Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount Podcast By Jeb Blount cover art

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

By: Jeb Blount
Listen for free

LIMITED TIME OFFER | Get 3 months for $0.99 a month

$14.95/mo thereafter-terms apply.
From the author of Fanatical Prospecting and the company that re-invented sales training, the Sales Gravy Podcast helps you win bigger, sell better, elevate your game, and make more money fast.2026 Jeb Blount, All Rights Reserved Career Success Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Jeb Blount’s 3 Non-Negotiables for Modern Sales Success (Ask Jeb)

    Jeb Blount’s 3 Non-Negotiables for Modern Sales Success (Ask Jeb)
    Jan 27 2026
    Here’s a question that’ll change how you think about this profession forever: What’s the one moment that reveals you’re built for sales success? For most people, that moment never comes. They stumble into sales, struggle with the stereotypes, and either quit or spend their entire career fighting against what they think selling is supposed to be. But for those of us who get it, there’s a moment of clarity so powerful it changes everything. Mine happened in high school when I was chasing a girl and ended up on the yearbook staff. Thirty days later, I handed over $3,800 in checks while everyone else struggled to hit their $300 quota. The Sales Crack Moment When Mr. Hall at Hall’s Hardware Store wrote me that first check for a yearbook ad after I had done little more than ask outright for the money, something clicked. This wasn’t complicated. Walk in, shake hands, present value, and people give you money. While my classmates were paralyzed by the same stereotypes you hear today (“I’m not a salesperson”), I was out there having conversations. That’s all prospecting really is. Talking to people. The gasp in that room when I revealed my numbers? That was better than the money. That was the competitive fire igniting. That was me realizing I could outwork, outsell, and out-earn anyone if I just committed to the process. The Discipline Problem Most Sellers Miss Here’s what nobody tells you about sales success: It’s not about talent. It’s not about charisma. It’s about ruthless execution of proven processes. By the time I was 21 or 22, I was making $300,000 in the early nineties. That’s equivalent to making close to a million today. Not because I was special, but because I understood something fundamental that most people never figure out: The more people you talk with, the more you sell. And here’s the beautiful part. There are lots of people to go talk with. The pipeline never runs dry if you’re willing to fill it. The Three Non-Negotiables for Modern Sellers The future of selling is blending. Not choosing between video and phone and in-person. Blending all of them based on one critical question: What communication channel gives me the highest probability of capturing my desired outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money? When I started selling, we had two channels. Maybe three if you count snail mail. Phone and in-person. That’s it. Today? You’ve got a dozen ways to connect. WhatsApp lets you text, call, and video chat almost instantly. The options are endless. But here’s where Gen Z sellers (and honestly, every generation) screw this up: They get single-siloed. “I’m only good at email.” “I only do video calls.” “I hate the phone.” That mindset is killing your income potential. You need to be good at everything. Master every channel. Because the channel doesn’t matter. The outcome does. Synchronous Beats Asynchronous Every Single Time Here’s the second non-negotiable to sales success: Stop hiding behind asynchronous communication. We do deals in a synchronous world. Real-time conversations. Phone calls. Video meetings. Face-to-face interactions. If you think you can close business through email threads and text messages, you’re delusional. Why? Because robots can write better emails than you can. AI can craft more persuasive text messages. But sales is the ultimate human career in the age of AI precisely because of the human connection required in synchronous conversations. Lead with phone calls. Get face-to-face when the deal size justifies it. Use video when it makes sense. But always, always prioritize real-time conversations over digital hide-and-seek. Ask Questions and Actually Listen The third non-negotiable is mastering the art of asking great questions and listening to the answers. People make five decisions before they buy from you: Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and my problems? Do I trust and believe you? Notice what’s not on that list? Your product features. Your company’s awards. Your clever sales pitch. They’re evaluating you. Your ability to connect. Your capacity to understand. Your commitment to making them feel important. And the only way to get five affirmative answers to those questions is through synchronous conversations where you ask intelligent questions and actually listen to what they’re telling you. The Make It Rain Principle When Mr. Rouse made me editor of the yearbook after I brought in $3,800, I learned something that shaped my entire career: When you can make it rain, you can get anything you want. That principle holds true whether you’re selling yearbook ads in high school or enterprise software to Fortune 500 companies. Revenue solves problems. Performance opens doors. Results create opportunities. Most people in sales stumble into it. They take the job because it was available. They stick with it because the money’s decent. But they never ...
    Show more Show less
    13 mins
  • What Skateboarders Can Teach Salespeople About Mastering New Skills (Money Monday)

