[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer podcast. Today's guest is the godfather of Prospect and the king of cold calls, the man you call when your sales pipeline runs dry. The only guy I know that could sell a mirror to a vampire. One of my favorite authors and thought leaders on planet Earth.

Mr. Jeb Blount. Hello, sir.

[00:00:44] Jeb: Hey, how are you doing? Nice to have or nice to be, honestly about to say. Nice to have you on my podcast. Nice to be on someone else's podcast. Thank you, Jay.

[00:00:53] Jay: Yeah, it's so great to have you. And I gotta tell people, you know, you sent, I, I'm on your marketing stuff. I'm a big Fanatical prospecting fan. I got one of your marketing emails and I said, look, this is Jeb at Sales Grave. I said, I'm gonna try emailing back just to see if, and sure enough, you know, maybe 20 minutes later you sent me back, a yes.

I'll be on the show. And,I really appreciate it and I know you're all over the place. Actually, I wanna play,F Mary Kill real quick, if you're familiar with that game. f Mary kill J-F-K-L-A-X or DFW,which ones would you do?

[00:01:24] Jeb: JFK. J-F-K-L-A-X-D-F-W-J-F-K-L-A-X-L-A-X. 

[00:01:30] Jay: All right. All right. Those are the ones. All right, we'll do that. All right. We'll, I mentioned this before the show you, Do a good job of being professional, Jeb Blount, and you don't have a lot of, you know, too much, visibility into the background of such a popular guy, and I don't even want to get into how you've managed to do that.

What I am interested in is where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being this, you know, sales machine slash entrepreneur slash kind of public speaking? did anything where you grew up kind of impact that?

[00:01:59] Jeb: You, I don't know if anything where I grew up impacted. I grew up in, on a farm in the country, in, in a little town called Harlem, Georgia. Went to a small high school. I can tell you that, you know, as a public speaker, I. In high school, I would always find a way to be the public speaker. So one of the things I did was I went to Model UN, for example, as a student, and I came back and they had the entire school there together.

Not a big school, but the entire school in the gym. And I gave an entire speech using a British accent. Talking about Model un. So I would do things like that and I was, you know, I was active at school, I was active on the yearbook, I was active in clubs and played sports. I played as many sports as I could possibly play.

So, you know, being out and being around people was normal. you know, even I was even on the, like the quartet. So I, we, you know, we, I was on the debate team, so I was always doing things like that. I think that. Growing up in a small town, in a small school, and I was a small person, so I was a, you know, I wasn't the biggest person out there.

I was not the best athlete on any of the teams, although I did well, I had to fight constantly, you know, with, to, to be relevant to I guess, my peers and sometimes I just to fight because I was little and people would bully me, so I had to fight back. So I think I took a lot of. A lot outta that where I had like a chip on my shoulder coming out of grade school, middle school, going into high school where I always felt like I, I had to prove something or had to, had to be better than everyone else.

And so the only thing I could tell you that I brought out of it was. I've just got this belief in myself that I'm not the smartest person in the world because I'm not the best author in the world. I'm not the best trainer. I'm certainly not the best speaker. If you ever hear me on stage, I make up stuff like, I mean, literally, I'll make up words.

I stumble over myself. I've never been the best at anything. Nobody will outhustle me. Nobody. And that's why a lot of people call me like the hardest working man in sales, because you can be better than me, but I will wear you out because I will work you to death. I will outwork you. I will be there when you're not there.

I will, you're you don't show up. I'm gonna show up for your customer. and that, that has a tendency over time to pay off. Like, I mean, it's like the analogy with water. If you looked at the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is the result of the persistence of water just flowing over the land. I just look myself the same way.

So I think if anything came out of my childhood, it was just that. And I didn't grow up in a bad home. Grew up in a great home with great parents, and I'm the oldest of five kids and I don't have some, you know, some, you know, rags to riches story. I just have. I was always in a situation where I was having to fight for, you know, for what I wanted.

and not like fist fighting, but just fighting. And, I just think that, I think that rolled over into my adulthood.

[00:04:48] Jay: Okay.

And what was your sport of choice? I know you played a lot. I mean, everybody kind of has their favorite. What do you fall back

[00:04:54] Jeb: in, in high school and college, it was soccer. So I built a good sport for someone of my stature. Today is golf. Like today, you know, I'm, I was, we were just having a conversation 'cause I hurt my wrist and I haven't been able to play golf and I'm very sad about that right now. But I love golf.

[00:05:07] Jay: Okay. All right. d do you use sports or have you used sports in any of your sales kind of, methodology to break the ice? To do, you know, are you a

sports guy? Yeah.

[00:05:20] Jeb: Because if you think about sales, the salespeople we're elite athletes, we're just elite athletes of business. I you think about any company out there, your salespeople are the reason you exist if you don't have people selling them. When I say salespeople could be your receptionist if your receptionist, sales stuff, but the people in your organization that are actually standing in front of your customers or having conversation with customers, selling things.

Without them, you have no business. Because the way businesses fail is you are, you either don't get enough customers, you don't keep enough customers. That's how you fail. So salespeople are the elite athletes in the business world, and sales in particular is a skill position. No different than any other athlete.

So

[00:05:59] Jay: Yep.

