Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

The year was 1938. Families across America gathered, listening during the golden age of radio. On the eve of Halloween, a broadcast interrupted their evening: A live report claimed Martian cylinders had landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Within minutes, panic erupted as citizens fled their homes, convinced Earth was under alien attack.

The entire event was fake. It was a perfectly executed radio drama by 23-year-old Orson Welles.

Here’s the sales lesson tucked into The War of the Worlds sci-fi scare: Welles wasn’t just reading a script. He was executing a masterful lesson in emotional engagement. He had listeners hooked, buying into his story emotionally before their brains had time to register, “Wait, this can’t be real.” 

That emotional buy-in is a core tenet of sales: People buy on emotion and then justify it with logic and facts.

If rational adults can flee their homes over a fictional Martian invasion, imagine the force of emotion you can unleash when you find your prospect’s emotional trigger. Sharpen your emotional intelligence, and you deploy a powerful sales tool.

Welles sold tension, uncertainty, and gravity, not a product. His voice was calm yet urgent, delivered with the authority of a trusted news anchor. The audience felt an adrenaline surge—heartbeats rising, eyes widening—before they had time to check the facts.

This is the non-negotiable first step in sales. Your passionate storytelling creates the emotional charge. Your tone carries more weight than any spreadsheet full of ROI data. Emotion gets your buyer leaning in and invested in the outcome. The data you provide simply helps them sleep well at night after they’ve already made their decision.

If your message isn’t landing, stop reviewing your product deck and start analyzing your delivery. Are you speaking with urgency, and are you connecting to their emotional state? Without that emotional resonance, even the best solution just adds to the noise.

Welles dressed his fictional story in familiar trappings like live news bulletins, eyewitness reports, and crackling radio static. Each detail made the unbelievable feel legitimate. He commanded belief by establishing immediate, undeniable authority.

Bring that same presence to your sales interactions. Authority isn’t arrogance; it’s commanding belief. Sound like someone who’s been there, knows the terrain, and has the solution. Communicate with unwavering authority, and you build trust before price discussions begin.

This is how you sell the experience. Prospects must believe in you and your company; belief in your product comes next. They buy the experience of working with you before seeing the product. If you sound uncertain, you’ll never build a foundation of trust.

Welles predicted a strong reaction to his broadcast and stayed calm, controlled the narrative, and guided the audience through the panic he was creating.

In sales, moments of crisis or uncertainty test your professionalism. When a prospect goes cold, objections arise, or a competitor attacks, do not panic. Do not mirror their anxiety—it only feeds chaos and cedes control of the deal.

Control the process, control yourself, control the outcome. When deals wobble and emotions spike in your buyer, that is your moment to shine. Breathe, slow down, ask questions, and lead steadily. Be the calm voice that reassures, guides, and inspires confidence. Mastering internal composure is the essence of emotional intelligence in sales. 

Mastering composure under pressure is a skill, not a gift. It requires commitment to developing emotional intelligence so you can use logic while others react in fear.

1. Start a ‘Rejection Journal’ Drill. Stop letting rejection or setbacks paralyze you. Create a Failure Log to immediately document your feelings (frustration, anger, anxiety) and behaviors (rushing calls, getting defensive). This practice builds self-awareness and helps you identify emotional triggers before they hijack your sales process.
2. Practice the ‘Mute Button’ Listening Exercise. On your next call, mentally mute your urge to speak. Analyze the prospect’s delivery: tone, pace, hesitation. This drill sharpens social awareness and forces you to catch subtle emotional cues—the things they won’t email. This is how you truly understand their situation.
3. Implement the ‘Two-Second Pause’ Rule. When a high-stakes moment occurs—a sharp objection, competitor mention, or deal crisis—pause for two seconds before speaking. This creates a cognitive buffer, shifting you from reactive to controlled.

The Orson Welles broadcast is nearly a century old, yet it still teaches us today that a gripping story delivered well can move mountains. The way you connect, build trust, and influence emotion hasn’t changed since radios ruled the living room.

You are an broker of features and benefits. You are a storyteller, and the calm in your prospect’s noisy, chaotic world. You are the guide who connects the dots between their terrifying “Martian invasion” of a problem and your ultimate solution.

Embrace this role, and you move past objections and skepticism. You stop triggering defensive panic and start inspiring action.

Your ability to command a room starts with your ability to command your own emotional intelligence. When the sales airwaves get noisy, keep your voice steady, your mind sharp, and your heart connected. 

Master your emotions, and you will close deals your competition can’t.

The real battlefield in sales is psychological, and if you can’t master your own emotions, you will never master your prospects. Jeb Blount’s book Sales EQ gives you the psychological edge to win the business your competition can’t even touch.

AI in sales isn’t coming soon. It’s already here, and it’s quietly separating the salespeople who will thrive from those who won’t.

On the Sales Gravy Podcast, sales expert and author Victor Antonio shares this quote: “You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose your job to people who are using AI.” 

While everyone debates whether artificial intelligence will replace salespeople, the real shift is already happening. What you need to know is which parts of your job will still matter when a machine can do everything else.

Most people think AI in sales is about automation. It’s not. It’s about augmentation.

Yes, AI can write your emails. It can analyze your pipeline. It can schedule your meetings and generate your proposals. But it can’t build trust with a buyer who’s about to make a six-figure decision they’re terrified of getting wrong.

Trust in selling comes down to three things:

1. Understanding the buyer’s point of view
2. Demonstrating real expertise
3. Keeping the buyer’s best interest front and center

When a buyer is staring at a purchase order that could make or break their business, they don’t want a chatbot. They want a human being who says, “I’ve got you. This is the right move.”

Transactional jobs are disappearing.

AI sales agents can already handle simple sales from start to finish. A customer calls about a broken window seal. The AI analyzes the image, checks inventory, schedules a technician, verifies the warranty, and puts the appointment on the calendar. No human required.

