendars. Three things kill sales goals before they have a chance: Lack of specificity. Your brain cannot attach to something vague. There is no finish line, no way to measure progress, and no emotional connection to the outcome. No breakdown. Big numbers paralyze you. Looking at an annual quota feels impossible. Your brain shuts down. You don’t know where to start, so you don’t start at all. Zero accountability. Goals that live only in your head are easy to abandon. There is no consequence for missing them because nobody, including you, is really tracking them. Research consistently shows that people who write down specific, challenging goals and track them perform significantly better than those who rely on vague intentions or hope. The difference between hitting your number and missing it is having a systematic approach to sales goal planning and the discipline to execute it. Step 1: Identify Your Major Milestones Big goals overwhelm you. When you stare at “close $1.5 million this year,” your brain checks out. It feels too big, too far away, and too abstract. The first step in effective sales goal planning is breaking that number into key checkpoints. These milestones tell you whether you are on track or falling behind. For a $1.5 million annual goal: Q1: $375K Q2: $375K Q3: $375K Q4: $375K Now you are not chasing $1.5 million. You are chasing $375K this quarter. Still significant, but manageable. Take it further. What does $375K mean for your pipeline? If your average deal size is $50K, you need eight closed deals per quarter. If your close rate is 25 percent, you need 32 qualified opportunities in your pipeline each quarter to close those eight deals. Suddenly, that intimidating annual number becomes a concrete monthly target of roughly 11 qualified opportunities. You cannot control whether a deal closes, but you can control how many qualified opportunities you put in your pipeline. That is the number you chase. Step 2: List Your Specific Tasks Milestones tell you where you need to be. Tasks tell you how to get there. These numbers will vary based on your market, deal size, and conversion rates. The point is forcing your goal all the way down to weekly actions you can control. This step requires brutal honesty about the activities that actually generate results in your sales process. If you need 11 qualified opportunities per month and your prospecting-to-opportunity conversion rate is 10 percent, you need 110 prospecting conversations monthly. What does that look like in weekly tasks? 30 outbound calls 15 LinkedIn connection requests with personalized messages 10 follow-up emails to lukewarm prospects 3 referral conversations Assign realistic timeframes to each task. Making 30 calls doesn’t require four hours. It requires 45 minutes of focused effort. Block the time, make the calls, move on. The more specific you get, the less room there is for excuses. You either completed the tasks or you did not. You are either on pace or you are behind. If you cannot list the specific weekly tasks required to hit your goal, you do not have a sales goal. You have a hope. Step 3: Consider Obstacles and Resources Every goal has obstacles waiting to derail it. Ignoring them does not make them disappear. Identify what will try to stop you, then plan around it. The biggest time killers in sales are rarely mysterious. Meetings that don’t move deals forward. Prospects who will never buy but keep you engaged. Administrative tasks that someone else should handle. Reorganizing your CRM instead of filling it with opportunities. Here is how to expose them. Track your time for one week. Write down every activity in 30-minute blocks. No editing. No judgment. Just honest data. At the end of the week, categorize everything: Income-producing activities like prospecting, discovery, and closing Income-supporting activities like proposals, follow-up, and research Waste, which is everything else Most salespeople discover they spend less than 30 percent of their time on income-producing activities. If that is you, you just found out why you are not hitting your goals. Once you know where your time actually goes, you can protect the activities that matter. Block prospecting time before meetings start. Batch administrative work. Decline meetings where your presence adds no value. Now identify resource gaps. What do you need that you don’t have? Skills you need to develop. Tools that would improve your results. Support from leadership to open doors with key accounts. Find these gaps early. Discovering you lack a critical skill in November is too late. Step 4: Stay Flexible Without Lowering the Goal Sales goal planning requires flexibility in tactics, not flexibility in commitment. Markets shift. Buyers change. Your original plan may need adjustment. That does not mean the destination changes. Review your goals monthly and let the data guide you. Ask three questions: Am I on track What’s