Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

If you are still the only person selling at your company, the worst thing you can do is start hiring before you have a documented process for people to follow.

In this Ask Jeb, Jeb Blount answers two questions on scaling a sales team the right way, one from Yemi, who is building his first team from scratch, and one from Ramesh, who is trying to figure out how to budget for sales pay and support in a B2B healthcare business.

Jeb walks through the three stages every founder hits when they try to grow a team: the solo seller, the roller coaster, and the building phase, including the $45,000 mistake he made this year by skipping straight to hiring without a process in place. He also breaks down how to think about compensation, why a lower base and higher commission actually raises your cost of sale, and how to calculate what a new sale should cost you as your business grows.

What You'll Learn:

• Why documenting your sales process before you scale protects you from expensive turnover
• The three phases every founder cycles through when growing a sales team, and which is the most dangerous one
• Why you have to block time outside of peak selling hours to build out your system instead of waiting until you are desperate
• How bringing in a sales leader to document the process, separate from the founder's own instincts, speeds up the process
• How to calculate cost of sale in and use it to guide your compensation strategy
• Why a low base salary and high commission structure can actually lower your true cost of sale
• Why your margin should determine how much you can afford to pay in commission
• How support staff and infrastructure spending shift as a company grows past its early scrappy stage

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Submit your question: salesgravy.com/ask

Purchase Jeb Blount's new book: 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

Grab your tickets for OutBound Conference

Follow Jeb Blount on LinkedIn

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It’s the never-ending task that most people push off as long as they can. But knowing the best day of the week, even the best time of day to make cold calls, is a sales skill itself. Jeb Blount tackles one of the most common questions salespeople ask him and discusses the oversaturation of internet studies that all contradict each other on the best times to pick up the phone. If the smartest teams in the business can’t agree on a set time, is there really even a best time to cold call? The trainers at Sales Gravy, backed by years of experience and measurable data, all overwhelmingly agree that there is.

📖 Purchase Jeb Blount's book, 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

🎲 Learn more about the OutBound Conference

🖋️ Download our Free Fanatical Prospecting Call Tracker

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


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Buyer resistance doesn't stop with the client. Leaders face a second, tougher version of it inside their own teams. Amy Franko and Jeb Blount Jr. get into where the smartest organizations are finding growth right now, and why so many are looking at the accounts they already have instead of chasing new ones. Amy breaks down what it actually takes to get your own team behind a strategy before it ever reaches a customer. She urges sales leaders to make the investment in the OutBound Conference to work through these strategies in person with her.

📖 Purchase Jeb Blount's book, 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

🎲 Learn more about the OutBound Conference

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


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Getting screened out of sales jobs by AI before a human even looks at your resume?

In this episode of Ask Jeb on the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount answers a question from Nick, who is trying to move from the rail industry into a sales career and keeps getting screened out by applicant tracking systems.

Jeb's answer is simple: stop treating your job search like an application and start treating it like a prospecting campaign. Nick's rail industry background is the exact expertise that companies selling into that industry are looking for. Jeb breaks down how to identify those companies, use LinkedIn and local networking to get in front of the people who make hiring decisions, and shares a real world example of an in-person walk in that landed a interview in just a few minutes.

What You'll Learn:

• Why resume screening and AI applicant screening systems disqualify non-traditional candidates before a human ever sees their resume
• How to identify companies that sell into your current industry and use your expertise as a shortcut into sales
• Why treating your job search like a prospecting campaign beats just sending in applications
• How to use LinkedIn, your network, and local business owners to get directly in front of hiring managers
• How walking in the door instead of submitting a resume can change the outcome entirely

Whether you're pivoting from a specialized industry or just trying to get noticed instead of filtered out, this episode gives you a practical playbook for getting in front of the right people in your search for a sales role.

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Submit your question: salesgravy.com/ask

Purchase Jeb Blount's new book: 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

Grab your tickets for OutBound Conference

Follow Jeb Blount on LinkedIn

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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Prospecting can feel like playing the lottery, but treating it like one is a sure way to lose. In this week’s Money Monday, Jessica Stokes explains why the random approach to prospecting fails, and what actually separates reps with full pipelines from reps stuck in feast or famine. She breaks down how to target the right prospects, build lists before you need them, and use enough touchpoints to actually get a response, then leaves you with five questions to determine if your prospecting is working or just running on hope.

