The JB Sales Learning Lab Newsletter
Free, actionable sales advice sent to your inbox every weekend.
I couldn't write about sales this week
. October 10, 2026 | Read online Fair warning, this week's newsletter is a lot heavier than usual, so if you're looking for a feel-good read you might want to save this one for later. My hope is that it gives someone out there a reason to do something. I've sat down to write this newsletter a bunch of times over the past two weeks, and every time I started on something about sales it felt hollow. Cold call openers, AI agents, how to book more meetings. All stuff I care about and all stuff I...
The Experience Premium
. October 03, 2026 | Read online I was out in San Francisco this week for Apollo's NEXT conference (which was awesome btw), and I stayed a few extra days to spend time with my mom, my sister, and my nephew. I also got to catch up with two of my good friends, Roderick Jefferson and Richard Harris. The three of us are all over 50, and we've been in the training and consulting game for a long time. What stuck with me was how much energy was at that table. Most of the conversation was about what...
The Last 10%
. September 26, 2026 | Read online I was in two very different rooms this week. On Thursday, I was at Bryant University with my friend Dr. Stefanie Boyer, teaching a class of sales students who have grown up with AI in their pocket. The other room was a team of senior reps selling into manufacturing, people with years of relationships in their territories, and a few of them had never even tried AI. I taught both groups the same fundamentals and showed both of them how to use AI on top of...
A terrible sales experience that oddly gives me hope
. September 19, 2026 | Read online I had one of the worst sales/buyer experiences I’ve had in a long time last week, and oddly enough, it gave me some hope that AI isn’t nearly as far along as we’re all being forced to believe it is. I debated on whether or not to name the vendor on this one, but I’m going to in the interest of continuous improvement and hope that someone out there is paying attention. As most of you know, I pretty much built my career on/with Salesforce. Not the platform...
Sales therapy
. September 12, 2026 | Read online I was on a call last week with two people I know really well. One of them runs a billion dollar company. The other is a senior executive with an impressive history/background in start-ups. They wanted to talk about starting a podcast. So we started brainstorming topics, and about ten minutes in it stopped being a brainstorm. They started telling me what they were actually dealing with. The pace, the pressure to have an AI answer for everything, the feeling...
Ready, fire, aim
. September 05, 2026 | Read online Monday morning, a contract hit my inbox for a product the rep couldn't explain to me on Friday. It was the end of one of the worst sales experiences I've had in a while, and I've been chewing on it all week because it's a perfect picture of where a lot of companies are right now. It started innocently enough. I saw a promo video for a new AI feature inside a product I already use and pay for. It looked interesting, so I submitted an inbound lead to be one of...
The Hallway Track
. August 29, 2026 | Read online I spent last week at the Totality conference and ran into a bunch of people I hadn't seen in years. Some of them I used to talk to every month. Then the pandemic hit, everything moved to Zoom and LinkedIn, and somewhere along the way those relationships turned into the occasional like on a post. Standing in a hallway with them again, catching up on kids and jobs and what actually happened over the last five years, was more refreshing than I expected. I didn't...
Trees Without Rings
. August 22, 2026 | Read online I spent this week in Tennessee at a conference called Totality, hosted by my friend Dale Dupree and the Sales Rebellion crew. I haven't been to a live event in a while, and I forgot how much I needed one. When Dale asked me to speak, he didn't give me much guidance on what he wanted me to talk about (in true Rebel fashion). My first instinct was to do my Iron Man talk about the future of sales being the human, the suit, and the AI. After thinking about it for a...
Nobody has a good answer
. August 15, 2026 | Read online I've been asking the same question on my podcast for months now, and I haven't gotten a great answer yet. Where do fundamentals come from if the experience that builds them is going away? And the even bigger question is: what are the fundamentals anymore, and have they changed? Let me back up. When I started in sales, I did a lot of grunt work. For leads and contact info, I had to buy a book of CDs from Dun & Bradstreet D&B Marketplace, which was a CD-ROM...
AI Ruined My Favorite Nugget
. August 8, 2026 | Read online For years, I’ve been using and training the “Summary Email” as one of my favorite tactics (nuggets) in Sales and I had the proof points to back it up. I even wrote a post called “My Favorite Nugget” because it was so effective for me. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a simple summary email that you send at the end of the meeting that captures the key highlights from the conversation and aligns expectations, including next steps. The key was to...
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