Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

By: Jeb Blount
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  • Summary

  • From the author of Fanatical Prospecting and the company that re-invented sales training, the Sales Gravy Podcast helps you win bigger, sell better, elevate your game, and make more money fast.
    2025 Jeb Blount, All Rights Reserved
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Career Success Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
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Episodes
  • How Sales Reps Should Break the Rules

    How Sales Reps Should Break the Rules
    Apr 3 2025
    All’s fair in love and war—and sales. At the end of the day, what really matters is whether the deal closed or if you were left holding the bag. Did you make quota this quarter? Did you crush your numbers? Or did you fall short? If you missed quota, chances are you played it too safe. You followed the so-called 'best practices'—the ones that average reps cling to. Top performers don’t just follow the playbook. They know when to bend the rules, take calculated risks, and do what it takes to win. Be a Pattern Breaker The greatest don’t stick to rules and expectations. They forge their own path in a sea of conformity. They constantly reinvent themselves and their practices to push boundaries and find new ways to win. What you won’t see is an elite sales rep following the same script day after day and struggling to escape mediocrity. As venture capitalist Mike Maples Jr. put it on this week’s Sales Gravy Podcast, “People who are winning are the ones who change the rules and tell people how to think about it.” Now’s the time to shake up your own sales routine and adopt the practices of Ultra High Performers. Fanatically Prospect You don’t have an option—prospect every day, or get left behind. The pipe is life. If you’re not feeding it, you’re starving. Fanatical prospectors don’t just carve out time—they demand it. Every single day. You make calls, period. Distractions? They don’t exist. But too many sales reps think they need to follow traditional suggestions: Prioritize research over calls; call when you think your prospects will be available; warm leads up with social touches and emails. These “rules” are screaming to be broken. There’s no room in sales to avoid cold calling. The telephone is still the single most powerful weapon you have when it comes to selling. Sure, the norm is to hate cold calling, avoid the phone, and send out dozens of emails because it’s easy. Rule breakers don’t do easy—they’re on the phone every day. The best reps value prospecting and know that—even when they’re closing deals—they need to be watching out for tomorrow. Mediocre reps make fewer calls, qualify fewer prospects, and close fewer deals. Don’t be mediocre. Ruthlessly Disqualify; Pursue Those Who Will Buy Never waste your time on a prospect who simply won't pull the trigger. There are lots of tire kickers out there who will intentionally or unintentionally waste your time. Recognize early the deals that will never be done. Most sales reps chase every lead because they’re told to ‘always be closing.’ The best reps break that rule by disqualifying early. Be intentional in your discovery; ask all pertinent questions before spending precious time wooing a lead. You don’t have time to find out weeks down the road that your prospect wasn’t the decision maker or that there’s no budget for the deal. You can even disqualify before you start prospecting. When generating cold calling lists, zero in on a subset of your market that is most likely to buy—don’t squander energy parsing through every single business simply to tell your boss you called everyone. Jerome, a media rep in Texas, covered all of Austin. Instead of cold calling tens of thousands of businesses, he zeroed in on the ones most likely to be in the market for his services and who could afford them. He weaned out businesses that weren’t strictly his target demographic and saved himself thousands of useless calls. Break the norm by cutting deadweight fast. Play the Long Game Mediocre reps make useless calls and let the fear of annoying prospects sabotage their follow up game. Forget the outdated advice about not being ‘too persistent.’ Elite pros break that rule and keep showing up until they hear ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ They bend the rules of social niceties (i.e. don’t annoy your prospect) and keep calling, no matter how long it takes. Xant found that 50% of sales happen after the 5th follow-up,
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    45 mins
  • How Coaching Transforms Sales Performance and Culture (Ask Jeb)

