Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Have you ever gone into a closing meeting, a sales presentation, or even a prospecting call with total confidence? That mindset and feeling that everything’s going to go your way, that nothing can go wrong, that you’re absolutely going to win?

I’ve been there. I know you have too. It’s one of the greatest feelings ever.

But let’s juxtapose that against going into a meeting feeling insecure, where your focus is on everything that could go wrong versus everything that could go right. And then, as soon as something does go wrong, everything starts to spiral downward.

There is absolutely nothing that can make or break a deal like confidence.

In this Sales Gravy podcast episode, we’re going to explore exactly where confidence comes from, why it matters so much in sales, and most importantly, what you can do to build the unshakeable confidence that closes deals.

The Insecurity Death Spiral

Recently, I learned a profound lesson about confidence.

I was invited to play golf with a group of businesspeople in Florida. Beautiful day, sunshine, great course. It should have been perfect.

Except I’m not a very good golfer. And these guys? They were good. Really good. The kind of golfers who carry single-digit handicaps and talk about their swing plane like it’s a science project.

So I’m standing on the first tee, watching them stripe their drives straight down the middle, and I can feel it happening. That little voice in my head starts whispering: “You don’t belong here. You’re going to embarrass yourself. Everyone’s going to see how bad you are.”

I started strong enough. Made it through the first couple of holes without humiliating myself. But then I hit a bad shot. Then another. And instead of shaking it off like I normally would, I started fixating on those bad shots.

That’s when the downward spiral began.

Every swing became an exercise in anxiety. I was so focused on not messing up that I couldn’t help but mess up. My mechanics fell apart. My rhythm disappeared.

By the end of the round, I had played one of the worst games of golf in my life. Not because I suddenly forgot how to swing a club, but because I let insecurity take over.

Now, I managed to keep a smile on my face. We were playing golf in the Florida sunshine, after all. But inside, I was frustrated because I knew what had happened. I let my insecurity about being the weakest player in the group sabotage my entire game.

And here’s what hit me on the plane home: That’s exactly what I see happen in sales all the time. One moment of uncertainty, one unexpected challenge, and suddenly, a salesperson who is perfectly capable starts spiraling. Their confidence evaporates. And with it goes their ability to perform.

Why Confidence Matters in Sales

In sales, there is nothing that sells like confidence. Nothing.

Buyers lean into confidence. They’re attracted to it. They trust it. And because of emotional contagion—your ability to transfer your emotions to another person—you basically take your confidence and hand it to the buyer, who then gains more confidence in you.

Think about it. When you walk into a meeting radiating confidence, the buyer thinks, “This person knows what they’re doing. They believe in what they’re selling. I can trust them.”

But when you walk in feeling insecure, the buyer picks up on that too. They start thinking, “Why is this person nervous? What aren’t they telling me? Maybe this isn’t the right solution.”

In sales, because we can’t always control the playing field and because we don’t always feel like we should be where we are—especially when we’re dealing with the C-suite or high-level decision makers, when we’re in super competitive situations, or when we don’t really know what we’re talking about—one thing that goes wrong can create a cascade of other problems, creating a downward insecurity spiral that is real and deadly.

The Ultimate Source of Confidence

So the question is: Where does confidence come from? Where do you get it?

Well, confidence by its very nature comes from the inside. It’s a mindset. It’s something that you believe, just like insecurity is a mindset that comes from the inside.

Confidence is mostly created by certainty.

When you feel certain that you can control the outcome, you feel more confident.

When you’re in situations that feel familiar, or you’re talking about a product, your service, or some part of your offering that you totally understand, you feel more confident.

When you’ve executed the sales process perfectly and built deep relationships with your customers, you feel more confident that they’re going to buy from you.

When you’ve practiced your presentation multiple times and know it by rote, you feel more confident.

By the way, the same thing works in reverse. Uncertainty begets insecurity.

When you walk into a situation, and you feel uncertain—and this happens to a lot of brand-new salespeople who don’t know what to say or feel like they don’t really understand the product offering, their industry, or their customer’s business—it creates a level of insecurity.

