『Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount』のカバーアート

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

著者： Jeb Blount
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 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.2025 Jeb Blount, All Rights Reserved マネジメント・リーダーシップ マーケティング マーケティング・セールス リーダーシップ 出世 就職活動 経済学
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  • Why Your Rivals Pray You Cut Training (And Why You Shouldn’t)

    Why Your Rivals Pray You Cut Training (And Why You Shouldn’t)
    2025/11/03
    This time of year is critical. As sales leaders map out their budgets for the new year, the conversation always centers on a core conflict: How to cut expenses and, simultaneously, motivate teams to hit larger quotas. What's the first line item to feel the squeeze? Training and development. It is often incorrectly labeled a 'want' and not a 'need.' We hear leaders say, "It can wait until next quarter," or, "Once we stabilize revenue, we'll invest in the team." This short-sighted thinking doesn’t save money. Instead, it's costing organizations a significant, quantifiable amount of revenue and talent. When professional development is treated like a luxury, we undermine the foundational ability of our teams to perform consistently at a high level. Training is the Foundational Requirement for Peak Performance Sales leaders should consider peak performance in any high-stakes environment. In the military, or in elite professional sports, ongoing training is not a choice—it is a non-negotiable, daily priority. So why is it that, in Sales, we view continuous development as optional or too expensive? The simple truth is that lack of training is the most expensive mistake you can make. Think about the rate of technological change. Most of us have upgraded our cell phones in the last three to five years because the old ones simply couldn't keep up. The same principle applies to your sales team’s skill set. If your representatives are still relying on techniques learned 5, 10, or 15 years ago, then they are operating at a competitive disadvantage. They will be outmaneuvered and outperformed by competitors who are strategically investing in modern sales frameworks every time. Henry Ford’s famous quote still holds true: "The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them." If you believe training is expensive, you must take a moment to calculate the monumental loss of reps consistently missing their quotas. The True Cost of Inconsistency and Turnover Look at the numbers. Assume three of your representatives are consistently missing quota by just 20%. That deficit is lost revenue—but it also represents wasted leads, missed opportunities, and the corrosive ripple effect of deals that never even make it into your pipeline. The amount of potential revenue lost due to underperformance is often far greater than the entire annual budget you would allocate to comprehensive sales training. Action Plan for Sales Leaders & Managers To reverse this loss, you must treat coaching as a continuous operational requirement, not a perk. Calculate the 'Cost of Inaction' to Justify Budget: Reframe thinking of training as an expense and start focusing on the cost of the status quo. Calculate the annualized revenue loss from your bottom 20% of underperforming reps (e.g., missed quota * average deal size). Use that concrete number to justify and secure a budget for development, proving that not training is your biggest liability. Implement a Continuous Coaching Framework: Don't rely on annual training events. Transform your managers into daily coaches by mandating 30 minutes of structured, one-on-one coaching per week focused on skill development. This reinforcement is what locks in new behaviors and prevents the initial energy gained in training from fading. The Hidden Expense of Disengagement Talent turnover is another critical cost of lack of training that is often overlooked. A representative who feels unsupported, or who consistently misses quota because they don’t have the necessary tools and coaching, is highly likely to seek opportunities elsewhere. The cost of recruiting, onboarding, and ramping a replacement—which includes the loss of established customer relationships and the disruption to team morale—significantly outweighs the expense of proactive investment. How to Take a Struggling Rep From Liability to Asset
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    8 分
  • 16 Sales Horror Stories That Prove You’re Not Alone