working What’s not working If something is working, do more of it. If something isn’t working, adjust your approach. For example, your data might show inconsistent execution, poor list quality, or weak follow-up. The answer is not abandoning foundational activities like cold calling. The answer is tightening your process, improving targeting, or reinforcing outreach with disciplined follow-up. Flexibility means adjusting how you execute, not lowering the standard because the work is harder than expected. Salespeople who hit ambitious goals stay flexible in their methods and uncompromising about the outcome. Monthly reviews keep you honest. They prevent you from wasting months on ineffective activity before realizing you are off track. Execute Your Sales Goal Planning System Take one goal right now. Write it down with a specific number and a deadline. Break it into three to five milestones. List the weekly tasks required. Identify your two biggest obstacles and the resources you need to overcome them. Then execute. Review weekly. Adjust monthly. Never stop driving toward the outcome. This system works because it eliminates ambiguity. You know what needs to happen this week. Obstacles don’t blindside you because you planned for them. You aren’t following a broken plan for six months because you built in regular reviews. While other salespeople hope for a good year, you will be executing a plan. While they react to whatever fires pop up, you will be proactively driving toward measurable outcomes. The difference between salespeople who hit their goals and those who do not is not talent or luck. It is having a systematic process for turning big goals into daily actions and the discipline to follow through when motivation fades. Sales goals don’t fail because you lack desire—they fail because the plan isn’t specific enough to execute. Download the FREE Goal Planning Guide to turn your sales goals into results. 

Here’s a question that keeps salespeople up at night: How do you ask for more compensation when you’re getting competitive external job offers without sounding like you’re issuing an ultimatum? That’s the question posed by Brady from Arkansas. Brady’s been getting legitimate job offers from recruiters, and he’s wondering how to leverage these opportunities into better compensation at his current company without burning bridges or coming across as disloyal. If you’ve ever found yourself in this position, you know it’s a delicate dance. You want to be paid what you’re worth, but you also don’t want to destroy the relationships and goodwill you’ve built. So how do you navigate this conversation? The Right Way to Have the Conversation If you’re getting external job offers from legitimate companies with strong brands, the key is in how you frame the conversation with your boss. Here’s the approach: “I really like working here, and I want to stay at this company. I love it. But I’ve got another company out there that’s a good company. They’re a great brand, they’re well known, and they’re making this job offer to me at a significantly higher level of compensation. It’s hard for me to say no to that. I feel like I need to bring this to you before I make a decision because I like working here.” Notice what you’re NOT saying. You’re not walking in with an ultimatum saying, “If you don’t give me this, I’m leaving.” Instead, you’re saying, “I want to stay here. I like it here. I’m just in a situation where they’re offering me enough that it’s turning my head and I’m looking their way.” This approach keeps the door open for a productive conversation about what might be possible without threatening your current employer or damaging your relationship. When Loyalty Actually Matters Now, before you go schedule that meeting with your boss, you need to ask yourself a hard question: Do you owe this company some loyalty? If you were down on your luck, lost a job, and they came along and gave you something that saved you, you probably owe them some loyalty for that. Not forever, but there’s a little bit of honor in not just jumping to the next place immediately. You also need to think about your resume. If you’ve just got there and a year later you’re jumping to another place, that’s on your resume. And believe it or not, even in today’s world, that still means something. I won’t hire people who jump from job to job every year. I don’t care how good they are because they’re probably going to jump again. So think long term: Am I demonstrating to a future employer that I’m worth investing more money in? The answer is yes when you gave them three years of your life, performed at a really high level, and now you’re going to leverage that to go level up elsewhere. Speaking Your Boss’s Language Here’s what most salespeople get wrong when asking for more money: They forget to speak the language their boss understands. If you walk into your sales leader’s office and say, “I want to