This isn’t science fiction. These systems exist today.

AI handles simple tasks easily, but complex sales still require humans. Everything on the straightforward end—cold outreach, basic prospecting, routine follow-ups—is getting automated fast.

But complex B2B sales are different. When deals involve multiple stakeholders, custom solutions, and high-stakes decisions, buyers still need salespeople. Humans don’t trust machines with decisions that keep them up at night.

Your job security lives in complexity. If you’re selling simple products with simple processes, you need to start adding value now. 

Most salespeople are waiting while AI transforms the industry. Don’t make that mistake.

Here’s how to start experimenting with AI today:

• Use ChatGPT, Google’s Notebook LM, or your AI of choice to digest long articles and research reports in minutes instead of hours.
• Feed it information about your products and competitors to create your own custom knowledge base.
• Role-play objection handling by assigning it different buyer personas and practicing your responses.
• Ask it to critique your proposals before you send them to catch weak points you might miss.

These tools aren’t perfect. They’ll feel clunky at first. But you’re not trying to master AI today. You’re building comfort with technology that will be 100 times more powerful in just a few years.

The salespeople who are experimenting now will be the ones who know how to use AI when it really matters. The ones waiting for their leaders to force them to adopt AI will scramble to catch up.

So what actually matters when AI handles the busywork?

The biggest obstacle in complex sales isn’t convincing buyers that your solution works. It’s helping them trust their own judgment enough to decide.

Buyers freeze not because of your pitch, but because of fear: What if I’m wrong?

AI can show data, ROI models, and comparison charts—but building buyer confidence still requires human judgment.

That’s the skill that matters: Building buyer confidence.

You need to get exceptional at reading hesitation—when a buyer goes quiet or starts asking the same questions in different ways. They’re not confused about your product. They’re uncertain about themselves.

Your job is to help them trust their judgment. That means understanding internal politics, knowing who has veto power, and recognizing when more information helps, or when it just creates more doubt.

The other critical skill? Using AI tools effectively. Knowing what AI can handle lets you offload routine work and focus on moments that require your human judgment.

The salespeople who win will be the ones who master both. Human skills for the moments that matter. AI skills for everything else.

AI isn’t your replacement. It’s your upgrade.

The sales skills you need most are the ones that have always mattered: understanding people, building trust, solving complex problems, and giving buyers confidence in risky decisions.

What’s changing is everything else. The admin work, research, and proposals are getting automated whether you like it or not.

Irreplaceable reps are the ones who use AI to eliminate grunt work so they can spend more time doing what only humans can do. The ones who lose are the ones still doing everything manually while insisting they don’t need help from a machine.

Pick one AI tool this week and start using it. Get uncomfortable. Make mistakes. Learn.

The future of sales is happening right now. And the only question that matters is whether you are ready.

Want to master AI in sales? Get The AI Edge for the complete blueprint on leveraging artificial intelligence to dominate your competition and accelerate your sales results.

Here’s a question that’ll keep you up at night: How do you take a company from $300K in annual revenue to $1.5 million in 18 months, then scale to $3-$5 million within five years?

That’s the challenge facing Greg Hirschi from Colorado. He’s the new executive leader of an 18-year-old company selling ethics assessment services to professional licensing boards. They’ve expanded from an entrepreneurial model to a small team with one salesperson and one customer service representative. The goal is aggressive growth, and Greg needs to know where to focus his limited resources to get the biggest bang for his buck.

If you’re nodding your head right now because you’re in a similar situation, pay attention. Because the mistakes you make at $300K will haunt you at $3 million.

Let’s be brutally honest about what a $300K revenue company means: You have no money. You have a razor-thin budget. You have one salesperson and one leader trying to do everything.

At this stage, you have exactly one priority: REVENUE.

You don’t have the luxury of fixing operations, perfecting your tech stack, or building elaborate systems. You need to sell. Period.

Here’s where most small companies screw this up. They think selling means taking anything with a pulse. If it can fog a mirror, they’ll do business with it. That’s a death spiral disguised as growth.

Greg comes from an operations background. He’s analytical, process-driven, and systematic. Those traits are incredible assets for building a business, especially when the goal is to scale fast. But they can also be a liability when managing salespeople.

Here’s what happens: Operators think in systems and logic. Salespeople think in relationships and emotion. Operators want everything organized and predictable. Salespeople throw deals on the table that are messy and unpredictable.

If you’re an operator trying to lead sales, you need to understand this fundamental tension. Your salesperson is out there getting hammered with objections every single day, building narratives in their head about why people won’t buy. You’re thinking, “Just brush it off and do it again. What’s wrong with you?” They’re thinking, “You have no idea what it’s like out here.”

This is why reading New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg is non-negotiable if you’re an operator managing sales. You need to learn how salespeople think, how they operate, and how to lead them effectively without losing your mind.

The single most important thing Greg needs to do right now to scale is get laser-focused on his Ideal Customer Profile.

Not kind of focused. Not “we have a general idea.” I mean obsessively, precisely, ridiculously dialed in on exactly who they should be targeting.

Why does this matters so much at $300K? Greg’s salesperson has a $600K pipeline and will close 50% of it. Sounds great, right? But if half those customers churn because they’re the wrong fit, requiring constant re-education and hand-holding, Greg’s salesperson will get stuck in account management mode. They’ll stop prospecting for new business because they’re too busy re-selling existing accounts.

That’s how you stay stuck at $300K forever.

Your ICP drives everything. It determines your messaging, your marketing, your presentation materials, and which stakeholders you need to reach inside target organizations. It helps you build relevant social proof stories. It allows you to coach your salesperson on handling specific objections instead of generic brush-offs.

Most importantly, it gives you guardrails. You can ask your salesperson in pipeline reviews: “Tell me the strategic reason why we should chase this account. How does it fit our ICP? Why is this worth our limited resources when our singular goal right now is growth?”

