Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss why sales is a process. You will learn about pre-call planning, the science of selling and why winging it on sales calls is wickedly stupid. Listen to Part One - Selling Without Selling Listen to Part Two - Intentional Empathy

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss intentional empathy discuss and it is a meta-skill in complex sales. Empathy is the key to stepping into your buyer's shoes, understanding their situation, and building relationships. Yet, the best salespeople are naturally less empathetic and more self-centered. Therefore, to be more effective at closing complex sales, they must focus on and leverage intentional empathy. Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process Becoming Other-Focused Jeb: The statistics and scientific data tell us that salespeople who are more self-centered over time, have a tendency to do better than people who are more empathetic. Now there's a reason for that. That exists in sales, and even as a business owner, you need to be a little bit self-centered because you have to put all your effort into your business. How do we, as naturally self-centered people, shift into becoming other-focused? Really Get To Know Your Prospect Diane: If you believe that being interested in other people is how you're going to get to a goal, and that goal is to have really great business with people and companies you really like and can really help, you naturally want to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Long-term, that's going to be what's best for your business and best for you. So then if you say, “The only way I'm going to know whether this is a relationship I should enter into is by learning about them. So I just have to make that happen.” Your focus has to be on discovery, investigation, archeology, whatever you want to call it, so that I can learn as much about them— not just about the problem they're having that I could solve— but about them, how they work, their philosophies, their values, etc. Those things are all part of being in a business relationship. The more I know, the more I'm going to be able to identify how I can help them. And then I can shine because I'm going to be able to point it out to them. I'm really able to say, “This is what I heard, this is how we can help.” It's hard to have objections when I really heard what you said and I’m matching everything that you told me. Then we're both walking down the same road. I think it comes down to really understanding what you want and the way to get there is by knowing as much as you possibly can about your prospect. The Best Objection In Sales Jeb: Yesterday, I was doing a training with a group of veteran salespeople and we were talking about objections. And one of the things I said to them is, “The best objection that you get is the one that never shows up.” And it doesn't show up because you did all the work up front and you got to know them. As you got to know them, either the objections got on the table or the objections just went away and it's often when you go, “Hello, wanna buy?” you know, that's when the objections go up. So I think what you said about making sure that you're doing all of that homework is really important. You're doing sales archeology and understanding them and as you pull all of that information in, you're matching your recommendations to what they see as both their success criteria and their evaluation criteria for doing business with you. And when you match it up, there's no objection. It just makes sense to do business together for both of you. Build Trust And Show Up As A Professional Diane: If it doesn't match up, it doesn't match up. So you say, “Listen, I'm not the best resource for you. Let me point you towards somebody who is.” And there's no weird conversation, but this is also why the salesperson has to ask a lot of questions and questions that are uncomfortable like the budget question or the decision-making question. There are ways of asking those questions so that you just continue to build trust and show up as a professional.

This Sales Gravy Podcast episode is part one of Jeb Blount's (Virtual Selling) conversation with Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) about why for business owners, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals success in selling and business growth really isn't about "selling." Instead, when you focus on solving problems, that's when the real magic happens. Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here Why Did You Choose To Write This Book? Diane: The book is called Succeed Without Selling: The More You Think About Selling The Less You'll Sell. I decided to write it because so many salespeople and small business owners are, in my estimation, behaving badly because they are so focused on selling that they're not getting what they want. They're not getting the results that they want and it's frustrating. And so I thought, this is what I teach when I do sales training. What if I could put it into a book and just tell them everything about sales mindset? You know, what happens when you do this, but what happens when you do that, with scripts and, and templates in the back of the book. If I can just give them everything, hopefully, a bell will go off in their head and they'll start doing things differently and achieve better results. So Why Does Being Successful in Sales Have Nothing To Do With Selling? Diane: When salespeople are selling, they are thinking about themselves. They're thinking about the fact that they have to hit quota, that they have to get revenue, that they have to do all of these things. Their mindset is, “I need to convince you that you need what I have to sell. I have to be eloquent enough and say the right things. I have to be persuasive.” They do it at networking events, they do it when they're in a sales meeting, they do it all the time. And the truth is that when salespeople behave that way, they don't get the sale because they're not listening. They're not matching what they have to what that person needs. They're not hearing what the situation is. So that's why I say that it's not about selling. It's about solving, right? It's about connecting and making sure that it's a good fit because that's how you get long-term business relationships that serve your business for decades. Sales Is Not About Selling, It's About Solving Jeb: I totally agree with you. Not that long ago, I was doing training out in Oregon and one of the people in my class was an ex CIA agent. I was teaching some concepts out of Sales EQ around human influence frameworks. And he grabbed me and said, “What's the difference between what you're teaching and what we