So the answer, if we want to be more confident, is to create more certainty.

Certainty Creates Confidence

Let me give you an example from my horrible, awful, terrible round of golf.

In the middle of that terrible round, I got desperate for anything that would give me confidence. So I started playing entire holes with my 7-iron because that was the one club I felt I was certain I could hit.

Except for putting, I would hit the 7-iron off the tee, on the fairway, and chip with it around the green. 150 yards at a time with my 7-iron, I could make it go straight down the fairway and hit the green.

That certainty in that particular club helped me feel more confident, and my game actually improved when I stuck with what I knew worked.

Now, in sales like golf, there is nothing you can be 100% certain about, simply because there are too many variables. We’re dealing with human beings, nasty competitors, and a shifting landscape. Even in accounts that are in our pipeline, things are always changing.

So for us as sales professionals, there’s no absolute certainty. But there are ways you can boost certainty in order to gain more confidence.

Four Ways to Create Certainty and Boost Confidence

1. Invest in Yourself Through Education

If you get insecure when you’re talking about things in your industry or about your product that you don’t understand, then go educate yourself.

Take the time to learn. Take classes. Go to your LMS and take e-learning. Read everything about your product. Become an expert—not just in your product, but in your industry.

Also, learn about business. The more you can educate yourself about business, the more you gain business acumen, which makes you feel more confident in conversations with executives.

When you know your stuff cold, understand your product inside and out, and can speak intelligently about your industry and your customer’s business challenges, uncertainty evaporates, and with it, goes insecurity.

2. Plan Every Single Call

Winging it is wickedly stupid on sales calls because when you wing it, you create uncertainty.

So sit down and think about every single call.

What am I going to do?

What questions am I going to ask?

What’s my objective for being there?

What am I going to close for at the end (targeted next step)?

Build a plan, write it down, and review it in advance of your meeting. Planning creates certainty.

3. Murder Board Your Big Meetings

Along with planning comes the concept of murder boarding, red teaming, or scenario playing. Murder boarding creates certainty around handling the unexpected.

Especially in large presentations and closing calls, you need to start pulling the thread on everything that could possibly go wrong. Every objection you could get. Every pushback. Every hard question.

Think about the different stakeholders who are going to be around the table, and the types of questions they’re going to ask, and the potential things they may say. Then find somebody on your team or somebody in your household to role-play all those scenarios with.

I’ve found that nothing gives me more confidence in big sales meetings than murder boarding. Because when I get into those situations—especially with objections or negotiations that can be super intimidating—the more I role-play those things, the better I am at them and the easier they are to deal with. In fact, they’re far less difficult in real life than they were in the role-playing.

4. Keep a Full Pipeline

This is powerful: There’s nothing that makes you more confident than being able to sell like you don’t have to sell.

When you are fanatical about prospecting and build a full pipeline, it gives you lots of options. You know you can walk away from anything. You’re detached from the outcome.

When it doesn’t make a difference if you win or lose, you gain immense confidence, which is why a full pipeline is the ultimate confidence builder.

With Confidence, Mindset Matters

When it comes to confidence, mindset matters. If you are obsessed with how you might fail or what you might do wrong, there’s a tendency to get the thing you’re focused on. It’s called target obsession. Whatever we focus on, we tend to attract and move toward. So be careful what you’re focused on.

One of the things I do—and I know this is kind of weird, but it works—is before I walk into a sales meeting, I look into the mirror and tell myself, “I’m a great salesperson.”

I actually say the words out loud. It’s a little bit cheesy. But by saying those words, changing my body language, pushing my shoulders up, my chin out—the power pose, as some would say—that actually begins to change my mindset and makes me feel more confident.

Add to that eating well, getting plenty of sleep (sleep really does wonders for your confidence), exercising, and making sure, before you go into a big presentation, that you’re not going in on an empty stomach.

How to Overcome Insecurity in the Moment

I sell every single day, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what it’s like to walk into a meeting with a prospect or customer and feel insecure. It happens to me still. But here’s the thing: I’m very careful not to let people see me sweat because insecurity and sales make a poor mixture.

