Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Here’s a question that’ll make your head spin: How do you train MLM recruits who have zero sales experience to actually sell instead of just posting on social media and hoping for the best? That’s the question Andrew Osborne from Pittsburgh brought to me. Andrew works in direct selling and network marketing, specifically health and wellness nutrition supplements. Like most MLM leaders, he’s frustr...

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times lately— AI is coming for your job . Every week, there’s a new headline about another role being automated, another company replacing people with bots, another “AI agent” that can do the work of ten humans in half the time. And if you spend too much time reading those headlines, it’s easy to start wondering, W hat happens to me? What happens to salespeople l...

The gap between average salespeople and elite performers lies in process. While most reps chase quick wins and hope something sticks, top producers follow proven sales strategies that consistently deliver results. They’ve mastered the fundamentals that turn prospects into customers and customers into advocates. If you’re ready to finish the year strong and blow past your quota, these five battle-t...

How do you prepare your mindset and create the discipline to be effective every single day? That’s what Jeff Vellas asked on a recent Ask Jeb episode, and it’s the question that separates the pros from the amateurs in sales. Sales is the hardest profession in business. It’s the only job where you have to go out and find rejection and bring it home every single day. Every ask you make carries the p...

Here is an undeniable truth: The No. 1 reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline, and the No. 1 reason you have an empty pipeline is that you are not doing enough prospecting. In sales, everything rests on putting qualified opportunities in your pipeline. Prospecting is the beginning and the end, alpha and omega. If you don’t prospect, you will fail. That is a guaranteed truth. Each and eve...

Cold calling terrifies most salespeople more than losing their biggest account. The rejection. The hang-ups. The voice telling you that you’re bothering people who don’t want to hear from you. Before transitioning into sales, Steve Munn spent nine years as a professional hockey defenseman. As a hockey player, his job was to make life difficult for the other team and absorb whatever they dished bac...

Here’s a question that keeps startup founders up at night: How does a first sales hire build pipeline and prospect effectively when there’s zero technology, no tools, and absolutely no data resources available? That’s the challenge Matthew Russell brought to the table, and it’s a scenario that’s far more common than you’d think. Companies transitioning from founder-led sales often throw their firs...

Cicero once said, “Cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food to the body.” Sales is fundamentally a mental game. Your capacity for understanding your prospects at a deeper level and developing creative solutions that solve their problems—that’s your winning edge. In a profession where you need to outwit and out maneuver your competitors to win, your ability to think, to truly contemplate and...

Most salespeople lose a sales meeting before they ever open their mouth. They show up with decks of slides, lists of discovery questions, or AI-generated talking points, thinking preparation is about having more material.  But while they’re busy organizing, their prospects are mentally checking out—and the meeting hasn’t even started. Lee Salz, bestselling author and founder of Sales Architects, h...

You know AI is transforming sales, everyone’s talking about it, but you’re still staring at ChatGPT like it’s some mysterious black box, wondering what magical question you should type in first. That’s the reality for most salespeople even now. They know they need to embrace AI, they’ve heard the success stories, but they’re paralyzed by the complexity and overwhelmed by the options. If you’re nod...

Welcome to Grind Season. This week, we enter the most pivotal period of your entire sales year. From now until mid-December, how you choose to invest your limited time will determine whether you end your year strong, hit your income goals, make it to the winner’s circle at President’s Club, and start next year with a full pipeline OR wallow in mediocrity, miss your number, and damage your career. ...

Most salespeople waste their careers fighting over the same crowded prospects. Meanwhile, untapped markets are sitting in plain sight. These are the industries, segments, and territories your competitors don’t take seriously—or don’t even notice. They’re wide open, and they reward the salespeople willing to do the work. On the Sales Gravy Podcast, I spoke with Nicholas Lalla, an economic developme...

Here’s a question that’ll keep you up at night: What do you do when you believe in “buy or die” but you’re terrified of ruining future opportunities with annoying prospecting sequences? That’s exactly what Angie Anderson asked during a recent Ask Jeb session, and it’s a problem that’s plaguing salespeople everywhere. Angie subscribes to the “buy or die” mentality but doesn’t want to destroy her od...

