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Cover image of an episode of Ask Jeb on the Sales Gravy Podcast. Episode title "How to Use the Ledge Technique for Sales Objection Handling"

How to Use the Ledge Technique for Sales Objection Handling (Ask Jeb)

Here’s a question that’ll make every salesperson’s blood pressure spike: What do you do when your cold call gets an objection in the first five seconds because prospects immediately stereotype you as something you’re

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What Is Sales Main Character Syndrome? Sales main character syndrome is when you position yourself as the hero instead of your prospect. You see it everywhere: On the phone: You launch into a five-minute pitch about your company history before asking a single question. In email: You send giant blocks of text about features without mentioning their actual problems. On LinkedIn: Your connect request immediately hits them with "Here's my product, here's my calendar link, let's meet." No matter the channel, it all leads back to the same place: your product, your company, your agenda. Prospects don't care about your product yet. They care about their problems, their goals, and what’s at stake in their world. When you make it all about you, you trigger resistance. Buyers feel sold to instead of collaborated with. And that leads to ghosting, objections, and stalled deals. Nobody wants to sit through a feature dump. People need relevance. They want to feel heard and know you actually get them. Listen to the full episode of Jeb Blount's Sales Gravy Podcast, the number one sales training podcast

Main Character Syndrome: Why Prospects Tune You Out (Money Monday)

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You’re at a networking event and someone corners you. For the next ten minutes, they talk nonstop about their vacation, their dog, their new car. You’re not having a conversation. You’re trapped in their

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The world's oldest customer complaint was carved in stone 4,000 years ago. Here's what 4 millennia of B2B sales history teaches modern sellers. Listen to the full Sales Gravy Podcast episode with Jeb Blount Jr and Ashley Blount

Stone Tablets, Trade Shows, and Telephones: 4,000 Years of Sales History

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Imagine that you’re so angry about a business deal gone wrong that you grab a chisel, find a slab of stone, and spend hours carving your complaint. That’s exactly what a Mesopotamian merchant did

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Learn the 5-step system that increases show rates by engineering commitment at every stage. No-shows are a systems problem. Listen to the full episode with Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy podcast, the number one sales training podcast

How Do You Stop Prospects From No-Showing Virtual Appointments (Ask Jeb)

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Here’s a question that’ll frustrate every salesperson reading this: What do you do when you prospect, set the meeting, block the time on your calendar, and then… your prospect no-shows? That’s the challenge Emily