📖 Purchase Jeb Blount's new book, 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

💻 Enroll in Sales Gravy University Courses with Jessica Stokes

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


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You've been taught to keep a poker face with prospects, and it's costing you their trust. Todd Caponi has spent his career learning the history of sales, and he found that sales started as a service profession. Somewhere in the last several decades, that service mindset was traded for pressure tactics and feature dumps. Todd joins Jeb Blount Jr. to break down what it takes to rebuild that trust, drawing on his newest book, The Four Levers of Negotiating, to explain why stiff, perfect pitches repel buyers and why sharing your flaws upfront wins them over instead.

📖 Purchase Jeb Blount's book, 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

👉 Download our Free Fanatical Prospecting Dial Tracking Sheet

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


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If you are trying to get budget approved for professional development, wondering whether AI can actually improve your sales coaching, or stuck trying to motivate senior reps who have stopped caring, this episode of Ask Jeb on the Sales Gravy Podcast covers all three.

Jeb tackles three real questions from the field. First, how to build the case for conference budget, whether you are asking for yourself or bringing your whole team. Second, what actually works and does not work when using AI to analyze and coach sales calls. Third, how to create urgency with successful but complacent senior reps who have lost their edge.

What You'll Learn:

• How to build the ammunition you need to justify professional development budget to leadership
• Why framing a sales conference as a reward or a team kickoff event can unlock budget at small companies
• Why Outbound Conference works especially well for small companies that cannot afford a traditional sales kickoff
• Where AI genuinely helps with sales call coaching, and where it falls apart at scale
• How to build a prompt library for AI call analysis and coaching
• Why some of your best reps stop trying and what that actually means
• How a transparent, goals-first conversation can re-engage a complacent top performer
• Why asking a veteran rep to teach the team can reignite their own learning and buy-in

Whether you are fighting for conference budget, experimenting with AI in your sales process, or trying to reach a rep who has checked out, this episode gives you practical, tested approaches you can use right now.

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Submit your question: salesgravy.com/ask

Purchase Jeb Blount's new book: 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

Download our FREE Prospecting Call Tracking Sheet

Follow Jeb Blount on LinkedIn

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Text messaging is one of the fastest tools in a salesperson's toolkit, but it can also destroy the relationships it's supposed to support. In this episode, Jeb Blount breaks down how to blend intentional texting into your account management process and shares a personal story about losing a longtime vendor relationship after his account manager let texting replace real conversation.

📖 Purchase Jeb Blount's new book, 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

📱 Read Blending Text Messaging Into Your Account Management Process

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Most reps aren't losing deals because they're lazy. They're losing deals because they're busy with the wrong ones. Mark Hunter joins Jeb Blount Jr. to call out the habits wrecking pipelines everywhere, and hands over the one move that flips a stalled deal into a closed one.

Mark also talks about the OutBound Conference, where he’s been a speaker since the very first event in 2018. He explains why he still shows up every year to challenge his own limiting beliefs alongside other top performers. 

🎟️ Grab your tickets for OutBound Conference

📝 Download the FREE A.C.E.D. Buyer Style Playbook for Sales Professionals

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn!

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


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If you're moving into sales from a completely different industry, you're probably wondering which matters more: how likable you are or how well you run your process.

In this Ask Jeb, Andrew, a former manufacturing supervisor from Manhattan, Kansas now building a sales career, asks Jeb Blount to settle the debate between people skills and sales mechanics.

Jeb breaks sales down into two forces that both matter: the poetry of messaging and relationship building, and the probability of running a consistent process. He explains why he'll bet on a process person over a "gift of gab" person almost every time, why tricks and tactics fail the moment a prospect sees through them, and why the one metric he tracks above all else is qualified first time appointments, the Moneyball number that predicts everything downstream.

What You'll Learn:

• How to diagnose whether a slump is a targeting problem or a skills problem
• How to build a qualification process around the are the one metric that matters most in your business
• Why Jeb bets on a process-driven salesperson over a naturally charming one
• Why sales is both an art and a science
• How the "alternatives equal power" principle plays out in every deal you're chasing
• How a mindset from manufacturing applies directly to building a sales system
• Why relationship building matters, but never at the expense of running your process

If you're new to sales and trying to figure out where to focus first, this episode gives you the framework to build your foundation the right way.

Submit your question: salesgravy.com/ask

Purchase Jeb Blount's new book: 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills

Download our FREE Prospecting Call Tracking Sheet

Follow Jeb Blount on LinkedIn

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Plaud AI and use my code JEB for a great deal: https://www.plaud.ai/jeb


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy