Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen above or watch the video below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen above or watch the video below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are materialistic, yet generous when others need help.

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

There is racism, prejudice, poverty, and exclusion.

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

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

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

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

There is defeat, failure, and plenty of roadblocks.

There are poor people and rich people.

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

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

Some people give, some people take.

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

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

However, when you allow these external forces to control your actions and thoughts you hand over control of your life to the government, the company, the boss, your heritage, your circumstances, the whims and opinions of others, and to your own internal voice that keeps telling you that bullshit story about “what you can’t do.”

“Starting today I will not depend on, wait on, or hope for luck, the lottery, the company, fate, or the government to help me change my life!  I will take responsibility. I will set my own course. I will make my own success. I will take action. I will persist. I will find lessons in setbacks. I will look forward not backward. I will turn haters into motivators. I will be empowered by my circumstances not impeded by them. I can achieve whatever I want and nothing can hold me back. I own my future. This is my Independence Day!”

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

This is REAL independence. Make this your Independence Day!

Listen to more Sales Gravy Podcast episodes HERE

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino recap some of the many lessons and takeaways from the OutBound Conference. In particular, they dive into two mindsets – Scarcity and Abundance – and how these mindsets can either make you a winner or inhibit your long-term success.

What does emotional intelligence have to do with sales leadership?

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

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

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

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Michelle Rockwood teach you how to avoid coming across as pushy and desperate and instead compel people to lean into you by leveraging the choice based closing method. It’s all about selling without selling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss why sales is a process. You will learn about pre-call planning, the science of selling and why winging it on sales calls is wickedly stupid.

• Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling
• Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy

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

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

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

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

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

That exists in sales, and even as a business owner, you need to be a little bit self-centered because you have to put all your effort into your business. How do we, as naturally self-centered people, shift into becoming other-focused?

Diane: If you believe that being interested in other people is how you’re going to get to a goal, and that goal is to have really great business with people and companies you really like and can really help, you naturally want to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Long-term, that’s going to be what’s best for your business and best for you.

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

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

It’s hard to have objections when I really heard what you said and I’m matching everything that you told me. Then we’re both walking down the same road. I think it comes down to really understanding what you want and the way to get there is by knowing as much as you possibly can about your prospect.

Jeb: Yesterday, I was doing a training with a group of veteran salespeople and we were talking about objections. And one of the things I said to them is, “The best objection that you get is the one that never shows up.” And it doesn’t show up because you did all the work up front and you got to know them.

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

You’re doing sales archeology and understanding them and as you pull all of that information in, you’re matching your recommendations to what they see as both their success criteria and their evaluation criteria for doing business with you. And when you match it up, there’s no objection. It just makes sense to do business together for both of you.

Diane: If it doesn’t match up, it doesn’t match up. So you say, “Listen, I’m not the best resource for you. Let me point you towards somebody who is.” And there’s no weird conversation, but this is also why the salesperson has to ask a lot of questions and questions that are uncomfortable like the budget question or the decision-making question.

There are ways of asking those questions so that you just continue to build trust and show up as a professional. You show up as someone who really knows what they’re doing and really understands that you need that information in order to be able to accurately propose a solution with that person or not.

Jeb: I made a statement earlier that salespeople who overperform have a tendency to be lower on the empathy scale, so they’re more self-centered. And what you’re saying is that we need to be more other-focused. When I say self-centered, I mean outcome-focused.

So when I’m in a meeting, I’m always thinking about the outcome. What’s the next step? What am I getting to? What am I closing for? And that’s one of the reasons why people who are more self-centered and less other-focused have a tendency to do better over time.

They’re much more likely to advance the sale through the process. People who are high empathy and really other-focused when it comes down to asking for the next step, they’re thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t want to be too pushy.” So they end up with a lot of “call me maybe’s” and you know, “I’ll get with you next week,” and things like that.

One of the problems is that people who are more self-centric or lower on the empathy scale, work great in transactional sales.

So if I need to sell you something and it’s a one-call close, probably the best attribute you can have is no empathy, close the deal. But when you’re talking about building long-term relationships, when you’re talking about complex sales and spending a lot of money, and serving your customers over time, you can’t live in that world.

All you’re focused on is getting as much out of your customer in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of emotional investment, and it just doesn’t work. So you have to start getting intentional about being-other focused. In other words, before you walk into a conversation with a customer, you have to tell your brain to stop, listen, pay attention, get out of your own head.

The way that I do that is I remind myself of the benefits. As you said, if I really listen, if I’m really doing that sales archeology, it helps me focus on what I really want.

Do I want to close the sale really quickly and burn the customer relationship? Or do I want a customer for life? Do I want to turn a small sale into something big? I made a sale in 2012, then that company spent more than $3 million with my company. It was a tiny sale back then. Focusing on that long-term relationship has paid off over and over for us.

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

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

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

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

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

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

If I can just give them everything, hopefully, a bell will go off in their head and they’ll start doing things differently and achieve better results.

Diane: When salespeople are selling, they are thinking about themselves. They’re thinking about the fact that they have to hit quota, that they have to get revenue, that they have to do all of these things. Their mindset is, “I need to convince you that you need what I have to sell. I have to be eloquent enough and say the right things. I have to be persuasive.”

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

So that’s why I say that it’s not about selling. It’s about solving, right? It’s about connecting and making sure that it’s a good fit because that’s how you get long-term business relationships that serve your business for decades.

Jeb: I totally agree with you. Not that long ago, I was doing training out in Oregon and one of the people in my class was an ex CIA agent. I was teaching some concepts out of Sales EQ around human influence frameworks.

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

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

I said, “In your line of work, you were using these influence frameworks to manipulate people into giving you what you wanted. And in my line of work, I help people, and I solve problems.”

Jeb: The very last thing I want to do is sell someone something, or do something for someone that they don’t want or don’t need. And that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t because I’m pretty good at influencing people and persuading people. I could certainly do that. I could go out and sell things to people that they didn’t need, but I never do that.

It’s a normal thing for me and my business to turn customers away and say, “We’re the wrong fit for you. You should not do this because you’re going to spend money with me and you’re not going to get the outcome that you desire.” And I’ve always led with that. And I believe that people know there’s sincerity in that. What’s so funny about it is when you tell them, “I’m the wrong fit for you,” they start trying to figure out how you can be a fit for them.

Diane: That is so true! Exactly. I had someone say to me, once I said, “Listen, I’m not the right resource for you.” She said, “Well, I sure hope you are because I trust you.” And I said, “Well, then you’re going to have to trust me when I tell you I am not the right resource for you.” It’s exactly what you say. And those people will refer you to people because you’re honest.

Jeb: Exactly right. You’re honest. There’s a local place where I live called C&C Tire, we only take our cars there because we trust Tommy and he’s honest. If he can’t fix it, he won’t say, “Yeah I can fix it.” And then you spend money with him. He’ll say this isn’t going to happen here, let me get you someone that can do that.

Or if you come in and say, “I need this fixed. Cause I think this is the problem.” He’ll say, “Nah, it’s a $2 part. You don’t have this problem.” And he’s always been that way. If you look at his business, there are people waiting in line to get him to work on their cars because he’s not trying to sell you something that you don’t need.

Diane: And because we are so used to mechanics selling us things we don’t need that, he’s a gem, right? So the salespeople who don’t sell are the ones that people gravitate toward because they know they’re going to be told the truth. It’s a total integrity thing.

And I’ll add something to what you were talking about, which is when you convince somebody they need what you have, it’s a really bad relationship. And neither of you like it. So why would you do it? You’re going to end up spending time with someone that it’s just difficult all the time.

Jeb: If I sell you something that you don’t need and you realize that I did that, then you resent me. Maybe you’re a small business. I’ve been in this position before where I needed a sale or I needed to get a deal done.

I would lower my price, or add on services in order to convince someone that I could help to do business with me. But down the road, as my business grew, I started resenting that customer because I felt like they were taking advantage of me.

Resentment leads to contempt, which is the gangrene of business relationships. It will rot them out at the core until there’s a point where you cannot save the relationship. There won’t be any referrals, you don’t like each other, and it almost always ends badly.

So when your focus is on solving rather than selling, you only solve problems you can solve. You solve the problems you can solve at a price point that allows you to provide the service that the person is expecting you to deliver down the road, post-sale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They avoid pain and they shy away from obstacles. This is a mistake because adversity – being broken – is our greatest teacher. It is through the crucible of adversity that we become stronger. 

Sometimes we’re so broken that it transforms us. It changes us. We come back from that deep pain, different than who we were before. 

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

God uses broken things. 

I’ve had the privilege of traveling to every continent on the globe except Antarctica. Along the way I’ve met some incredible people from all walks of life. What I’ve learned about successful people, is that ultimately they share two mindsets in common. 

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

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

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

Learn from adversity, learn from pain, learn from the bad things that are going to happen to you; and trust me, bad things are going to happen to you. You will be broken again and again and again.  

What successful people realize is that this is just part of walking through life and you have a choice about how you view this brokenness. 

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

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

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

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

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

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) answers a listener’s question about how to effectively balance prospecting for new logos with serving and managing existing accounts.

Maggie is a member of my insider group, and she asked me a pretty important question about how to balance prospecting and account management.

“I’m a top salesperson, and I want to stay on top. But one of the things about my job is that I have to manage and service my existing accounts, and I have to go out and look for new logos and new opportunities. And the more business that I sell, the harder it is for me to prospect to go find new opportunities so that I can sell more.”

If in your sales job, you have to go hunt new accounts and you have to manage the accounts that you go out and close, then Maggie’s question makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to be a hunter and a zookeeper at the same time.

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

This is one of the key reasons why people struggle to balance prospecting with account management.

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

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

Next, you procrastinate and put off prospecting. You find every excuse not to prospect. Having an account base gives you really good excuses not to prospect, so you don’t. The need to prospect and the need to fill up your pipeline begins to add up.

Your sales manager is saying, “Hey, you have to go find me some new business,” and you’re not making the commissions that you want to make. There’s a lot of pressure on you. So suddenly you’re faced with, “Oh my goodness gracious, I have to prospect.” Then you try to pile all of your prospecting into one day.

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

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

You start looking for an easy button solution to a problem that, if you’re honest with yourself, you created. Not because of your workload, but because you were avoiding prospecting in the first place.

The key is that you need to prospect a little bit every day. And when you do a little bit of prospecting every single day, you begin to take advantage of the cumulative impact of all those little bits of activity.

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

The first thing you want to do is begin blocking time out for prospecting. That means that it needs to be on your calendar. You need an actual time block on your calendar every single day for prospecting.

Account management is going to consume most of your day, spending time with your existing customers.  Those customers are going to be calling you. They’re going to be interacting with you. They’re going to be sending emails to you. So the best time to schedule your prospecting block is at the very beginning of the day.

If you wait, you will never do it. First of all, you don’t want to do it, so it’s easy to procrastinate. And second, because so many things are going to be hitting you every time you sit down to prospect, another problem is going to show up and you’re going to go chase the problem for an existing customer rather than prospect.

So front-load your day with prospecting. That means the very first thing you do in the morning is prospect. The next thing you want to think about is how much prospecting you actually have to do. And if you’re really honest with yourself, it’s not that much.

In Maggie’s case, for example, she’s a top salesperson and she’s got a full book of accounts that she’s managing.

Those accounts are putting commissions in her pocket and they’re producing revenue. So what she needs to do is sell enough new business to make sure that she’s covering any accounts that she loses and she closes enough new business to continually grow her account base and stay on top of the sales rankings.

So the truth is, for Maggie and most salespeople who have to balance account management and prospecting, you only need to dedicate about an hour a day of prospecting to do all of those things. When I say dedicate, I mean actually prospecting with your head down during that block of time.

You’re not researching. You’re not getting coffee. You’re not talking to friends. You’re not texting people. You’re not answering your email. You’re not answering your phone. You’re not taking incoming calls and you’re not watching cat videos. You are prospecting. You have to dedicate the time to prospecting. If you really think about this, it’s not that hard.

In fact, it’s really not even about balancing account management and prospecting. It’s about having the discipline to manage your day. Discipline is sacrificing what you want now for what you want most.

And if what you want most is to stay on top of the rankings, to produce new business, to earn more money, and to gain the praise and the adoration of your leaders and your peers, then simply tap into that desire to shift your mindset and do a little bit of prospecting every single day.

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

P.S. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On my final Coronavirus talk, I discuss what happens post-pandemic, the power of blending, and what you need to do right now to now to future-proof your sales career.

A year ago, I made the first coronavirus talk about outbound prospecting. No matter when, where, or how as a salesperson, your number one job is to go out and fill up the pipeline. A lot of people were asking questions at the outset of the coronavirus about whether or not they should prospect at all.

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

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

We’ve been through a lot this year. But as we start looking to the future, as salespeople we’ve got to think, “How do we future-proof ourselves?”

The one thing that is absolutely true about the last year is that we compressed about 10 years’ worth of innovation into a period of about 12 months. Salespeople everywhere woke up to a new playing field. 

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

What top sales professionals discovered over the last year is something called blending.

Blending is choosing the communication channel at any given point in the sales process that gives you the highest probability of achieving your sales outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. This is the formula for the future: choosing the communication channel that gives you the highest probability of getting the outcome that you desire, at any given place in the sales process, with any given customer, at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money.

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

It’s the ability to use every possible way to connect with someone. Even with social media or smoke signals if you have to. Mastering all of those channels so that you gain a competitive edge. You can meet your buyers where they are and blend these different communication channels so that you can have more conversations with people.

If you just go back to what I said earlier, a year ago, I talked about prospecting because one of the truths about sales is that the more people you talk with, the more you’re going to sell. But because we have all these different channels to use, now it makes sense that we can talk to more people in less time, which puts more in the pipeline. That means that we’re going to sell a lot more in the long run.

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

But let me give you a couple of stats.

McKinsey did a study of B2B sales and they found that 77% of customers prefer virtual when they’re dealing with an existing vendor. 71% of buyers say that they prefer a virtual interaction at the top of the sales funnel when they’re evaluating a new vendor. 76% of buyers said that if they have a choice between a telephone call and a video call, they want a video call.

What buyers are telling us is that they like virtual because it’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s frictionless. And the salespeople who are adopting this new technology, they’re the ones that are owning the future.

The wishbones who wish things didn’t have to change, the wishbones who think maybe things will go back to the way they were are deluding themselves.

And in sales, you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. To the wishbones who are hoping and wishing that they can go back to their comfort zones: it’s never going to go back, ever. We have changed forever. So in order to future-proof yourself, what you have to begin to do is invest and start learning.

I use a simple formula called Adopt, Adapt, Adept. Adopt means that I’m constantly looking for new technology, new ways to communicate, new ways to interact with my customers, new ways to sell, new ways to make myself better at the craft of selling.

And then I adapt those new ways to my way of going to market, to my customer base, to my industry. And so I don’t just take everything and say, “Well, there’s one black and white way of doing things.” Because there’s not, right? Sales is about probabilities.

I want to choose things and use things that give me the highest probability in any given situation. So I adapt it to my particular way of doing things. And then I practice and practice and practice until I become adept at it.

That’s what rainmakers do. Rainmakers practice. They put it into practice and you know, they’re going to fail. That’s okay. You’re going to make a mistake here and there. That’s okay. They keep trying.

Wishbones? They try it once and it doesn’t work, then they just go back to the way things were before. The word of the day is future-proofing. Future-proof, yourself. This is what I believe. There has never been a better time ever in the history of the sales profession to be in the sales profession.

We have so many things in front of us and so many innovations that are coming our way. We have so many ways to connect with buyers. Salespeople who step into this future, step into this innovation, they’re going to own the world. They’re going to be the ones that are helping buyers and cashing huge commission checks.

They’re going to be the ones on the top of the ranking report at their company and their sales organization. Future-proofing is the word of the day.

So as a sales professional, right now, as we start looking toward the end of the pandemic, instead of looking backward, and thinking, “Maybe things will go back to the way they were,” I want you to think about moving forward.

And I want you to think about the explosion of innovation that is going to be coming your way, the digital transformation that is going to be rolling over. It’s like a tsunami. And I want you to get on your surfboard and I want you to ride that wave because you, the sales professionals, the rainmakers that adopt these new techniques, you’re the ones that will own the future.

And you are the ones that will take sales to a completely new level.

• Prospecting Coronavirus Talk #1
• Excuses Coronavirus Talk #2
• The Gift of Time Coronavirus Talk #3
• Confusion Coronavirus Talk #4
• Fear and Worry Coronavirus Talk #5
• On Mourning Coronavirus Talk #6
• Gratitude Coronavirus Talk #7
• On New Possibilities #8
• On Mental and Physical Resilience #9

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

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

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

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

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

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

We want to hear from you. What are you doing this year to celebrate success, reward yourself, and stay motivated? Send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

We are here in studio blue with the great Victor Antonio, who I believe is one of the greatest orators of our generation. His presence on stage excites me. It’s incredible, it’s engaging, and his stories are real. The path that Victor took to get to where he is today is inspiring. You came up from poverty and you’ve built an empire since then.

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

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

I loved to walk on stage and get a trophy, I lived for that as a salesperson. In fact, I told my sales manager, “I don’t care about the money. I want to win. I want the trophy.” So in this world, I thought there was no better person than you to have a conversation with. What can salespeople do to celebrate their victories, both big and small?

It’s interesting to me that people want that external validation. A trophy is an inanimate object, you know what I mean? The real victory comes from looking at everything you’ve done. Take a moment to reflect and say, “Look at what I did!” and walk on your own mental stage. We all want recognition.

We all want our successes to be meaningful. But if I just nailed that year, my biggest trophy was always the check. That was my trophy. For people who need that external validation, why do you need it? Why depend on somebody else’s appreciation of you to determine your value? Appreciate it. Live in that space, man.

One of the things that I’ve always lived by is that when you’re in second place, your job is to take first place. When you’re in first place, you’re competing with yourself.

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

The only place that’s real is the present right now, the future hasn’t been written, and the past doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just something that happened. One of the problems that we face when we’re struggling to motivate ourselves or feel that recognition is that we’re living in the wrong place. We need to spend more time in the present than these other places.