were doing as CIA agents? Essentially, when we were bringing people in, we were using the same frameworks you're teaching to get people to turn over information or rat out someone else. And I said, “The human brain works the way the human brain works." For example, if you listen to someone, it makes them like you more. It's just how we operate. And if they like you more and you listen to them, they're more likely to give you something because you made them feel good. I mean, that's just basic influence frameworks, but what you said is exactly how I explained it to him. I said, “In your line of work, you were using these influence frameworks to manipulate people into giving you what you wanted. And in my line of work, I help people, and I solve problems." "I'm Not The Right Fit For You" Jeb: The very last thing I want to do is sell someone something, or do something for someone that they don't want or don't need. And that doesn't mean that I couldn't because I'm pretty good at influencing people and persuading people. I could certainly do that.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount focuses on brokeness and the two common mindsets of highly successful people and how to grow from adversity. This past week I stumbled on this quote passage from Vance Havner.  God uses broken things: broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength and broken people to do great things.  We have all been broken in some way, no matter what your path, no matter where you came from, no matter where you started, no matter where you finished, no matter how rich you are, how poor you are, everyone at some level has been broken.  That's good news because as human beings, brokeness binds us together. It's the one thing that we all have in common.  When we have faced that adversity and we have grown from it, is a story that we can tell other people. It's something we have that's part of us that we can share, and we can help other people with.  One of the things I've noticed recently is that there are a lot of people out there that are doing everything possible to avoid being broken, avoid adversity, and avoid even being bent.  They avoid pain and they shy away from obstacles. This is a mistake because adversity - being broken - is our greatest teacher. It is through the crucible of adversity that we become stronger.  Transformation Sometimes we're so broken that it transforms us. It changes us. We come back from that deep pain, different than who we were before.  Sometimes it opens up our eyes so that we can truly see. Other times it opens up our heart so that we can truly feel and love. That's the power of brokenness.  God uses broken things.  The Two Most Important Mindsets I've had the privilege of traveling to every continent on the globe except Antarctica. Along the way I've met some incredible people from all walks of life. What I've learned about successful people, is that ultimately they share two mindsets in common.  First, they believe that there is a higher power in their lives that put them on Earth for a purpose, and they're supposed to fulfill that purpose. In other words, they believe that they're supposed to be successful in their walk in life. The second thing they believe is that everything happens for a reason. This is the strongest of the two because this mindset gives you strength. This mindset frees you from the chains of victimhood.  This mindset that everything happens for a reason, allows you to learn from being broken. Learn from adversity, learn from pain, learn from the bad things that are going to happen to you; and trust me, bad things are going to happen to you. You will be broken again and again and again.   The Choice What successful people realize is that this is just part of walking through life and you have a choice about how you view this brokenness.  If it makes you a victim, you learn nothing. It holds you down, holds you back, and leads to misery and suffering.   On the other hand, if you believe that God (or your personal higher power) uses broken things on purpose, then you ask to most uplifting question: "What am I supposed to learn from this?" Sometimes what you learn is that you were broken because you were on the wrong path and that you need to get back to your purpose. In other situations, it's a signal that you need to make a quick course correction. What you were doing wasn't working. Try something new. Sometimes being broken gets you fired up. It's becomes the fuel and the motivation to get back up, dust yourself off, and run back into the game.  God uses broken things, broken soul to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength and broken people to do great things.  Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) answers a listener's question about how to effectively balance prospecting for new logos with serving and managing existing accounts. Balance Prospecting and Account Management Maggie is a member of my insider group, and she asked me a pretty important question about how to balance prospecting and account management. “I'm a top salesperson, and I want to stay on top. But one of the things about my job is that I have to manage and service my existing accounts, and I have to go out and look for new logos and new opportunities. And the more business that I sell, the harder it is for me to prospect to go find new opportunities so that I can sell more." If in your sales job, you have to go hunt new accounts and you have to manage the accounts that you go out and close, then Maggie's question makes a lot of sense. It's hard to be a hunter and a zookeeper at the same time. Going out, prospecting, facing rejection, knocking on doors, picking up the phone, and calling people is completely different than servicing your accounts, upselling, cross-selling, and retaining the business that you have. This is one of the key reasons why people struggle to balance prospecting with account management. Prospecting Sucks The truth is, in most cases, you struggle to strike a balance because prospecting sucks and you don't want to do it. It's a whole lot easier to call up an existing account, solve their problems, do customer service, and upsell and cross-sell with people that already know you than it is to pick up the phone and call an invisible stranger. It's a whole lot easier to call a friend than to call someone that will probably reject you, because that's what happens in prospecting. You get a lot of rejection. So you say that you struggle with balance, but the reason that you're struggling is that you don't have any balance. You spend all of your time managing accounts and none of your time prospecting. Next, you procrastinate and put off prospecting. You find every excuse not