Because emotions are contagious and people have a tendency to respond in kind, I want to avoid transferring my insecurity to them, causing them to feel uncertain about me. So I’m very careful with my body language, eye contact, voice inflection, and how fast I speak.

One tactic I use when I feel insecure is to slow down, pause, and ask a question. This gives me a moment to regain my composure and manage my body language.

Build Confidence with Knowledge, Planning, Practice, and Pipeline

Confidence isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build through preparation, knowledge, practice, and a full pipeline.

The good news is that all of these things are within your control. You can choose to educate yourself, to plan, practice, and prospect.

Here’s what I want you to do this week:

First, identify your gaps. Where do you feel uncertain in your sales process? Is it product knowledge? Industry knowledge? Objection handling? Closing? Write it down.

Second, create a learning plan. For each gap you identified, create a specific plan to fill it. What books will you read? What training will you take? Who will you shadow or learn from?

Third, plan your next three calls. Don’t wing another call this week. Sit down and plan your next three sales conversations. Write out your objectives, your questions, and your close.

Fourth, murder board your biggest opportunity. If you’ve got a major presentation or closing call coming up, spend an hour this week role-playing every possible scenario with a colleague.

Fifth, evaluate your pipeline. Is it full enough that you can sell without desperation? If not, block time this week for serious prospecting.

This is how you build the kind of unshakeable confidence that buyers respond to, competitors fear, and that feels so good.

And remember, when it’s time to go home, and you’re tired and worn out, always stop and make one more call. Because that one more call gives you the confidence that you can walk in any door, anytime, stand toe to toe with any buyer, and have a winning sales conversation.

Over a million sales professionals and sales teams have become more confident prospectors with the Fanatical Prospecting system. Learn more here.

You are on slide 34 when the CFO’s phone buzzes. She glances down. The VP to her left is nodding, but you can tell he checked out ten minutes ago. You know this pitch cold. You have rehearsed it. You built the deck. You covered every feature, every capability, every objection. And still, you are dying up there.

You spent weeks on this presentation. None of it matters because everyone in that room has already sat through the same pitch from three other vendors this month.

“Pitching sucks,” says Danny Fontaine, author of Pitch, on an episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast. “It sucks for the people doing it because we get so stressed out, and we spend weeks doing mountains of work. Meanwhile, there is a whole audience who has just as bad of a time as us because they have to sit through an hour of 100 PowerPoint slides and they’re bored.”

He is right. The audience suffers just as much. They sit through identical presentations, back to back, trying to remember which vendor said what. Both sides leave exhausted. No one wins.

There is a better way. Effective sales pitch techniques don’t rely on slides. They create engagement, tell stories, and turn monologues into conversations that actually move deals forward.

Why Traditional Pitches Fail

The standard pitch follows the same predictable pattern. Company overview. Capabilities. Case studies. Pricing. Questions at the end. Every competitor uses the same structure. That means you are asking your prospect to choose between nearly identical presentations.

When everything looks the same, decision makers default to price or familiarity. Your carefully crafted message gets lost in the noise.

You are treating the pitch like a presentation when it should be a conversation. You are trying to inform when you should be persuading.

Experience Beats Information

In 1979, a small advertising agency called Allen Brady and Marsh (ABM) competed against industry giant Saatchi & Saatchi for the British Rail account. ABM’s founder, Peter Marsh, knew he couldn’t win by playing it safe.

When the British Rail executives arrived for the pitch, no one answered the door. They rang the buzzer three times before it finally opened, with no one behind it. The receptionist ignored them while filing her nails. The waiting area was filthy. After a while of being dismissed, the chairman stood up to leave.

That is when Marsh burst through the doors and said, “Gentlemen, you have just experienced what your customers go through every single day. Shall we see what we can do to put it right?”

ABM won the account. And it worked because the executives didn’t just understand the problem. They felt it.