make more money,” you know what they’re going to tell you? “Go sell more.” And they’re right. If you’ve got a great compensation plan with no limit on how much commission you can make, the answer is simple: crank out more sales. So before you ask for more base salary, ask yourself: Do I have a limit on how much commission I can make? If the answer is no, then your first conversation should be about getting bigger opportunities. Try this approach: “I can sell. I’m hitting numbers, but I’m not making the money I want. What can you do to give me bigger accounts, bigger opportunities, bigger customers? Give me better leads. What can you do to get me in a situation where I can earn more?” This is speaking the boss’s language. You’re showing that you want to produce more, not just get paid more for the same work. If you get shut down in that situation, then you have another conversation. The Commission vs. Base Salary Play If you’re a baller and you’ve proven you can sell, here’s a move most salespeople never consider when negotiating compensation: Ask for a higher commission percentage instead of a higher base salary. I honestly don’t care about base. I think a base matters when you’re getting started, and it’s nice to have, but I would much rather have a higher commission percentage than a higher base. Here’s how you position it: “In the open market, I can take a similar job and make $400,000. I want to make the same thing here. Now there’s two ways we could do this. One is that you can increase my base salary. Two is you give me a higher commission rate, and I think the commission rate should be this. I think I’m worth that.” What you’re basically saying is that your cost of sales is going to be variable. They only pay you if you sell it, so their carrying costs stay the same. In my company, the people who don’t take a base salary make more than double in commission what people who do take a base salary bring home. There’s a massive difference because the people saying “pay me more commission” are saying “I’m willing to put skin in the game in order to make more.” Now, this doesn’t work if you’re at a massive company with a thousand salespeople and rigid HR policies. But if you work for a smaller organization where people can make decisions, have an honest conversation around this approach. You might even propose a tiered structure: “You can pay me your base commission on everything up to the quota you gave me. But once I cross that quota, I want my commission to roll up so that if I get over this number, the rate scales.” That’s a conversation most entrepreneurial leaders will entertain because it’s putting your money where your mouth is. What Money Can’t Buy Here’s the thing most people miss when they’re chasing the next big paycheck: There’s always money out there you can chase. You have an obligation to yourself and your family to make as much as you possibly can in sales. But there’s also the value of working in a place that values you. There’s more than just the money. There’s the freedom, the flexibility, and the opportunity to be part of something that gives you purpose. I had somebody come to me recently and ask this question, and I said, “This job that you’re moving to that’s going to pay you all this money, suddenly you’re going to have someone who’s micromanaging and telling you what to do every single day. In your current role, you’re not making as much money, but you call the shots on your day every single day. Nobody even messes with you. Are you willing to sign up for that?” They said their wife told them the exact same thing. Maybe that’s a sign that having the freedom and flexibility is more valuable than making a lot of money but being miserable because everything you do is being micromanaged. The Bottom Line When it’s time to ask for more money, remember these principles: Bring the conversation to your boss before making a decision. Frame it as wanting to stay, not threatening to leave. Consider what you owe in loyalty. If they gave you a chance when you needed one, factor that into your decision. Speak your boss’s language. Ask for bigger opportunities before asking for more base pay. Consider the commission play. If you’re confident in your abilities, asking for higher commission rates can be more lucrative than base salary increases when looking at total compensation. Weigh the intangibles. Money isn’t everything if you’re trading freedom and fulfillment for a micromanaged existence. The best compensation conversations happen when you approach them with confidence, gratitude, and a clear understanding of your value. That’s how you get paid what you’re worth without burning bridges along the way. Want to learn more about leveraging your personal brand to create more career opportunities? Check out Jeb’s newest book, The LinkedIn Edge, and discover how to turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful career and sales tool.