to prospect. Having an account base gives you really good excuses not to prospect, so you don't. The need to prospect and the need to fill up your pipeline begins to add up. You Can't Do All of Your Prospecting At Once Your sales manager is saying, “Hey, you have to go find me some new business,” and you're not making the commissions that you want to make. There's a lot of pressure on you. So suddenly you're faced with, “Oh my goodness gracious, I have to prospect.” Then you try to pile all of your prospecting into one day. Desperately, you try to do it all at one time. That's when you start to run into big problems because you have the demands of your existing account base and you have to prospect. And nobody wants to spend an entire day prospecting because as I said earlier, prospecting sucks. Suddenly, you're overwhelmed with this big old pile of prospecting that you have to do. So you don't prospect. Instead, you go back to account management, which makes the problem worse. Because you're overwhelmed and stressed out, you feel out of balance. You start looking for an easy button solution to a problem that, if you're honest with yourself, you created. Not because of your workload, but because you were avoiding prospecting in the first place. Prospect Every Single Day The key is that you need to prospect a little bit every day. And when you do a little bit of prospecting every single day, you begin to take advantage of the cumulative impact of all those little bits of activity. Breaking up your prospecting activity into little bits that you do every single day also makes it easier. It's a lot more palatable to do the things that you don't want to do in small chunks than to save it all up and do it at one time. The first thing you want to do is begin blocking time out for prospecting. That means that it needs to be on your calendar.

On my final Coronavirus talk, I discuss what happens post-pandemic, the power of blending, and what you need to do right now to now to future-proof your sales career. The Pipe Is Life A year ago, I made the first coronavirus talk about outbound prospecting. No matter when, where, or how as a salesperson, your number one job is to go out and fill up the pipeline. A lot of people were asking questions at the outset of the coronavirus about whether or not they should prospect at all. And if we take a look at the last year, the salespeople who kept the pipeline full, crushed it, and salespeople across all industries had the year of their life because they kept prospecting. Salespeople who were prospecting by foot and in-person moved to the telephone. People that were using the telephone found that because they were working at home and not driving as much, they could double up on their prospecting compared to the year before. A year ago, prospecting consistently was the most important thing that you could do. And today, it is still the most important thing that you can do because the pipe is life. The number one reason why people fail in sales is that they fail to prospect. It's just that simple. We've been through a lot this year. But as we start looking to the future, as salespeople we've got to think, “How do we future-proof ourselves?” There's A Whole New Playing Field In Sales The one thing that is absolutely true about the last year is that we compressed about 10 years’ worth of innovation into a period of about 12 months. Salespeople everywhere woke up to a new playing field.  This playing field was being driven primarily by buyers because buyers had changed. The new playing field was, “I'm not going in person, I'm going to be on a video. I've got to learn how to leverage an omnichannel approach for connecting with my customers and moving deals through my pipeline.”  What top sales professionals discovered over the last year is something called blending. How To Win With Blending Blending is choosing the communication channel at any given point in the sales process that gives you the highest probability of achieving your sales outcome at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. This is the formula for the future: choosing the communication channel that gives you the highest probability of getting the outcome that you desire, at any given place in the sales process, with any given customer, at the lowest cost of time, energy, and money. Essentially, it’s efficiency + effectiveness = productivity. It’s that simple. So as you start thinking about future-proofing yourself, the number one thing you have to do is start mastering every single communication channel, whether it's direct messaging, the phone, video, email, snail mail, you name it. It's the ability to use every possible way to connect with someone. Even with social media or smoke signals if you have to. Mastering all of those channels so that you gain a competitive edge. You can meet your buyers where they are and blend these different communication channels so that you can have more conversations with people. We Can Talk To More People In Less Time If you just go back to what I said earlier, a year ago, I talked about prospecting because one of the truths about sales is that the more people you talk with, the more you're going to sell. But because we have all these different channels to use, now it makes sense that we can talk to more people in less time, which puts more in the pipeline. That means that we're going to sell a lot more in the long run. This is future-proofing. Sadly, over the last year, I've noticed that there are two basic types of salespeople. There are wishbones and there are rainmakers. The wishbones are the folks that were hoping and wishing that things would go back to the way they were. There are people right now looking at the end of the pandemic, which is in front of us and it's going to end very soon,

On this fun Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Sales Gravy Master Trainer Gina Trimarco and Account Executive Jeb Blount Jr discuss how they learned to love selling. From cold calling, to losing deals, and all of the challenges in between, you'll love the story of how a young college grad finds his way in the sale profession. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount is joined by the Women Your Mother Warned You About - Gina Trimarco & Rachel Pitts. We get behind the scenes with the WYMWYA podcast, learn how Gina and Rachel almost broke up, the value of getting a coach, and why when you are coachable, other people will invest in helping you reach your goals. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Sales teams that read together, succeed together. Download our FREE Virtual Selling Book Club Guide for a complete kit for starting and running a book club for your sales team.