When you’re running a $300K company with one salesperson and one leader, you cannot afford to chase every deal. You need to focus on the right deals that will close and stick around.

Greg’s company doesn’t have contracts. They discovered that larger organizations with stable staff become sticky customers once they see the value. Smaller organizations with high turnover require constant re-education and reselling.

This is not how you scale.

If you don’t segment your market correctly and build processes around retention, you’ll hit a wall fast. Your salesperson will close deals, then get pulled back into account management, abandoning the pipeline. Salespeople will always choose talking to people they already know over talking to strangers.

You don’t have this problem yet at $300K. But you will as you begin to scale. Start thinking strategically now about your retention process and which customer segments are worth the ongoing investment.

Getting your ICP right isn’t just about qualifying accounts. It’s about building a foundation that allows you to scale without constantly backtracking to fix problems you created by going after the wrong customers.

Every time you chase the wrong deal, you’re creating downstream problems. You’re wasting limited resources. You’re building frustration in your team. You’re teaching your salesperson bad habits about what constitutes a qualified opportunity.

The leap from $300K to $600K in annual revenue is hard. The leap to $1.2 million is harder. The leap to $3.5 million is brutal. But if you get the foundation right now while you have backing and support, those leaps become exponentially easier.

Start with objection handling fundamentals that are specific to your ICP. When you know exactly who you’re targeting, you can anticipate their concerns and craft precise responses that resonate.

Build your messaging around the multi-threaded stakeholders in your target organizations. Who needs to be involved in the buying decision? What does each person care about?

Create a systematic, process-based approach to pipeline management. As an operator, this is your superpower. You can bring discipline and structure to a highly emotional profession.

At $300K, you’re essentially starting from scratch. You have aggressive growth targets, limited resources, and one shot to get this right.

Stop being reactive. Start being strategic. Get obsessed with your ICP. Build processes around the right customers. Coach your salesperson with precision instead of frustration.

That’s how you scale from $300K to millions. That’s how you avoid the mistakes that kill small companies. And that’s how you build a business that doesn’t just grow, but grows sustainably.

The good news? You have the backing to do this right. Don’t waste it chasing the wrong customers just because you need revenue today. Build the foundation that generates revenue for years to come.

Lead your salesperson, focus on the right deals, and scale from $300K to millions—start Jeb Blount’s Sales Leadership Essentials course on Sales Gravy University today.

I’ve been intrigued by all of the LinkedIn posts lately from sales professionals, leaders, and experts proclaiming the phone is back! Even the “phone-is-dead” evangelists seem to have had a change of heart and are encouraging salespeople to “phone a customer.” 

My favorite posts are from salespeople who took this advice, called a customer, and were surprised—even stunned—to discover that their customer actually wanted to talk. It’s more proof that buyers are starving for real, authentic, human-to-human conversations with their sales reps and account managers. 

I saw one post yesterday from an account manager who said that, for the first time in years, he had picked up the phone and called a customer. In his post, he described how rewarding it was to have a real, live conversation—as if this was some new revelation. He said that even though the phone was “old school,” he had given it a try because his customers weren’t responding to his emails anymore. 

Although I’m super pleased to see that salespeople are rediscovering the power of the humble phone, I was bothered by this particular post because it is an indictment of just how far the sales profession has fallen over the past few years.

It also exposes the malpractice of this guy’s leadership team. Seriously, how is it possible that his leaders and company allowed him to avoid having actual conversations with his customers for years? 

Account managers who are not talking with their customers, the ones who keep their customers at digital arm’s length and send random “just checking in emails,” are swinging the door open and inviting competitors in.

When you fail to proactively manage relationships—when you don’t talk with your customers—those customers end up talking to your competitors and considering other options.

Nearly 70 percent of customers are lost due to neglect. Not prices, not products, not the economy, not aggressive competitors.

Neglect! They feel the sting of being taken for granted. If you’ve ever been taken for granted (and I bet you have), you know that it makes you feel unimportant, small, and resentful, which can lead to the feeling of contempt.

Resentment and contempt are the two most powerful negative emotions in the pantheon of human emotions. They are the gangrene of relationships, festering below the surface, slowly rotting away the connections that bind people together until the relationship is destroyed.

The good news is the secret to defending accounts is completely in your control. It’s simple. Pay attention to your customers.

And guess what? A simple, regular phone call can make all the difference. Just pick up the phone, dial their number, and ask or say:

• How are you doing?
• What can I do to help you?
• I have an idea for you.  
• Have a great weekend.
• Thank you for your business.

Regular telephone contact ensures that you are top of mind with customers. Hearing your voice lets them know that you care. It doesn’t need to be anything particularly special. You don’t need to schedule it on their calendar. You don’t need a reason to tell your customers that you appreciate them. 

Pick up the phone and say “hello” because it doesn’t cost a thing to pay attention to your customers.

But it’s not just that account manager and his company. Rather than picking up the phone and talking with people, sales professionals everywhere have replaced this beautiful, synchronous sales communication tool with email.

This aversion to talking with people by phone has become so acute that at least half of Sales Gravy’s training and consulting engagements have focused on one thing: Teaching and compelling salespeople to pick up the damn phone and just have real-time human conversations. 

So, let’s start with a reality check:

• The telephone is not old school. 
• Talking in real time with your prospects and customers on the phone is not old school. 

Pay attention: Talking with people is THE School with a capital THE. 

That’s what you get paid to do. The more people you talk with, the more you will sell. And the easiest, fastest, lowest-friction means of talking with people is by phone. 

Last Monday, I discussed the reasons why AI will not be displacing sales professionals any time soon. I made the argument that sales is the most human-centric career choice in the age of AI. 

But there is a caveat. If you choose to keep your customers and prospects and digital arm’s length or if you avoid engaging in synchronous conversations by phone, in-person, or video, AI can and will replace you. 

