Summary

How do you know what sales advice to trust? Look at who’s giving it. Credible sales advice comes from people who are actively selling today, have a verifiable track record across years and companies, and are willing to acknowledge that multiple approaches can work. Avoid anyone promising easy results, claiming there’s only one way to sell, or building a platform on a single year of success. The best indicator of trustworthy guidance is whether the advisor is still in the trenches doing the work they’re teaching.

How to Know What Sales Advice Is Actually Worth Following

When Andrew Osborne from Manhattan, Kansas, called in to Ask Jeb, he came with a question I hadn’t heard before on the podcast. Andrew is making a career pivot from manufacturing supervision into sales. He sees the opportunity. He’s motivated. And he’s doing the right thing by actively seeking out knowledge. But he ran into something a lot of new salespeople hit almost immediately: the noise.

There is more sales content, more sales gurus, and more conflicting advice floating around than at any point in history. And if you’re new to the game, there is no obvious way to sort the signal from the noise. Andrew’s question was pointed: how does someone new to sales know what advice actually matters?

That might be the best question anyone has ever brought to this show.

The “One Hit Wonder” Problem

Start with LinkedIn. I’ll be honest with you: LinkedIn is a cesspool for sales advice. And the reason is that the barrier to entry for declaring yourself a sales expert is basically zero.

Someone spends a year in a sales role. They hit their number. Maybe they were number one on their team. Then they pivot into sales training and start posting about the technique that made them successful. The posts get traction. People follow. And suddenly this person has a platform and an audience built entirely on twelve months of results.

Here’s what’s wrong with that. Correlation is not causation. That person may have succeeded because of their technique, or they may have succeeded in spite of it. It could have been the economy. It could have been the territory. It could have been the product. They have no way to know, and more importantly, they have no track record across time, markets, or industries to test their assumptions against.

There is also a deeper problem with tricks and gimmicks. The more people who use a specific technique, the more buyers encounter it, recognize it, and tune it out. Short-lived tactics have diminishing returns baked in. What worked for one person in one market in one year is not a reliable foundation for a sales career.

The “Only Way” Red Flag

The next thing to run from is anyone who tells you their approach is the only way to sell.

I’ll say this plainly: that is absolute nonsense. There is no black and white in sales. Selling is poetry and probability. The poetry is the messaging, the questions, the art of the conversation. The probability is the science of it. Understanding what approach gives you the highest likelihood of winning in this specific situation, with this specific customer, in this specific market.

Everything works in the right context. Cold calling works. Email works. Social selling works. Referrals work. The framework that works is the one applied with skill to the right situation at the right moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is oversimplifying to the point of being misleading.

When someone says cold calling is dead, I want you to run in the other direction. When someone says you should never do a particular thing, same thing. The best sales professionals build a full toolkit of frameworks, develop their situational awareness, and learn to read what the moment requires. That takes time, exposure to multiple approaches, and advisors who are honest enough to say “this works here, but not there.”

Walk the Walk

I want to be clear about something, because I hold myself to this standard too.

Every trainer on my team at Sales Gravy carries a book of business. Every single one of them has a number. They are required to actively sell. You cannot stand in front of a room full of salespeople, tell them what they need to do, and then go home and not do any of it yourself. That is a credibility problem I refuse to have on my team.

If you watch me long enough, you’ll figure out that when I walk into a company where reps are cold calling, I’ll sit down right next to them and say, hand me a list. I’ll call. Because everything I teach, I do. That’s the standard.

When you’re evaluating whose advice to follow, watch what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying. Are they on calls? Are they closing deals? Are they writing about theory from a comfortable distance, or are they producing results in real accounts right now? The answer tells you almost everything you need to know.

Body of Work Versus a Highlight Reel

Longevity matters. A track record built across different eras, different markets, different company sizes, and different economic conditions is qualitatively different from a highlight reel. Anyone can have a good year. Very few people sustain excellence across decades.

Look at the full picture. Where have they been? What have they built? How have they failed, and what did they take from it? A person who’s only talking about wins should make you cautious. Sales is failure. It is landing face first and getting back up, over and over. Advisors who aren’t honest about that are either new or they’re selling you something.

And here’s something I take seriously personally: even with eighteen books and twenty years of building Sales Gravy, and years before that leading and managing sales teams at every level, I still tell people to go seek out other voices. I bring speakers from all over the world to our Outbound Conference specifically because I want my audience exposed to multiple perspectives. Different frameworks connect with different people. One perspective, no matter how strong, is not enough.

If you want to see what that looks like at scale, join us at the next Outbound Conference. It’s the rock show of sales, and it exists precisely to give you access to the best sales minds on earth, all in one place.

When They’re Telling You What You Want to Hear

The last thing I’ll flag is pandering.

Sales is hard. Most of what we do, nobody actually wants to do. Everybody wants to close the deal. Nobody wants to fill the pipeline that makes the close possible. When someone is making it sound easy, when they’re telling you to ignore the hard parts, when the whole pitch is framed around shortcuts: they’re selling you something, and that something is not going to help you build a career.

Easy is the greatest marketing hook in existence. It works because everyone wants it to be true. Your job is to resist that pull. Listen to your instincts. If something sounds too convenient, if the common sense center of your brain is raising its hand, pay attention to that. Your intuition will flag it before your logic catches up.

Follow people who tell you the truth about how hard it is. 

Follow people who have the track record to back up their perspective. 

Follow people who are willing to say “this works, and so does this other thing, and here’s how to know which one fits your situation.” 

Those people are harder to find, but they are out there. And they are the ones worth your time.

If you’re new to sales or working to level up fast, the single best investment you can make right now is 90 Days to Level Up Your Sales Skills by Jeb Blount. It’s built for exactly where you are: focused, practical, and designed to accelerate results from day one. Grab your copy and get moving.

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