I want to challenge your perception of your success a little. I think your joy really comes in the process of getting to the next level. It has nothing to do with actually reaching the next level. Everything’s a game of inches, and you’re a guy who lives like that. “How do I make it a little better?” “How do I fix that?” That in itself is your thrill. You’re always thinking, “What else can we do?” And there’s a joy in that.

For us, the fun part of the journey is to see if I can take it to the next level. Some people see that as effort or work or almost fatiguing. The person who was disappointed in just having their name in a bullet point on a presentation is one of those people. What they’re not looking at are all the things they probably did that year to adjust, to make it happen. Even if they hit the same number in a pandemic year, I think that’s a win. Now, if you killed it, congratulations! Really celebrate. High five yourself!

If you are building anything, whether it’s a sales pipeline, a sales year, or a business, it’s long stretches of grind and suck interrupted by a few brief moments of elation. So when you get the elation, you have to be able to celebrate it. You can’t celebrate too long, but I do think it’s part of the journey. In many cases, people don’t take the time to celebrate the little wins.

You have to be in the moment, enjoy the journey and the small victories along the way. Long stretches of pain, long stretches of grind, and a few brief moments of elation. That’s the formula. It’s not a lot of elation and a little bit of grind. It doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to pay for success in advance with some pain.

I want to go back to the person with their name on a bullet point. They think, “I did all of this work. I expected something at the end and for somebody to give it to me.” And what you’re saying is, why don’t you just give it to yourself every day on a daily basis after you do something cool?

I’d rather have a lot of small little celebrations over 365 days than wait for one big one at the end. A big one’s always going to disappoint me, but man, if I can celebrate 365 wins, I’m good.

An optimist says, “Hey, let me move to the next thing, move to the next thing, move to the next thing.” And I think that optimism also allows you to change your self-talk. And one of the things that I read recently is that the way that we talk to ourselves is much faster than the way that we speak normally.

We’re speaking up to 4,000 words per minute to ourselves in our head because we compress the way that we talk to ourselves in our brains. Let’s say that you went to your sales kickoff and your name got up there, and then you felt like it was anti-climatic. If you’re telling yourself that over and over and over again, when you leave, you’re like, “Oh God, I didn’t get what I needed.”

And you become the victim, instead of saying, “My name was on the bullet point. I mean, there were a thousand other salespeople out there. None of the other people got recognized.” It’s all in the way you look at it and how you talk to yourself.

In this environment, you have to learn how to fail fast. When you’re in a situation and you are trying new things, you have to always be iterating. I’ve probably got a hundred thousand dollars of studio equipment in a closet someplace because we tried them and they didn’t work. So we said, “Let’s do it again.” We didn’t say we’re never going to buy anything again.

We said, “We still know what we want to accomplish. What we’re looking for, this just isn’t going to get us there. Let’s do something else.” So we get better and better and better. I think this is also part of optimism. It’s looking around and every time you see something, explore it. You have to be present and say, “Look, this didn’t work.” And instead of beating yourself up for it, say, “I learned that it didn’t work. Let’s try something else. Let’s do something else.”

You have to keep trying. Do it again, do it again, do it again. Iterate, iterate, iterate. And I think that is a big part of me being in the present. I love iteration. I love doing something and finding out, “Okay. I can make it a little bit better. Let’s do it again. I can make it a little bit better. I can get a little bit better at this.” Over time, that creates small victories.

I think it’s all momentum, isn’t it? Just be better than who you were yesterday. That’s all it is, right? That’s your motivation to be better— who you were yesterday. That’s the true competition because if you start looking at what other people are doing, you lose focus on what you should be doing and what is meaningful to you.

When you look at what other people have, you start saying, “Why don’t I have that? I should have that.” It really takes the focus off of what you really want. Your journey is your journey alone. It sounds so cliche, but the toughest road to success is the road back to you. It isn’t until you figure out who you want to be, how you want to roll, that you’re going to be happy. There is no external validation that can beat that.

I don’t know about you, but I have my own happy dance. I do a 30-second happy dance. And I do it at my desk. Nobody else sees it. Nobody else will ever see it. But it’s my dance. I love that because it’s my personal celebration moment. That’s what matters.

The Coronavirus third wave is putting a strain on the mental resilience of sales professionals and impacting performance.

The last time I came to you with the coronavirus talk was back in July. Back then we were talking about new possibilities— about how going through a crucible of adversity helps you lift the chains of limitations off of yourself so that you can see that anything is possible if you make the choice to persevere. 

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

All of this stress and anxiety combine to put you in a situation where you just don’t feel very good about life. In sales, if you don’t feel good about life, it’s going to be really, really hard to feel good about selling. 

The net result is that many people just feel mentally and physically drained. In sales, you need a great deal of mental resilience because you often face so much rejection. The job is hard. And now, you have to work twice as hard to accomplish your sales goals. 

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

If you’re allowing those days when you just feel depressed to take you down with them, then it’s going to be a lot harder to to to gain the physical stamina that you need. 

So my challenge to you on this Coronavirus Talk is to go look in the mirror:

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

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

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

I’ve got so much more energy and feel much more equipped to handle the disappointments, stress, and anxiety that come along with this horrible pandemic. 

So take action now. Start eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising. Do this and I promise you that you will not only get through this, but you’ll also put yourself in a position to win on the other side. 

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

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

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

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

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

Join Jeb Blount’s Insider Group. Text “insider” to 1-706-397-4599 or HERE

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

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

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

What chance do they have when someone gives them half a second online?

I was working with a group of CPAs who were going to networking events, but they weren’t really getting anything out of them. When I asked about their process, they said, “We talk to people, collect their business cards, and then we come back and wait for them to call us.”

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

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

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

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

What’s your take on starting conversations, following up, and making connections online?

If I take a sales mindset, maybe with people on social media, after I walking out of the room means that we are starting to foster that relationship. I’ll connect with them on LinkedIn. Depending on your relationship, why not connect with them on Facebook? Check them out on Instagram.

One of the things I tell people is to look people up on LinkedIn beforehand who you know will be there. Instead of all these unfamiliar faces, you actually have a bunch of people you’ve already connected with before you go. It shouldn’t be a bunch of preplanned conversations, but tell them, “I look forward to speaking with you tomorrow.”

You should never stop a conversation without a plan for your next follow-up. The problem is when you introduce yourself incorrectly, it leads to this kind of awkward conversation where you say, “Oh, I’m in insurance.” They’ll say something like, “I’ve already got insurance. Thanks.” Now you have an awkward exchange before you have to ask them what they do and then the conversation’s over.

My suggestion is to change the dynamic altogether. I had this guy come to me and he said, “I love selling insurance. But when I go to networking events and tell people I sell insurance, I watch their eyes scream. They’re like, ‘How do I get out of this conversation in less than three minutes? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I go to the bar?’”

So he explains to people what he does, but he already knows what they’re going to say. And then he feels obligated to ask them. Now he’s just wasted the money and the time of going. It’s stressful. If you’re commoditizing yourself and saying, “I fit in this category,” I already know from the moment I speak to you, I can disqualify you or say I don’t need it. That’s what most people do in the numbers game of transactional sales networks.

You want to introduce yourself differently, but to do that, I need to know why you actually care about this product. If you don’t care about the product or service that you’re selling and you don’t think it adds value, find something else. What I find is that most people gravitate to the products and services that they are connected with in some way, shape, or form.

I asked him why he was passionate about selling insurance, and he said he likes to help people. I told him it needs to get deeper than that. Between a person that earns $50k a year versus somebody that earns $250k, which one do you care about helping most? He said he would pick the person who makes $250k because he can sell them more stuff.

I told him that’s not really where we want to go with this. What about a guy that hustles to get into a Harvard degree and got into a C-level executive role where he makes $250k, versus someone that started their own business out of nothing, hired on a bunch of people, and now they make $250k. Which one of those do you care about helping most?

And he said, “Obviously the small business owner. I just feel like they deserve more help because my grandfather got a business, owned a farm, and hired all these people. Then he got sick and ended up having to sell it. I just watched him wither away and die for 10 years in front of the TV in this little apartment, because that’s what he could afford.”

So I said, “Here’s what I want you to think about instead of going in and introducing yourself as an insurance salesperson. Why not introduce yourself as the ‘hustle lifeguard’? When people ask what that is, you then talk about your passion and mission, helping the hustlers of this world, the people who create something out of nothing. You’ll find that people will gravitate to you.”

What was funny is that the small business owners that heard that, they’re like, “I need that. You’re right. I’m not prioritizing, I don’t want to end up like your grandfather.” But people who aren’t small business owners almost never seem passionate about what they do, so they hear his story and they want to extend his passion into what they do. They’re like, “I’m not in a small business, but could I work with you too?”

It transformed everything. He went from an employee to starting his own business, and his business exploded.

One of the introvert’s strengths is our ability to be empathetic, ask great questions, and really listen to what the answers are. An extrovert often wants to talk about themselves. Extroverts can learn how to actively listen and empathize, but introverts believe they can’t learn to do those other behaviors, and the key isn’t about being more extroverted.

That’s a true recipe for failure and feeling inauthentic. You have to learn a system that channels your introverted strengths. The thing that I will tell you though, is absolutely like when you go and speak to someone for the first time, it’s about being interested, not interesting.