[00:05:59] Jeb: you like, you know, we're high in football season right now. We're Georgia Bulldogs down here and from the college standpoint, and,we try to be Atlanta Falcons, but it's really hard. So we, but if you look at athletes on the field, there's a coach there. They're training, they're doing repetitions, they're practicing.

Sales is the same way. The reason that elite NFL players are always practicing is because all of those skills eventually will degrade over time if they're not practicing. Same thing for golf. if you practice and practice golf, you get better and better at golf. So the same thing for sales.

Sales is a skill position, just like any other skill position. So salespeople need to read, they need to go to training, they need to practice, they need to role play. And the people that lead them need to understand that you don't put sales on someone's business card and then expect them to go make touchdowns for you.

You, you've got to build the skills.

[00:06:51] Jay: I love that. What did you wanna do when you grew up?

[00:06:54] Jeb: I wanna be a lawyer. So my dad is my dad, one of the, in his time, one of the America's greatest jurist, one of his great lawyers, great legal minds. I used to, when I was a kid. During the summertime, I would go to federal court. That would be my babysitter. And I would sit in the courtroom and watch my dad try cases and he was like the tiger woods of his day when he showed up.

A lot of times people just folded up. So, I wanted to be a lawyer my entire life and I got into sales outta college. 'cause like a lot of people do, because I had, I went to school, got my degree, got married. Law school was on my radar, applied to law school, took the LSAT, got accepted, but in the meantime, I was selling things and I told my company at the time, I'm quitting because I'm gonna go to law school.

And they came to me and said, look, what is it gonna take to keep you? Like we, we don't wanna lose you. What will it take? And. I'm hemming and hawing and they made me a couple offers and I went and talked to my dad about it and I said, look, they're, you know, these people are offering me all this money.

They're offering me a promotion. They're gonna make me a leader of a team. I've been accepted to law school, the same law school you went to. I wanna go to law school. And my dad sat down with me and said, here's, I'm gonna give you some advice. He goes, I think you're gonna be way more successful in business than you will in law.

I think you're gonna be way happier and you're gonna make way more money if you go do that. And my entire life, all I thought about was being a lawyer. And it was one of those like weird moments in life where it's like the, that Robert Frost poem where, you know, there's two paths in the wood. And I took the business path and I never looked back.

Like at that moment, I never regretted, never looked back, never said, I wish I'd gone to law school. I just chose that path. But my dad was a guide there. I don't know if he was right or wrong about business or law school, but we could argue that, you know, 17 books in maybe I found my place. But, but that was the, that was just the moment of truth.

It was, I was, I think 24 years old when I made that, that fateful decision.

[00:08:46] Jay: And when, how long after that did you write your first book?

[00:08:50] Jeb: I didn't write my book, my first book until 15 years later. So I wrote my first book in when I was 39. so I guess it would've been 15 years later. And I thought about writing books, you know, in my early thirties, but it wasn't until that moment, it was right in the middle of the great recession where everything was falling apart.

And it was like that, you know, that calling like, I gotta get this thing done. and so, I just wrote, I wrote book number one.

[00:09:14] Jay: Was book number one.

[00:09:15] Jeb: Book number one was a book called Power Principles, or is a book called Power Principles. You can go buy it today. It's not, my best work. but I sold a lot of copies of that book.

So I, from a just pure hustle, I would, I mean, I would sell to anybody. I was, I'm, I was literally the guy with a box of books in my trunk, go into Chamber of Commerce meeting saying, Hey, buy this book. People say, can you come speak to us? I go, you buy 10 books. I'll come speak. I sold enough copies of that book that I got on the radar of a big New York publisher, McMillan, and I was running a podcast.

I've been podcasting now for, gosh, going on 19 years, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. But I'd started a podcast in 2007 before podcasting was cool. Same podcast. We have a day Sales Gravy and they. Called me up and said, Hey, we've been watching you, we've been watching your book sales. We wanna do something.

So I did with them. And then, John Wiley and son, who is my publisher, who has done all my other books, they reached out to me and said, Hey, we've been watching you. We wanna do a book with you. I liked John Wiley and Sons, and I like Shannon, who was my editor over there, so much better than the folks that I was dealing with at McMillan.

They weren't bad people, they just, it just, I don't know that they were a sales focused, business focused company like Wiley. And I did People By You with Wiley, which was a great book. Like that was the book that sort of put me on the map as an author. And we really haven't looked back. So we're, you know, we're doing about a book a year.

this book just came out LinkedIn Edge and got another book coming out in March. But the first book, man, lemme tell you something, Jay, I agonized over that book. I wrote and wrote. It's not even a long book. And I edited and edited. And if you go back and read it today, for me, it just makes me wanna puke because I read the words and think.

You know, it's, it was just so passive. It wa it just wasn't my voice today. And, and it's a good lesson for people on, you know, on any type of craft, like writing. I'm not a great writer. I've never been a great writer, but I've done so many much of it now. I've written, you know, in the neighborhood of around, you know, 1.5 million words in, in books.

You just get better at things over time. And that's, I think. For everybody who, if you're thinking about, for example, people ask me all the time writing a book, like the, what do I do? I go write a book. Like you just gotta go write and you're gonna have to put yourself out there and you know, you'll look back 20 years later and go, that was terrible.