Ever since Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words on the first phone over 140 years ago (Mr. Watson, com here, I want to see you.) the telephone has been the workhorse of selling. The telephone has always been and will continue to be your most powerful sales tool.

I’ll bet my next book royalty check that there is a phone near you right now. People sleep with their phones, eat with their phones, and are more likely to lose their car keys and wallet than their phone. Though it is probably used more for texting, posting selfies, and watching cat videos, if you dial a number, in an instant, you can be in a sales conversation.

So, I’m going to say this one more time, slowly, for the folks in the back of the room who are still not tracking. You get paid to talk with people. There is no other tool that will connect you to people faster, deliver better results, fill your pipe more effectively, and help you cover more accounts and ground in less time than the humble telephone. 

If you are one of the many salespeople who are quick to say, “My customers like it better when I use email,” I’ve got a message for you. The “My customers like it better when I use email” trope is primarily a BS story that YOU keep telling yourself to justify why YOU are not talking with people.

This lazy excuse is why so many salespeople have devolved into asynchronous sellers. Trust me, if you keep this behavior up, the robots are coming for you.

I’m not downplaying email as a sales channel. There are plenty of situations when email is the most appropriate communication tool. 

What I’m trying to get through to you is that when you consistently default to an asynchronous communication channel like email—because emotionally it’s easier for you to keep people at arm’s length—human connections begin breaking.

What’s beautiful is that the phone can make you more productive. In so many cases, one short phone conversation can replace five or more emails and the frustrating back and forth that comes with them. 

When there is a misunderstanding, before you reach for your keyboard to blindly send another email, stop and pick up the phone.

Over my many years in business, I’ve found that the phone is the quickest and most effective way to easily solve problems and handle sales tasks that require human-to-human connection.  

I live by a simple sales mantra: When in doubt, pick up the phone.

• Got a customer service issue? Pick up the phone.
• Have a misunderstanding? Pick up the phone.
• Want to stay in touch and keep your relationships anchored? Pick up the phone.
• Need a reference or a referral? Pick up the phone.
• Have a question? Pick up the phone.
• Need to follow up? Pick up the phone.
• Deal stalled? Pick up the phone.
• Need to qualify an opportunity or identify a buying window? Pick up the phone.
• Before you schedule yet another excruciating Teams or Zoom meeting? Try giving your customer a call. I’m positive that they’ll appreciate not needing to schedule time on their calendar and be on camera when you can both just jump on the phone. 
• Empty pipeline? Put the cat video down and pick up the damn phone!

And when it’s the end of the day and you’re tired and ready to go home, always stop and will yourself to pick up the phone and make one more call. 

If you haven’t ordered my book The LinkedIn Edge yet, stop now and take action. This instant bestseller will transform your relationship with LinkedIn, give you new tools and techniques for using LinkedIn for prospecting, and make you a lot of money. 

Here’s what one five-star reviewer said on Amazon: “I’m impressed by how Jeb cuts through the noise and delivers sales insights that feel practical, human, and immediately useful. What stood out to me is how he shows you not only how to leverage LinkedIn & AI to increase sales, but also how to bring the human side back into the process—reminding us that relationships are at the heart of sales.” 

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If you don’t have The LinkedIn Edge, go now and get your copy at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Your sales team has the tools. They know the pitch. The CRM is full of leads. So why are half your reps still missing quota?

The real issue? Most sales leaders are managing activity instead of developing people. They’re applying pressure instead of addressing the mental blocks that sabotage performance before reps ever pick up the phone.

Walk into any sales bullpen and you’ll hear the same beliefs on repeat:

“I’m not good at cold calling.”

“Nobody wants to hear from me.”

“I don’t know if I can hit these numbers.”

Most leaders dismiss this as an attitude problem or lack of confidence. So they fire up the team with a motivational speech, send everyone back to their desks—and nothing changes.

Here’s what’s being missed: These aren’t attitude problems. They’re belief systems that determine behavior. And behavior determines results.

Nobody was born knowing how to sell. Your top performer didn’t start with the ability to handle objections or close deals. They learned it. But the reps who believe they can’t learn it won’t put in the work to improve. They’ll make half the calls, avoid the hard conversations, and prove themselves right.

The real work of building elite performers is getting inside your reps’ heads and rooting out the thought processes that are killing their performance. That’s where true coaching separates managers from leaders.

Group training builds skill, but addressing mental blocks requires one-on-one coaching—where you can dig into patterns, ask uncomfortable questions, and challenge unhelpful thinking.

Why does this rep always sabotage themselves right before closing a big deal? Where did this idea that “people don’t like being sold to” come from? What past failure is creating this blind spot?

Good coaches shine a light on the patterns that people fail to recognize or flat-out avoid. They name the behavior that’s been there all along, but no one wanted to confront.

Awareness alone doesn’t create change. Your rep can have that breakthrough moment where they realize they are the problem, and still fall back into the same habits.

Real coaching means holding people accountable to the change they commit to making. It means checking in, following up, and not letting them slide back into old patterns when things get uncomfortable. That’s the difference between feel-good conversations and actual performance improvement.

Most sales leaders don’t actually coach. They manage activity, review numbers, and deliver pep talks. But managing metrics does not build high-performance sales teams. Developing people does.

Coaching starts with curiosity. It means sitting down one-on-one and asking questions that uncover what is really holding a rep back. Not “why didn’t you make enough calls?” but “what made those calls hard to make?”

Sometimes the barrier is a belief. Other times, it is a communication issue between the rep and the leader. If you do not understand how each person communicates and processes feedback, you will keep missing the mark.

When you tailor your coaching to match how a rep thinks and responds, conversations become more productive and performance starts to shift. That is how coaching turns from another meeting on the calendar into a catalyst for real growth.

