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Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Auteur(s): 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.2024 Jeb Blount, All Rights Reserved Gestion et leadership Marketing Marketing et ventes Réussite personnelle Économie
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  • Main Character Syndrome: Why Prospects Tune You Out (Money Monday)

    Main Character Syndrome: Why Prospects Tune You Out (Money Monday)
    Feb 16 2026
    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 monologue. You're annoyed. You tune out. You start looking for the exit. That's exactly how your prospects feel when you make yourself the star of the conversation. 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. The Real Cost of Sales Main Character Syndrome Sales main character syndrome has consequences that will wreck your quota. Prospects disengage. When you focus on yourself and your product instead of the buyer and their needs, they tune out. Calls feel like lectures. Emails read like brochures. Messages get deleted without a response. Lose their attention, and you've lost your shot. You miss the real opportunities. By making the interaction about yourself, you fail to ask the right questions. You don't hear what's actually going on in their world. You can't identify the true pain points, the real goals, or what's actually motivating them. So you pitch solutions that don't align with what they need. You waste discovery time chasing the wrong problems. Destroy trust before it’s built. Your prospects stop seeing you as a helpful guide. Instead, you're just another salesperson pushing a product. Without trust, everything gets harder and long-term relationships become impossible. The cost is too high. So how do you flip the script? The Mindset Shift: From Hero to Trusted Guide Your job is to be a trusted guide, not the hero. Think Yoda, not Luke Skywalker. Your prospect is the hero of their own story. They're the ones facing the challenge, making the decision, and living with the outcome. When prospects feel like the main character, they engage more. They open up. They trust you. And trust moves deals forward. Here's a simple three-step framework you can use in every conversation. Step #1: Change Your "I" to "Why" Stop starting conversations with: "I want to show you..." "I'd love to introduce..." "I think you'll like..." Your buyers don't care about your "I." They care about their “why.” Why should this matter to them? Why is it relevant right now? Why does it solve a problem they're actually facing? Lead with "why," and the focus shifts from your agenda to their reality. You'll stop sounding like a salesperson and start being seen as someone who understands their world. Before: "I'd love to show you our new platform and walk you through all the features we've built." After: “Companies in your industry are losing 20% of their pipeline to manual data entry errors. Here's how to fix that." One is about you. The other is about them. Step #2: Define What You Solve, Not What You Sell Most salespeople can rattle off what they sell. A platform. A service. A software solution. That's not what your buyer cares about. Buyers don't wake up thinking, "I need a new vendor today." They wake up thinking, "I need to fix this problem that's making my life harder." When you define the problem you solve instead of the product you sell, you build immediate value. You position yourself as a partner in their success, not just another pitch in their inbox. Product-focused: "We're a sales engagement platform with email sequencing, call tracking, and analytics." Problem-focused: "We help sales teams stop losing deals to slow follow-up and inconsistent outreach." Stop leading with what you sell and start leading with what you solve. Conversations convert faster when prospects see themselves in the problem you're addressing. Step #3: Listen to Hear, Not to Respond The biggest mistake in sales? Listening just long enough to jump in with your answer. Most reps wait for their turn to talk. They're mentally preparing the pitch while the buyer is still speaking. It feels efficient. It's actually ineffective. Listening to hear means shutting up long enough to understand. You catch the nuance. You pick up on the emotion. You uncover the hidden pain points that competitors miss because ...
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    8 min
  • Stone Tablets, Trade Shows, and Telephones: 4,000 Years of Sales History

    Stone Tablets, Trade Shows, and Telephones: 4,000 Years of Sales History
    Feb 12 2026
    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 in 1750 and made sales history. The merchant was furious because he'd been promised high-grade copper, but the final product was subpar. That angry customer complaint is now sitting in the British Museum, 4,000 years later. The tablet reads: "What do you take me for? That you treat someone like me with such contempt?" If you think dealing with issues in the sales process is a modern problem, you're off by about four millennia. Sales Hustle Is Ancient We talk about sales like it's a modern corporate invention. CRMs and automated sequences are new, but the art of the deal and dealing with angry customers? That’s been around since humans started trading. The copper merchant in 1750 BCE wasn't just selling copper. He was managing client expectations, handling logistics, and clearly failing at quality control. The core practices of B2B sales—promise, delivery, and relationship management—haven't changed. 1600s: Sales Becomes a Profession Fast forward to 1600, and you see the founding of the East India Trading Companies. They were some of the first corporations that allowed people to buy shares in a business. One of the East India Trading Companies was owned by "the 17 gentlemen"—a group of wealthy investors who funded global trade expeditions. They kept spices like nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon flowing across continents. The spices were so valuable that they were practically currency. This was B2B sales at scale. Shareholders' expected returns. Merchants negotiated deals across continents. The stakes were massive, and so were the profits. This era established something critical to modern sellers: the separation between ownership and operation. The 17 gentlemen didn't sail the ships or negotiate every spice deal. They hired people to do it. Sales stopped being a personal trade and became a repeatable profession with accountability structures built in. 1851: Visibility and Competition Arrive The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 was the world's first massive B2B trade show in sales history. Thousands of exhibitors. Hundreds of thousands of attendees. A giant glass building called the Crystal Palace. Nearly 200 years later, sales pros still pack convention centers, set up booths, and fight to stand out in a sea of competitors. This is where B2B sales became visible. You weren't just competing against one or two local merchants anymore. You were standing next to dozens of alternatives, all promising similar value. Differentiation became mandatory. Following up meant writing a letter and waiting weeks for a response. Today, if you're not following up within 24 hours, you're losing to competitors who are. 1957: Reach and Leverage Scale Up The first inside sales team was formed at a company called Dial America in 1957. Before that, if you wanted to sell, you hit the road. Door-to-door, city-to-city, face-to-face. Every single deal required physical presence. The telephone changed everything. Suddenly, salespeople could work virtually, reach more prospects, and close deals without leaving the office. One seller could now have 20 conversations in a day instead of three. The math of sales productivity fundamentally shifted. Fast forward to today, and inside sales is the dominant model. The tools have evolved—Zoom calls, screen shares, digital demos—but the core principle remains: you don't need to be in the same room to build trust and close deals. From Stone Tablets to Instant Messages: Why Speed Matters Now Think about the effort that the merchant put into carving his complaint into stone. He didn't fire off a quick email. He didn't leave a one-star Google review. He created a permanent record that would outlive both him and the seller by thousands of years. Today, complaints are easy. Maybe too easy. A customer can blast you on LinkedIn, tank your review scores, or CC your entire executive team on an email thread—all before lunch. Every major shift in B2B sales increased speed. Trade shows multiplied visibility. Telephones let sellers reach 20 prospects a day instead of three. Email collapsed follow-up from weeks to hours. Social media made reputation instant and permanent. In 1750 BCE, you had time to respond. Now, you have hours—maybe minutes. Each acceleration rewarded the sellers who could execute fast without sacrificing quality. The ones who couldn't keep up disappeared. Why This Timeline Matters More Than You Think We’re in another massive shift in sales history. AI, automation, predictive analytics—the pace is relentless. It’s easy to think everything has changed. Zoom out 4,000 years, and the pattern emerges: speed accelerates, but the core practices stay the same. So the next time you get a harsh email from a customer, remember that stone tablet. You don’t have to worry about your ...
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    43 min
  • How Do You Stop Prospects From No-Showing Virtual Appointments (Ask Jeb)