A lot of people get worried that they’ve got nothing to add. The person that’s networking wants to talk about themselves. So if you ask, “What brought you to this networking event?” something will come up. Or, “What’s going on in your life at the moment?” Maybe they’ll say, “Oh, I just got promoted.” Be genuinely excited for them.

Or if they say, “Oh, no, I always didn’t get here because something’s going on at the office,” ask them questions about it. Empathize with them. Offer assistance or advice. Somebody will say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I haven’t even asked you what it is that you do!” And then you get permission to answer.

I like to travel economy sometimes, because going on a short flight, I find that a lot of people these days don’t want to spend the extra money on first-class for a short flight. So I’ll sit down and I’ll have a conversation where the first thing I’ll say is, “Are you going home, or are you heading out for a meeting?”

And a lot of times they’ll say, “Oh, I’m heading out to a meeting,” especially if it’s the morning. And we’ll then have a dialogue. I’ll joke about the fact that I won’t pay for first-class for short rides to create this dialogue. Now we’re having a dialogue about all the people that are in first class.

There’s a story in the book actually about one of the best relationships I created was literally at an airport. The flight had been delayed and I’m sitting in a restaurant waiting for my flight to get sorted. I heard everybody else talking about the conference that they’re going to next to me. And I was the speaker at the conference. So I turned around and said, “I’m hoping that we can get out today as well.” And that is all I needed. That is just building on something that you’re overhearing.

The night before an event, I’ll go out for a meal and generally I’ll sit at the bar and there’ll be another executive sitting at the bar because they don’t want to sit at a restaurant by themselves. They’re like, “You’re in business, too?” And then we’ll have a conversation. I’ll say, “What did you order? Is it any good?” That dialogue is all you need to strike up a conversation. And then I’ll say, “What are you here for?” It literally brings the same conversation back.

I’ll then invest in them about what they do, what brought them there, if they got some time to enjoy the city, some of the things that I saw earlier today, if I’d been to the city before, and eventually they’ll say, “So rude of me, I cannot believe I haven’t asked you what you do. What is it that you do?”

The thing is that you can create these serendipity moments everywhere. It’s unbelievable. I talk about this for a whole chapter. So many people tell me how lucky I am for running into all the right people. I have practiced and practiced so much that I always have conversations thought out.

Now, when I first started, it was a networking room and that’s it. But once I mastered the networking room, I started to look for conversation starters that I could use when I was at sports games, when I was at restaurants, or doing something in the city. Anytime I see an opportunity, I almost get upset with myself unless I practice one of my conversation starters.

This is for two reasons: One is that it’ll either be a great opportunity I could have missed out on, or secondly, maybe it leads to nothing, but I really learned something that didn’t go well that I can then practice later when I do run into that right connection. I’ll know exactly how to handle it.

One of the ways that I’ve helped myself create these conversation starters is by talking to people when I’m waiting in line for fast food. I’ve always practiced this and it doesn’t make me feel even a little bit nervous. I’m a big fan of fast food, so I’m always getting the burger.

I’m waiting in line and there are people in line and they have logo shirts on. I’ll go, “Hey, I couldn’t help but notice that you work for this company. What do you do there?” And people love to talk about that. I can always start asking questions and it just helps me open up a dialogue or find out about the company.

And I learn a lot about the marketplace that way. I don’t always create the same sort of these reciprocal relationships that last a long time, but I learn things I didn’t know. They’re usually pretty good conversations and I never feel even the least bit of nervousness about that at all.

I think that you have to be intentional about it. You have to decide you’re going to do it. And then, you have to practice. Practicing has been the way that I’ve gotten myself better at those types of conversations. I have conversations with strangers that have zero impact on my life. I’m probably gonna have zero impact on their life.

So there’s nothing to lose, nothing to gain. And my thought is that if I asked them about their day, let them talk, and I don’t say anything, all I did was make their day brighter and they walked away thinking, “Wow, that was a really nice person.”

I get practice by getting out of my own head and having those easy conversations.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast Jeb Blount (People Follow You) and Kristie Jones discuss the trials and tribulations of building and sustaining a sales accountability culture. You’ll learn that without accountability your sales team will generate inconsistent results and devolve into the wild, wild west.

I actually started in SaaS sales leadership back in 2000. As I progressed through my career, I started to work for some VC-backed companies, and I got that VC-backed startup bug. Accountability is so critical when you’re dealing with people who have given you money and expect a return on the investment. Early-stage startups and fast-growing startups are all about urgency and results. I was working as a VP of Sales and it was clear that those environments needed to have a sales accountability culture. We needed to create and maintain one.

In about 2016, I left the W2 world and started my own sales consultancy. I’m passionate about helping early-stage tech startups build their sales teams and formalize their process. I spend a ton of time doing executive coaching on accountability culture. I’m still walking into companies and talking to them about accountability culture after really not seeing it. That includes everything from not having firm quotas, to not dealing with “accountability dodgers”.

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

It starts with setting expectations and putting those in writing. In the middle of this pandemic, it’s more important than ever. There’s more uncertainty than ever before, which also means that sales reps need accountability more than ever before. They need to understand: “What will cause me to lose my job?” Everybody’s worried about that. They need to understand the circumstances around that. A sales accountability culture starts during the interview process. During the interview process, I’m already starting to set expectations just by the behavioral-based interview questions that I’m asking to ensure that people will walk their talk and that people will fall on the sword when they need to.

During the start of COVID-19, I went back to all of my clients and former clients and wrote a little how-to menu and said, “You have to create accountability around the work schedule because the work schedule is not eight-to-five anymore. You have to understand what you can expect from them, even from a work schedule standpoint.” Also, expectations are a two-way street. As a leader, I can’t just sit down with you and say, “Here are my expectations, let’s negotiate them and put them in writing.” I also need to say, “Here’s what you can expect from me.” And then, at the end of our expectations meeting, I ask, “What do you want me to do if you don’t hold up your end of the bargain?” I let them set their own consequences.

Why would I wait until it’s gone south on me, just to go back to fix it in a way that may not work for the rep? I hear everything from, “I need a gentle reminder,” to, “I need you to take me out to lunch, clearly something’s going on and I need some one-on-one attention.” I hear a lot of different answers to that question, but I write those down on the document, too. And so it’s so much easier for me to go to a rep who’s not walking their talk and say, “We had this conversation and this is what we discussed. This is what you told me to do if you weren’t holding yourself accountable. I think we’re at that place, so now we can have that conversation.”

I let the conversation happen a couple of different ways. So I want that first conversation to happen in the first one or two weeks of onboarding. I spend a lot of time helping my founders onboard new reps, and I build that in. I create an hour-by-hour, day-by-day, formal onboarding plan for the first two weeks for my founders, including a two-hour expectations conversation. If I worked with the founder before, they can run through that themselves. I want them to understand not only expectations but also communication.

For example, how does the employee want to be communicated with? We’re dealing with a lot of Gen Y and Gen Z, right? So they like having conversations over Slack. And I always say to people, when my door is open, you’re welcome to come in. But I run a very tight schedule. I say to them, if it’s a 911, you better text me. If you need an answer in 24 hours, email me. Those are expectation conversations, too, that people just don’t think about. Business is shifting so quickly that you really need quarterly expectations conversations.

You can’t just set expectations in week two and expect them to not change by month nine. So we need to sit down quarterly as a team. What are the expectations of the team, as well as individual expectations? We’re going to have these conversations upfront so we don’t have to have a very awkward conversation in the middle of a crisis.

That expectation meeting matters, because when I look back on the early stages of our company, our biggest mistake was not having those conversations. So when there was a crisis, it was pretty easy for the employee to look at me and say, “You didn’t tell me what to do.” And there is a truth in the fact that if people think they’re doing the right thing, it didn’t even occur to them to do anything else.

You’ve got to go in with that attitude. I assume everyone is doing the best they can. Sometimes the best they can do is subpar, but only because I failed them as the leader. When executive coaching, I’m teaching them how to do this because my clients can not afford to make hiring mistakes. They can’t afford to let people go because they didn’t know they should have had these conversations. And now things are so left of center that there’s no coming back to the center.

I think one of the harder things for people who are the hiring manager, whether that be the founder, whether that be HR, whether it be the VP of sales, is that you might’ve mis-hired. That’s accountability for yourself. That’s saying, “I made a bad hire. I’ve got to fix my own problem.” And again, it’s not the employee’s fault. I always take full responsibility for bad hires because I should know better.

We had a mis-hire that happened, and I consulted with the founder and said, “This person is not qualified for this job. You’re going to set them up to fail, and it’s never going to be their fault.” And now seven months later, after two of the four sales reps quit, now we’ve got ourselves a problem. Now we have to make the decision we should’ve made if we were disciplined during the hiring process. But the other thing that people don’t realize is the morale problem that it causes. When I terminate a rep for accountability issues or non-performance and another rep walks in my office and closes the door and says, “We weren’t sure how long it was going to take you,” it’s embarrassing.

The managers always are the last to know, right? We’re not living amongst the gossip and we’re not going out for a beer afterward with the employees, but I’ve had that happen to me two or three times over 20 years. And it is embarrassing and humiliating that your team was waiting patiently for you to get rid of the bad apple so we could change the culture on the sales floor.