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You've got a champion. Someone inside the account who gets it. They love your solution, they're fighting for your proposal, and they're feeding you intelligence about the decision-making process. So you're golden, right? Wrong. One reorganization, one promotion, one departure, and your deal could vanish overnight. Research from LinkedIn Sales Solutions analyzed thousands of enterprise deals and found something most salespeople refuse to believe: sales teams that build relationships with multiple stakeholders inside an account are 34% more likely to win. That's the difference between hitting quota and missing it. Between a banner year and a brutal one. Why Single-Threaded Deals Die On average, 4-7 people influence a complex B2B buying decision. Even if you nail the pitch, you're still just one voice in a conversation happening behind closed doors. A conversation where people you've never met are raising objections you'll never hear. Where priorities you don't know about are shifting the criteria. Your champion can be dismissed as "the person who likes that vendor." But when you've got three advocates from different departments? Consensus wins deals. Your Champion Won't Stick Around One in five of the people you're counting on right now won't be in their role twelve months from now. They'll get promoted, reassigned, poached by a competitor, or laid off in the next restructuring. When that happens to your sole contact, your deal doesn't just stall. It dies. The new person in that role has zero relationship with you, zero context on your solution, and zero incentive to champion something their predecessor started. But if you've built what top performers call "account insulation"—relationships with two, three, or four people across different departments and levels—the web flexes when someone leaves. It doesn't break. Weak Ties Matter More Than You Think We're trained to go deep with our primary contact. Build trust. Understand their pain points. Tailor every message to their specific needs. That's not wrong. It's just incomplete. In complex selling scenarios, influence often spreads through what researchers call weak ties—the casual, adjacent connections that link clusters of strong relationships. These are your amplifiers. A brief introduction. A shared article. A helpful insight that makes someone in operations remember your name when your solution comes up in a meeting you're not in. These loose connections become the difference between a deal that stalls and one that scales. Think about how deals from referrals close. They close twice as fast as deals that start cold. Accounts with multiple contacts grow larger, stay longer, and refer more business. The pattern is clear. Get enough internal referrals, and you stop being the vendor someone works with. You become the partner everyone trusts. Five Mistakes That Keep You Single-Threaded Account multithreading fails most often before it ever really begins. Not because it is hard, but because salespeople sabotage it with impatience, poor judgment, or misplaced effort. If you recognize any of these behaviors, they are costing you leverage inside the account. Trying to build fifty superficial relationships instead of multiple deep, meaningful connections. Spray and pray doesn't work in prospecting, and it doesn't work in account multithreading. Asking for referrals before you've built credibility. You can't extract value before you've created it. Failing to nurture the relationships you've already initiated. You can't plant seeds and never water them. Ignoring the law of reciprocity. If you don't offer value first—business insights, useful data, relevant introductions—people won't feel any obligation to help you. You'll burn through goodwill and get nothing back. Wearing out your welcome. If you've reached out multiple times with relevant insights and gotten silence, that's a signal. Move on. How to Build Your Account Web With Multi-Threading Start by mapping the web of people connected to your account. Decision makers, influencers, skeptics, the quiet analysts whose opinions shape what the decision makers think. Write it down. Visualize the relationships you have, the ones you need, and the blank spaces in between. Then ask questions that open doors and show you recognize the decision is bigger than one person. "Who else on your team would have a point of view on this?" "Would it be helpful if I shared what other departments are doing with similar tools?" "Is there someone else who should see this?" Or use my favorite: "I need your advice on this." That phrase invokes reciprocity and dramatically increases the probability they'll give you the referral. When trust is formed, asking for a direct referral becomes an act of generosity rather than an intrusion. Frame it around value, not obligation. "Would you be willing to introduce me to your colleague in operations? I think she'd have an interesting take on what we're talking about." "If anyone else on your team might benefit from this, would you mind sharing my name?" People say yes far more often than you think when you ask this way. The Quiet Chorus That Closes Deals The more people who trust you, the faster and further your message travels inside the account. You've got accounts in your pipeline right now sitting on a single thread. One job change, and that deal you've been nursing for months vanishes overnight. Stop searching for the one perfect contact. Start building a small community inside every account. It's not a single voice that carries your deal through. It's three voices in three different departments saying the same thing about you when you're not in the room. Protect Your Pipeline with Discipline Account multithreading isn't complicated, but it requires discipline and a shift in how you approach relationship-building. If you're ready to protect your pipeline, increase your win rate by 34%, and build accounts that grow instead of churn, start mapping your key accounts today. Identify the blank spaces. Ask better questions. Build the web before you need it. “Ready to close more deals? Explore Keith Lubner's courses on Sales Gravy University.

Single-Contact Selling is Killing 34% of Your Deals (Money Monday)

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You’ve got a champion. Someone inside the account who gets it. They love your solution, they’re fighting for your proposal, and they’re feeding you intelligence about the decision-making process. So you’re golden, right? Wrong.

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Why Your Sales Team is Underperforming — Patrick Lencioni on Working Genius

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“You know, at the core of Working Genius, what it does is it allows us to avoid guilt and judgment—guilt about ourselves and judgment of others.” That’s Patrick Lencioni, bestselling author and organizational health