The best thing you can do for your team is lower the pressure on outcomes and increase the focus on process. This doesn’t mean accepting mediocrity—it means being relentless about the activities while being patient with the results.

Your new reps are going to struggle. It’s a reality you have to accept, not a problem to solve. They need to fumble through bad calls, make mistakes, and learn from real conversations with prospects. You cannot prepare someone to be good at sales. They have to do it badly first.

The question is whether you’re creating an environment where that’s okay. Where making a mess is expected, and failure is part of the learning process, instead of a reason to panic about their future with the company.

Consider the typical new rep experience: second week on the job, a prospect tears them apart on a call. The bullpen laughs. The rep feels like an imposter. They’re making dozens of dials a day and destroying every conversation.

But if they keep showing up and keep making calls, something happens: They get slightly less terrible every week. That’s the compounding effect you need to protect in your team. Consistency over time produces skill development. But only if you don’t crush people’s confidence before they have a chance to build competence.

Your job as a leader is to set clear activity expectations, hold people to them, and trust the process. Make 50 calls. Talk to 10 decision-makers. Run 5 demos. Do that every day for three weeks and watch what happens. The skills develop naturally when the reps are unavoidable.

You can’t do this if you’re constantly freaking out about weekly results or applying pressure instead of providing coaching. High-performance sales teams aren’t built on fear. They’re built on consistent execution supported by leaders who actually develop their people.

Working one-on-one with reps creates breakthrough moments. They start to recognize the patterns that have been holding them back—the beliefs that quietly shape every call, and the habits that limit their results.

But breakthroughs only matter if they lead to change. The real coaching happens in the follow-up:

• Check in regularly. Ask what they’ve done differently since your last conversation.
• Revisit commitments. Remind them of what they promised to work on.
• Hold the line. Don’t let them slip back into the comfort of old habits.
• Celebrate progress. Reinforce small wins that build long-term confidence.

That’s the unglamorous work of building a high-performance sales team. It’s not about motivational speeches or new methodologies. It’s consistent, intentional development of each person on your team.

Professional athletes have coaches. CEOs have coaches. Your sales team deserves the same level of focus and accountability. Managers track numbers; coaches develop capability.

Building high-performance sales teams through connection instead of pressure doesn’t mean ignoring activity—it means understanding that activity is only effective when driven by the right beliefs and behaviors.

Most of the time, it’s not effort. It’s not laziness. It’s mental blocks that determine behavior. What people do drives what they achieve. If you want different results, you need to address the thought processes first.

This requires coaching people individually, having uncomfortable conversations, creating an environment where consistent execution is valued over short-term outcomes, and staying with people through the messy middle of skill development.

Pressure doesn’t create lasting excellence. It burns people out and creates a revolving door of mediocre performers who never stick around long enough to get good.

Connection is what separates high-performance sales teams from those that simply survive.

When you connect, you don’t just hit the number—you build a team that crushes it again and again.

Most sales leaders know they should coach—few actually know how. Learn the framework that works and book a free consultation. 

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 frustrated watching new recruits default to the guru-approved strategy of posting on Instagram and waiting for the magic to happen.

Spoiler alert: The magic never happens.

If you’re nodding your head right now, you’re not alone. The “social media is the new cold calling” myth is one of the most damaging lies being sold to new direct sales representatives today, and it’s costing MLM organizations their best potential talent.

Remember that story in Fanatical Prospecting where I went head-to-head with someone who swore their social media guru had all the answers? I said, “Great, you do yours for a week, I’ll do mine for a week, and we’ll test it out.”

Guess who won?

Here’s the brutal truth: Posting on social media feels easy because it lets you keep people at arm’s length. You don’t have to face rejection. You don’t have to interrupt strangers. You don’t have to have uncomfortable conversations.

But here’s what actually happens. After two months of posting videos that get one view each and zero sales, your recruits quit. They’re demoralized, broke, and convinced MLM doesn’t work.

The real problem? They were never taught how to actually sell.

When Andrew recruits someone into his network marketing organization, they’re making two types of sales: selling the product and recruiting new team members. Most of these people have never sold anything in their lives.

They came from every background imaginable except sales. Something happened in their life that made them say, “I want more.” That motivation is critical, but motivation without skill is just frustration wrapped in hope.

The things they need to do are really hard. Nothing in their life has prepared them for what sales prospecting actually requires. They have to sacrifice what they want now (ease and comfort) for what they want most (their goals).

That’s why the first question I ask every new recruit is this: What are your top five goals in the next twelve months?

Not company goals. Not team goals. Their goals. Because if they don’t want something bad enough to go through the pain of rejection, nothing else matters.

In MLM, there’s one simple formula that works every single time: Go talk with people.

The more people you talk with, the more you recruit. The more product you sell. It’s that simple.

Think about it this way. If you had a marketing strategy that could create all your product sales and recruiting automatically, you wouldn’t need an MLM. You’d just have an e-commerce business. The reason network marketing exists is because a network of people can spread the word and sell better than online ads.

But here’s the problem. Talking with people means getting past your discomfort. It means interrupting a stranger in line at Walmart. It means seeing someone at church who mentions financial problems and saying, “Hey, what if I had a way to help you out?”

Most people would rather post on TikTok than have that conversation.

If I’m building an MLM sales training program for recruits, here’s exactly what I’m teaching them, in this order:

First, teach them how to open conversations. Not pitches. Conversations. With strangers and with people they know. What’s the first question they ask? How do they approach someone in line at Walmart? How do they bring up their network marketing business with friends without being weird?

Run drills on this. Practice it until it becomes muscle memory. Because if they can’t start the conversation, nothing else matters.

Second, teach them how to listen. Most network marketing reps who actually work up the courage to talk to someone immediately blow it by pitching for five minutes straight. The prospect’s eyes glaze over and they walk away.

