The JB Sales Learning Lab Newsletter
Free, actionable sales advice sent to your inbox every weekend.
Age of the Agile Sales Org
. November 14, 2026 | Read online Thursday afternoon, my email stopped working. Nothing coming in, nothing going out, and it stayed that way until Friday morning. Microsoft 365 went down across multiple regions. Outlook, Teams calendars, SharePoint, and Copilot all choked at the same time. Downdetector logged around 130,000 Outlook reports at the peak, and Microsoft spent the night rebuilding servers and rolling back a network change trying to figure out what broke. I'm not going to lie, I...
I’m Wicked Smart
. November 7, 2026 | Read online If you'd told 20-year-old me that I'd be teaching a class at Harvard someday, I would've laughed, cracked another beer, and gone back to figuring out which 8 a.m. class I could skip. I'm a state school kid. University of Maryland, class of 1998, and I'll be the first to admit I drank my way through a good chunk of it. Harvard was a place I drove past my whole life, growing up around Boston. I never pictured myself inside one of its classrooms, let alone at the...
Happy Halloween Ears
. Oct 31, 2026 | Read online Happy Halloween! We had our annual Halloween party last weekend, and it's one of my favorite nights of the year. I keep my entire basement painted for the party all year, everyone goes all out on their costumes and we all pretend like we’re 25 again. This year I went as Michael Jackson in Thriller and we all tried to do the Thriller dance in my backyard which was hysterical. I thought I had the best costume until a buddy of mine showed up as a zombie version of me...
Headless
. October 24, 2026 | Read online LinkedIn is now cited in AI answers more often than YouTube or Wikipedia. I had a feeling this was true, but wanted to find out, so I had AI do some research for me. Semrush analyzed 325,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity and found LinkedIn is the #2 most-cited website in AI answers. Profound found it's #1 for professional questions across six different AI platforms. That got my attention because LinkedIn has been home base for me for a...
Is IP dead?
. October 17, 2026 | Read online I've never put a lot of value in IP, especially when it comes to sales training. There's nothing really new in sales. Almost everything any of us teaches is a repackaged version of something somebody else figured out a long time ago. We slap a new name or a new acronym on it, and the fundamentals underneath are the same. That's why I've always been open about giving my content away in pieces. Tips, nuggets, and chunks of my process went up on YouTube,...
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...
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