    What Skateboarders Can Teach Salespeople About Mastering New Skills (Money Monday)
    Jan 26 2026
    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 many times someone comes up to me and says, “Jeb, I read Fanatical Prospecting. Great book. But that stuff doesn’t work for me.” Or they’ll say, “I tried that objection handling technique you taught, but it didn’t work, so I went back to what I was doing before.” Here’s what they don’t understand: The problem isn’t the technique. The problem is that they gave up too soon. The brutal truth is that most people fail to implement what they learn. The Skate Park Lesson A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling for business, working with one of my clients’ sales teams. One afternoon, I decided I needed some exercise, so I went for a walk. Along the way, I came across a skate park where kids were riding their skateboards and doing tricks. There was a bench nearby, so I sat down to watch for a while. Close to me was a group of young guys, probably 13 or 14 years old. They were huddled around a phone watching a YouTube video of someone doing a particular trick on their skateboard. They watched it, talked about it, and then one of them threw his skateboard down and attempted the trick. He immediately fell off and failed. The next kid tried, and he failed. Then the next one and the next one. All of them failed to do the trick. So what did they do? They went back and watched the YouTube video again. Then they threw down their boards and crashed and burned, but this time, slightly less dramatically than the first time. They repeated this process over and over. Watch the video. Try the trick. Fail. Watch again. Try again. Fail a little less badly. Until finally, one of them nailed it. When he landed the trick, they all erupted. Clapping, fist pumping, and cheering. And once one kid got it, the rest of them started getting it too. They practiced until they had the trick nailed down, then went back to YouTube to find another trick to learn. At that point, I got up and headed back to my hotel. But as I was walking, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d just witnessed. Too Often, We Give Up too Soon How often do we do the exact opposite in business and sales? We read a book, watch a video, listen to a podcast. We hear about a technique or concept that sounds really good. And we think, “Yeah, I’m going to try that.” So we give it one shot. Maybe two if we’re feeling ambitious. And when it doesn’t work perfectly the first time, we say, “Well, this doesn’t work for me,” and we give up and never try it again. Or worse, we read the book, feel really good about the concept, then put the book down and never even attempt it at all because we’ve already convinced ourselves it wouldn’t work for us before we even tried. But here’s the thing: Those kids at the skate park didn’t look at that trick and say, “This looks hard, it probably won’t work for me.” They looked at it and said, “We’re going to figure this out.” They understood something that most adults have forgotten: Just because you read about something or see someone else do it, doesn’t mean you’re going to master it on the first try. The Homemade Yogurt Failure Paradigm As I was walking back from the skate park, this lesson reminded me of something that had happened to me over the holidays. I’d seen something in my news feed about making homemade yogurt. It looked interesting, so I bought some milk, studied the recipe, and made an attempt. And I failed. My concoction didn’t turn into yogurt at all. My immediate reaction was, “Well, this isn’t going to work; it must be a bad recipe.” I gave up after one failed attempt. But after watching those kids at the skatepark, I realized the giving-up-too-soon trap I’d fallen into. So when I got home from my trip, I went back, reread the recipe, walked back through my steps to figure out what went wrong, and tried again. This time it worked, and I actually made yogurt. The recipe wasn’t the problem. My execution was the problem. And I only figured that out by trying again. The Human Overconfidence Fallacy Here’s the lesson: We are all susceptible to this human fallacy of believing that we can read something, watch something, or hear something once and then immediately do it perfectly. When it doesn’t work the first time (or even the second time), we conclude that the technique is flawed, or it won’t work for us, or our situation is unique and different. But the truth is, we gave up too soon, before we gave the technique a fair shot. That’s just being human. We’re wired for overconfidence, instant gratification, and immediate results. When we don’t get them, we move on. Why This Matters in Sales Let me bring this back to sales, because this pattern will absolutely kill your results. You read a book on ...
    Show more Show less
    13 mins
  • Coaching Sales Reps Who Think They Know Everything