    How Coaching Transforms Sales Performance and Culture (Ask Jeb)
    Apr 2 2025
    Dennis from Chesterfield, Missouri, wants to know if sales coaching truly moves the performance needle, especially when shifting from transactional approaches to more consultative selling. Below are the key insights from our conversation on why coaching matters, how it boosts sales and culture, and what leaders should do right now to make it happen. Why Sales Coaching Is Essential Sales is a skill position. Even the best reps lose their edge if they’re left on their own for too long. Much like elite athletes, sales professionals need ongoing input to fine-tune their mechanics, recharge their motivation, and keep small errors from turning into big problems. Coaching can be the difference between a rep who has plateaued and one who keeps climbing—because it provides immediate, personalized feedback when it counts most. From Knowledge Acquisition to Knowledge Application Training is vital for learning new strategies, product details, and selling techniques, but it doesn’t guarantee that anyone will actually use those ideas. That’s where coaching comes in. A coach helps each individual absorb and adapt those lessons to their unique style, role, or territory. Research shows that simply sending people to training without one-on-one follow-up leads to a big dip in retention and performance. But when coaching supports training, skill application soars—along with results. Leading, Managing, and Coaching: The Three Pillars of Leadership Sales leadership has three core pillars. Leading sets the emotional vision of where the team is headed. It's getting people emotionally connected to a future state. Managing is driving the step by step processes that execute strategy. Coaching is developing your people to execute at a high level. It is the force that keeps every member of the rowing in the right direction. Think about it this way. 90% of strategy (leading) is execution (managing) AND 90% of execution is people (coaching). Everything depends on people which is why you can’t afford not to coach. Sales Leadership and Coaching Priorities Leaders who prioritized weekly one-on-ones, real-time one-to-one coaching, and rigorous sales pipeline reviews consistently deliver better results and productivity. One of my top clients reconfigured its leadership approach with inside sales reps, focusing on call-by-call coaching in real time. While the broader industry shrank, this company grew by over 20%. The common thread? Leaders were present. They weren’t waiting for problems to surface; they intervened early and often, guiding reps through each challenge. Why Simply Showing Up Makes a Difference Leaders sometimes fear that sitting with their reps will feel intrusive, yet just being there raises performance. When a coach or manager listens in on a sales call or rides along on an outside sales appointment, reps immediately sharpen their focus. They’re more likely to use proven techniques and avoid shortcuts. Even better is when the leader offers coaching in the moment—helping the rep pivot if the call starts going sideways. Catching issues before they snowball is how reps maintain a consistently high standard of performance. The Power of Being Side by Side One sales organization I work with discovered, after a big dip in sales productivity, that none of its sales managers were spending time on the floor. Rather than spending time on the sales floor coaching, the leaders were in their offices, behind closed doors grading calls. As soon as the managers started actively coaching—right next to their people, live—the entire team’s win-rates rose sharply. True coaching works best in real time, because your rep can implement what they just learned to get better on the next call. The Culture Shift from Transactional to Consultative When a coach is on the floor or in the car, they can see how a rep handles difficult questions, responds to objections, or frames value to a hesitant buyer.
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    13 mins
  • Q1 Sales Performance Gut Check

    Q1 Sales Performance Gut Check
    Mar 30 2025
    This is a very important Monday because this is the first Monday of the second quarter and it’s time for a major gut check and assessment of where you are against your number, coming out of Q1 and what you need to adjust and think about as we move into Q2. Start with setting aside a dedicated, focused time block of one to two hours for reviewing your: Q1 Results Current state of your pipeline 2025 goals & Personal business plan Evaluate Your Q1 Performance Against Your Sales Goals Begin with an honest evaluation of your Q1 sales performance it’s likely that your performance falls into one of three scenarios, You Crushed It – You had a killer quarter, blew away your goals, and you are walking on cloud nine. You Hit Quota – You on track and right where you are supposed to be against your number You are in trouble – You missed your number, are behind quota, and are feeling the pressure. Incredible Quarter If You Crushed it, and you’re on the top of the ranking report congratulations, this is exactly where you want to be at the end of Q1. Being ahead of your number now is an insurance policy against unforeseen setbacks in the future. It can also make life much easier if your sales plan and quota gets bigger in the back half of the year as many do. The most important thing you can do right now is conduct a deep dive analysis of your pipeline. It’s not unusual to work hard to close so many deals at the end of the quarter that you start off in a weak position at the beginning of the quarter. Get your calculator out and do the math on how much you need in your pipeline to crush your Q2 number. Then get to work immediately building the pipe you need to hit that goal. But do not wait to do this. With a great quarter behind you, the temptation will be there to take a breather and take your foot off of the accelerator. After all, you deserve it. But be very careful if your pipeline needs work, the failure to take immediate action will come back to bite you. If you feel a bit burned out from working so hard to deliver such a great quarter, it might make sense to take a few days off to rest, recover, and recommit to your goals or raise the bar with stretch goals. You’ve set the foundation for what could be a massive year and a trip to President’s Club, take advantage of what you accomplished in Q1 to get even better in Q2. Right on Quota If you hit your quota in Q1 and ended up right where you should be, nice job! Quota isn’t easy to achieve. You’ve executed and done exactly what your company asked you to do. You’ve kept your promise. Your biggest challenge now is that it's not going to get any easier as the year progresses. You'll need to keep executing and keep grinding. For you, this is a good time to step back and take a look at what is working well for you, where you can improve, and where you may have gotten off track. It’s a good time to reacquaint yourself with the basics and fundamentals that create success in both sales and your industry. Of course, after battling it out in Q1 you may need to refill your tank. This is the perfect time to double down on investing in yourself. With so much volatility in the market place in the moment I highly recommend listening to my book Selling in a Crisis on Audible or Spotify taking my courses on selling during uncertainty on Sales Gravy University at learn.salesgravy.com I’ve always found that investing in myself and learning gives me a boost of energy and motivation when I need it the most. Bad Quarter: You are In Trouble If you had a bad Q1 and you are behind your number then you are likely in trouble and are feeling the pressure. You may have already been put on a plan which is not fun. The good news is that this is survivable if you choose to survive. I know this isn’t where you want to be. No-one tanks their sales number on purpose. But where you are now is almost always a result of small slips ...
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    9 mins

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