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Here's a question that hits every sales professional right in the gut: What do you do when your email prospecting tanks and you're staring at response rates that are circling the drain? That's the question Tara asked on a recent episode of Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast, and it's one I hear constantly from SDRs, account executives, and even sales managers who've convinced themselves that cold calling is outdated. If you're nodding along thinking email is the future and cold calling is dead, you need to wake up. Email efficiency is going down without bound, and if you're not picking up the phone, you're leaving money on the table. The Hard Truth About Email Prospecting Let me be blunt: Your email isn't failing because the channel is broken. It's failing because what you're doing is terrible. Before you blame the medium, look in the mirror. Did people ignore your email because you sent them something genuinely personalized and valuable? Or did they ignore you because you followed up thirteen times in five days? Did they ghost you because your seven colleagues already called them that same day? The brutal reality is that most salespeople treat email like a spray-and-pray numbers game. They blast generic messages, add zero personalization, and then wonder why nobody responds. Meanwhile, they avoid the one thing that actually works: picking up the phone and having real conversations. Why Cold Calling Will Always Matter Cold calling isn't going anywhere. It never has been, and it never will be. You want to know why? Because sales is a human business. People buy from people they trust, and you can't build trust through automated emails that sound like they were written by AI. A phone call gives you something email never can: the ability to prove you're a real human being who's genuinely there to help, not just to pitch and sell. When you call someone and say, "Hey, I sent you an email last week with this case study because I saw you talked about this at the Outbound Conference," you're showing them you did your homework. You're not just another robot in their inbox. Here's a line I love: "Would I be the worst salesperson in the world if I didn't also try to call you?" It's honest, it's human, and it cuts through the noise. You Don't Know What to Say? Make the Calls The number one excuse I hear from salespeople: "I don't know what to say." Here's my advice: Make one hundred calls and talk to people. They'll teach you. You're going to learn what not to say. You're going to start seeing patterns in how your prospects think, what problems they face, and what language matters to them. This is how you develop business acumen that separates you from the pack. You can't learn it behind a keyboard. I was in an alignment call today with a new client, and they said, "You totally understand us." Why? Because last week I was with a business adjacent to their industry, learned their language, and pulled that knowledge into the next call. Use Tools to Compress Your Learning Curve Use tools like ZoomInfo to accelerate your learning curve. At Sales Gravy, we use it every day to find information about people, see what they're doing on our website, and get intent signals that build our lists automatically. You can use these tools to learn the language of industries you're breaking into. You can see company news, understand their challenges, and show up on calls sounding like you belong. But here's the key: The tool doesn't make the call for you. It gives you the ammunition. You still have to do the work. Be Strategic and Resourceful Here's a strategy most salespeople are too lazy to try: If you're having trouble getting through to a decision maker, call someone else in the company who'll actually talk to you. Selling HR services? Call a sales rep. They'll talk your ear off about the company and might even make an introduction. Try this: "Hey, I know you're in sales. I've been trying to get hold of Joseph for nine months. Is there any way you could help me out?" That's not being cheesy. That's being resourceful. But you have to be genuine. You can't just ask for something without building rapport. Your Action Plan If you're struggling with email effectiveness: Pick up the damn phone. Stop making excuses about why cold calling doesn't work. It works if you work it. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Introducing yourself to strangers will never be easy, but it's the price of admission for being great at sales. Use data strategically. Build sequences that interweave multiple channels over 30, 60, 90 days. Email, phone, LinkedIn, video. Give yourself the best odds. Don't oversell on the cold call. A little interest isn't an invitation to vomit your pitch. Your job is to earn the next conversation. Make one more call. At the end of the day when you're tired, make one more call. That's where discipline separates winners from everyone else. The Bottom Line Email isn't dead, but it's not a magic bullet. Cold calling isn't outdated. It's the foundation of everything we do in sales. Stop hiding behind your keyboard. Stop blaming the tools. Stop making excuses. The shortest path to a meeting is through a real conversation. That's how you build relationships, develop trust, and separate yourself from every other salesperson who's too afraid to dial. Get outside your skin. Be genuine. Be there to help. And pick up the phone. Ready to take your prospecting skills to the next level? Join us at one of our upcoming Sales Gravy LIVE events where you'll learn directly from top sales leaders and get hands-on coaching to transform your results.

Why Cold Calling Will Never Die (Ask Jeb)

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Here’s a question that hits every sales professional right in the gut: What do you do when your email prospecting tanks and you’re staring at response rates that are circling the drain? That’s the

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We’re just a little more than 30 days away from our new year intentions, resolutions, and goals. A month ago, we set out into the new year with hope and ambition that this year would be our best ever and that we’d make positive lasting changes in our lives. Listen to the Sales Gravy Podcast with Jeb Blount. The Number one sales training podcast.

First Month Sales Results Gut Check (Money Monday)

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On this first Monday of the second month of the year, it’s time for a gut check. First, we need to check where we are against our new year goals. Next, we need to

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Why Founder-Led Sales Teams Struggle to Scale

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“Buyers want a machine, a sales machine, not a mystery. If the sales machine only works because of the founder, it’s not that valuable. It’s actually quite risky.” Chris Spratling, founder of Chalkhill Blue

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