    16 Sales Horror Stories That Prove You’re Not Alone
    2025/10/30
    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 predict. The moment you sat in your car afterward in complete silence, questioning every decision that led you to this career. These moments feel intensely personal and isolating. But the truth is, every rep who’s lasted in this profession has been there. On an episode of The Sales Gravy Podcast, Ashley Blount and I collected nightmare sales stories from our years in the automotive and telecommunications industries, plus stories from the sales community. We found 16 tales that prove no one faces this alone. Here are some of the most terrifying. Smelly Dave: The Angel of Death This sales horror story comes from the automotive industry, posted on Reddit by someone who still sounds traumatized. Dave started at the dealership after Sears closed. We found out he’d been the “Angel of Death” at several franchises—Sears, Future Shop, RadioShack. Every place he touched eventually shut down. Dave was in his early 40s, wore the same shirt with the same coffee stain on it every single day, and smelled terribly. Customers would flee after test drives, refusing to come back into the building with him. On one occasion, a customer was dry heaving. Management tried to delicately bring up the hygiene issue, but Dave wouldn’t listen. One day, the manager was told to drop off a sold vehicle to a customer, and Dave drove the chase car. As they returned together, the smell in that enclosed space was so unbearable that the manager walked into the boss's office afterward and apologized for whatever he had done to deserve that punishment. The boss laughed, called Dave in, and fired him on the spot. The Bluetooth Incident That Still Haunts Ashley Ashley had been selling cars for a few months when a sweet older couple came into the dealership. The husband was retiring, probably late 60s, and they were one of those rare couples who were actually pleasant to work with. He picked out a lime green Ford Fiesta for his retirement car. They completed the test drive, finished all the paperwork, and Ashley sent the vehicle back to get ready for delivery. When delivering a new vehicle, you always get in with the customer to help them connect their phone to Bluetooth and walk them through all the features. Since it was a couple, the husband was in the driver's seat, his wife was in the front passenger seat, and Ashley was sitting in the middle of the back seat. They got his phone connected to the Bluetooth, matched the code, and turned up the volume on the car. He went to open his phone. The most explicit, obscene audio you can imagine came blasting out of the speakers. Dead silence in that vehicle for what felt like forever. Ashley wished them well, exited the car, and walked back inside, mortified. When asked how it went, she told them the story and muttered, “I don’t really want to follow up. I’m not sure that’s appropriate.” The Telecom Contractors Who Started a Gunfight I had door-knocked a large hair salon and built a relationship with the salon owner, who also owned the building. He helped me get in the door with all four of his tenants. Because he was switching, they all switched. I closed three to four months of quota on this one deal because of what he did for me. Installation day arrives. At 6 a.m., my phone rings. I try to sound as awake as possible with my gravelly morning voice, and the owner immediately screams, "Jeb, what the f**k?" He explains that our contractors came out the night before, got in a huge argument, waved guns at each other—he swears one of them shot at the other. Then they came back in the morning and dug a trench that cut every single internet line to the building. Every single one. No internet on the salon’s busiest day, and all the other stores were out, too. I arrived at 6:45 a.m.
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    47 分
  • How to Build an Enterprise Sales Strategy for Startups (Ask Jeb)

    How to Build an Enterprise Sales Strategy for Startups (Ask Jeb)
    2025/10/29
    Here's a problem that'll tie you in knots: You've got a killer software solution that saves companies massive money on employee benefits. You know exactly who needs it. Fortune 1000 companies with self-insured health plans. But you can't get a single meeting with the people who matter. That's the situation Peter Kleinman from Provo, Utah, found himself in. As the sales and marketing guy for his dad's startup, he was tasked with landing enterprise clients while juggling full-time classes at BYU. He had LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and a burning desire to make it work. He also had virtually no chance of success using his current approach. If you're nodding your head right now, keep reading. Because Peter's problem is your problem if you're trying to sell into enterprise accounts without the business acumen, social proof, or strategy to break through. The 100-Foot Wall Problem Let me be brutally honest: Fortune 1000 CHROs and C-suite executives have built a wall around themselves that's about 100 feet high. Their entire job is keeping people like you from wasting their time. And if you're young, inexperienced, or new to enterprise sales? That wall might as well be 1,000 feet high. Peter was doing everything the sales books tell you to do. He was going straight to the top. He was messaging decision makers on LinkedIn. He was targeting the right titles. He was also getting absolutely nowhere. Here's why: It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with business acumen. You can't speak the language of enterprise buyers if you've never lived in their world. You don't understand their buying process, their risk aversion, or the organizational politics that determine whether your deal lives or dies. Most critically, you're trying to sell something they don't even know they need. And you have zero social proof to back up your claims. That's not a recipe for success. That's a recipe for frustration, burnout, and a pipeline full of nothing. The Bottom-Up, Top-Down Strategy If you can't get to the top, start at the bottom. I'm not talking about giving up on enterprise accounts. I'm talking about running a multi-threading strategy that builds your business acumen while creating pathways into those massive organizations. Here's how it works: Find the amplifiers. These are the people in the trenches who actually deal with the problem your solution solves every single day. They're not directors or VPs. They're managers, analysts, and coordinators who feel the pain but lack the authority to fix it. These people are 100 times easier to talk to than C-suite executives. They'll take your call. They'll teach you. They'll tell you exactly what's broken in their organization and how decisions actually get made. Compress your experience. When you talk to these amplifiers, you're not selling. You're learning. You're asking questions like, "Help me understand how you make these decisions," and "What problems are you running into?" Every conversation compresses years of experience into hours. You learn the language. You understand the pain points. You gather insights that become ammunition for conversations with decision makers. Surface the insights upward. Now when you finally get in front of that CHRO or VP of Benefits, you're not some kid with a PowerPoint. You're someone who understands their organization better than they do. You can tell them stories about what their own people are experiencing and how you can close the gap. That's how you get meetings. That's how you build credibility. That's how you win deals when you have no business acumen and no social proof. The Insurance Broker Shortcut Here's another path Peter needed to explore: Insurance brokers. If you can't talk to the self-insured companies directly, talk to the people who advise them. Insurance brokers work with these organizations every day. They understand the buying process. They know the pain points.
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    21 分
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