But, but you had to get the first one out in order to make it go.

[00:11:34] Jay: No, I love that. and so did the book come first or did Sales Gravy come first? The idea for the business? Like how, tell me the kind of how that

[00:11:43] Jeb: All at the same time. So the idea for the book, you've seen the movie Rudy, right?

[00:11:47] Jay: So at the time I was running a really large sales team for a Fortune 200 company, and I had sales meetings, the same people who hire me now to come keynote their sales meetings. I had sales meetings, a sales kickoff meeting, and I was, I hired Rudy to do what I do to be my keynote speaker.

[00:12:04] Jeb: Everybody loves Rudy, loved the movie, and he's got this shtick. You know, the movie comes on and the whole crowd goes. Rudy, and I was the speaker before him. It was my meeting. So I did this speech called Power Principles that I wrote out, and then I got the crowd going. Rudy, he goes up on stage, does his speech, and then when he is done, I'm in the back of the room and he's walking the back room and people are shaking his hands and he comes up to me and he puts his arms around me.

He's shorter than I am, and I'm short. He puts his arms around me and he just says, you need to do something with that. So that was sort of the spark to, I need to write this book. And that was in like the fall of 2006 and, or maybe this fall of 2005. So I think maybe a year went by when we did that.

So. move into 2006. I'm like, okay, I've gotta write this book. you think the recession happened like 2008, 2009, but we were the canary and the mind. we saw it coming, started writing the book. And and then at the same time I started working on this concept of Sales Gravy.

But at the time, it wasn't even called Sales Gravy. It was a. Sales professionals online. It was gonna be an online resource center for salespeople. Didn't even know how to write a website at the time. But the book was everything. Like, I'm gonna write this book. And I was building Sales Gravy at the same time.

Sales Gravy evolved, while I was building the book into Sales Gravy.com or Sales Gravy, the business today. But it was kind of all at the same time. But that was the, like the catalyst was Rudy.

[00:13:29] Jay: Not many people can probably say that. I mean, just to zoom into a little more of the sales side of things, what's your take on kind of founder-led sales versus a sales team and like, when does, you know, somebody's doing a certain number of revenue? is it the, you know, the number of clients you have or the prospects?

When do you need, when does a sale, you know, a founder need to go from founder-led sales to like starting to build a sales team?

[00:13:52] Jeb: Wonderful question. There's no answer for that. We're not gonna give you a black and white on that if you're. Like, for example, my company sells gravy. I started the Sales Gravy as it is today in late 2006. And for. Three, four years, I would say, all the way until the end of the summer in 2010. I'm the only salesperson.

I'm it, I'm also customer service. I'm all kinds of stuff. And I mean, at the time we were printing money. we were, we were, we started originally as an online job board, so we were like a subscription based job board. For sales and I was everything. And we got to 2010 and I realized that I'm like starting to come apart at the seams 'cause I'm working, you know, 20 something hours a day.

If you're a founder and you're building your business and you got hustle, sooner or later you're gonna find yourself at the same place. So I had to go get my wife to come in and help me because I needed help with the financials because we were making a lot of money. But. I, you know, I was just shoving it in the bank 'cause I didn't have time to go and even account for it and then I had to go hire my first salesperson and bring someone on to help me.

And, and then grow from there. Those are, that was a very hard thing to do. And depending on, as a founder where you are, if you've got VC money and you've got investors, you'll have more cash to make that investment with, so you, you have a little bit more runway if you make a mistake.

If you are a bootstrap founder like me, and I've always been bootstrapped, we're always been a cash forward business. That at that moment, like it was like, I need to be able to maintain what I'm doing, bring someone on, get them loaded up. Then I had to actually keep being the closer on deals. So I got them really focused on top of the funnel or working on inbound leads and bringing things in.

And I continued to be the closer until I could get them to the place where they could be independent and then bring 'em more people. And that was in, in the fall of 2010. By the end of 2011, I believe we had three salespeople on the team plus me. And, one of those salespeople, two of those salespeople are still with me today, even though the business is completely different than it used to be.

But it, you just have to think about like, at what point do I need to bring someone on, because as a founder, I've got to do. Multiple things, and I can't always be the salesperson, but I believe, especially if you're bootstrapped as a founder, you're just, you're gonna be the salesperson and you're gonna be the salesperson for a while, so just get used to it.

Entrepreneurialship is selling, and that is a problem for a lot of founders, especially people who come from like engineering backgrounds or they come from corporate backgrounds and they've decided that they're gonna start a business. They don't know how to sell. They don't think about selling. they don't see it that way, but you are the closer.

If you try to abdicate that responsibility to a sales hire without mastering that yourself. It becomes a major problem. Now I get that. There are some businesses, like software businesses, tech businesses, AI businesses where you've got someone who's come outta MIT and they've gone to Y Combinator and they've got a bunch of money and they're trying to build something and their craft is engineering that they might not always wanna be the salesperson.

Even in those businesses, what I've experienced, at least myself, is that the founders that do a really good job of not only getting more money for their business, but also getting more customers, they find a way to adopt the sales gene, even though they may have a competency that someplace else.

