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Tag: Money Monday

Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, the number one sales training company, explains why people buy based on emotion and how salespeople can close more deals by aligning with the way buyers think.

People Buy for Their Reasons, Not Yours (Money Monday)

Summary: Why people buy has far less to do with logic than most salespeople think. Buyers make decisions driven by emotion first, then justify those choices with rational explanations after the fact. To close more deals, you have to learn…

Sales trainer Duff Tucker of Sales Gravy, the number one sales training platform, shares Q1 sales strategy insights for sales leaders on the Sales Gravy Podcast Money Monday.

Q1 Sales Strategy Reality Check: How Top Sales Teams Finish Strong in Q2 (Money Monday)

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. The key is intentionality: protecting time,…

Sales coasting is the quiet career killer no one talks about. Jeb Blount Jr. shares how ice skating — and getting lapped by a six-year-old — broke him out of a sales slump and delivered his best quarter ever. Read the full blog by the number one sales training company

I Was Coasting in Sales Until a Six-Year-Old Humbled Me on the Ice (Money Monday)

Summary Sales coasting is a silent career killer: it feels fine on the inside, but slowly drains the skills you've built. The "expert trap" convinces experienced reps there's nothing left to learn. It's wrong, and it's dangerous. Picking up a…

Sales Gravy senior master trainer Brad Adams teaching sales professionals how to protect golden hours and prioritize prospecting — Sales Gravy University, the number one sales training company.

Stop Letting Busy Work Steal Your Golden Hours (Money Monday)

We all have the same number of hours in a week. The same golden hours. Yet so many sales reps do a poor job of protecting them. I have a customer who sells into manufacturing. One of their top reps,…

Sales will always be a grind. The calls don't make themselves. The pipeline doesn't fill itself. The deals don't close themselves. But grinding without certainty is just another form of suffering. It's unsustainable. Eventually, you get frustrated, burn out, and give up. Certainty doesn't eliminate the hard work but it does make the hard work sustainable.

Why Grind Without Tenacity is Not Enough to Hit Quota (Money Monday)

You've heard people say, "Sales is a grind." And they're right. Sales requires relentless effort. You've got to make the calls, run the process, deal with internal roadblocks, handle piles of rejection, and show up every day with a smile…

In the age of AI B2B sales professionals must take the friction out of the buying process to remain competitive

Are You Just Friction With a Friendly Face? An AI Wake Up Call for B2B Sales (Money Monday)

I'm going to ask you a question that might sting a little. As a sales professional, are you just friction with a friendly face? Think about it. A whole lot of salespeople are good people. They're polite, fun to be…

So, the next time you bomb a sales call, lose a deal you thought was a lock, get yelled at on a cold call, or face an embarrassing situation in front of your peers, remember: you get to choose. Will this be just a bruise, or will you sear it into your psyche, turning it into a tattoo of permanent self-doubt?  Listen to the full episode of Jeb BLount's Money Monday on the Sales Gravy podcast, the number one sales training podcast

Failure is Not Permanent (Money Monday)

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood was the day I was bucked off my pony, Macaroni. I was only six years old. We were in an arena where my mother was giving me my very first riding…

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)

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,…

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)

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 take stock of our first month's…

Jeb Blount on the Money Monday Sales Gravy Podcast discussing how to master new sales skills through the lens of skateboarder discipline. This image highlights the importance of sales persistence and why reps give up on sales techniques too soon before they see results.

What Skateboarders Can Teach Salespeople About Mastering New Skills (Money Monday)

I’m not sure if you noticed this, but there is a massive gap between what salespeople and leaders know and what they actually do. I've written 18 books and trained hundreds of thousands of salespeople. I can't tell you how…