That is one of the keys to creating a sales accountability culture. You’ve got to recognize that people who aren’t accountable pull down and hold back the very best of the best salespeople. They are lifted up when they’re surrounded by people who are accountable to the mission, accountable to the numbers, and accountable to integrity. I think sales is a competitive environment where everybody is working to get to the top of the leaderboard. There can’t be backbiting and people doing side deals behind your back. And I’ve had that happen in my own business and people didn’t tell me, so I found out later on.

It pulls the entire organization down. Even if they are your top salesperson, it pulls everybody down around them. That’s just a key part of building that accountability. One of my early leaders and mentors, Mary Gardner, who in my early twenties taught me how to be a sales leader, said to me: If you have to fire somebody, the first thing you do is go into the restroom, look in the mirror, look yourself in the eye, and you say, “This is my fault. It is my fault that I have to fire this person. I own this, I’m accountable for this.”

Then you go fire them. It sounds weird on the outside, but it was a really important lesson. I’ll have leaders even say to me, “Well, I didn’t hire that person.” But they don’t get a free pass on that, either. You’re firing this person and it’s your fault because you couldn’t coach them. It’s your fault because you couldn’t make them better, and it’s usually your fault because you hired them in the first place. You did it too quickly and you didn’t ask the right questions. I think that as leaders, if we’re accountable to ourselves, then it’s easier for us to lead from a place where we’re saying that this is a place where we’re all going to be accountable for the things we’ve promised the organization.

Don’t forget that it’s a two-way street. I can’t set expectations for my sales reps, but not be willing to be held accountable myself. Tell them: “Here’s what you can expect from me now. What else do you need that I didn’t mention? What else are you expecting from me?” These sound like complicated conversations, but with a couple of these under your belt, they’re not. I promise that it will make your life as a sales leader so much easier. It will add a level of respect to your organization and the team. Not every department has an accountability culture, either. I tell sales leaders that we’ll lead the way for the company and set the example.

Everybody’s looking to us anyway, so we’ll create an accountability culture. Set those expectations, and then set consequences. You and I talked a lot about termination today, but it doesn’t have to get to that point. There have to be milestone consequences along the way. How are we going to handle that? Ask the employee, what do you want me to do? Let them set their own consequences. You have to negotiate that and agree to that.

As a new leader who comes into an existing team, you have to sit back within the first two weeks and have those expectation conversations. You have to start all over again, no matter whether the last leader did it or not. This is now your team. It needs to be run by you and they need to understand what they can expect from you.

Get Kristie’s free resources here: https://salesaccelerationgroup.com/salesgravy

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

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

Listen all Sales Gravy Podcast episodes here.

I was in corporate life from the time I graduated college in 2000, all the way up until 2020, and the last four jobs that I had in the corporate world were inside sales and customer service. Then between 2013 and 2015, I moved into more of a pure sales role where I was cold calling. 

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

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

After that, I was in development at Habitat for Humanity of Greenville, which was essentially a sales role. That’s where I put into practice what I had learned in those first few years, and what I was teaching the guys on the field, in order to bring in donations for Habitat for Humanity. I finally left that job to start the photography business full-time in February of this year.

I got my first digital camera in 2004 or 2005. My dad was into photography. He didn’t train me, but I was at least exposed to him having a camera. When I got my own digital camera, that kind of launched it for me. It was very simple to make art by just going out and clicking a shutter.

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

I felt that it was more of a contribution to society and to the world to take my skill and talent and give that in the form of photography, as opposed to being in the sales trenches. 

I remember when I first started Sales Gravy 13 years ago, we were in the middle of the Great Recession and I had to make a pivot in my career. I decided that at that point in my life, I was either going to be an entrepreneur, or not.

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

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

What was it like when you first started? And are you still in that place of, “Do I let go of what I’m used to”?

It’s gone really well this year, but I definitely have those same concerns. I also remember waking up in the middle of the night and wrestling with things like, “Well, what if it rains that whole next day? Then I can’t do the outdoor construction shoot, so I don’t make any money.” Your brain just goes to all of these irrational places about why you’re going to fail.

Someone told me to remember that it’s reversible. If at some point it’s not going well, you can turn around and go back and get a day job or a W2 job. You also hear people say to burn the boats and don’t give yourself an opportunity to go back, then you’ll drive yourself to success. I was in that first group that was like, I’m going to go try this. I’ll regret it if I don’t.

And if all else fails, then I can go back and get a regular job. The stakes were higher because I had the Habitat job, which was the best job that I ever had. Those are the best people. It was the best mission. It was my favorite job. I felt like if I failed, I’d have to go back to something that just wasn’t as great.

But if you go out and try, I don’t see it as a failure. If you don’t have great success, and you do have to turn around, I think the credit still goes to the person in the arena, the person who goes out and tries their hand at their dream. 

I think there’s a lot to be said about how your belief system and your attitude attract people and opportunities into your life. I believe that about prospecting as well.

I think the salespeople who are prospecting get lucky. It’s not always a direct, “I talked to this person, therefore I get”, but more like, “I talked to this person, they told somebody that links with somebody else, my phone rings.”And sometimes we don’t put all those dots together, but I do believe that’s true. 

Photography is one of those professions where people have that dream and then they get into it and they don’t realize how insanely competitive it is. Everybody wants to be a photographer. Many people get into photography and very quickly exit because they find it hard to make a living.

I think this is important for salespeople as well. They’re out there thinking, “Man, my competitors, they got lower prices, they got this, they’re beating me up, blah, blah, blah.” You jumped into one of the most competitive industries in the world and tried to make a living in it. Talk to me about that. 

I think people buy you. I really believe that. The marketplace is super crowded. There are a hundred other photographers that can come and take your real estate listing photos, your headshot photos, your company’s website photos, and do it well.

You really end up, especially as an entrepreneur, selling yourself, your vision, your passion, your process, how you go through homework before the shoot, your personality, and how you respond to texts and emails.

Jumping into a crowded marketplace is daunting, but in another way, it really lets you express yourself fully and be who you are. By being a little different, by being unique in some way, you can separate yourself from the competition.

I just started to sell myself. I shared my life and my photos on social media, and that started to attract what I’ve been able to build into a pipeline. 

The more people you talk with, the more pictures you take, the more clients you have, the more opportunities that come in.

Let’s break down the real estate example. If you’re working with a couple of brokers and they’re listing houses, what they really want is they want to trust that you’re going to pick up the phone when they call. You’re going to go get the job done. You’re going to go get the photos that they want because you’ve taken time to understand them.

And then you’re going to get it up and running for them fast on Zillow so that they don’t have to think about it, so they can go focus on real estate. They could probably go take the pictures themselves, right? But they want to go knock on another door and get another listing. 

Exactly. I’m not selling just a well-exposed bedroom photograph, I’m selling that real estate agent their time back. I was able to understand the value of sales. I started to see it in my own journey, my own life. The realtors are selling their butts off every day. They can have another meeting, another coffee, get another contract. That’s what’s paying their bills. Shooting photos is a very low-value activity for them.

That’s what I would put right in the copy I would send to real estate agents. I’m not saying my photos are tremendously better than anyone else’s, but you can trust me and rely on me to operate efficiently so that you can move on to a higher leverage activity, like getting the next lead into your pipeline. 

Problem solvers are the champions of the world. Photographers, they’re pitching pictures, but you’re pitching what your pictures solve. It’s the service. It’s peace of mind. For example, if you’re taking pictures of a wedding or of someone’s family pictures, there’s a lot of emotion involved.

What I’ve found with those types of relationships is that it’s the photographer that sits down and creates the entire experience. It’s not just that they’re snapping photos, but they’re sitting down and talking with us and asking us, what do you want? And what’s important to you? What do you want to capture? What are you looking for? What are your family values?

And by listening to us and making us feel like we’re part of the process. Then there’s the artwork on the back end to make them look the way that you want them to look.

But it’s still the same thing. It’s not about the picture, it’s about the emotion that we feel while we’re working with that individual person. And it’s that emotion that causes us to tell other people. Your buyer’s emotional experience while they’re working with you is a more consistent predictor of outcome than any other variable. You said this, people buy you, right? But you have to talk to people. 

As an entrepreneur, you have to be fanatical about prospecting. You have to be a nut job about building your business. Many entrepreneurs forget about the selling side as they’re building this ideal vision of what their business is going to be.

And in the meantime, they don’t make any money while they’re building their blog and putting together their business cards. How do you remain consistent in your business development practices while you’re running the rest of your business?

I think a great tactical shortcut right here is to show your work. That’s how I started this job. I would go shoot. The photos I would shoot, I would edit them. I’d post them to Facebook. Shoot, edit, post to Facebook. Then I started to get traction: “Hey, can you come out and shoot the swim meet?” “Hey, can you come out and shoot me with my dog?” “Hey, our company needs new website photos.”

So it started to build a little bit organically. When I was showing my work, I wasn’t waiting to be discovered. It’s one of those big soapbox topics that’ll get me cranked up like an old van. You’re not going to get discovered.