Then they get really serious about bringing on good people that they can work with. the hardest thing that I see with founders Jay, is that you get someone safe with an engineering background and they bring on salespeople and then they keep breaking the sales team because they don't understand that sales is different than engineering.

and so they end up in this loop of just turning people over, rather get, rather than getting some sustainability over time. And in those cases, my recommendation is, and that's what a lot of companies come to us for, is you just get a fractional sales leader, someone who can speak sales language, talk to salespeople under sales salespeople, they can help you scale up.

So until, and that person that your fractional sales leader should also be helping you find a permanent sales leader so it can help you scale up, then find a permanent sales leader, slot them in, and then you can go keep doing all your engineering founder stuff. it's a great question. it's a question I think that every founder deals with when do I hire salespeople?

But it's, if I had an, if I had the, like, the black and white answer for it, I would own my own island for sure.

[00:18:23] Jay: I'm surprised you don't at this point. finagle prospecting one of my favorite books of all time. it ties directly into what you were just talking about. it got me. More in tune with being the sales guy for the business. And I remember very clearly sitting at a bar one time with one of my clients slash friends, and I was dressed, you know, in a suit and he was just dressed in whatever.

And this girl's sitting next to me and she goes, oh, you must be the sales guy for your company. I'm like, I'm not the fucking sales. I'm not the sales guy. This is the dumbest thing I ever, I'm not the sales, but it like that moment. Kind of made me go, wait a minute, maybe I am the same. And then I read Fanatical Prospecting, by the way, it led to, maybe like my only five cold calls I've ever done in my life.

So thank you for at least getting me to try that. I'm never gonna do that again. I, and leads me to another question. Do you still make cold calls? you don't, no way. You're still

making cold calls. To who? To who? Who would be cold to Jeb Blo. You know, you just, they see your name come up and they're like, oh, I gotta take

[00:19:16] Jeb: I do it for my own company. Like we have the outbound conference that we run every single year as an organization and we have lists and I call people up and go, Hey, this is blood. I'm calling you about buying tickets for your team, for your outbound conference. But I also make cold calls with my own clients.

So when I'm out with my customers and I'm working with their sales teams and we're teaching their sales teams fanatical prospecting, we run live phone blocks. And there's always someone who challenges me or is scared or having a problem, and I'll just say, gimme your list. And I just, I'll just dial the list and you know, I mean, it's just a cold call.

[00:19:52] Jay: Oh, dude, I can't. Yeah, and I'll tell you what, my 20-year-old son who's doing insurance sales down in Florida now, he's cold calling people and he's fine. he got into it before, I think he knew to be afraid of it. And so now he's got his own little, you know, business on the side of, his main thing he's doing.

He is like, yeah, I walked up to this guy at a landscaping truck in the parking lot, was asking me if he needed SEO. I'm like. Who is this kid, but very much what you're saying. It just, it's like I got so far in by not doing that, then trying to pick it up later during the cold call thing was very difficult for me.

But, all right. So who was your first customer at Sales Gravy? I don't need a name, but just in general, who was it? Where did it come from? And then I also wanna know like, who was your customer today versus who it was back then.

[00:20:33] Jeb: Well, when we started Sales Gravy, we started, we wanted to be a training and consulting business. No one knew who I was or what we were doing, and it's really hard to build a training consulting business just flat from nothing. So when, because I was a head of sales for a large company, I recognized that the thing that I woke up every day and worried about was my head count.

So we immediately in 2007, shifted into an online job board, and by 2010, we were the market share leader in job board, and we ran it like a SaaS company. So it's a subscription based company. It took a while to get that moving. And when I started, like you said, the first customer was some small company or a recruiter someplace.

'cause I would go to like talk about cold calling. I would go to job fairs, which were a big deal back then. And I would crash 'em. Like I wouldn't pay to get in. I would just go in and I would walk around with a flyer and I would go to every recruiting table and say, Hey, my name's Jeff Blunt, I am the founder of Sales Gravy.com.

You're hiring salespeople Post a free job here. And I would get 'em post jobs on my board. And what happened was I kept meeting people from a DP and I had the recruiters, like individual recruiters would come on and just buy a subscription to post jobs on the job board. Over time I got a lot of 'em and so I started talking with them and I said, Hey, I've got 12 of you guys that are recruiting people on Sales Gravy.

Who do I need to talk to? And they gave me a name, and this was in like 2008 and I'd been spending a lot of money, so I bootstrapped this whole business for my own savings, and it was a burn the boat moment when I started this company. So I. I like got all the information from 'em. I made a cold call and it was kind of a warm call because I knew who the person was and they were using me to one of their VPs up in Chicago.

Made the pitch, said, Hey, this is what you guys are doing. You're using me right now. You got 12 year recruiters. I can put you on a program that will allow all your recruiters to use me. We'll put all your jobs on. I wanna talk to you about it. And he said, it sounds good. He goes, can you be in Chicago on Wednesday?

I'll meet with you. I got no money, like I am. I mean, I'm like, literally, I got money coming in. I'm trying to pay bills. I got money going out, and so there's nothing in the bank. So I basically burn like my last few hundred dollars to buy the cheapest ticket that I can to Chicago with a, if I don't close this deal, I might not be able to keep going as a business.