Have you ever gone into a closing meeting, a sales presentation, or even a prospecting call with total confidence? That mindset and feeling that everything's going to go your way, that nothing can go wrong, that you're absolutely going to win? I've been there. I know you have too. It's one of the greatest feelings ever. But let's juxtapose that against going into a meeting feeling insecure, where your focus is on everything that could go wrong versus everything that could go right. And then, as soon as something does go wrong, everything starts to spiral downward. There is absolutely nothing that can make or break a deal like confidence. In this Sales Gravy podcast episode, we're going to explore exactly where confidence comes from, why it matters so much in sales, and most importantly, what you can do to build the unshakeable confidence that closes deals. The Insecurity Death Spiral Recently, I learned a profound lesson about confidence. I was invited to play golf with a group of businesspeople in Florida. Beautiful day, sunshine, great course. It should have been perfect. Except I'm not a very good golfer. And these guys? They were good. Really good. The kind of golfers who carry single-digit handicaps and talk about their swing plane like it's a science project. So I'm standing on the first tee, watching them stripe their drives straight down the middle, and I can feel it happening. That little voice in my head starts whispering: "You don't belong here. You're going to embarrass yourself. Everyone's going to see how bad you are." I started strong enough. Made it through the first couple of holes without humiliating myself. But then I hit a bad shot. Then another. And instead of shaking it off like I normally would, I started fixating on those bad shots. That's when the downward spiral began. Every swing became an exercise in anxiety. I was so focused on not messing up that I couldn't help but mess up. My mechanics fell apart. My rhythm disappeared. By the end of the round, I had played one of the worst games of golf in my life. Not because I suddenly forgot how to swing a club, but because I let insecurity take over. Now, I managed to keep a smile on my face. We were playing golf in the Florida sunshine, after all. But inside, I was frustrated because I knew what had happened. I let my insecurity about being the weakest player in the group sabotage my entire game. And here's what hit me on the plane home: That's exactly what I see happen in sales all the time. One moment of uncertainty, one unexpected challenge, and suddenly, a salesperson who is perfectly capable starts spiraling. Their confidence evaporates. And with it goes their ability to perform. Why Confidence Matters in Sales In sales, there is nothing that sells like confidence. Nothing. Buyers lean into confidence. They're attracted to it. They trust it. And because of emotional contagion—your ability to transfer your emotions to another person—you basically take your confidence and hand it to the buyer, who then gains more confidence in you. Think about it. When you walk into a meeting radiating confidence, the buyer thinks, "This person knows what they're doing. They believe in what they're selling. I can trust them." But when you walk in feeling insecure, the buyer picks up on that too. They start thinking, "Why is this person nervous? What aren't they telling me? Maybe this isn't the right solution." In sales, because we can't always control the playing field and because we don't always feel like we should be where we are—especially when we're dealing with the C-suite or high-level decision makers, when we're in super competitive situations, or when we don't really know what we're talking about—one thing that goes wrong can create a cascade of other problems, creating a downward insecurity spiral that is real and deadly. The Ultimate Source of Confidence So the question is: Where does confidence come from? Where do you get it? Well, confidence by its very nature comes from the inside. It's a mindset. It's something that you believe, just like insecurity is a mindset that comes from the inside. Confidence is mostly created by certainty. When you feel certain that you can control the outcome, you feel more confident. When you're in situations that feel familiar, or you're talking about a product, your service, or some part of your offering that you totally understand, you feel more confident. When you've executed the sales process perfectly and built deep relationships with your customers, you feel more confident that they're going to buy from you. When you've practiced your presentation multiple times and know it by rote, you feel more confident. By the way, the same thing works in reverse. Uncertainty begets insecurity. When you walk into a situation, and you feel uncertain—and this happens to a lot of brand-new salespeople who don't know what to say or feel like they don't really understand the product offering, their industry, or their customer's business—it creates a level of insecurity. So the answer, if we want to be more confident, is to create more certainty. Certainty Creates Confidence Let me give you an example from my horrible, awful, terrible round of golf. In the middle of that terrible round, I got desperate for anything that would give me confidence. So I started playing entire holes with my 7-iron because that was the one club I felt I was certain I could hit. Except for putting, I would hit the 7-iron off the tee, on the fairway, and chip with it around the green. 