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast Jeb Blount and Keith Lubner explore sales messaging tactics for closing bigger deals. From stories to images to stepping into your buyer's shoes, these tried and true techniques will help you both grab and hold your buyer's attention and rise above your competition. There is no doubt that developing powerful sales messaging is one of the most challenging skill sets for modern sales professionals. Jeb and Keith break the process of down in a way that makes it easy to begin crafting sales messages that resonate. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode - we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here

How to celebrate success during the pandemic? Salespeople and their leaders are asking this question. This season, the pandemic has canceled President's Club and moved Sales Kickoffs from physical meetings to virtual. Its left many sales professionals feeling that the work they did to reach the top is anti-climatic and empty. In this Sales Gravy Podcast episode,  Jeb Blount and Victor Antonio discuss the keys to celebrating success and staying motivated this year and beyond. We want to hear from you. What are you doing this year to celebrate success, reward yourself, and stay motivated? Send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or just CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Jeb: Celebrating Victories, Big and Small We are here in studio blue with the great Victor Antonio, who I believe is one of the greatest orators of our generation. His presence on stage excites me. It's incredible, it's engaging, and his stories are real. The path that Victor took to get to where he is today is inspiring. You came up from poverty and you've built an empire since then. I want to talk about some of the issues that people are dealing with today in that context. We're in the third wave of the pandemic right now, and I'm hearing stories of salespeople who just feel down. One of the people in my insider group sent me a text message and it broke my heart. She's like, “I worked all year long. I put everything into getting to President's Club, and then we had our virtual sales kick-off. I saw my name on a bullet point on a slide and it was just completely anti-climatic. How do I celebrate this? How do I tell my family and friends that I had this victory in my life?” It hurt me because I know how that feels. I loved to walk on stage and get a trophy, I lived for that as a salesperson. In fact, I told my sales manager, “I don't care about the money. I want to win. I want the trophy.” So in this world, I thought there was no better person than you to have a conversation with. What can salespeople do to celebrate their victories, both big and small? Victor: Don’t Let Others Determine Your Value It's interesting to me that people want that external validation. A trophy is an inanimate object, you know what I mean? The real victory comes from looking at everything you've done. Take a moment to reflect and say, “Look at what I did!” and walk on your own mental stage. We all want recognition. We all want our successes to be meaningful. But if I just nailed that year, my biggest trophy was always the check. That was my trophy. For people who need that external validation, why do you need it? Why depend on somebody else’s appreciation of you to determine your value? Appreciate it. Live in that space, man. Jeb: Trophies Are The Past, Live in The Present One of the things that I've always lived by is that when you're in second place, your job is to take first place. When you're in first place, you're competing with yourself. The problem with getting good is that you get in first place, you win the trophy, and you forget who you're competing with. You forget that your job is to put the accelerator on instead of getting complacent. Looking at your trophies is living in the past. There are basically three places that you can live at any given time. You can live in the past. You can live in the present. You can live in the future. The only place that's real is the present right now, the future hasn't been written, and the past doesn't exist anymore. It's just something that happened. One of the problems that we face when we’re struggling to motivate ourselves or feel that recognition is that we're living in the wrong place. We need to spend more time in the present than these other places. Victor: The Thrill of the Journey I want to challenge your perception of your success a little. I think your joy really comes in the process of getting to the next level. It has nothing to do with actually reaching the next level.