Went up there, met with the guy, closed the deal. A DP became my very first like customer. And then right after that we signed Verizon. So like it was, and I just, I had a series of large organizations that came in, but that a DP thing was like, it's, it saved us. Like it was the catalyst that then kept that part of the business going.

Then by, you know, 2011, 2012, we had ca we were doing enough sales training, we had cash, flowed enough of sales training. So the what we, the original strategy of building a SaaS based job board to build the cash flow, to build the training business, it all paid off. And today we don't do jobs anymore. We just do training and consulting.

[00:23:40] Jay: Who are your clients today compared to back then?

[00:23:43] Jeb: very similar. I mean, you, if you think about the clients that we have today,they're some of the biggest names out there that you, that, you know, I mean, we work with, one of my favorites is John Deere. Like we love John Deere. They're an amazing organization and love their people. so we work with them.

I've got, you know, Penske's, one of my longest term customers, and I love that company dearly like. They're family to me. they, when we started working on the training and consulting side of the business, they were one of our early customers that came on and we work with their sales team.

They're just amazing people. and, but if you take a look at those kind of customers, we've got software customers, we. you know, you think about all of the major software companies. Almost all of 'em are our clients in some level, but we also have small companies, like we've got, you know, small waste companies.

One of our favorite new customers is a company that they clean water tanks for cities and they have a whole Salesforce out there. We've, we've got, major league sports teams that, that work with us. You know, from software to bioengineering to genomics, I mean, I mean you, like, you name it, we're in a sector.

We've always been, a company that is,that's industry agnostic. But the array of customers that we have today, I, I think we're probably north of. Almost 2000 customers that we work with in some capacity. they're every walk of life and almost on almost every continent that we work with, that our trainers and our consultants go out and take care of.

[00:25:06] Jay: Do you like the business side more or sales side more? Do you

like growing and building a 

[00:25:11] Jeb: I love the business side. I mean, I did this like, so you know, to answer that question, if you think about what most, like, think about most sales trainers or sales training businesses, when we say most, 97, 90 8% of those businesses are one person. Who wrote one book or two books, they hung a shingle out and they're a sales trainer and they have a small group of clients that they work with.

It could be locally, it could be nationally. If they get lucky, they'll be doing keynotes. And so they're going out and most of their businesses showing up at sales kickoff meetings, doing keynotes. That's what most businesses are. And it, by the way, it's the easiest business to run 'cause it's you go out and do some, some keynotes.

It's pretty lucrative. So you can make a pretty good living doing it. You're not gonna get rich, but you'll make a good living. That's not me. From the very beginning, it's grow this business. So today we have 34 people on our team. We are continuing to grow, we're adding trainers. We're, we're adding resources.

We are leveraging AI where we can to, to accelerate our growth. And so we can, take one person on our team and 10 x that person if we can put enough agents around them. So I've always been a grower and the, and that's the biggest frustration as a founder who also sells and is a face of a business and is also going out and delivering keynotes and training and doing consulting for clients because those are things that I'm really good at.

And I am the guy that write the book, and I'm in the author that's writing a book every single year. There's always that balance of the fun and joy that I get working on the chess board of the business. Like how do we grow the business and how do we take it to the next level and how do we, you know, how do we go out and, you know, and compete with the biggest names in our business.

That with the, just the fact that like the same question you had about founders. the fact that I'm a founder, that also produces a lot of revenue for our organization individually. It's a, it's always the balance, but if I have my druthers, if I'm gonna spend my time on things, it's right now, probably more than any because we are just at this amazing place as an organization, we have.

I mean, we're, we've got so much runway and we're just so sustainable, and we've got this amazing group of people that work for us. We're just at this place where we can make this, you know, this leap. That's not incremental. That's big. That's where I wanna spend my time and effort, at least over the next couple of years.

[00:27:33] Jay: Love that. I tell people all the time, I love running a business almost as much as I love my kids. Like I, I love, it's just the constant challenge and team building and the chess board, I think is a great way to put it. I do have one question, and this is, a very selfish question because this is all about me.

So, I hired, you know, sales consultant. I've done, you know, I hired SDRs, I've done the. Didn't, you know, it probably sunk a hundred grand into it didn't really work because they didn't have the infrastructure in place for the SDRs to be successful. but what I'm wondering is like, how do you guys. Really kinda rightsize the consultants that you put into a business, right? Because I would argue that, you know, our sales consultant, which I thought was a good guy, and I think he did some good work, but he was from the enterprise space and we're in the agency space working more small business, and the messaging and just the cadence and just the way that you talk to people and the way you engage and even the channels you go through, you know, are completely. Different. And if you try to sell corporate big enterprise to SMB, you just look like a,

you know, another spam kind of, you know, email LinkedIn guy. How do you guys right size fit the right consultant for the right size business and market?

[00:28:40] Jeb: So it, it is an ongoing, process for us. So we, as, when we're, like, for example, you think about our, like our consultants or our fractional sales leaders or our trainers. So you're a business and you wanna hire a company to come in and train your salespeople. Here's what you're hiring. You're hiring someone to come in and transform your culture.

Or to impact your culture or to. To infuse your culture with a new language or a new process. That's a big decision for people to make and we 'cause culture's different. Like, you know, you think about business like we're working on business culture's precious. So if you don't get the right person that is coming into your organization, that's gonna impact your culture positively.