No one’s going to discover you. You have to show your work. I think people will be better served by consistently putting their stuff out there instead of sitting back and thinking, “I’m excellent. I’m a killer photographer. Why aren’t companies finding me?”

They’re not going to find you. Sometimes you have to pursue, and you should pursue the ones that you want to work with because they will say yes, eventually.

It’s easy to start to reach overwhelm when you’re the sole proprietor and you’re doing the billing, marketing, shooting, and everything else. I’ve stayed pretty close to burnout much of this year, I can say. But I’m also very excited by the possibility of selling, and I very much believe in it.

I wrestle with the fact that I have a lot of business and this is great, but at the same time, I want to be selling more. I’ve just kind of wondered, how do I throttle between driving or pursuing the business that I want, but also delivering on the day-to-day?

I think part of the answer lies in curating the type of business that you’ve taken. I said yes to every job when I first started, and it’s just not the best technique. I realized that every yes that I’m telling a company is also saying no to another opportunity. 

When I started Sales Gravy, I took anything because I had to build. Some of those yeses came back to haunt me because they were taking me away from other things. Some of them turned out to be the greatest yeses I ever said yes to, because they changed the organization.

I don’t think, as an entrepreneur, you have much of a choice. It’s really nice to idealistically say that all customers aren’t good customers, but when you’re trying to pay the light bill, any customer is a good customer. I think what happens over time is that there’s a curve.

As you grow and get more mature, you can be pickier with what you want. It’s no different for a salesperson. If you’ve got a full pipeline, you can be really picky about the deals that you’re going to work on so that you spend your time on the most lucrative deals with the highest probability of closing.

If you’ve got an empty pipeline, you’re going to take anybody that calls or says yes. You’re going to show up. You’re going to drive across town for eight hours, in order to go see a company for 20 minutes that may or may not do business with you, ever.

But when you’re full, you don’t have to. This is part of being an entrepreneur. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying yes when you get started. You just start teaching yourself what not to do through the mistakes that you make.

We talk about the 30-day rule in Fanatical Prospecting. The prospecting you do in any given 30-day period has a tendency to pay off over the next 90 days. In other words, the work that you’re doing now to connect with people will start to pay off in the next 90 days.

Well, you take a week, two weeks, three weeks, or four weeks off, then suddenly you’re on the desperation rollercoaster. Too many entrepreneurs live in the feast or famine amusement park. It’s up and down, up and down, up and down. Salespeople do the same thing.

It’s an awful way to live because there’s so much anxiety, stress, and pressure. Then what do you do? You make really bad decisions. You start saying yes to everything again, and you don’t want to do that. It is key for entrepreneurs to schedule time every single day for business development. Clearly, there’s going to be some days where you can’t always do that. My advice is to never let a day go by that you don’t do something, even if it’s just five minutes.

You said something earlier about passion, and I love the way you explained it. The way I look at passion is that it’s awesome to be able to follow your passion. But it is way better to bring your passion with you wherever you go and with whatever you’re doing. You need that passion to help you do the hard things. Working on a project, serving your client, taking care of them — that’s the fun stuff. Calling a stranger, cold calling, reaching out, going to networking events, following up on things — that’s the hard stuff. As an entrepreneur, if you’re not willing to do the hard work, what you have is a hobby, rather than a business that you can grow. 

My advice is that you’re going to reach some level of success where you have to start making some decisions about what type of business you’re going to be. Are you going to continue to be a sole proprietor business where you’re doing all the work, or are you going to scale? If you do scale, you have to bring on other photographers, because you’re a good salesperson.

You can cover sales for a while, but you can’t cover the work. So you have to go out and bring more business in and bring another photographer in. The more photographers you bring in, the more you can scale up.

They don’t have to go prospect, because there’s a lot of people out there whose ideal is to be a photographer, but they don’t want to hustle the way you’re willing to. As a result, you have the opportunity to build a much bigger business you can grow into.

You’re right. I don’t know exactly what that looks like for me yet. I’m still kind of young in the business and just want to figure out how to design my life. I don’t want to create a soul-sucking job or a tremendous amount of stress.

But I do have to relieve that active income versus passive income gap somehow. It’s very active income right now, so I have to be on-site with a camera. But I am definitely looking at ways to try to change that percentage a little bit.

The good news is that you know how to sell. Find something that you like to do that you’re good at. Then understand that just because you’re good at it, just because you’re talented at it, that’s not enough.

It’s all about hustle and your ability to make connections, talk with people, build relationships, and build your business. If you get really good at that, if you can sell, then you can accomplish anything. And entrepreneurship is selling at its heart and soul.

If you have one last piece of advice for our listeners from what you’ve learned over the years, whether they’re salespeople or entrepreneurs, what would you leave us with? 

I hear this a lot from entrepreneurs: “I don’t like to self-promote,” “I don’t want to sell myself,” “I don’t know how to do it,” et cetera. You can actually get around a lot of that by talking to people every day. It might take the form of texts, direct messages, phone calls, or emails.

You should be passionate about your work, and be good at it. As Jim Rohn says, even if you approach someone and ask, “Hey, you don’t want my service, do you?” Eventually, someone will say, “Maybe I do. Tell me about it.” When you infuse it with passion and you’re decent at it, people will want your service or product.

Get out there and talk to people. The more people you talk with, the more you’re going to sell.

Most of us, at one time or another in our careers, have heard some trainer or manager exclaim,

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

This philosophy is prevalent in business culture.

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

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

And what was the message?

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

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

The entire audience nodded in unison.

For this wise man and many others, the phrase sell yourself  has become an easy-to-use cliche´. It just rolls off the tongue. Like the audience at the speech I attended, most people will nod their heads in agreement to the statement as if some prophet on a hill had just read it from stone tablets.

Sales expert and bestselling author Jeffrey Gitomer teaches a simple philosophy, “People love to buy but they hate to be sold.”

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

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

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

But it does not work, because people like to buy, they don’t like to be sold.

The harder you try to sell yourself to others, the more you push them away. A conversation where the other person tells you all about themselves, their accomplishments, and how great they are is a turnoff. It is a features dump.

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

You don’t walk away from that conversation thinking how much you would like to spend more time with them. Instead you think, “What a jerk,” or “How boring,” or “Wow,  that guy is full of himself.”

Still, we do love the opportunity to sell ourselves. Most of us, if given the opportunity, will talk for hours about our favorite person, oblivious to the negative impact it has on how we are viewed by others.

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

Here is the brutal truth: You cannot sell yourself to others; you have to get others to buy you on their terms.

Even if you are preceded by a great reputation and others are anticipating meeting you, your attempts to sell yourself can backfire. I learned this lesson at a speech I gave to a large dinner group. One of the audience members was such a big fan of one of my books, that he lobbied the meeting organizer to be seated right next to me.

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

He hesitated for a moment and finally said, “I’m telling you this because I like you; but Daniel did not come away with a very good opinion of you.” It was like being punched in the gut! I responded that I thought that we had a great conversation and asked what went wrong.

The meeting planner explained that Daniel felt that all I did was talk about myself.

The truth hurts. I sold, but Daniel did not buy.

People buy you for their reasons, not for your reasons. So, when we sell people on why they should like us or buy from us, it backfires.

However, when step into their shoes, truly listen, and build bridges to what is important to them, it creates a powerful connection that makes almost anything possible.

Learn how to gain influence through Effective Listening Skills

I love blending text messaging into my account management process. As a communication tool, it’s fast, efficient, less formal than email, and allows for arm’s-length, nonintrusive, synchronous communication that still feels personal. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real key to blending text into your account management process is ensuring that your text messages are intentional, systematic, and part of an account management plan

A brutal truth is that most customers are lost because of neglect. Not prices, not products, not the economy, not aggressive competitors. Neglect!

Neglect happens slowly. It creeps up on customer relationships. 

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

Wrapped up in this warm blanket of delusion, salespeople swing the door open and invite competitors in.

Aggressive competitors don’t miss an opportunity to displace salespeople who neglect their customers. When you fail to proactively anchor your customer relationships, those competitors slip through and encourage buyers to consider other options. 

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

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

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

Quarterly business reviews and other formal meeting are time consuming. You probably have a large account base and you can’t possibly meet with everyone. Every single day you are putting out fires and dealing with immediate customer service issues. 

The good news is the one secret to defending your accounts is completely in your control. Pay attention to them.  

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

• How are you doing? 
• What can I do to help you? 
• I have an idea for you.
• I thought you might like to read this article.
• Here is a link to a resource that I thought you might find valuable.   
• Have a great weekend.
• Thank you for your business. 

Staying in regular contact with your accounts ensures that you are top of mind with customers. It lets them know that you care. 

Just remember,  it doesn’t cost a thing to pay attention to your customers. 

Even though text messaging is a quick and convenient channel for communicating with your accounts, you must not allow text messaging to become a substitute for meeting with you customers by phone, video, and in-person. 

I recently ended a several-year relationship with one of my vendors because my account manager was just “texting it in.” We’d always used text as a way to stay in touch. I appreciated being able to communicate with him and quickly get questions asked or problems solved. I’d even made several purchases after he sent me special offers in text messages. 

A year earlier, though, text became his primary channel. Where we used to talk, now he never called. He was no longer blending texting into his account management process; texting had become his account management process. 

