Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

On this Sales Gravy podcast episode, Jeb Blount and Daniel Disney discuss the real secrets to becoming a LinkedIn selling machine. You’ll learn the keys to to filling your pipeline with qualified opportunities, building your personal brand, improving your closing ratios, and increasing your income. Why You Should Use LinkedIn’s Marketing Power LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools ever created for sales professionals. It ranks right up there with the car, telephone, and the internet. Leveraging LinkedIn gives you the ability to connect with and learn more about prospects and customers than at any other time in history. Sales professionals who master LinkedIn quickly rise to the top of the ranking report. LinkedIn offers a huge opportunity for salespeople, but it isn’t easy and not everyone was born with the skills to use it. Salespeople need to learn and practice using LinkedIn. It isn’t something that you can jump into headfirst and be successful. As salespeople, you tend to automatically sell, but with LinkedIn, you have to take a step back from your regular habits. It is all about the long game and building relationships, not quick sales. You Have To Find The Balance Between Your Professional Persona And The Personal You Another problem that most salespeople have when using LinkedIn is that they have a hard time finding a balance. We are so used to using social media in our personal lives that when we have to use LinkedIn professionally, it feels strange and can become a balancing act between being our professional self and staying social. When you get it, however, it is a very powerful tool. LinkedIn is about nuance and building familiarity to create awareness for your product, and it is also a direct message tool. People Have Different Preferences For Receiving Messages That Resonate One thing to remember is that people have different preferences when it comes to engaging. Some like the phone, some like email, while some don’t have the time to talk and others have full email boxes. LinkedIn is a different way to reach someone to start a conversation, so in some respects, it can be a pirate’s way in – but only if you use it effectively.  The key is reaching the prospect with the right message at the right time, and that often takes sequencing your communication so that it is cumulative and encompassing. When you think about the numerous ways that we now communicate, you can’t just use one channel, be it email, telephone, instant messaging, or snail mail. You have to be the master of all of them and master using LinkedIn’s marketing power. If you only choose one silo, then statistically you are going to miss prospects. And if you do, you miss building familiarity through a channel and the cumulative effect. Success lies not in one over the other; it is about using all the tools and being persistent in an authentic way. Persistence Is The Key To Building A Certain Amount Of Reciprocity Persistence is a mental skill for people, and it demonstrates that you care about them and believe that you have the solution to help them. Also, when you are persistent on a genuine level of obligations, you develop a certain amount of reciprocity. When someone does something nice for you, and you are in the right place at the right time, you are likely to gain their business. You have to blend and sequence all the channels that you have to reach your prospect, which involves cumulative messaging. People have so many different ways of communicating that you need to hit them from every angle you have at your disposal. Using LinkedIn’s marketing power comprehensively can help you achieve that! Consistency Adds Cumulative Layers Of Messaging The key to LinkedIn is consistency. If you walk into a conference room and you stand in the corner and don’t say a word, you aren’t going to make any connections. If you walk in, however, and you strike up conversations with people, you are going to create connections that will generate business. That is the nature of LinkedIn. If you show up consistently and people see you more and more, they build familiarity with you and get to know you. It is all of those cumulative layers where every time they see your face or your name, they come to recognize you and ultimately build a relationship with you. Without consistency, it becomes harder for you to pitch.  Familiarity leads to liking. The more I see you, the more I like you. It is like a song that you hear; often you have to hear it many times before the tune catches on, and once it does, you feel a connection to it. We call it LCS – like, comment, share – that creates a connection. Building A Routine  Feed Your LinkedIn Pipeline Like feeding your pipeline, LinkedIn requires building a routine so every day you are doing a little bit more to create brand familiarity. Set time aside like you would with prospecting and feeding the pipeline – whether it is 30 minutes or an hour – and commit to posting. After three months, it will become routine. Repetition leads to habit and some days are going to be harder than others, but consistency is a must. Putting in the work will be a game-changer. Curation Can Give You Some Breathing Room From Creative Burnout Sometimes you can get burnout from creating new content and it can feel like a grind. Curated content gives you some breathing room and allows you to step back and recharge your social batteries. Going completely MIA could jeopardize the progress made. This is where your professional and personal persona have to balance. Putting more of “you” into your engagements leads to authenticity and diving deeper into relationships with people. It Isn’t All About Likes When Using LinkedIn’s Marketing Power We get so caught up in scoring the highest likes, but likes don’t always convert as well as quality. It is about how well you are “speaking” to the audience and giving them something value-added that is relevant to them personally. Find ways to be creative while still staying within the parameters of your overall marketing message. Taking Cumulative Steps To Familiarity LinkedIn is not something that you jump into too deeply. It is important not to get burned out and not to get into trouble. Disclose parts about yourself, but don’t be too self-disclosed. Whatever it is that you do well, do it on LinkedIn. It is all about being “you” since you are your own brand. When you connect as a person, it is 100% more impactful. Try not to get into your own head and overthink being “creative.” Sometimes the best engagement is found in just being authentic and genuine. Good Behavior And Bad Behavior On LinkedIn There are good ways and bad ways to connect on LinkedIn. The “bait and switch” is one of the quickest ways to turn someone off. It involves sending a connection request with something that is favorable to your prospect, and then going in for the hard sell when they accept. It makes you appear disingenuous, leading to the prospect feeling manipulated. You wouldn’t make a prospecting call where you pretended to be interested in your prospect and the very next second try to sell them something, so don’t do it on LinkedIn. As salespeople, sometimes we go on autopilot and all we think about is the sale and close.  When you switch off autopilot, that is when the real sales happen. Hyper-personalization is the key to creating relationships. The more you make your message about them, the more conversions you will create. The “Spray And Pray” Campaign Won’t Work On LinkedIn, Either! Don’t try to lure them in or you will lose them right out of the gate. The “spray and pray” campaign doesn’t work anywhere else, so don’t think that it is appropriate on LinkedIn. If you remain genuine in your conversation with someone, they are much more likely to grant you a sit-down. LinkedIn is one of the best sales resources out there to build your brand and create relationships. But you have to be consistent, add variety, and build relationships not sales. For more tips, check out Jeb Blount’s book  Fanatical Prospecting. It provides you all you need to be a marketing guru, using cumulative prospecting and the channel sequencing you need to get your message across. NEW BOOK: Jeb Blount’s new book, Selling the Price Increase is an essential handbook for sales professionals, account managers, customer success teams, and other revenue generation leaders looking for a page-turning and insightful roadmap to navigating the essential—and nerve-wracking—world of price increases. Get your copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Price-Increase-Ultimate-Customers/dp/111989929X/