First of all, you're not gonna get an ROI for the training 'cause people don't wanna adopt it. But it also could cause some damage. So when we bring a client in everything that you said we're looking at, right? We're looking at who the client is. We ask this question all the time, what's the demographic of your sales organization?

And the primary thing we're looking at is, do you have a bunch of young gun SDRs? Are you got a bunch of old veterans who have been around for a long time? Or do you have some mixture of that? Do you have people, for example, who really didn't come from sales backgrounds? So I was personally working with a company 'cause I'm really good at these type of engagement.

Where none of their people who are in sales come from a sales background. They all come from healthcare backgrounds. So if you don't walk in and you handle them with kid gloves, like if you come in, you know, gunning, like fanatical prospecting down their throat, you are gonna turn 'em all off. But if you come in and you're having a conversation with them about their mission and what's important to them and their why, then you can get 'em all to buy in.

And now you're not like doing something that's gonna hurt the culture. And by the way, they want more so. That process of pairing the right person for the right culture, the right company. It is a, it is an art, it's a, it's also data, it's science, it's thinking through, we also have people who specialize in particular segments.

So for example, Keith, on my team. Works with all of our big name software clients because that's where he came from, and he's really good at it and he understands how those businesses work. And Sarah on my team works with a lot of our, we call 'em blue collar, like, you know, middle America companies, that they got people out in the field and they're knocking on doors and they're in mud and they're, you know, they're out there, just, they're, you know, they're closing.

You know, the old school way to swing doors. Go talk to people. She's brilliant at that. So we've got people that specialize in inside selling or you name it, that process matters. Now if we build that bridge, Jay, so the question that you asked to, like a sales organization, I'm a founder and I'm bringing in salespeople.

[00:31:17] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:18] Jeb: You just named actually one of the big mistakes that founders make. There's a salesperson, they got a great pedigree. They were working for, let's say you're a SaaS company. They were working for Microsoft. They're an account executive for Microsoft, maybe an enterprise account executive for Microsoft.

You want to sell software to the same businesses that Microsoft is selling to. You hire this person and they fail almost every single time because they can't make the leap because when they were at Microsoft. All they had to do was call people up and say, Hey, I'm from Microsoft, and would meet with them, you know, because they had the brand credibility of Microsoft.

And by the way, you're, if someone from Microsoft calls me, I'm probably gonna meet with them. I mean, why not? what? They may know something, I don't know, but they're calling, you know, x, y, Z software company. And the people are going, I don't know who you are. I don't know what it is. And they don't have the ability to articulate to that person a reason why they should meet.

And by the way, when they get there, they're so used to the brand name doing most of the selling for them, that they don't understand how to, like in a green field, when you're trying to get people to, you know, like you're trying to create demand, you know, in the moment, in a discovery call, they don't know how to do that.

So, so that for founders, if you're a small business, you've gotta go find salespeople that can, carry water for you and are willing to go do the hard work and hustle. Almost never the pedigree that's gonna do that for you. It's usually some misfit someplace who can't like make it anywhere else that shows up on your doorstep that really wants to grind like you do and like wants an opportunity and wants a chance.

And they may not be the smartest person in the world or have the most world knowledge, most business acumen, but they're willing to get in your back pocket and learn every single thing from you and be loyal to you and grow with you. Those are the people that are gonna make it. The thing about, for example, you're, you know, I've spent about a hundred thousand dollars hiring salespeople.

The thing about being a founder led business and you're hiring people is you're gonna make mistakes and you're gonna make a lot of them, and they're gonna be expensive. So the key thing is don't make mistakes that break the business. And be prepared when you're bringing salespeople in that when you bring 'em in, they gotta be able to fit in your culture and they gotta be able to work and they gotta be able to be in independent because you're not gonna have time to spend all this time with them.

Like you can't, it's not like to a big company and they've got this entire training team that's gonna bring 'em along for six months. Like you brought 'em in, like, I need production today. So be ready to cycle through some people. And when you find good people. Put that stake in the ground and build your team around those good people, and it's an iterative process.

[00:34:00] Jay: I love that. I, so I, this is a question that,I feel very blessed to ask because I ask this question to everybody, and I don't know if there's a right answer. So I gotta ask you this question. I'm very much a relationship based sales guy. Some would say business development, right? I do.

My wife calls me the chief Lunch officer, right? It's all I do is I have lunches, I do network, I do networking events. Like I wanna be the QA software, quality assurance guy of Philadelphia, right? I always tell people like, be the someone of somewhere, right? Like be the like own your space, especially your backyard. I do wonder if I'm leaving money on the table not doing, and I do outbound, you know, I use the IES and the Apollos and all the outbound that way. you know, I wonder if I'm, you know, losing business from not. Hitting direct sales as hard, but my biggest concern is that I don't wanna lose the later business development sale Six months later when somebody goes, oh, I remember Jay.

He was great. And like, I loved our conversation. He wasn't pushy and whatever. And like, we need QA now. And that happens a lot, right? We get a lot of these deals that are six to 12 months later that come from. am I thinking about it wrong? Is this a balance that everybody has to fight as a salesperson, as a founder?