If he had an upsell or special offer, he sent it via text. When it was time to restock, he sent a text. Soon, I started to feel that he was taking me for granted, like he felt he no longer needed to make an effort in order to keep my business. 

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

Sadly, for my account manager, one of his competitors called me. She invested in the relationship. I gave her a little of my business and she did a great job. As the business relationship bloomed, I gave her more and more of my business. Soon, she had it all. 

And my old account manager? He has still not called. But I did get a text message from him this morning asking how I was doing. All I can do is SMH.

1. Send a text message to a customer just to say that you appreciate them.
2. Consider how you might begin blending text messaging into your account management process.

Direct messaging is a SALES MEGA-TREND. More than four billion people communicate on mobile messaging tools each day. Learn how to gain a massive competitive edge with strategies, tactics, techniques, and tips for leveraging text & direct messaging for prospecting, sales, and account management in our course: The NEW Essentials of Text & Direct Messaging

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

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

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

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

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast,  Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) discuss the massive impact of small actions, done a little bit, every day. Listen to the other episodes in the series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Alex, I’ve got a question for you about faith. This is not a religious question. It’s a faith question.  

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

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

How important is faith in the system, over a long period of time, to actualizing the five-minute selling process? 

Great question. Faith is a great word in sales.  Faith in the system is really about faith in yourself.  

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

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

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

If you do that for two weeks, you will find more open opportunities and more close opportunities. It’s just two weeks of faith and here is no way that you won’t improve your sales position.  

It’s all about cumulative impact. The cumulative impact of small actions every day. Over time, these small actions add up to real numbers.  

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

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

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

What happens then? I get busy and then I quit. How do I make sure that I don’t stop doing what’s working? 

You’re totally right. Salespeople are busy. They’re not sitting around. Therefore, the answer is you must schedule proactive, outbound sales calls into your day.  

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

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

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

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

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

The easy way to do this is to use a timer. Set it for five minutes. When the Clock is running, you’re doing your proactive work. You’re making your calls. Then when it dings, your 5 minutes are up.  

I love the frog eating analogy.  There’s a chapter in Fanatical Prospecting titled Eat the Frog. The point that I make in that chapter is that you should start your morning doing the hard stuff first because it’s not going to get better for you the rest of the day.  

The timer method is how my mother, who is the most productive human being on Earth, runs her entire day. She carries a little timer with her and breaks everything up into 15-minute blocks.  

For example, she will be in the garden weeding. She sets the timer for 15-minutes and when 15-minutes is over she moves on to the next task in her day.   

Three hours of gardening feels like it’s a lot just like three hours of rejection is too much. But, 15-minutes or 5-minutes, that’s doable.  

And, with just 15-minutes a day of effort, she has a pristine garden. 

I had this client who was very serious about getting all of his salespeople in the office on Mondays for cold calling day. When I questioned him about it, he balked, “It’s very important for our company,” he said.  

So, I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll come to your office and we’ll sit together and observed cold calling day so you can show me how it works.”  

At eight o’clock everyone came it, got coffee, and opened their laptops. At 8:30 a sales manager walks out onto the sales floor and says, “Everybody we need to get on the phones.”

The salespeople slowly start calling. Satisfied, the sales manager goes back into her office where she resumes sending emails. 

By 9:00 the salespeople are back up, walking around, getting coffee and talking to each other. The sales manager comes back out tells them to get on the phones.  

This occurs several times. By 11:00, the sales manager has given up and the salespeople are roaming halls.  

The senior leader I was sitting with was stunned. He truly believed that his salespeople were diligently spending 8-hours making cold calls. But this is not how humans work and it is certainly not how salespeople work.  

This is why I’m all about high-intensity prospecting sprints, done a little bit, every day. It’s not about prospecting day, it’s prospecting every day.  Small actions add up. 

Sequencing is the real secret to engaging hard to reach prospects. In our FREE guide Seven Steps to Building Effective Prospecting Sequences, we show you exactly how to build a sales prospecting system that works. Download it Free Now. 

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast,  Jeb Blount’s (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) offer a simple strategy for overcoming your natural fear of rejection by breaking it into doable doses.

Human beings fear rejection. We hate and avoid rejection at all costs. But, in Sales, your job is to go out and find rejection and bring it home.  

However, when you break your fear of rejection into doable doses, it gets easier to handle because, over time, when you face a fear repeatedly, you gain obstacle immunity.  

Yesterday I had a video call set up with prospect. It was at the end of a long day of video calls. You know, where everybody is a little box on the screen, right? My brain was tired of being on camera, I just wanted to walk around with my phone – just put my feet up and not be on a camera.  

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

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

That’s how important the telephone is right now. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens inside of you?  

In baseball, if you fail 70% of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame. For salespeople, if you’re failing 80 to 90% of the time, you’re doing damn good! 

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

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

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

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

So, if you’ve already been rejected eight times by this prospect, the ninth rejection is literally no worse. It’s the same. There is no difference. 

I’m working with a group right now and we are running high-intensity prospecting sprints. We’re doing 10-minute phone blocks.

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

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

Because we break rejection into doable doses (10-minutes at a time) it’s easier for them to remain motivated and focused.  

And it makes you feel more confident and accomplished because you’re having positive interactions! You’re going to feel better about yourself.  

You connected with someone. You feel positive and that’s a much better feeling than avoiding the phone and procrastinating. 

That bit of success is going to make you want to do it again. If you get focused on talking to people 5 minutes a day you can grow your sales tremendously. But, you’re going to want to do more than that. And, you will. 

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast,  Jeb Blount’s (Virtual Selling) and Alex Goldfayn (5 Minute Selling) teach you how to eliminate cold calling by talking with people you already know.

“Welcome back to part two of my conversation with author Alex Goldfayn about 5 Minute Selling Skills. On this episode, we discuss one of the greatest sources of new pipeline opportunities.   

It’s the people that you already know. Talking with the people you know is an easy way to eliminate cold calling.”

 “I feel like we don’t call people because we don’t know who to call, right? Unless you’re using a CRM perfectly, it’s not going to tell you who to call. It’s a list of names and numbers.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you not grow if you’re making hundreds of additional proactive communications a year?”

“It really is that simple.

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

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

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

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

Now most of that was to one business that was expanding rapidly. We got the owner on the phone and the he was ready to buy. He said he was just about to put out an RFP.”

“It was so hard for me not to jump in in the middle of that, I had to really practice my silence technique there because I got excited by what you were saying.

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

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

And, by the way, they. It wasn’t like you were cold calling. I mean, it wasn’t like there was somebody who didn’t know you. They had a relationship with your business in the past. They were familiar with your brand. There’s nothing to lose by calling them.

In no place in any of my books or any of my consulting work do I say that salespeople should be cold calling. All of us should be calling people who we know. I understand, some people have to cold call, but we all know hundreds of people that we can connect with them, catch up with, and some of them, as you said, have already spent money with us.

Your customers want to hear from you because they want to know you care. And the tragedy of it, is because of our fear, when we don’t call them, we hurt them, and we hurt ourselves, and we hurt our families. Because of stupid fear.”

Learn exactly how to grab your prospect’s attention and engage them in conversations in our FREE E-Book called Seven Steps for Building Effective Prospecting Sequences

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

This is Part One in our series on 5 Minute Selling – how to get a massive amount of sales activity done, a few minutes at a time.

On this episode Jeb tells the story of a lazy sales rep who lost his business that because he began “texting it in” rather than interacting by phone.

“A year earlier, text became his primary channel. Where we used to talk, now he never called. He was no longer blending texting into his account management process; texting had become his account management process.

If he had an upsell or special offer, he sent it via text. When it was time to restock, he sent a text.

Soon, I started to feel that he was taking me for granted, like he felt he no longer needed to make an effort in order to keep my business.

Sadly, for this account manager, one of his competitors called me. She invested in the relationship. I gave her a little of my business and she did a great job. As the business relationship bloomed, I gave her more and more of my business. Soon she had it all.”

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

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

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

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

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Anthony Iannarino (Eat Their Lunch) get down and dirty about why salespeople need to adopt a phone first approach to outbound prospecting sequences.

There is no tool in your sales arsenal that is more powerful than the phone. None. Yet sales professionals across the spectrum have abandoned the phone for spamming prospects with an endless stream of email.

In many cases this destructive behavior has its origin in fear. These salespeople are afraid of rejection and therefore avoid talking to people. Email allows them to keep people at arms length.

In other circumstances, it is a case of ignorance. Salespeople have been blasted with the false message that the “phone no longer works.”

They’ve been lead to believe that the only way to effectively prospect is by email. Therefore, they stuff outbound prospecting sequences with spammy emails rather than leading with the phone first.

Finally, there is the failure of leadership. From sales managers to marketing organizations, salespeople are not being taught how to do outbound prospecting by phone or held accountable for talking to people.

Leaders, through their actions and inaction, encourage email first vs phone first outbound prospecting sequences. This results in thin pipelines and, in many cases, a negative impact to the company’s brand.

The objective of outbound prospecting sequences is to improve the probability of engaging a prospect. For this reason, sequences deploy multiple communication channels and prospecting touches over set duration of time.