Most sales pitches fail because they ask buyers to care before they are emotionally engaged. Information alone doesn’t create urgency—experience does.

Start With Them, Not You

Pitches always start the same: ‘Thanks for your time. Here’s our agenda. Let me tell you about our company.’

Your prospect stops listening after the first sentence.

If you want engagement, start with a question. Ask what matters to them. Ask what would make the time valuable. Ask what problem they are trying to solve.

Before you show a single slide, say something like, “Before we start, what would make this conversation worth your time today?” Or, “What is the biggest challenge you are facing with this right now?”

Those questions do three things immediately. They show respect. They give you intelligence. And they turn the pitch into a conversation from the first minute.

This works even better over Zoom, where attention is fragile and distractions are everywhere. When you ask early questions, you pull people in instead of competing with their inbox.

Stories Create Memory

The most powerful stories aren’t pulled from case studies. They come from real life. Every meaningful achievement involves obstacles. Those obstacles contain lessons. Those lessons connect directly to the challenges your prospects are facing.

A story without relevance is just noise. A story with a clear lesson becomes a lever.

A consultant once shared a story about buying a secondhand Lego set. She started building it, only to discover key pieces were missing. After hours of searching for replacements, she had to start over. When pitching a complex implementation, she said, “That taught me something. At the beginning of any project, we have to make sure all the pieces are in the bag.”

That story worked because it made preparation tangible. It made risk visible. It connected emotionally and logically.

If the story does not clearly support the point you are making, don’t tell it.

Ask Before You Lose Them

Most salespeople cling to their script even when they can see the room drifting away. They are afraid of losing control, so they keep talking.

That is how you lose the deal.

Don’t wait until the Q&A to ask questions. Sprinkle them throughout your pitch to keep your audience engaged and the conversation alive.

Ask if you’re hitting the mark, what they want to explore deeper, and what matters most to them.

When you ask questions, you aren’t giving up control. You are gaining it. The person asking the questions is always in control of the conversation.

Emotion First, Logic Second

Buyers like to believe they are rational. They are not. Emotion drives decisions. Logic justifies them.

If you want someone to care, you have to make them feel something. Frustration. Relief. Possibility. Urgency.

That is why the British Rail experience worked. Marsh didn’t argue that customer service was bad. He made them experience it. The feeling came first. The logic followed.

Once a buyer is emotionally engaged, they start looking for reasons to say yes. They look for data to support the decision they already want to make.

This is why information-first pitches fall flat. You are asking people to care before you have given them a reason to.

Create the emotional connection first. Then give them the facts.

When the Room Goes Cold

Even the best sales pitch techniques don’t work every time. Sometimes the wrong people show up, there is a fire you didn’t know about, or your message just doesn’t land.

When that happens, don’t push harder. Pivot. Call it out. Ask what would be more valuable. Acknowledge the moment instead of pretending it is not happening.

That level of honesty builds trust. It shows you are there to solve a problem, not deliver a performance.

Why This Matters

Your prospect didn’t show up to be entertained or to be bored.

When you give them an experience they didn’t expect, you separate yourself from every competitor running the same tired deck. You become memorable. You become relevant. You become human.

The pitch that feels risky is usually the one that wins. The personal story. The direct question. The willingness to have a real conversation.

Because the alternative is being forgotten the moment you leave the room, no matter how many slides you showed.

Want to take your pitch from forgettable to unforgettable? Download the FREE A.C.E.D. Buyer Style Playbook, which shows you exactly how to read your buyers, adapt your approach, and turn every conversation into a deal-closing opportunity.

Here’s a question I get asked all the time: What’s the single biggest misconception holding salespeople back?

That question came from a room full of college students at BYU-Idaho, ages 19 to 24, all exploring sales careers. And my answer is the same whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the game for decades.

The biggest lie about selling is this: Good salespeople have the gift of gab.

You know the stereotype. The smooth talker. The fast-talking closer. The person who can talk their way into or out of anything. We’ve all seen it in movies, TV shows, and plays like Death of a Salesman. It’s been around for a century, and it’s completely wrong.