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

How Do Top Performers Stay Motivated When Sales Gets Hard? You know the feeling when you close a big deal. The rush. The quiet satisfaction of updating your pipeline. Maybe a quick high-five with your manager. And then, almost immediately, it fades. You’re back to cold calls that go unanswered, emails that disappear into inboxes, and prospects who promised they were interested suddenly going silent. In sales, rejection isn’t a side effect of the job. It is the job. That reality is exactly why most people don’t last in sales. And it’s why the people who do last tend to get paid very well. Over the past quarter, we talked with some of the most consistent sales leaders in the business. Here are four moments from the Sales Gravy Podcast that reveal how top performers stay motivated and close more deals, even when the work feels heavy. Find Your Carrot and Make It Specific Will Frattini, VP of Sales at ZoomInfo, keeps a small Christmas ornament on his desk. His daughter gave it to him when she was five. That ornament is his carrot. During a recent podcast conversation, Will explained that when sales gets hard, that ornament reminds him exactly why he keeps pushing. Not in an abstract or inspirational-poster way, but in a deeply personal one. It represents his family, his responsibility, and the future he’s building for them. That distinction matters. Many salespeople say they’re motivated by family, freedom, or financial security. Those values are real, but on their own, they’re often too broad to sustain sales motivation during a brutal stretch of rejection. When you’re fifty dials deep with no connects and another demo just canceled, vague motivation doesn’t hold up. Will doesn’t just think “my family.” He sees a moment, a memory, and a tangible reminder of what’s at stake. That specificity gives his motivation weight. Top performers anchor their sales motivation to something concrete and emotionally charged. A down payment they want to make by a certain date. A trip they want to take without checking their bank account. A milestone that matters beyond quota. The more specific the carrot, the more powerful it becomes when sales gets hard. How to define yours: Write down one specific outcome you want to achieve in the next six months. Not “hit quota,” but the real-world result that quota enables. A number. A purchase. An experience. Put it somewhere you’ll see it every day. Work With Customers Who Actually Value You One of the fastest ways to drain sales motivation is closing deals with customers who make you miserable. On an episode of Ask Jeb, Jeb broke down how companies grow faster by focusing on the right customers, not just more customers. When you’re behind on quota late in the year, it’s tempting to take anything that looks like revenue. Any company that shows interest. Any prospect willing to meet. You convince yourself that a deal is a deal. Then January arrives. That customer floods your team with support tickets, questions every invoice, demands exceptions, and slowly erodes the satisfaction of the win you celebrated just weeks earlier. Consistent performers learn to protect their energy. They get ruthless about fit. Not just company size or industry, but values. They ask questions like, “What do you value most in a partner?” and they listen carefully to the answer. Some buyers want constant responsiveness. Others value expert perspective and challenge. Some want efficiency and minimal interaction. None of those preferences are wrong. But only one aligns with how you actually sell. When sales gets hard, motivation comes easier when you’re pursuing customers who respect your approach instead of fighting it. How to clarify your ideal customer: Look at your three favorite customers. The ones your entire team enjoys working with. What do they share beyond surface-level traits? How did they behave during the buying process? Those patterns matter more than any firmographic filter. Slow Down Before You Create Your Own Problems When pressure builds, speed starts to feel productive. You rush contracts. You promise timelines without checking internally. You say yes to custom requirements because slowing down feels risky. On an episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount, Jr. shared one of the most painful stories we heard this year. A $1.4 million deal with a pediatrics practice unraveled after someone rushed the process and placed the client into an early adopter program without a test environment. The result was catastrophic. The client’s live system crashed, HIPAA was violated, and the company lost not only the deal but $600,000 in annual recurring revenue. Top performers understand something most reps learn the hard way: smooth is fast. They build guardrails around high-risk moments. Before sending a contract, they align internally. Before committing to timelines, they check with the people who actually do the work. Slowing down at the right moments builds trust. It prevents chaos. And it preserves sales motivation by