The secret to sales influence isn’t what you say. It’s what you hear. Get the other person talking. Ask questions that trigger the self-disclosure loop. Find out what’s wrong in their life, what they’re frustrated with, where they’re feeling stuck.

Third, teach them to build value bridges. Once someone is talking about their problems, your job is to connect where they are to where they want to be using your product or opportunity as the bridge.

Tell stories. Use social proof. “I met someone three weeks ago just like you who told me the same thing. Here’s what they did, and here’s what their life looks like now.”

New recruits don’t have their own stories yet, so give them yours. Give them other people’s stories. Teach them how to take what someone tells them and give it back in the context of how you can help.

Finally, teach them to ask. Asking is the most important discipline in sales. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. But asking means you have to set yourself up properly so you can reduce objections before they happen.

Look, I get it. Your recruits didn’t come from a sales background. They’re starting from scratch. They don’t know what to do.

But that’s exactly why they need you to teach them the fundamentals instead of pointing them to another Instagram guru.

Have some grace for them, sure. But also have some standards. Because if you’re not teaching them how to actually have conversations with real human beings, you’re setting them up to fail.

The beautiful thing about selling health and wellness products? Everyone is a prospect. Everyone needs what you’re selling. Everyone you meet could potentially join your team.

You have a 300 million person prospecting pipeline in the United States alone.

Stop hiding behind social media and start talking to people. That’s how you build a real MLM business. That’s how you develop successful recruits. And that’s how you stop losing good people to the myth that posting and praying is a real strategy.

Want to leverage LinkedIn the right way instead of just posting and praying? Check out Jeb’s new book The LinkedIn Edge and learn how to turn social selling into real conversations that convert.

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, What happens to me? What happens to salespeople like us in a world where machines can do almost everything we used to do?

You can’t escape the truth. AI is going to change everything and impact almost every part of our lives. The train has left the station, and it will not be turning back.

AI is going to displace a lot of people and jobs, but it’s not going to replace everyone.

Because no matter how smart machines get, they can’t feel or connect the way you and I can. Sales is, and always will be, the ultimate human profession. It’s the one job built entirely on human emotion, human judgment, and human connection.

Just think about it:

• AI can write words. But it can’t create belief.
• It can predict who might buy. But it can’t build trust.
• It can score a lead. But it can’t lead a human being through uncertainty, fear and doubt while giving them confidence to make the right decision in complex situations. 

That’s what you do. That’s what we do. That’s what salespeople have always done—long before there was technology, long before there was AI, and long before algorithms tried to simulate emotion.

In sales, it’s not about the product. It’s about the person. People buy you. What you sell might get you to the door, but it is how you sell that determines whether they let you in.  

Every sale is a transfer of emotion from one human being to another. It’s the transfer of belief and confidence and trust.

When a customer says “Yes,” they’re not just saying yes to a proposal or a price. They’re saying ‘Yes’ to you. No matter how powerful technology becomes, that moment—that human moment—will never be replaced by a line of code.

As modern sellers, what we need to understand is that AI isn’t the end of selling. It’s just the next leap forward in our incredibly resilient profession. 

AI will replace some salespeople, so we need to keep it real.

There are reps who are lazy, transactional, and just go through the motions and never bother to think, adapt, or grow. Those reps will get left behind.

So AI will not make sales professionals less valuable, but it will absolutely make the gap between poor and exceptional salespeople wider and more pronounced. 

But the top performers—the ones who combine human empathy with AI-powered insight—will be unstoppable. Because when you merge the intelligence of machines with the intuition of a human being, it becomes a force multiplier. 

Right this moment, top sales professionals and high-earners are elevating their performance with AI tools that do the grunt work. It’ll build your lists, do your research, automate your follow-ups, and write every sort of draft. 

It will give you more time for human-to-human connections: to listen, discover, develop creative solutions, persuade, and see the emotional context behind the data.

The question isn’t whether AI will replace you. The question is whether you’ll use AI to become irreplaceable.

It’s simple. AI can give you the right words to say. But only you can make someone feel something when you say it.

AI can pull the data, do the research, and build your presentation. Only you can look someone in the eye and say “Trust me. We can solve this together.” and close the sale. 

That’s The AI Edge. It’s not about the tools. It’s about using the tools to amplify your humanity.

In the age of AI, your #1 competitive advantage is emotional intelligence. It’s your ability to understand how people feel, adapt to their emotions, and guide them through uncertainty toward a decision.

Think about the last time you made a big decision. It could’ve been buying a car, changing jobs, or moving to a new city. You didn’t make that decision because of pure logic. You made it because someone—maybe a friend, maybe a spouse, maybe a salesperson—made you feel confident. They helped you believe it was the right move.

That’s exactly what elite salespeople do every single day. They help other humans feel confident. And confidence can’t be coded.

As AI floods the marketplace with automation and shallow, synthetic communication, real human connection becomes even more valuable. Buyers are exhausted from automated everything and are craving authenticity they can feel.

So, what does this mean in practical terms? It means you need to double down right now on the one thing AI can’t replicate: your humanity.

Develop your listening skills. Grow your emotional intelligence. Learn how to become a more convincing communicator. Build your skills for influencing buying decisions. Learn how to connect and build relationships with people.

Because in our brave new world, soft-skills are the new hard skills. The future belongs to the sales pros who merge emotional intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Look, AI isn’t going away. You can choose to fear it, or you can choose to leverage it. You can choose to complain about it, or you can choose to get curious and learn. You can choose to stand still or evolve.

Powerful AI still needs a human guide. A sales rep who understands how to lead a conversation, build trust, read a face, and feel what another person feels.

That’s the magic of sales. That’s what makes our profession the ultimate human career choice.

If you don’t have my new book The LinkedIn Edge: New Sales Strategies for Unleashing the Power of LinkedIn + AI to Cold Call Less and Sell More, go get this book now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and where ever books are sold. 