150 yards at a time with my 7-iron, I could make it go straight down the fairway and hit the green. That certainty in that particular club helped me feel more confident, and my game actually improved when I stuck with what I knew worked. Now, in sales like golf, there is nothing you can be 100% certain about, simply because there are too many variables. We're dealing with human beings, nasty competitors, and a shifting landscape. Even in accounts that are in our pipeline, things are always changing. So for us as sales professionals, there's no absolute certainty. But there are ways you can boost certainty in order to gain more confidence. Four Ways to Create Certainty and Boost Confidence 1. Invest in Yourself Through Education If you get insecure when you're talking about things in your industry or about your product that you don't understand, then go educate yourself. Take the time to learn. Take classes. Go to your LMS and take e-learning. Read everything about your product. Become an expert—not just in your product, but in your industry. Also, learn about business. The more you can educate yourself about business, the more you gain business acumen, which makes you feel more confident in conversations with executives. When you know your stuff cold, understand your product inside and out, and can speak intelligently about your industry and your customer's business challenges, uncertainty evaporates, and with it, goes insecurity. 2. Plan Every Single Call Winging it is wickedly stupid on sales calls because when you wing it, you create uncertainty. So sit down and think about every single call. What am I going to do? What questions am I going to ask? What's my objective for being there? What am I going to close for at the end (targeted next step)? Build a plan, write it down, and review it in advance of your meeting. Planning creates certainty. 3. Murder Board Your Big Meetings Along with planning comes the concept of murder boarding, red teaming, or scenario playing. Murder boarding creates certainty around handling the unexpected. Especially in large presentations and closing calls, you need to start pulling the thread on everything that could possibly go wrong. Every objection you could get. Every pushback. Every hard question. Think about the different stakeholders who are going to be around the table, and the types of questions they're going to ask, and the potential things they may say. Then find somebody on your team or somebody in your household to role-play all those scenarios with. I've found that nothing gives me more confidence in big sales meetings than murder boarding. Because when I get into those situations—especially with objections or negotiations that can be super intimidating—the more I role-play those things, the better I am at them and the easier they are to deal with. In fact, they're far less difficult in real life than they were in the role-playing. 4. Keep a Full Pipeline This is powerful: There's nothing that makes you more confident than being able to sell like you don't have to sell. When you are fanatical about prospecting and build a full pipeline, it gives you lots of options. You know you can walk away from anything. You're detached from the outcome. When it doesn't make a difference if you win or lose, you gain immense confidence, which is why a full pipeline is the ultimate confidence builder. With Confidence, Mindset Matters When it comes to confidence, mindset matters. If you are obsessed with how you might fail or what you might do wrong, there's a tendency to get the thing you're focused on. It's called target obsession. Whatever we focus on, we tend to attract and move toward. So be careful what you're focused on. One of the things I do—and I know this is kind of weird, but it works—is before I walk into a sales meeting, I look into the mirror and tell myself, "I'm a great salesperson." I actually say the words out loud. It's a little bit cheesy. But by saying those words, changing my body language, pushing my shoulders up, my chin out—the power pose, as some would say—that actually begins to change my mindset and makes me feel more confident. Add to that eating well, getting plenty of sleep (sleep really does wonders for your confidence), exercising, and making sure, before you go into a big presentation, that you're not going in on an empty stomach. How to Overcome Insecurity in the Moment I sell every single day, and I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what it's like to walk into a meeting with a prospect or customer and feel insecure. It happens to me still. But here's the thing: I'm very careful not to let people see me sweat because insecurity and sales make a poor mixture. Because emotions are contagious and people have a tendency to respond in kind, I want to avoid transferring my insecurity to them, causing them to feel uncertain about me. So I'm very careful with my body language, eye contact, voice inflection, and how fast I speak. One tactic I use when I feel insecure is to slow down, pause, and ask a question. This gives me a moment to regain my composure and manage my body language. Build Confidence with Knowledge, Planning, Practice, and Pipeline Confidence isn't something you're born with. It's something you build through preparation, knowledge, practice, and a full pipeline. The good news is that all of these things are within your control. You can choose to educate yourself, to plan, practice, and prospect. Here's what I want you to do this week: First, identify your gaps. Where do you feel uncertain in your sales process? Is it product knowledge? Industry knowledge? Objection handling? Closing? Write it down. Second, create a learning plan. For each gap you identified, create a specific plan to fill it. What books will you read? What training will you take? Who will you shadow or learn from? Third, plan your next three calls. Don't wing another call this week. Sit down and plan your next three sales conversations. Write out your objectives, your questions, and your close. Fourth, murder board your biggest opportunity. If you've got a major presentation or closing call coming up, spend an hour this week role-playing every possible scenario with a colleague. Fifth, evaluate your pipeline. Is it full enough that you can sell without desperation? If not, block time this week for serious prospecting. This is how you build the kind of unshakeable confidence that buyers respond to, competitors fear, and that feels so good. And remember, when it's time to go home, and you're tired and worn out, always stop and make one more call. Because that one more call gives you the confidence that you can walk in any door, anytime, stand toe to toe with any buyer, and have a winning sales conversation. Over a million sales professionals and sales teams have become more confident prospectors with the Fanatical Prospecting system. Learn more here.