keeping you from spending the next quarter cleaning up mistakes made under pressure. How to build a slowdown system: Identify the three points in your sales process where you tend to rush. Proposals, negotiations, technical commitments. Create a short checklist for each and make it mandatory. Use AI to Think Faster, Not to Stop Thinking Sales demands constant context switching. Pipeline reviews. Prospect research. Discovery prep. Follow-up. Objection handling. The mental load adds up quickly. Victor Antonio recently shared an example of a window company using vision AI to diagnose broken window seals from photos. Instead of sending a technician, customers submit an image. The system verifies the issue, checks inventory, confirms warranty status, and schedules service automatically. AI hasn’t changed what strong salespeople do. It’s changed how quickly they get to the work that actually matters. Top performers use AI to handle tasks that drain energy but don’t require judgment. Research summaries. Organizing notes. Drafting frameworks. That speed preserves mental bandwidth for conversations, strategy, and relationship building. Used correctly, AI supports sales motivation by reducing friction, not replacing effort. How to use AI without dulling your edge: List the tasks you repeat weekly that consume time but not insight. Let AI handle those. Keep anything involving trust, nuance, or decision-making firmly in your hands. Why This Matters for Sales Motivation Sales has always been hard. Cold calling was hard decades ago, and it’s still hard today. You still have to find people, start conversations, build trust, and ask for commitments. What separates average reps from consistent performers isn’t resilience alone. It’s structure. Top performers know exactly what they’re chasing and why it matters. They protect themselves from bad-fit customers. They slow down when it counts. And they use tools strategically to preserve energy for selling. They still get rejected. They still lose deals. They still have months where nothing goes right. But they don’t drift. They don’t panic. And they don’t quit when the work gets uncomfortable. That discipline is what sustains sales motivation long after the initial excitement wears off. If you want a clearer target to aim at when sales gets hard, download the FREE Sales Gravy Goal Guide. It will help you define the goals that actually keep you focused, disciplined, and motivated—especially when rejection starts piling up.  

Here’s a problem that’ll make your head spin: What do you do when you can sell way more than your company can produce? That’s the question posed by Dylan Noah from Toronto. Dylan sells craft cider to bars and restaurants across his territory. He’s the only salesperson for a small producer, working with limited tools (no proper CRM), and here’s the kicker: he could sell a million dollars’ worth of product, but production isn’t enough to meet that demand. If you’re shaking your head thinking this is a champagne problem, you’re half right. But for Dylan trying to hit his income goals through commissions, it’s a real constraint that’s costing him money every single day. The CRM Obsession Is a Distraction Let’s tackle the first issue head on. Dylan is worried he doesn’t have the right CRM tools to manage his accounts and hit his numbers. Here’s the brutal truth: at one point in time, salespeople sold a lot of cider, beer, wine, liquor, and all kinds of other stuff without any CRM at all. They used index cards in a box. They had lists on paper. And they crushed it. You’re a small business with one salesperson working with 3,000 to 7,000 potential accounts in your territory. The last thing you should worry about right now is a $40,000 CRM system. Could you use automation for email sequences and promotions? Absolutely. Should you eventually invest in something like HubSpot or Pipedrive? Yes. But right now, what you need is a simple system to identify your best accounts and focus your time there. You’re not going to hit $1 million across 3,000 accounts. You’re going to hit it across 500 accounts that are the biggest restaurants and bars, where they like you, their customers like cider, and where you can create events and experiences that spike sales. Use a spreadsheet. Use index cards. Use whatever basic tool you’ve got right now. Create a 30-60-90 day system where you know who you’re calling on in the next 30 days, the next 60 days, and the next 90 days. Build a list of your top 250 accounts that buy the most from you. That’s where you live. Stop obsessing over tools you don’t have and start maximizing the opportunity in front of you. Scarcity Is Your Secret Weapon This brings us to the real issue: production capacity. Dylan can sell it, but his company can’t make enough of it. The bourbon distillers in America are dealing with this exact problem right now. They ramped up production years ago based on projected demand, and now they’re sitting on excess inventory that’s aging out. It’s a delicate balance, and if you make too much, it goes bad and you lose