Led sales is like how much business development kind of, you know, networking and building relationships versus, you know, you reach out to somebody, you give 'em your value proposition, you hit 'em at the right time and like luck. You know, they, they hop on a call and you luckily, if you bag 'em, is, are either one of those the right way to go?

is everybody doing both? And what's your kind of take on how you do that?

[00:35:26] Jeb: Well, I think that, I think first of all, I would say that because you are really good at. Launch and networking and referrals, lean into that like that. if that's what you're great at, do as much of that as you possibly can. But let me tell you a quick story. So I'm working with a group and they're, the people that are selling for them are a lot like you.

They're just really good at the networking piece. And, but they're complaining. They just don't have quite enough in their pipeline in order to hit all of their numbers that they want. Like they wanna grow a little bit faster. So these guys are selling to, into like, accountants and CPA firms and accounting firms.

So it's a, they're selling into that space. So. I just say, just walk me through like your last event that you went to. So they went to a networking event and this were just a handful of people and this is a consulting project. So they walked me through it and then I go, okay, well, so you met all these people and you got business cards and you got names and you know, you connected with 'em on LinkedIn and you did all these other things.

So walk me through when you followed up with them, like what was the follow up process? And I started getting things like, well, you know, a couple of weeks later I reached out to them, but they weren't really, you know, they weren't really interested at the time. And I every excuse in the book, it wasn't, Hey, we met, I had a, I had an opportunity to say, Hey, why don't we get together for lunch?

And then I booked the lunch. Or we met and I booked the lunch, but they didn't follow up with me, so I called them 12 times in a row to have a conversation because when we talked at the networking event, they said, Hey, we should get together. I mean that if someone says, Hey, we should get together. I'm taking you at your word, and so I'll call you until you tell me we shouldn't get together.

That's just me. Right. So it's that combo that's a combo of what you're saying, like this is, that's business development, because I've got the lead, but I just met him in person. So it's not like, you know, it's not like a pure cold call where I pull your name out of a list that I got off Apollo and I just start dialing.

Right. it's a purely, we met together, so. But for you, like if you said, okay, what do I do? The first thing I would ask you as a consultant is, okay, well what, maybe walk me through your revenue goals. Where are you now? How much business do you want? Said, Hey, we're doing great. I like where we are.

We're ha I'm happy. We're, I mean, we're producing enough pipeline to hit our business goals and to grow the way we want to grow. I would say don't do anything else. Like do what you're doing is working. If you said, Hey, we're, you know, we're doing well, but I think we could do a lot better, then I'm gonna tell you that you're gonna have to have a balance between the networking and the referrals and.

Outbound prospecting, and I would also tell you to quit doing drip campaigns and start picking up the phone and talking to people, because you've probably noticed that your drip campaigns aren't really working anymore because all of the customers are turning 'em off because they're so tired of ai.

[00:38:07] Jay: Mm-hmm. 

[00:38:08] Jeb: So, so what we've seen is a massive deprecation and the effectiveness of cold email prospecting, where we're seeing a improvement in both in-person prospecting, networking, and going and see people and picking up a telephone and having synchronous conversations. Now, that doesn't answer the question of.

That I think I, the question I hear behind the question is, what's the difference between doing business development and looking for qualified opportunities or developing future opportunities and shoving something down someone's throat so that they never wanna work with me again? And the, that's different, right?

So. Networking, prospecting, getting to know people, having conversations with people, being, you know, the mayor of Philadelphia, like that matters and you should do as much of that as you possibly can. That is completely different than running a sales conversation with someone and causing them to never wanna talk to you again.

And that's the ability to read the room. So if I'm having a conversation with someone and I'm talking to them, you know what questions to ask to see if they need you or if they have a place in their business where you matter. If I'm asking those questions and like right now, it's not a good fit for them.

I'm not gonna waste any more time with that. I'm gonna have my business card, or I'm gonna put 'em on a, I'll put 'em on a long-term drip campaign on my newsletter or what have you, and I'll keep up with them and, and I'll call them at another time. Or I'll try to nail down a future buying window and then I'm gonna cover that account over time.

Like, what I mean by account coverage is I've identified them as a business that's qualified to do business with me. Now's not the right time. You're in a defined geographic area in Philadelphia, so it's pretty easy. I know who all these folks are, and then I'm going to touch them on a regular basis in some meaningful way.

Even if that meaningful way is, Hey, Jay, how you doing? Hadn't talked to you in a while. Wanna see what's happening? Business and the right time will emerge because the truth is right. It's not am I networking or am I doing outbound, or am I doing, you know, whatever. It's, how many people am I talking with?

Because in Philadelphia, you wanna be the mayor of Philadelphia. The more people you talk with, the more you're gonna sell. So all you want to do is make sure that you're in position to have as many synchronous conversations with other people as possible, and your instinct that I can create a great first impression with someone.

I can keep my business going and I can play the long game until the time is right to move them in my pipeline. It's the right instinct because selling is not pushing things down their throats. Selling is helping them solve problems, and the sellers of today are consultative. We are out working with customers to help them.

Figure out how to get better outcomes from their business for, and by the way, for themselves as personally and professionally and the business. That's our job. And if I can't help you do that, then shake my hand. Here's my face. We're building familiarity over time. I'm confident enough to know that one day you're are gonna need me.