The Truth Top Performers Know

Here’s what the best salespeople actually do: They listen.

The greatest salespeople aren’t the best talkers. They’re the best listeners. They’re individuals who know how to ask the right questions and know how to ask questions in a way that create these aha moments for prospects and customers.

They understand something fundamental that average performers miss: Closing happens in the discovery process, not at some magical point where you lay the hammer down and ask for a sale.

Think about that for a second. The deal isn’t won when you deliver your polished presentation. It’s not won when you overcome the final objection. It’s won in those early conversations when you’re asking questions, uncovering pain, and building relationships.

Why the Stereotype Persists

The negative stereotype of salespeople has been pervasive in society for generations. Part of it’s because no one really likes to be sold. And there are salespeople who are bad. They talk at people instead of actually taking the time to listen.

But here’s the reality: Lots of professions have negative stereotypes. Lawyers. Politicians. Salespeople aren’t the worst of them.

And here’s the good side of that negative stereotype: Nobody wants to be in sales. So if you’re in sales, you’re making a whole lot more money than anybody else. That’s a good thing.

The people who look at the profession of selling and say “I could never do that” or “I could never interrupt people or take that type of rejection” are the same people who will never experience the income, freedom, and impact that comes with being great at sales.

The Power of Questions

When you shift your mindset from talking to listening, everything changes. Instead of thinking about what you’re going to say next, you’re focused on what your prospect is telling you.

You’re asking questions like:

What’s driving this decision right now?

What happens if you don’t solve this problem?

Who else is involved in this decision?

What does success look like for you?

These aren’t manipulative tricks. They’re genuine attempts to understand your prospect’s world, their challenges, and their goals. And when you do that well, you create trust. You build relationships. You position yourself as a partner, not a vendor.

The discovery questions you ask matter more than any pitch you could ever deliver. Handling objections starts with asking the right questions early in the process.

Who’s Really in Control

Here’s the truth: The person in control of the conversation is rarely the talker. In fact, it’s almost always the listener.

If you want to move deals, stop performing and start discovering. Build your calls around three things: smart opening questions, deep follow-ups, and crisp advances to the next step.

You’ll gain insights, not just air time. And insights are what close deals.

Success in sales isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about being the most curious, the most engaged, and the most intentional about moving the sale forward.

What You Need to Unlearn Right Now

If you’ve been operating under the assumption that you need to be a great talker to succeed in sales, unlearn that immediately.

Replace it with this truth: You need to be a great asker and an even better listener.

Your job isn’t to convince people. Your job is to help people convince themselves by asking questions that lead them to their own conclusions. When prospects discover the solution themselves through your questioning, they own it. They believe it. And they buy.

That’s the relationship you build through asking questions. That matters the most.

The Bottom Line

Stop trying to out-talk your prospects. Stop preparing 47-slide presentations. Stop thinking that your job is to educate and inform.

Your job is to discover. To listen. To understand. To ask the questions that help your prospects see clearly what they need to do next.

The best salespeople aren’t the smooth talkers. They’re the smart listeners who know that the power of the sale is in the questions they ask, not the words they say.

If you master this one fundamental truth, you’ll close more deals than all the gift-of-gab salespeople combined. And you’ll build a career based on relationships, trust, and value instead of pressure, manipulation, and empty talk.

That’s how you win in sales. That’s how you build lasting customer relationships. And that’s how you separate yourself from everyone else who’s still chasing the lie.

Ready to Master the Art of Prospecting?

Join us at Sales Gravy Live: Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp in Atlanta, GA on March 10-11th. Two days of intensive training where you’ll learn the proven systems and techniques that top performers use to fill their pipelines and crush their quotas. Stop guessing. Start prospecting like a pro. Register now at salesgravy.com/live.

You declined another prospecting block today, didn’t you?

That internal meeting popped up. Someone needed “just five minutes.” Your CRM screamed for attention. Before you knew it, another day passed without a single cold call, without one new connection request, without moving the needle on your pipeline. But hey, at least your calendar looked impressively full.