And remember, at the end of the day, when you’re tired, worn-out, and all you want to do is quit, always stop and make one more call.

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-tested sales strategies from previous podcasts will transform how you sell.

Your prospect doesn’t care about your bad morning or the three deals that fell through yesterday. When you walk through the door or dial their number, you’re the only conversation they’re having with your company today.

Elite salespeople know emotional consistency separates closers from pretenders. Think of it like a pro golfer staying calm and cruising forward regardless of what happened on the last hole.

As Jeb Blount explains: How your customer feels about you is more predictive of outcome than any other variable. They buy you first, and then they buy your product. They buy you because they feel safe, heard, and confident you will deliver.

This means you have to compartmentalize every interaction. Your fifth appointment of the day deserves the same intensity and professionalism as your first. When you show up desperate, prospects sense it immediately. When you rush through discovery, they feel undervalued.

Jeb emphasizes this critical point: Buying a house, car, or service is deeply emotional for the customer. Before every interaction, take sixty seconds to reset. Acknowledge whatever is bothering you, mentally file it away, then walk in focused entirely on their world and their goals.

Ask yourself: How many times do you attempt to reach a prospect before quitting?

If you answered three or four, you are leaving money on the table. Most reps quit after just three or four attempts, and sometimes without ever hearing a ‘No.’ They just stop and let leads rot in the CRM instead of risking rejection.

As Jessica Stokes reminds us, top producers understand this: While you are tracking your sixth or seventh outreach attempt, for the prospect, every touchpoint feels like day one. They are busy running their business—not waiting for your call.

The problem is not just the number of attempts; it is the spacing. When you leave a voicemail and wait a month to “give them space,” you lose momentum and start from scratch every time.

The winning sales strategy is persistence with velocity. That means touching base every few days or weekly. When you maintain momentum, prospects remember you. The real failure is letting quality leads die because you are afraid to pick up the phone and risk hearing “No.”

If you have ever hesitated before making a cold call because you thought, “I don’t want to bother them,” you are dealing with what Jeb Blount calls projection, and it is costing you deals.

Projection happens when you assume prospects hate being interrupted as much as you do. You start deciding for them before you’ve even made the call.

Successful salespeople recognize interruption is a professional necessity. Your job requires it; your income depends on it.

Letting empathy paralyze your prospecting is dangerous. The internal conflict is real: You want to be an empathetic person, but you also have to be an interrupter.

The mindset shift: Understand that projecting is the most dangerous thing in sales because you are deciding for your customer in advance what they want or need. Real empathy means showing up, asking sharp questions, and letting them tell you what they need. You cannot solve problems you never discover because you were too afraid to start the conversation.

What if your clients felt less like transactions and more like VIPs getting an exclusive invitation? That is the power of the Velvet Rope framework, a human-centered sales strategy developed by Kristin Andree that makes prospects want to work with you.

Kristin observed that people get excited to attend exclusive events. Her insight led to a three-part framework built around Know, Find, Love:

1. Know your people: Get crystal clear on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
2. Find your people: Execute disciplined activity that consistently fills your pipeline.
3. Love your people: Deliver experiences so exceptional that customers become your most effective marketing channel.

The “Love your people” element is where most drop the ball. Kristin focuses on “surprise and delight”, doing something unexpected that clients don’t see coming.

For example, giving personalized, curated gifts as a surprise creates a ripple effect. Clients talk about these personalized gifts with friends and colleagues, resulting in more referrals because there is a buzz about you. Curated clients don’t just stay; they sell for you. This is genuine relationship building at scale.

Most salespeople confuse activity with progress. They move fast, make lots of calls, send countless emails, but they are not actually getting anywhere because they are chasing the wrong outcome.

When Ron Karr asks what velocity means, everyone says “fast.” But that’s not velocity. Velocity is speed with direction. Direction requires knowing the destination before you start the journey. The biggest problem for most salespeople is that they are not going after the right outcome.

Ron’s solution? Hold a board meeting with yourself. When you’re stuck or not getting traction, step back and reframe your thinking. Ask yourself: What outcome am I really chasing? Am I pitching features when I should be diagnosing the real problem?

This shift in perspective changes everything. When you get clear on the outcome that matters to your prospect—not the one that matters to you—you stop competing on specs and start filling gaps that matter deeply to them.

When you master the velocity mindset, the close becomes inevitable because you have made the decision obvious.

Elite salespeople don’t wait to “feel” motivated. They execute proven sales strategies daily, regardless. These insights from Jeb Blount, Jessica Stokes, Kristin Andree, and Ron Karr give you the roadmap to stop selling on hope and start selling with discipline and certainty.

You have the knowledge. Now it is time to choose.

Do you keep making excuses—or do you show up, execute, and finish strong?

Start winning more on cold calls with our free guide: 25 Ways to Ask for the Appointment on Cold Calls, and boost your results today.

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 potential to be rejected at a deep, painful level.

That’s why we get paid so well. And that’s why most people can’t hack it.

But the ones who do? They’ve figured out the secret.

My friend Will Fratini from ZoomInfo nailed it when he talked about what motivates him, or what his carrot is. His five-year-old daughter once bought him a carrot Christmas ornament, and he carries it with him everywhere as a reminder of why he shows up every day.

Here’s what matters: Your carrot needs to be specific and tangible. Not some vague “I want to be successful” nonsense. I’m talking about something real. A commission check of X dollars. A boat. Generational wealth through real estate. A college fund for your kids.

Think of it like an old-time horse and carriage. You put a carrot on a stick in front of a stubborn horse, and suddenly it’ll go forward even when it wouldn’t before. That’s what your carrot does for you when everyone else is giving up.

Your carrot is what pushes you past the point where giving up would be completely justified. It’s what separates the best from the rest.

Let’s be clear about what sales discipline actually means. You have to show up every day and do a certain number of activities. Every. Single. Day.