And when you need me, you're gonna know my name and because you know my name, we'll be talking. that's how I see it.

[00:41:06] Jay: Love that. Well, I, that's the whole reason I booked this was for the free consultation, so thank you for that. I appreciate that you solved all my problems. All right. We're so far over, but God, I feel like I could do like eight hours with you. I have one more question. This is not, you know, sales related.

It's not business related. This is just Jeb. Jeb, if you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:41:28] Jeb: Oh, goodness gracious. That's a hard question.

[00:41:31] Jay: That's a great question. Thank you.

[00:41:33] Jeb: Oh my goodness gracious. If I could do anything on Earth and I knew I wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:41:39] Jay: It's my favorite stall tactic, by the way. Is reading the question again. That

[00:41:43] Jeb: Yes. Yeah,

[00:41:44] Jay: Keep it up. It's fine. Take your time. Got all day.

[00:41:48] Jeb: I would. Oh, I knew I wouldn't fail. I would, I would go try to qualify for the, the champions, tour on the PGA.

[00:41:56] Jay: Oh, there it is. There it is. The golf tour. that's a great, I love those answers because like, that's just like a raw. Like, I want to be in a professional sports setting and do what these crazy athletes can do. So, well, jab,I would love to have you on again sometime. I feel like we have so much other stuff to talk about, but this was just fantastic.

I can't thank you enough for being on. We didn't even get to talk about LinkedIn Edge. Plug the book real quick. I have it. I should have been the guy who like, was like, Hey, here's the LinkedIn. I have it, it's literally coming tomorrow. so I'll have to find some way to get, send it to you and get it to sign it for me.

[00:42:28] Jeb: I'll do that for 

[00:42:30] Jay: please tell us real

quick before we go, what is the LinkedIn edge?

[00:42:33] Jeb: Thank you so much for the plug. This is a prospecting book. It's a pure prospecting book. So, and by the way, Jay, this is a book that you would love. Because in this book, right, so what you just asked about prospecting, we focus on two types of prospecting, fast prospecting and slow prospecting.

So fast prospecting is business development. it's in it's interrupt. People engage them and convert them into pipeline opportunities and slow prospecting, which is running these long games sequences where we're building relationships and we're integrating ourselves into these companies. We're either identifying, anticipating, or creating future buying windows through our activity.

And it's built on the LinkedIn platform, which is the largest, self updating platform in business. And we walk you through all of these different ways in order to do both of those things. And a key point in this is that at the intersection, and this is a good lesson for our last conversation, at the intersection of this fast and slow prospecting, that's where you start making a lot of money.

And so this book helps you balance that. But this is first and foremost, it's a prospecting book. And if you like, fanatical Prospecting, this book is like, it just plugs right in, like a puzzle piece into fanatical prospecting. It extends that. And there's brand new frameworks in here. There's there's new ways of thinking.

It is not like a typical social selling book. It's not about how you go viral. This is super practical. Any business can use it, any salesperson can use it, but this book will help you make a lot more money.

[00:43:58] Jay: I'm telling you, and I genuinely mean this. I'm excited to read that book. I love the way that you lay stuff out. I love. The fact that this is LinkedIn specific, because I'm a very big believer, as you probably could guess in LinkedIn conversations and building rapport that way. So, it, it's available on Amazon.

I know that because I just ordered it and I think the audio book is coming out in a couple

[00:44:17] Jeb: Audiobook will be out. Yeah, late December. Audiobook will be out. And,for the folks who are audiobook,centric, this is one of those books where you really want to, if you like, audiobooks, not do, and a lot of times I'll buy a book, any audio book together. This is how you wanna buy either the digital copy or the hard copy with the audiobook, because.

It's not a, some, you know, concept driven, Hey, here's a concept. There's like, here's how you do this. step by step by step. So if you're listening to an audiobook and I listen to audiobooks when I'm walking or driving, there's not a lot that you can do with that. I mean, you can listen to it and it's gonna be super boring.

So we're gonna, we're working on how, right now, how to arrange this audiobook so it doesn't bore people to death through those step by steps, but. We'll reference the step by step. You're gonna want to have at least hands on the hard copy so you can go back and mark those pages because this book is gonna be much more like a handbook.

It's not a book that you read once and you put away this thing's gonna hang around on your desk, where you're gonna pick it up and go, Hey, how do I do that again? Or How do I remember how to do this? I mean, there's even some of the little just Easter eggs that you find in LinkedIn. You're not gonna remember how to find those things the first time through.

You're gonna wanna mark the page. So I would say. If you're, if you want the audio book, buy this book now, then go get the audio book, and it's my way of doing things. I'm, I mostly buy audio books and the hardcover at the same time, usually the Kindle copy, so I can follow along.

[00:45:37] Jay: I will be doing both, for sure. Well, Jeb, you did not disappoint my friend. fantastic as always. We wish you the best of luck with the book. I'll be reading it. I'll be telling everybody, that we'll listen to read it. And, we thank you being on and let's talk to you again soon. All right, Jeb.

Thank you buddy.

[00:45:51] Jeb: Thank you, Jay.

[00:45:52] Jay: See man. 

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