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: your jam-packed calendar isn’t proof that you’re too busy to prospect. It’s proof you’ve made prospecting optional. And optional activities don’t close deals or pay commissions.

The Meeting Excuse Is Killing Your Pipeline

Sales professionals love to point at their calendars as evidence of why they can’t prospect. Look at all these internal meetings. See how packed my schedule is. How could I possibly find time for outbound activity?

The real question is: when did you last decline an internal meeting to protect your prospecting time? Most salespeople never have. They treat every meeting invitation as a welcome escape from the discomfort of cold outreach. It’s the perfect alibi when your manager asks about pipeline activity.

But your calendar tells the truth about your priorities. If time blocking for prospecting isn’t on it, prospecting isn’t actually a priority. And if prospecting isn’t a priority, why exactly are you in sales?

You Don’t Need Hours—You Need 15 Minutes

The biggest lie salespeople tell themselves is that prospecting requires massive blocks of uninterrupted time. Two hours minimum. Otherwise, why bother starting?

This is the same mental trap that keeps people from reading, exercising, or learning new skills. They convince themselves that 15 minutes isn’t enough to matter, so they do nothing instead.

Consider this: reading for 15 minutes daily gets you through 20-25 books per year. Walking for 15 minutes adds nearly a mile to your day. Fifteen minutes of focused prospecting can generate six to ten cold calls, dozens of personalized connection requests, or several high-impact video messages to ghosting prospects.

The power isn’t in the duration, but in consistent, focused execution of time blocking for sales activities.

The 15-Minute Power Block Rules

These 3 rules are requirements if you want your time blocking strategy to actually work.

Rule 1: Single-task only. 

Your 15-minute prospecting block is for prospecting. Not prospecting while monitoring email. Not prospecting between Slack messages. Just prospecting. If you spend three minutes calling and twelve minutes scrolling Instagram, you didn’t prospect for 15 minutes.

Rule 2: Everything else can wait.

Yes, that includes your boss. You will not lose a customer or your job because you ignored email for 15 minutes. Responding at the end of your block is still professional. Think about it—if you were sitting face-to-face with your top client, would you stop mid-conversation to check email? Treat your power blocks with the same respect.

Rule 3: Protect the block like your commission depends on it.

Because it does. Top performers don’t ask permission to prospect. They schedule it, block it, and defend it against every interruption. The coworker who needs “just a minute” can wait sixteen minutes.

What Actually Happens in 15 Minutes

Specificity kills procrastination. You’re more likely to execute when you know exactly what you’re doing during your time blocking windows.

Eight to fifteen cold calls fit comfortably in 15 minutes. That’s enough to connect with two or three decision-makers if you’re efficient. Send ten to fifteen LinkedIn connection requests to stakeholders outside your network. Write and mail three handwritten notes to accounts you closed this month. Record personalized video messages for three prospects who’ve gone dark.

None of these activities requires elaborate preparation or perfect conditions. They require you to show up for 15 minutes and do the work. That’s it.

Schedule Your Priorities or Someone Else Will

Stephen Covey said the key isn’t prioritizing your schedule, but scheduling your priorities. Most salespeople do the opposite—they let their calendars fill with whatever lands there first, then wonder why revenue-generating work never happens.

Your calendar should reflect your income goals. If hitting quota requires consistent prospecting, your calendar should show consistent prospecting blocks. If building relationships with key accounts matters, those touchpoints should be scheduled.

When you schedule your sales priorities first, everything else fits around them. When you don’t, everything else crowds them out entirely.

Look at your calendar right now. How many prospecting blocks do you see this week? If the answer is zero, you’ve just identified why your pipeline feels thin.

How to Apply Time Blocking Starting Now

Open your calendar and block three 15-minute windows for prospecting tomorrow. Morning, midday, and late afternoon. Label them “Prospecting Power Block” and set them as busy.

Before each block, decide on one specific activity: cold calls, LinkedIn outreach, video messages, or handwritten notes. Don’t try to do multiple things. Pick one and execute for the full 15 minutes.