Where Confidence Comes From and Why it Matters in Sales (Money Monday)

Have you ever gone into a closing meeting, a sales presentation, or even a prospecting call with total confidence? That mindset and feeling that everything's going to go your way, that nothing can go wrong, that you're absolutely going to…

You declined another prospecting block today, didn't you? That internal meeting popped up. Someone needed "just five minutes." Your CRM screamed for attention. Before you knew it, another day passed without a single cold call, without one new connection request, without moving the needle on your pipeline. But hey, at least your calendar looked impressively full. Here's what nobody wants to admit: your jam-packed calendar isn't proof that you're too busy to prospect. It's proof you've made prospecting optional. And optional activities don't close deals or pay commissions. The Meeting Excuse Is Killing Your Pipeline Sales professionals love to point at their calendars as evidence of why they can't prospect. Look at all these internal meetings. See how packed my schedule is. How could I possibly find time for outbound activity? The real question is: when did you last decline an internal meeting to protect your prospecting time? Most salespeople never have. They treat every meeting invitation as a welcome escape from the discomfort of cold outreach. It's the perfect alibi when your manager asks about pipeline activity. But your calendar tells the truth about your priorities. If time blocking for prospecting isn't on it, prospecting isn't actually a priority. And if prospecting isn't a priority, why exactly are you in sales? You Don't Need Hours—You Need 15 Minutes The biggest lie salespeople tell themselves is that prospecting requires massive blocks of uninterrupted time. Two hours minimum. Otherwise, why bother starting? This is the same mental trap that keeps people from reading, exercising, or learning new skills. They convince themselves that 15 minutes isn't enough to matter, so they do nothing instead. Consider this: reading for 15 minutes daily gets you through 20-25 books per year. Walking for 15 minutes adds nearly a mile to your day. Fifteen minutes of focused prospecting can generate six to ten cold calls, dozens of personalized connection requests, or several high-impact video messages to ghosting prospects. The power isn't in the duration, but in consistent, focused execution of time blocking for sales activities. The 15-Minute Power Block Rules These 3 rules are requirements if you want your time blocking strategy to actually work. Rule 1: Single-task only.  Your 15-minute prospecting block is for prospecting. Not prospecting while monitoring email. Not prospecting between Slack messages. Just prospecting. If you spend three minutes calling and twelve minutes scrolling Instagram, you didn't prospect for 15 minutes. Rule 2: Everything else can wait. Yes, that includes your boss. You will not lose a customer or your job because you ignored email for 15 minutes. Responding at the end of your block is still professional. Think about it—if you were sitting face-to-face with your top client, would you stop mid-conversation to check email? Treat your power blocks with the same respect. Rule 3: Protect the block like your commission depends on it. Because it does. Top performers don't ask permission to prospect. They schedule it, block it, and defend it against every interruption. The coworker who needs "just a minute" can wait sixteen minutes. What Actually Happens in 15 Minutes Specificity kills procrastination. You're more likely to execute when you know exactly what you're doing during your time blocking windows. Eight to fifteen cold calls fit comfortably in 15 minutes. That's enough to connect with two or three decision-makers if you're efficient. Send ten to fifteen LinkedIn connection requests to stakeholders outside your network. Write and mail three handwritten notes to accounts you closed this month. Record personalized video messages for three prospects who've gone dark. None of these activities requires elaborate preparation or perfect conditions. They require you to show up for 15 minutes and do the work. That's it. Schedule Your Priorities or Someone Else Will Stephen Covey said the key isn't prioritizing your schedule, but scheduling your priorities. Most salespeople do the opposite—they let their calendars fill with whatever lands there first, then wonder why revenue-generating work never happens. Your calendar should reflect your income goals. If hitting quota requires consistent prospecting, your calendar should show consistent prospecting blocks. If building relationships with key accounts matters, those touchpoints should be scheduled. When you schedule your sales priorities first, everything else fits around them. When you don't, everything else crowds them out entirely. Look at your calendar right now. How many prospecting blocks do you see this week? If the answer is zero, you've just identified why your pipeline feels thin. How to Apply Time Blocking Starting Now Open your calendar and block three 15-minute windows for prospecting tomorrow. Morning, midday, and late afternoon. Label them "Prospecting Power Block" and set them as busy. Before each block, decide on one specific activity: cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, video messages, or handwritten notes. Don't try to do multiple things. Pick one and execute for the full 15 minutes. Close your email, silence your phone. For 15 minutes, nothing else exists except the activity you committed to. When the timer ends, return to everything else. Track your blocks for one week. Count how many you actually protected versus how many got sacrificed to "urgent" requests. This data will reveal whether you're serious about prospecting or just pretending to be. Make Time or Make Excuses—You Can't Do Both Top performers don't wait for the perfect time to prospect. They don't need two-hour windows or complete silence or ideal conditions. They make the time, even when it's just 15 minutes. Especially when it's just 15 minutes. That 15-minute window you're dismissing as too small? It could be the first conversation with your biggest account next quarter. It could be the connection that leads to your highest commission check. It could be the breakthrough that turns a struggling month into a record-breaker. But only if you actually protect it. Only if you treat time blocking for prospecting as non-negotiable. Only if you stop letting your calendar lie to you about why you're not doing the work. Your pipeline doesn't care how busy you looked today. It cares about the calls you made, the emails you sent, and the relationships you built. Fifteen focused minutes at a time. Stop letting busy work crowd out revenue-generating activities. Download our free Time Audit Log to identify exactly where your selling time is going and reclaim hours each week for actual prospecting. Track your activities for just three days and discover what's really eating your calendar.

Your Calendar Is Lying About Why You’re Not Prospecting (Money Monday)

You declined another prospecting block today, didn't you? That internal meeting popped up. Someone needed "just five minutes." Your CRM screamed for attention. Before you knew it, another day passed without a single cold call, without one new connection request,…