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

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

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

Ever been caught flatfooted when a buyer throws an unexpected objection at you? It turns out that improv can help you handle it and increase sales.

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and Gina Trimarco engage in a fun discussion on how to increase sales with improv. You’ll learn how developing the same skills comedians and actors use on stage, can help you in front of buyers during sales conversations.

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

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

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

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

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Virtual Selling) and James Carbary (Content-Based Networking) discuss how starting a B2B podcast can elevate your personal brand and build familiarity.

In Sales, familiarity is powerful because familiarity leads to liking. When people are familiar with you, the more likely they’ll be to engage on prospecting calls and feel comfortable with you on virtual sales calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s difficult to see new possibilities during this crisis. It seems like we’ve been in this pandemic for years rather than months. Secretly, most of us have been living with the hope that the coronavirus pandemic would be over quickly and that we’d get back to normal.

With the new surge in cases, what is becoming clear is that everything has changed, that there is no going back, and that the only thing we can count on is new possibilities. In Coronavirus Talk #8, I discuss why it is important that you shift your mindset now so that you are looking though the windshield rather than in the rear view mirror.

The last time I came to you with a Coronavirus talk, it was way back in April. We were talking about gratitude. And a lot’s happened since April.

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

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

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

The reason that I’m back, because I really wasn’t planning on any more coronavirus talks, is because the coronavirus is back with a fury. We’re seeing cases popping up everywhere. Now we’re shutting things down again. There’s a little bit of panic. I think we’re looking at some stiff economic headwinds if we don’t get this under control.

And a lot of folks who were thinking that we were going to get back to normal are now faced with the truth, that there is not going to be a “back to normal.” Everything has changed and it will continue to change.

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

Now, I’m not saying that the coronavirus caused us to look at the world with a jaded view. I think it’s going to, like I said, open up new possibilities. And I think for all of the folks who were holding on to the hope that we will go back to normal, I think right now you’re getting a massive wake up call, in particular with salespeople.

Because if you’re in sales, you know that everything has changed and it is not going back. If you want to be relevant, if you want to be competitive, if you want to differentiate, you have to learn how to sell differently, which means you have to adopt new tools, which means you have to become good at virtual selling, and you have to do it now. That is a fact.

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

And now you can see, as the cases have picked up and as we are really coming to grips with the fact that we’re in this for the long haul, that the truth is, is virtual selling is the way that we’re going to move forward.

But here’s the good news– and we’re getting this in from everywhere across industries, the size of companies, in different countries, everywhere– we’re hearing over and over and over again about sales professionals and companies, including my company, who have had the best months, best quarters of their entire history in sales. They’re crushing records.

My company’s had three months in a row of record sales at a time when I truly believed that we would be in deep trouble. And what we’re finding is that virtual selling has made us more productive. We’re able to have more conversations, talk to more people. We’re able to accelerate sales cycles. We’re able to connect with people when we weren’t able to connect with people before, because virtual selling makes it easy.

Well, it means that the coronavirus pandemic has been transformative for the sales profession. It has made us better. And salespeople everywhere are improving their skills and they’re making more money because they rose to the occasion.

This in fact is the lesson that I hope to teach you in this coronavirus talk. You have a choice, you can change your mindset and you can open yourself up to all the new possibilities. You can create a new vision for yourself. Or you can look backwards and hope that things will go back to the way they were before. You can see the world as a dark place with no hope. That’s a choice.

And if you look at the world with new eyes and you see those possibilities, you never know which one of those possibilities that you might capture, that could change everything for you and your family.

So here’s my challenge to you: What I want you to do is peel away some time to just sit quietly in silence. Turn everything off, no phone or devices. It’s okay to have a pen and a piece of paper if you want to take some notes.

And I want you to sit and think about all of the possibilities for your career, for your life, for your family, for your business, even for your community, and your country. And I want you in that moment to begin the process of sketching a new vision for yourself, who you’re going to be, what you’re going to be, what makes you happy? Where do you want to go?

Now, this doesn’t have to be big and audacious. This can be small. It can be incremental. The exercise itself is just a starting point. It’s a beginning, it’s a shifting of your mindset. It is getting you to start looking out of the windshield to the road ahead of you versus staring in the rearview mirror and looking at what’s behind you.

And in that moment, you will begin to transform because you will see that there are tons of new possibilities that lie before you. I mentioned my brand new book, Virtual Selling, and you can pick it up right now at Amazon, iBooks, at GooglePlay, or wherever books are sold.

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

Find out for yourself why more than 10,000 people have already enrolled in the Selling in a Crisis course. In this comprehensive course, you’ll learn the techniques and mindsets required to navigate and sell effectively in the current economic crisis.

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

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

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

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

• discovery
• demo
• presentation

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

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

I disqualify between 30% and 50% of prospects on initial meetings and never move forward with the next step.

For example: If you conduct ten initial meetings over the course of a week, about half will advance to the next step. Depending on your closing ratio, 1-2 of those will move on to closed/won.

Of course, some delusional salespeople throw proposals at every prospect, regardless of qualification. This is a terrible drain on productivity and a waste of resources.

A good field rep can handle no more than ten face to face, initial meetings per week and still have time for other important sales activities such as prospecting, discovery calls, follow-ups, and presentations.

Most reps never even get close to ten a week. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do more. Driving to initial meetings, and other sales calls eats up the day.

But, that all changes when sales reps cut out the windshield time and shift initial meetings from in-person to video.

There are four benefits to shifting initial meetings to video sales calls:

1. You’ll increase the number of initial meetings you can conduct a week, which increases the number of new opportunities advancing through your pipeline, which in turn increases the number of deals you close.
2. Because video sales calls tend to be shorter than in-person calls and you eliminate drive time, you immediately become more efficient.
3. You’ll face fewer prospecting objections. More prospects will agree to meet with you because a short video call (to determine if it makes sense to work together) is easier for them consume and lowers their risk of wasting time with you.
4. Reduced travel costs.

For many field salespeople, the idea of conducting initial meetings via video, rather than in-person, seems un-imaginable. There is no doubt that in-person communication is more effective.

However, the efficiency you gain by shifting initial meetings to video sales calls more than makes up for not being there face to face. You’ll be able to conduct far more initial meetings, resulting in a bigger pipeline, and more sales.

The good news is video sales calls, are the closest facsimile to being there in person. Done well, they open the door to deeper relationships, understanding, emotional connections and trust.

In modern sales, speed matters. Blending virtual selling into your sales process makes you more agile. This allows you to move faster, become more productive, and shorten the sales cycle.

Learn more about virtual selling and improve your virtual sales skills with Jeb Blount’s blockbuster bestseller: Virtual Selling: A Quick-Start Guide to Leveraging Video, Technology, and Virtual Communication Channels to Engage Remote Buyers and Close Deals Fast

On part five of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss how sleep can help you deliver better sales presentations. You’ll learn the same technique that Jeff uses to help athletes lock in practice, improve memory, and reach peak performance.

• Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Three of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Four of Sleep and Sales Performance

On part four of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the two laws of sleep.

Jeb and Jeff explore:

• Sleep Debt
• Circadian Rhythm
• Sleep Procrastination
• Techniques for battling insomnia

• Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Three of Sleep and Sales Performance

In part three of this Sales Gravy podcast series, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the bad things that happen to you when you don’t get enough sleep, and how sleep impacts sales performance.

Scientists have been studying sleep and health for over 100 years. They have proven that without enough sleep your health, motivation, passion, and cognitive abilities deteriorate. The good news is you can instantly feel and perform better by simply getting enough sleep.

• Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance
• Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance

On part two of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss the impact of sleep on emotional intelligence and positive mindset.

You will be surprised to learn that the lack of sleep makes it more difficult:

• to control your emotions
• perceive the emotions of others
• effectively manage sales meetings
• build relationships

Jeff says that walking into a sales meeting without enough sleep is the same as going in drunk.

You’ll learn that the sleep you get tonight is the beginning of your performance tomorrow.

• Listen to Part One of Sleep and Sales Performance

On part one of this Sales Gravy podcast series on sleep and sales performance, Jeb Blount (author of Sales EQ) and Jeff Kahn (CEO of Rise Science) discuss how sleep impacts sales performance.

• Listen to Part Two of Sleep and Sales Performance

In every sales conversation, the person who exerts the greatest emotional control has the highest probability of gaining the outcome they desire.

On this bonus Selling in a Crisis Daily Sales Briefing, Jeb Blount and and Jeffrey Gitomer discuss what you should be doing now to get ahead of the curve and read for recovery on the other side of the coronavirus shutdown.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount discusses entrepreneurship, self-reliance and why sales professionals need to view themselves as entrepreneurs with Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch, the author of the new book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur.

On this Selling in a Crisis Daily Sales Briefing, Jeb Blount discusses what salespeople need to be doing now to prepare to accelerate once the recovery begins.

In an economic crisis, retaining customers is job number one. You need to do whatever it takes to keep competitors at bay and work with your customers to ensure that they remain your customers. You will need them when the crisis is over.

In this crisis, when working and selling from home, it is easy for small distractions to have big consequences on your sales day. To be at your best and be productive, you must take steps now to protect the golden hours, block your time, and set a daily battle rhythm.