And to do those hard things consistently, you need that carrot.

It’s about sacrificing what you want now (which is easy) for what you want most (which requires doing hard things). I want to do things that are easy. But to get what I want most, I’ve got to do things that are hard.

That’s the entire game.

Look at Scottie Scheffler, the PGA golfer. When he makes a bogey, he bounces back with a birdie or better 62 percent of the time. The rest of the field? Less than 18 percent.

Why? Because Scheffler is crystal clear about what’s important to him. He knows his carrot. He understands what fulfillment means. When something goes wrong, there’s no cascade of “everything is wrong.” His ego doesn’t take a hit because he’s focused on what matters most.

He picks himself back up, brushes himself off, and keeps moving.

What most people don’t know is that it wasn’t always this way. When he first brought on his caddie, Ted Scott, Ted told him straight up: “I’m not working for you unless you get the attitude, temper, and anger under control.”

Think about that. The caddie refused to work with him unless he fixed his mindset first.

That’s how important mindset in sales really is. Everything else comes after.

Go get yourself a carrot ornament. Seriously. Find one on Amazon, hang it in your office, and use it as your visual cue for what matters most.

When you’re sitting at your desk in the morning trying to get started, or when something has gone wrong and you’re trying to bounce back, that carrot will remind you why you chose this soul-sapping profession in the first place.

Because maybe the only thing harder than sales is golf. But you chose it. Now own it.

Here’s the bonus that Will dropped that’s pure gold: Sometimes your carrot isn’t even about you. Sometimes the ultimate sales superpower is genuinely helping someone else be the star of the show.

The best sellers in the world don’t care about how great their product is. They care about making their customer the hero. If you genuinely believe you’re there to help someone else’s day get better, you’re going to come through.

And when you have that extra little carrot hanging there (that house, that milestone, that college fund), it’s going to doubly remind you that the reason you’re doing this is to serve others first.

Sales is really hard because it’s hard to put other human beings before yourself. If you have a carrot to motivate you to push through, and you know deep down that your intrinsic motivation is to help someone else, you will do great.

That’s what turns things around. That’s what creates longevity in sales.

Stop overthinking this. The formula is simple:

That’s how you prepare your mindset, create discipline, and separate yourself from everyone else who’s just going through the motions.

Ready to dominate your prospecting game? Check out my new book, The LinkedIn Edge, and discover how to leverage LinkedIn to fill your pipeline with qualified prospects.

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 potential to be rejected at a deep, painful level.

That’s why we get paid so well. And that’s why most people can’t hack it.

But the ones who do? They’ve figured out the secret.

My friend Will Fratini from ZoomInfo nailed it when he talked about what motivates him, or what his carrot is. His five-year-old daughter once bought him a carrot Christmas ornament, and he carries it with him everywhere as a reminder of why he shows up every day.

Here’s what matters: Your carrot needs to be specific and tangible. Not some vague “I want to be successful” nonsense. I’m talking about something real. A commission check of X dollars. A boat. Generational wealth through real estate. A college fund for your kids.

Think of it like an old-time horse and carriage. You put a carrot on a stick in front of a stubborn horse, and suddenly it’ll go forward even when it wouldn’t before. That’s what your carrot does for you when everyone else is giving up.

Your carrot is what pushes you past the point where giving up would be completely justified. It’s what separates the best from the rest.

Let’s be clear about what sales discipline actually means. You have to show up every day and do a certain number of activities. Every. Single. Day.

And to do those hard things consistently, you need that carrot.

It’s about sacrificing what you want now (which is easy) for what you want most (which requires doing hard things). I want to do things that are easy. But to get what I want most, I’ve got to do things that are hard.

That’s the entire game.

Look at Scottie Scheffler, the PGA golfer. When he makes a bogey, he bounces back with a birdie or better 62 percent of the time. The rest of the field? Less than 18 percent.

Why? Because Scheffler is crystal clear about what’s important to him. He knows his carrot. He understands what fulfillment means. When something goes wrong, there’s no cascade of “everything is wrong.” His ego doesn’t take a hit because he’s focused on what matters most.

He picks himself back up, brushes himself off, and keeps moving.

What most people don’t know is that it wasn’t always this way. When he first brought on his caddie, Ted Scott, Ted told him straight up: “I’m not working for you unless you get the attitude, temper, and anger under control.”

Think about that. The caddie refused to work with him unless he fixed his mindset first.

That’s how important mindset in sales really is. Everything else comes after.

Go get yourself a carrot ornament. Seriously. Find one on Amazon, hang it in your office, and use it as your visual cue for what matters most.

When you’re sitting at your desk in the morning trying to get started, or when something has gone wrong and you’re trying to bounce back, that carrot will remind you why you chose this soul-sapping profession in the first place.

Because maybe the only thing harder than sales is golf. But you chose it. Now own it.

Here’s the bonus that Will dropped that’s pure gold: Sometimes your carrot isn’t even about you. Sometimes the ultimate sales superpower is genuinely helping someone else be the star of the show.

The best sellers in the world don’t care about how great their product is. They care about making their customer the hero. If you genuinely believe you’re there to help someone else’s day get better, you’re going to come through.

And when you have that extra little carrot hanging there (that house, that milestone, that college fund), it’s going to doubly remind you that the reason you’re doing this is to serve others first.

Sales is really hard because it’s hard to put other human beings before yourself. If you have a carrot to motivate you to push through, and you know deep down that your intrinsic motivation is to help someone else, you will do great.

That’s what turns things around. That’s what creates longevity in sales.

Stop overthinking this. The formula is simple:

That’s how you prepare your mindset, create discipline, and separate yourself from everyone else who’s just going through the motions.

Ready to dominate your prospecting game? Check out my book, The LinkedIn Edge, and discover how to leverage LinkedIn to fill your pipeline with qualified prospects.