The Business Handshake: Types, Meaning, and How to Do It Right
Quick Summary A good handshake is firm but not crushing, palm to palm with the webs of your hands meeting, paired with eye contact and a smile, and lasting about two or three seconds.
Welcome to the Sales Gravy blog, where salespeople and sales leaders get better every week. We publish new sales training articles and podcast episodes three times a week, covering prospecting, cold calling, objections, negotiation, and leadership, written by Jeb Blount and the Sales Gravy trainer team.
Quick Summary A good handshake is firm but not crushing, palm to palm with the webs of your hands meeting, paired with eye contact and a smile, and lasting about two or three seconds.
Quick Summary Your goal in the first few minutes of meeting a prospect or client is simple: make them comfortable enough to trust you and open up. In sales, that first impression decides whether
Quick Summary The most effective way to follow up with a prospect is to make it structured instead of hoping they call you back. Set a specific day and time for the next contact
If you’ve earned a real database through years of cold calling, you stop the eight-hour grind, not the activity itself. You still need a steady trickle of new contacts coming in every week to
Quick Summary A strong sales follow-up call starts before the first call even ends. Lock in a specific date and time, then show up prepared and exactly on time. Open by reminding the prospect
The accounts you feel safest about are the ones you’re most likely to lose. When account managers grow familiar with long-term clients, familiarity quietly hardens into complacenct.
Here is the thing worth remembering. You don’t like being passed from person to person on the phone. Your customers don’t like it any better.
Quick Summary An effective cold calling approach isn’t about a slicker pitch — it’s about earning the right to a conversation. The five elements below are research, asking questions, listening, honesty, and follow-through. Cold
To follow up without being pushy, stop assuming silence means rejection, bring value to every touchpoint, and vary your communication channel until the prospect responds. Key Takeaways: Why Silence Doesn’t Mean No Have you
Jumping in to save a rep’s deal feels like leadership, but it trains your team to call you instead of solving problems themselves. Real sales leadership means coaching the rep, not closing the deal
If you want to know how to scale a sales team, document your sales process and prove your close rate before you add headcount, then decide whether your next hire is a leader or
To prioritize prospects effectively, evaluate every opportunity using three variables: lead temperature, sales cycle timing, and deal size. Together, these factors show which prospects deserve immediate action, which need ongoing nurturing, and which belong in automation. Key Takeaways Why do so
In this video, Jeffrey Gitomer, Jeb Blount, and Jennifer Gluckow discuss the two types of objections: The ones that we respond to. The ones that are prevented in the first place. A solid sales
The 3p’s holding you back from prospecting are: Procrastination, perfectionism, and paralysis from analysis. They are the enemies of prospecting and building pipeline in sales.
Douglas Burdett of The Marketing Book Podcast and CEO of Sales Gravy, Jeb Blount, dissect Jeb’s new book, Objections: The Art and Science of Getting Past No in this jam-packed episode. From becoming rejection-proof to understanding
How do you know when it’s time to give up on a prospect and stop hounding them, especially when you’re tasked with drumming up new business? Sometimes it’s hard to give up on prospects
The real cure comes down to first of all believing in yourself and your ability to help others. If you don’t believe you are helping others achieve a better outcome, then little else will
Try to put yourself into your prospect’s shoes. What would you want to hear when you pick up the phone where somebody is interrupting your day? As a brief introduction, we experienced a really
In this article, Mike Brooks encourages sales teams to ask themselves what’s really holding their prospects back from buying. The holidays are upon us and guess what? The teams I’m working with are still
Jeb Blount, Jeffery Gitomer, and Jen Gluckow offer tips, tricks, and techniques for getting past sales objections on this episode of Sell Or Die podcast. Jeb Blount, Jeffery Gitomer, and Jen Gluckow discuss actionable
On this short, high impact video, Jeb Blount and Jeffrey Gitomer battle it out over sales objections.
If you don’t like to sell, it means that you are doing it wrong. Stepping in with courage and determination into a sales conversation is the most powerful aspect of your business. The biggest
When their KPIs don’t recognize the importance of consistent prospecting follow-up to reach target contacts, you’re not only setting yourself up to lose a potentially good rep, you are also directly impacting your prospecting
The secret to an organized closet is to never bring in anything new unless you first get rid of something old. I recently sent out a survey to my colleagues, asking them to evaluate
People are Human Sounds pretty silly, right? Sometimes I find myself forgetting that everyone has their own perspective. We can start to assume that others think and feel the way we do, but this
No matter what type of company you have, there is always a need to find new customers. That’s what sales prospecting is all about regardless of the fancy name you give it. Early in
I want to believe that sales professionalism has evolved. I want to believe that at this time, everyone “gets” that the buyer matters most in the sales conversations. Yet, that isn’t what I’ve experienced.
If sales people (especially in a consultative sale environment) don’t learn the fundamentals of a consultative sales process, they will just stay mediocre at best. So, what are some of the basics that are
For both parties in this exchange, there is a lot at risk at this moment. This is why a collaborative selling approach continues to be important…This approach ensures that your mind is engaged, before
Objections frustrate sales reps to the point of them developing some serious call reluctance. Don’t you wish that you, and your team, had a proven approach that actually works? Every month, I get emails from
The best way to measure sales productivity is with leading indicators—the KPIs and metrics that predict future revenue and let you fix problems before sales dry up.
Most sales team meetings fail because they aren’t actually about selling. Mike Weinberg says the fix is simple: stop running status updates and start running meetings that make your team more aligned, more energized,
Jumping in to save a rep’s deal feels like leadership, but it trains your team to call you instead of solving problems themselves. Real sales leadership means coaching the rep, not closing the deal
If you want to know how to scale a sales team, document your sales process and prove your close rate before you add headcount, then decide whether your next hire is a leader or
Most sales forecasts fail for a reason no CRM can fix. Sellers stop telling their leaders the truth the moment honesty starts costing them something.
Summary The most effective sales compensation strategy for getting a small team focused on high-value complex deals is to layer a significantly higher reward on those deals without reducing incentives on transactional ones. Pair
Summary When the market shifts, your salespeople are not going to figure it out on their own. That’s your job. As a sales leader, your responsibility is to see the change coming, get ahead
Summary: Most sales managers confuse empathy with sympathy and pay for it in team performance. Jeb Blount breaks down the real difference, why listening first is the most powerful coaching move you have, and
Summary: Q1 is feedback, not failure. Top-performing sales teams use a Q1 sales strategy review to assess whether they have an execution problem or a focus problem, then make targeted adjustments heading into Q2.