    Coaching Sales Reps Who Think They Know Everything
    Jan 22 2026
    “That chip on my shoulder made me less empathetic, more rushed, too eager to solve things too fast, and less thoughtful. That chip built me, but then it started to tear me down.” I said that recently in a conversation with Harriet Mellor of Your Sales Co, and it captures something every sales leader needs to understand. I grew up in the sales training business. My dad literally wrote THE book on prospecting—several of them, actually. I worked at Paycom, Comcast, and various startups where I consistently crushed my numbers. But what I learned is that knowing the right techniques and getting your team to actually implement them are two completely different challenges. Sales training resistance is rarely about bad content. More often, it is about ego and pride standing in the way of growth. I had to recognize that in myself before I could address it in the people I lead. Why Your Top Performers Resist Training the Most When I was a rep, I was terrible at taking coaching. Not because I didn’t understand the concepts. I understood them better than most. But when someone tried to coach me, I tuned out. The problem was I’d already figured out a system that worked. I was hitting my numbers. Why would I mess with it? Think about learning golf. You chunk the ground twenty times, then suddenly you make contact. The ball doesn’t go straight or very far, but it goes. Someone tries to teach you proper form, your first thought is, “I already figured out how to hit the ball.” That’s where many top performers live. They’ve reached an equilibrium. Not peak performance, but functional competence. Training feels disruptive because it threatens what is currently working. They’re not resisting because they’re stubborn. They’re resisting because they have something to lose. What if they try something new and their numbers drop? They’d rather stay at 85% effectiveness than risk dropping to 60%, even if it means eventually reaching 120%. Two Ways Ego Hurts Performance Creates Rush Instead of Curiosity At Paycom, I carried a massive chip on my shoulder. I carried the same name as my dad. People knew who he was. I felt pressure to prove I belonged. So I rushed. I skipped discovery. I pushed toward proposals. I talked more than I listened. Every call felt like a test I needed to pass. You can hear this on your team’s calls. Reps who are trying to prove something move too fast. They stop asking questions. They perform instead of selling. That behavior is driven by ego, and it costs deals. Telling them to slow down will not fix it. You need to understand what they feel compelled to prove and why they associate speed with competence. Blocks From Actually Learning When I was carrying a quota, I thought I was a lifelong learner. I read every sales book. I listened to podcasts. I sat through hours of training sessions. But when it came to changing what I did on Monday morning, I defaulted right back to what I knew. I’d hear a new objection handling technique and think, “Yeah, I basically already do that.” I didn’t. But ego wouldn’t let me see the gap. Your salespeople are doing the same thing right now. They’re taking in your coaching but filtering it through their existing beliefs. They’re protecting the system that’s currently working. And they’re developing blind spots they can’t see. Watch for the reps who stop recording their calls because they “know what they sound like.” The ones who skip role play because it’s “not realistic.” The ones who tune out your coaching because you “don’t understand their territory.” Reps who do this aren’t trying to be difficult, but instead trying to protect their self-image instead of improving their performance. Why Your Team Listens to Outside Trainers But Not You One of the most frustrating parts of leadership is to preach a methodology for six months and nothing changes. Then an outside consultant shows up and says the exact same thing. Suddenly, everyone’s taking notes and engaged. I experienced this firsthand with my dad. He would offer advice, and I tuned out. Days later, I would hear the same message from someone else and think it was brilliant. It wasn’t about the message. It was about who was delivering it. When you try to coach your team, there’s history. There’s baggage. Maybe you’ve given conflicting directions before. Maybe they see you as “management” instead of someone who gets it. Maybe they just don’t like admitting to their boss that they need help. Outside trainers don’t carry that weight. They show up with a clean slate and credibility that’s granted just by being an outsider. The real question isn’t how to make your team listen to you. It is how to create an environment where learning feels safe, regardless of who delivers it. How to Break Through Sales Training Resistance Frame Training as Addition, Not Correction I stopped resisting coaching when my leaders stopped making me feel like ...
    Show more Show less
    51 mins
All stars
Most relevant
I listen to this everyday on the way to work. Most engaging sales podcast I’ve found to date. Lots of great material in here from experienced sales professionals that have also experienced the grind day in and day out. Pick up the phone!

Real life words of wisdom

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.