    How Do You Stop Prospects From No-Showing Virtual Appointments (Ask Jeb)
    Feb 10 2026
    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 Weissmueller faces every single day. Emily is a former elementary school teacher who pivoted into K-12 edtech sales eleven years ago. She works with special education administrators, and like so many salespeople in 2026, her meetings are primarily virtual. She’s doing everything right: prospecting consistently, securing appointments, sending calendar invites. But when it’s time for the meeting? Hit or miss. Sometimes they show up. Sometimes she’s sitting there waiting while nobody logs on. If you’ve ever stared at a Zoom room alone wondering if your prospect forgot about you, you know exactly how this feels. And if you’re wondering whether confirmation emails help or hurt, you’re asking the wrong question entirely. The Virtual Meeting Paradox Let’s be honest about something: Virtual meetings are throwaway appointments for both sides. When you had to drive four hours to meet someone in person, both parties had serious skin in the game. You invested time, gas money, and effort. Your prospect blocked their calendar knowing you were making the trip. Neither of you would casually blow that off. But virtual meetings? They’re low commitment on both ends. No one’s driving anywhere. It’s just a calendar block that can easily get bumped by the next urgent thing that pops up. And when you’re selling into education like Emily is, where everything moves infinitely slow and decision-makers are incredibly risk-averse, you’ve got even more working against you. The question isn’t whether to send a confirmation email. The real question is: How do you stack the deck so heavily in your favor that prospects feel obligated to show up? The Commitment and Consistency Framework There’s a principle in human behavior called commitment and consistency. When people commit to something, they typically feel compelled to follow through. Otherwise, they feel guilty. And guilt is actually useful because you can leverage it to reschedule when someone doesn’t show. But the goal isn’t to make prospects feel guilty after they no-show. The goal is to engineer so many small commitments throughout the process that they show up in the first place. Here’s the system that works: Step 1: Confirm Verbally When You Set the Meeting When your prospect agrees to meet, always repeat it back: “Okay, so I’ve got you on Thursday, January 26th at 2:00 PM. Did I get that right?” When they say yes, that’s commitment number one. You’re putting it in their brain. You’re making it real. Then say this: “Let me grab your email and I’ll send you a meeting invite for your calendar just to make it convenient for you.” This does two things. First, it confirms you have the right email. Second, it gets another yes. That’s commitment number two. Step 2: Send a Meeting Invite That Actually Helps Most meeting invites are useless. They say “Meeting with Jeb Blount” or “Sales Call” and include seventeen different international dial-in numbers that nobody needs. Here’s what your meeting invite should look like: Title: Emily Weissmueller (Company Name) + Prospect Name (School Name) – Why We’re Meeting Location: Virtual Meeting (then paste the meeting link, nothing else) Notes: Keep it simple. Here’s the meeting link. If it’s a phone option, include just that number. Then add: “If anything changes, here’s my direct number and email.” When your prospect looks at their calendar the morning of the meeting and sees this, they know exactly who you are, why you’re meeting, and how to join. You own the moral high ground. Step 3: Send a Video (This Is Non-Negotiable) The next morning after you set the meeting, pull out your phone and record a 20-30 second video. Look at the camera. Smile. Sound excited. “Emily, this is Jeb at Sales Gravy. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me. I’m so excited to spend time learning about you and your mission for helping these kids. Just want to confirm our meeting is on January 26th at 2:00 PM. The invite is on your calendar. I can’t wait to see you.” Send that via email. Now think about what you’ve just done. You’ve made it personal. You’ve shown effort. You’ve demonstrated that you actually care about this conversation. It’s exponentially harder for them to no-show because they can see you’re a real human who invested time in this relationship. This philosophy is about going the extra mile to demonstrate that you’re different, that you care, and that this matters. Step 4: Leave a Voicemail the Day Before The afternoon before your meeting, when you know your prospect is likely gone for the day, call and leave a voicemail. “Hey Emily, this is Jeb. I’m so excited to meet with you tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about your ...
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    13 min
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