The buyers in procurement are professionally trained to negotiate. Salespeople not so much. This can put you at a huge disadvantage when you are forced to negotiate with them. But not anymore. On this fascinating Sales Gravy Podcast episode, Jeb Blount who is the author of the sales negotiating book INKED and Mike Landers an ex-procurement buyer turned sales trainer teach you the secrets to playing to win, when negotiating with procurement. You’ll learn the keys to mastering the sales negotiating chessboard and going toe to toe with professional buyers who are paid to extract maximum concessions from you. Want more tips on effective sales negotiation? Then download our free training guide on the Seven Rules of Sales Negotiation here: https://salesgravy.com/7-rules-sales-negotiation-guide/

On this special episode of the Sales Gravy podcast you’ll step into the shoes of a Senior Vice President of Sales.  Jeb Blount, Jr. (A.K.A. JBJ) interviews Ammon Woods who is the Senior Vice President of Sales for Shred-It and Communication Solutions at Stericycle. If you love sales and sales origin stories you’ll enjoy this wide ranging interview on the keys to high-performance in sales. If you aspire to rise to the upper echelons in your organization, this episode will give you a peak behind the curtain into what it’s like lead a large, national sales team. Looking for more free resources to help you boost your sales career? We’ve got them here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount (author of Selling the Price Increase) and Donald C. Kelly (host of the Sales Evangelist podcast) discuss how to approach customers with price increases. You’ll learn techniques, tactics, and strategies for crafting price increase messages, planning price increase conversations, and compelling customers to accept price increases without losing their business. At Sales Gravy we are constantly adding free sales training resources to our growing library of downloads. Check them out here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

Most sales organizations and sales enablement teams are actively seeking ways to ramp salespeople up fast on new sales technology. Likewise, many sales leaders and executives have experienced the frustration of investing in Sales Tech only to see it go unused by their sellers. If you’ve been there, you know that it’s a huge waste of money when sales teams fail to adopt sales tools. On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount, Sr (Author of Fanatical Prospecting) and Sean Adams (Head of Sales for iorad), discuss how to ramp salespeople up fast on new sales technology and the keys to teaching salespeople how leverage sales technology to become more productive. At Sales Gravy we are constantly adding free sales training resources to our growing library of downloads. Check them out here: https://salesgravy.com/resources/