everything. Here’s what most salespeople don’t understand about scarcity: it’s actually a competitive advantage if you manage it right. When you have limited product, you’re always going to be in an ebb and flow situation. Sometimes you’ll have an abundance of one product type. Sometimes you’ll have high demand products in short supply. The key is building a system that lets you move fast when opportunity strikes. This is where building buying profiles for every single customer becomes essential. You need to know which accounts buy which types of products, what their purchase patterns look like, and what their potential is (high, medium, or low). Think about it like your account coverage pyramid. When you have product available, you start at the top with your highest value accounts and work your way down. You’re not treating all 150 accounts the same. You’re prioritizing based on potential. When you have an abundance of one product type, you go directly to the customers who buy that product and say, “Hey, I’ve got product right now. Do you want to buy?” You can run specials. You can offer incentives (within legal limits). You move it fast. When your high demand products come in, you call your best accounts first and say, “I’ve got ten cases of this. I’m calling you first. How many do you want?” Then you go down your list. Most of the time, you’ll sell out before you even leave your office. But if you’ve got 150 accounts and you’re treating them all the same, it gets overwhelming fast. Segment them. Prioritize them. Work them strategically. Making Your Number When You Can’t Control Supply The income issue is where this gets really interesting. Dylan wants to double his sales and earn more commissions, but he can’t because the company keeps running out of product. Here’s my take: if you’re supposed to sell $1.5 million but your company only produces $750,000 worth of product that you could sell, they should pay you for the $1.5 million. Production was the reason you couldn’t make your number, not your sales ability. Now, I know there are people in operations reading this who are going to say I’m full of it. But from a sales standpoint, if you’ve sold out of everything available, you’ve done your job. The constraint isn’t you, it’s production capacity. That’s a hard conversation to have with ownership, I get it. But here’s how you make that case: sell out of the other stuff that people don’t want as much. Figure out how to move all of it. Put yourself in a position where you own the moral high ground when it comes to sales performance. If you do that and they still can’t or won’t pay you for what you could have sold, then you’ve got a decision to make. But at least you’ll have learned how to sell in a resource-constrained environment, how to build relationships, how to manage your territory, and how to work a manual system. Those are skills that transfer to any sales role, especially ones that give you all the bells and whistles and unlimited product to sell. The Power of Old School Discipline Let’s go back to 1985 for a minute. In 1985, you would have had a Rolodex with tabs for H (high potential), M (medium potential), and L (low potential) accounts. When product came in, you’d open to H, pull out the cards, and start dialing. “I’ve got ten cases of your favorite cider. I’m calling you first. How many do you want?” If they don’t want any, click. Next card. By the time you hit the tenth account, you’re usually sold out. That’s the power of segmentation combined with discipline. Systems beat moods. Sequence beats sporadic effort. Process creates momentum. You don’t need fancy technology to do this. You need clear priorities, good segmentation, and the discipline to work your system consistently. The Bottom Line If you’re in Dylan’s situation with limited tools and limited product, here’s your game plan: Stop worrying about what you don’t have and focus on maximizing what you do have. Build a simple segmentation system using whatever tools are available. Create detailed buying profiles for all your accounts so you know exactly who to call when specific products become available. Work your account coverage pyramid from top to bottom, always prioritizing your highest value customers. Sell out of everything, even the less popular products, so you have leverage when talking to ownership about compensation. The reality is that most sales challenges aren’t about having the perfect tools or unlimited resources. They’re about having the discipline to work a proven system consistently, even when conditions aren’t ideal. That’s how you win in sales. That’s how you hit your numbers. And that’s how you build a foundation of skills that will serve you for your entire career, whether you stay in a resource constrained environment or move to a role where the sky’s the limit. Ready to master the fundamentals of prospecting and account management? Check out Jeb Blount’s latest book with Brynne Tillman, The LinkedIn Edge, and learn how to build systematic, relationship-driven sales processes that work in any environment.