The JB Sales Learning Lab Newsletter
Free, actionable sales advice sent to your inbox every weekend.
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...
I've never had a strategy
. August 1, 2026 | Read online This is tough to admit out loud, but I've never really had a strategy when it comes to how I use social media, specifically LinkedIn, unless you count throwing spaghetti against the wall as a strategy. I was member #36,541 on the platform, which means I was one of the first 15,000 real people on it, since the story goes that the first 20,000 accounts were dummies created to make the place look populated. I used it originally as the networking and relationship...
Frameworks don't run themselves (playbook inside)
. After 25 years of training sales teams, the most common thing I hear isn't a question about technique. It's some version of "JB, my team knows what to do. I can't get them to do it consistently." They can quote you ICP, personas, trigger events, sequencing, all of it. Then they go back to their desk, and none of it turns into pipeline. For years I thought that was a discipline problem. It isn't. You can teach a rep the sharpest prospecting framework in the world, but if the system they run...
Happy Ears
. July 25, 2026 | Read online I spent an hour of my Saturday inside a Good Feet Store with my wife and daughter, and I walked out laughing so hard I almost cried. Let me set this up. I didn't know much about the place going in, and we did zero research. I figured it was insoles. I have high arches, and my go-to Adidas shell toes have the arch support of a piece of cardboard. My wife's feet and back had been bothering her, and my daughter has high arches too. So one day we decided to walk in....
Are Sales Stages Still Relevant
. July 18, 2026 | Read online The sales funnel was invented in 1898. A guy named E. St. Elmo Lewis created it to explain how advertising works: grab Attention, build Interest, create Desire, drive Action. AIDA. We've been running some version of that model ever since. I even use it as a framework for emails and calls. Which means the framework most sales teams use to manage deals in 2026 is older than the radio. That sent me down a rabbit hole this week with a question I don't fully have the...
Stop The Negative Tailspin
. July 11, 2026 | Read online My daughter went to a volleyball camp this week. After the first morning session, she texted me, frustrated. She wasn't on one of the top courts, she wasn't playing well, and she was spiraling. I could feel her frustration through the texts. That feeling of "this isn't going the way I wanted it to go" was pulling her down, and everything after that first disappointment was being filtered through that lens. I called her with the main goal of trying to shift her...
67% don't want you. 69% do
. July 4, 2026 | Read online 67% don't want you. 69% do I used to use a Gartner stat in my training that was about how 43% of B2B clients want a “rep free” experience. I used this to highlight the challenges we face as Sales professionals. I would then contrast that with the good news that of those 43% who wanted a rep free experience, they had a 23% higher regret rate. This meant that they regretted their decision more when a rep wasn't involved. I highlighted how this proved that Sales reps...
Free, actionable sales advice sent to your inbox every weekend.