I had intended for this Money Monday to be something powerful, a new message that would get you fired up for this week and this season. But last week, while delivering training to an amazing group of young salespeople with wide-open minds, I learned that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. It disturbed me deeply, and I feel compelled to deliver this message. The Assassination That Shook America On...

What if one simple discovery question could close your next big deal? Here’s the one I used: “Tell me what’s going on with your team?” Then I shut up and listened. The buying committee talked, debated, and worked their way toward their own clarity. By the end of the call, they had essentially closed the deal for me. I barely said a word. That’s not a fairy tale—it happened. And it proves why most...

Here’s a question that’ll make you rethink everything about sales performance: What happens when your team has all the skills, tools, and training they need, but they’re still underperforming because they can’t regulate their emotions under pressure? That’s exactly what Natalie Brooks from Charlotte discovered when she noticed how drastically emotions were impacting her team’s performance during t...

While your competitors are stuck in voicemail purgatory, a small group of top performers has unlocked a secret pipeline of qualified sales leads. They’ve discovered how to stop chasing and start attracting, all by generating warm leads through podcast interviews. Not by starting their own shows, but by treating every podcast appearance as a lead generation machine built on conversation and credibi...

A day in the life of a rep heading toward sales burnout: You wake up ready to crush your sales goals, skip breakfast to get an early jump on calls, grab fast food between appointments, and by 2 p.m., you’re mentally checked out, struggling to focus on that critical prospect meeting.  That’s the reality facing Angela Mendez from Austin and Marcus Taylor from Denver. Angela’s crashing every afternoo...

Leadership is the single most important factor in a sales team’s success. You can have talented reps, strong products, and a solid sales process, but without effective leadership, performance stalls. As Duff Tucker, Sales Trainer, puts it on this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast: “You have to model the behaviors that you want your team to live out. When you model those, you get a lot of credibil...

Here’s a question about sales territory disputes that’ll make your head spin: What do you do when overlapping territories and shared relationships turn your sales team into a collection of lone wolves fighting over who owns what? That’s the exact predicament faced by Kayla Lujan, VP of Sales at Down to Earth Landscape and Irrigation, in Orlando, Florida. Her team manages defined territories, but t...

Sales activity is the lifeblood of your career. But for too many salespeople, it’s the very thing holding them back. You’re generating a ton of activity, your calendar is packed, your inbox is overflowing, and by the end of the day, you’re drained.  But your numbers aren’t moving. You’re not gaining ground; you’re just driving in circles. As Ron Karr, author of Velocity Mindset , says, the differe...

Here’s a question that’ll flip your understanding of cultural intelligence in sales upside down: How do you win over a room full of skeptical Spanish teenagers when you’re the obvious American outsider who barely speaks their language? That’s exactly what Spencer Birmingham from Arkansas faced when he called into Ask Jeb. Fresh out of college with a marketing degree and an internship at Internatio...

In today’s economy, being the account manager who keeps clients happy and renewals steady simply isn’t enough. Every budget line item is under the microscope. Customers want proof of ROI, so you have to show measurable value while driving growth. Reva Pellerin, the #1 enterprise account manager at Vidyard, puts it bluntly: “If you simply renew your book of business at 100%, that’s not your target....

Overcoming call reluctance starts with understanding why even seasoned sales pros freeze up when it’s time to pick up the phone. They’re paralyzed by one simple fear: interrupting a prospect’s day. That’s exactly what Kirk Roberts from Richmond, Virginia, brought to the table. Kirk’s problem wasn’t about not knowing what to say or how to pitch—it was the mental block around the very idea of interr...

In 1960, two brothers scraped together $900 and bought a failing pizzeria in Michigan, launching what would become a cautionary tale about sales incentive programs gone wrong. Within months, one brother traded his half of the business for a beat-up Volkswagen, leaving Tom Monaghan alone with his ambitions. By 1965, with three stores under his belt, Tom faced a naming crisis. He couldn’t legally ke...