 “God, when I cross the truth, give me the awareness to receive it the consciousness to recognize it the presence to personalize it the patience to preserve it and the courage to live it.” ― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights The number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline. The number one reason for an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect every day, every day, every day. This is the truth. A brutal, universal, and undeniable truth. But, of course, the truth, as the saying goes, is like poetry and everyone effing hates poetry. A few weeks back, my 24-year-old son was delivering a telephone prospecting workshop to a group of sales development reps (SDRs) who were all about his age. Early in the training, one of the reps pointed out that my mega-bestselling book Fanatical Prospecting, “Was written a while back.” And asked, “Is it even relevant anymore?” The young, always eager for the next bright, shiny thing and ready to chunk any ideas perceived to be “old.” That’s always been true from one generation to the other. ANY EXCUSE NOT TO PROSPECT What is also true though is that sales reps of all generations, for at least the past 125 years, have been willing to make any excuse, and I mean any excuse, to avoid the grind and pain of prospecting. And that’s exactly what this young man was seeking to do. He wanted my son to let him off the hook. To say that prospecting was old-school, that the marketing department should deliver hot leads on a silver platter and that he could while away the sales day sending asynchronous, automated email spam to prospects on his company’s sales engagement platform and call that prospecting. Mostly, he wanted validation that “that the telephone didn’t work anymore” and he could avoid talking to people. My son responded, “What do you think has changed in the past six years?” The young SRD shot back, “Well, nobody answers the phone anymore.” At that, my son pulled up his prospecting list for the day, showed it to the group, and said, “Ok, let’s test your hypothesis.” Then, he began dialing, right in front of the SDRs. In the first fifteen dials, he spoke to four decision makers and set two appointments. Then turned to the group and asked, “Any more questions?” Cased closed. As Elvis Presley said so aptly, “The truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.” YOU CANNOT BE DELUSIONAL AND SUCCESSFUL AT THE SAME TIME Of course, there are loud voices, mostly on social media outlets, who shout that cold calling is dead, the telephone is dead, sales is dead, and one form or another of prospecting is dead – depending on which way the wind is blowing that day. Still others shout loudly from their “holier than thou” mountain top that robots and AI should take the place of people for sales prospecting activity. They argue that allowing these bots to spam stupid humans via email, text, and direct messaging is the secret to all present and future sales success. It isn’t. People hate robots and spammers. Put these two annoyances together and it only serves to turn prospects off and teach them to ignore generic, mindless robot messages. “Being loud,” says Mark Homer, in Uncommon Sense, “doesn’t increase the value or validity of their opinion. In fact, often by the very nature of being the loudest, those opinions are typically the furthest from reality.” The young sales rep in the story above is among the multitudes of sales professionals who are susceptible to these messages that pander to their fear and discomfort with interrupting strangers with prospecting activity. On a perpetual trip to delusionville and burdened by confirmation bias, sales professionals who believe that they can avoid prospecting seek out any information or excuse that contravenes the truth and gives them an easy way out. But you cannot be delusional and successful in sales at the same time. The results are predictable. Sales professionals who avoid prospecting spend their days at the Feast or Famine Amusement Park riding the desperation roller coaster. Abandon prospecting. Hide behind excuses. Complain that the leads are weak. Suffer with a thin pipeline. Sell from a place of desperation. Miss quota consistently. Get fired. Move on to the next sales job. Rinse and repeat the same loser behaviors. SALES SUCCESS IS PAID FOR IN ADVANCE WITH PROSPECTING The truth is: The more people you talk with, the larger your pipeline will grow and the more you will sell. And talking with people means you need to engage both strangers and existing accounts in conversations. If you don’t consistently prospect you will sub-optimize your income, fail and get fired. Prospecting is hard work. It is long stretches of pain and grind, interrupted by a few brief moments of elation. Prospecting is not blissful, fun, easy or an activity that you are likely to look forward to. It sucks and nothing will make it suck less. There is no easy button for prospecting. In Sales, success is paid for in advance with prospecting, and the rent is due every single day. Therefore, you must face the truth and make a choice for success or failure. Ultra-High Performance or mediocrity. Losing or winning. Some salespeople get offended when I confront them with these binary and brutal choices. I get it. The truth hurts and feels offensive when you are lying to yourself. Cognitive dissonance is a painful emotion. But the lies will cripple you. Never forget that the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline. The number one reason for an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect every day, every day, every day. In the most comprehensive book ever written about sales prospecting, you learn the real secret to improving sales productivity and growing your income fast. DOWNLOAD THE FREE FANATICAL PROSPECTING BOOK CLUB GUIDE HERE.

