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.
As professionals who take pride in their work (just as the celebrities care about their charities), your staff will likely try their best to ensure your company’s success while exhibiting. However, by matching your
If you employ salespeople or proactively sell a product or service by another means, you have a sales standard. Sales improvement is satisfied with an increase in qualities and quantities of various sales activities.
Mike called me recently and asked, “What does the 4th of July look like?” I replied, “It looks like the 5th, but a day earlier and it also looks like the 3rd, but a
Though still emerging, the concept of “sales without selling” has attained a precedent that no variation of the American standard can claim: the American sales model has not been merely revised, but rather replaced
How much, and how fast, would you improve if you could critique and correct how you handle the brush offs you get, the stalls you have to deal with when getting back with prospects,
In order for sales to occur, a process for converting prospects into clients or customers must exist. The essential goal of a sales improvement effort is to discover and maximize the process that most
If you want to improve the sales performance of your sales team, then you need to stay focused on and monitor what is driving those results – what your reps are saying and doing
Do you schedule prospecting time into your calendar every week? Use a variety of methods to prospect for new business. Too many sales people take the same approach week after week. Although they may
For training to be perceived as relevant and beneficial by the sales force, they must be given the opportunity to contribute to topic selection. An excellent way to elicit input and establish training priorities
Although every conversation presents you with an opportunity to ask better open ended questions, draw a very clear line between a coaching session, a strategy session, a deal review, your agenda and a performance
What you can’t fall victim to is negative thinking. That only leads to deflated attitudes, less activity, and poor sales skills. It tends to feed itself and you start looking for reasons to fail,
SALES SECRET #1: Customers do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. In the world of sales- there is no more important step in the process than probing,
Can’t stomach cold calling? Steal Jeb Blount’s 13 proven alternatives to picking up the phone that build real pipeline and actually work.
When should you ask questions on a cold call? Questions come after you’ve earned the right, when you’re gathering information and qualifying, and they lead the conversation only when the prospect contacted you first.
To prospect for new clients, stop making random touches and run a consistent five-step system. Work this system every day and you gain control of your pipeline, along with the peace of mind that
Salespeople fail at cold calling for five common reasons. Fix them and the phone starts producing appointments again.
Email response rates are collapsing because decision maker inboxes are stuffed with automated, AI-written slop. This is exactly why the phone is more powerful today than it was ten years ago.
Quick Summary Cold calling anxiety is not a symptom of weakness. It’s human and natural to feel fear when you cold call. You are interrupting a stranger who was not expecting you, and everything
Fear of the phone is quietly draining sales pipelines, and the reps who win are the ones willing to stop hiding behind email and LinkedIn and simply make the call.
Salespeople seek a magic window that makes cold calling easy. When prospects answer happy, say yes without a fight, and book the meeting themselves. So, is there a best time to call?
Short Answer Yes, you can make cold calling fun, and it is worth doing, because the reps who enjoy the phone are the ones who stay on it. Fun is not a personality trait
If you’ve been looking for a way to hit or exceed your annual quota, qualify for President’s Club, or simply earn a bigger paycheck or bonus, focusing on helping business owners reduce their tax
Is Your LinkedIn Personal Branding Built for Buyers or Bystanders? “Respectfully, you are not my audience.” Performance coach Giselle Ugarte said that on a recent episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, and it might
What Does a Perfect Bowling Game Have in Common With Top-Performing Sales Reps? Walk into a bowling alley on a Friday night, and you’ll see a scene that looks like pure recreation. The crash
A strong LinkedIn prospecting sequence is built around subtle, intentional touches. If phone and email are the boxing gloves of prospecting — direct and hard-hitting — LinkedIn is the velvet glove. It softens your
Here’s a truth most car dealerships don’t want to admit: people don’t hate buying cars. They hate buying cars from salespeople who make the customer experience painful. That’s the challenge Brendan Carlington from Mount
It isn’t everyone who can say they got an education in sales at the dinner table, but for my brother and I, that’s exactly where our education—and our love of sales—began. My father was
Every sales professional has a horror story that still makes them break out in a cold sweat years later. The deal that imploded spectacularly. The customer interaction that went sideways in ways you couldn’t
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
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?
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.