During the holiday season, sales professionals face a host of difficult challenges. The holidays offer a perfect excuse not to go out and prospect new business. It is harder to close deals in December and create urgency with pipeline opportunities, let alone engage and get meetings with new prospects. And now more than ever, it’s critical to have proper time discipline to reach your goals and crush your number as the end of the year approaches, while also setting yourself up to have a robust Q1 pipeline in the new year. In this conversation between Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) and Anthony Iannarino (Eat Their Lunch), they break down exactly how to deal with these end of year roadblocks and truly outsell the holidays. You’ll learn how to sell more and still have fun over the holidays! You get specific tips, tactics, and techniques for compelling buyers to act, prospecting, time management, and keeping your pipeline full so you start the new year strong. Jeb and Anthony will also teach you how to: Target high potential prospects who have an urgency to buy now— maybe they have left over budget or are looking for year-end specials for products or services Create urgency with pipeline opportunities by using the emotional and business outcome value equation Build your Q1 pipeline with targeted lists and daily outbound prospecting Develop a daily battle rhythm with high intensity activity sprints and time blocking strategies Also find out: How much is too much when it comes to holiday promotions and marketing offers. Listen to the podcast or watch the video HERE. You may also want to read: Why Holiday Parties Can Make or Break Your Sales Career  

This is another episode of #AskJeb where Jeb answers a question, from Justin, a sales leader based in Dallas. Justin asked: “What’s the best predictive indicator of a person becoming a sales champion.” Sales Champions Are Optimists This is a question that sales leaders all across the globe grapple with because they all want to hire sales champions and build sales champions. The answer is relatively simple, and it’s based on studies that have come from numerous places. It comes down to optimism. Salespeople who have a higher degree of optimism tend to become champions, and for good reason. Salespeople face a lot of defeat, a lot of rejection, and so many things can go wrong in sales that salespeople who wallow in that defeat have a tendency to crash and burn pretty quickly. Sales Champs Forget Failure Fast However, the salespeople who forget rejection fast or forget failure fast and see the next yes, the next opportunity around the corner— those are the salespeople who are more likely to be more mentally resilient. They have a stronger ability to make a shift or be more agile. They’re the ones that when things go wrong, rather than saying, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?” they’re more likely to say, “What am I supposed to learn from this failure? What am I supposed to learn from this defeat?” Therefore, they continue to grow and improve over time. So How Do You Find Salespeople Like That? The key is in your interview process. During the interview, you’re looking for that glimmer of optimism. You need to ask questions about what they have done in the past when they faced defeat. Have them give you a specific situation where they failed and what they did next. Create A Winning Atmosphere As a leader, you want to hire people who have a high degree of optimism, but you also want to build that optimism by creating an atmosphere that people want to be in. That’s a winning atmosphere that rewards people for the good work that they do by patting them on the back and doesn’t beat them up for the things that they do wrong. Instead, it coaches them when they do things that don’t work out to get better or to learn from that. Through your coaching and through your leadership, you want to build an environment where you’re fostering and nurturing that optimism because optimism is the greatest predictor of a person becoming a sales champion. Take your prospecting campaigns to the next level, get into more doors, build deeper relationships, and close more deals with the techniques in our FREE guide, The Seven Steps To Building Effective Prospecting Sequences.

It’s How You Sell That Matters Most On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount Jr. and Larry Levine, author of Selling From the Heart, discuss why how you sell is often more important than what you sell. Larry and JBJ break down why sales professionals who demonstrate authenticity and empathy gain a clear competitive advantage and what it really means to sell from the heart. Watch the Video  

On this #AskJeb, Jeb Blount takes a question from Becca who wants to know what to do when prospects hang up on cold calls. Getting hung up on can be disconcerting, discouraging, and often feel like rejection. But, they don’t have to be. Jeb gives you tips and tactics for dealing effectively with prospects who hang up during cold calls.