Close your email, silence your phone. For 15 minutes, nothing else exists except the activity you committed to. When the timer ends, return to everything else.

Track your blocks for one week. Count how many you actually protected versus how many got sacrificed to “urgent” requests. This data will reveal whether you’re serious about prospecting or just pretending to be.

Make Time or Make Excuses—You Can’t Do Both

Top performers don’t wait for the perfect time to prospect. They don’t need two-hour windows or complete silence or ideal conditions. They make the time, even when it’s just 15 minutes. Especially when it’s just 15 minutes.

That 15-minute window you’re dismissing as too small? It could be the first conversation with your biggest account next quarter. It could be the connection that leads to your highest commission check. It could be the breakthrough that turns a struggling month into a record-breaker.

But only if you actually protect it. Only if you treat time blocking for prospecting as non-negotiable. Only if you stop letting your calendar lie to you about why you’re not doing the work.

Your pipeline doesn’t care how busy you looked today. It cares about the calls you made, the emails you sent, and the relationships you built. Fifteen focused minutes at a time.

Stop letting busy work crowd out revenue-generating activities. Download our free Time Audit Log to identify exactly where your selling time is going and reclaim hours each week for actual prospecting. Track your activities for just three days and discover what’s really eating your calendar.

Are your fitness goals realistic for the life of a busy sales professional?

“I find that a lot of sales leaders I work with are operating at about 110% capacity. So when we’re talking about tackling health and fitness, we have to really understand what is going to be the few habits that are really easy to do and have the biggest bang for buck.”

That’s Josh Hulsebosch, a fitness coach who specializes in working with sales professionals, speaking on the Sales Gravy podcast. His observation cuts straight to the real reason most January fitness resolutions fail: they’re trying to add more to an already overflowing plate.

The typical sales professional is already drowning in competing priorities while operating at maximum capacity. When New Year’s hits, the instinct is to overhaul everything at once. New diet. New workout plan. New morning routine. That approach might work for people with open calendars and low pressure. For salespeople pushing through Q1 kickoffs, territory planning, and quota pressure, it is a fast track to burnout.

The All-or-Nothing Trap

Meet Steve. He’s an individual contributor who decided January 1st would mark his transformation. No more coffee. Five-mile runs every morning. Intermittent fasting. Four hours of cold calling daily because he just finished reading Fanatical Prospecting.

Ten days in, Steve slept through his alarm, missed his workout, and ordered a triple-shot latte on the way to work.

That emotional crash bled into his work. His prospecting activity dropped. His confidence dipped. His motivation evaporated under the weight of his own perfectionism.

Steve’s mistake wasn’t lack of commitment. He turned ambitious goals into self-sabotage by refusing to acknowledge a simple truth: sustainable change requires starting where you are, not where you wish you were.

Most sales professionals approach fitness goals like they approach pipeline building—more activity equals better results. But health doesn’t work like prospecting. You can’t brute force your way into better sleep or lower stress. The body requires a different strategy.

The 110% Capacity Problem

Sales is a cognitively demanding profession. You’re the quarterback of the business. Every day requires strategic thinking, relationship management, objection handling, and staying mentally sharp through rejection.

When you’re already operating at 110% capacity, adding extreme fitness commitments creates another obligation you can’t meet, another source of stress, another thing to feel guilty about when you inevitably miss a workout or eat fast food between calls.

The sales professionals who successfully improve their health identify which habits will support their performance, then build them into their existing routine. They do not chase trends. They focus on fundamentals.

The Four Pillars of Health for Sales Professionals

Fitness and health goals for sales professionals need to be realistic for people working at maximum capacity. You can’t afford to waste energy on complicated protocols or fitness fads. You need the fundamentals: exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress management.

When these four pillars are strong, everything else becomes easier.

Pillar One: Exercise

The fitness industry wants you to believe you need intense workouts, complicated programs, and hours at the gym.

For sales professionals, the single most effective exercise habit is walking 8,000 steps daily.

This number is achievable for most people regardless of fitness level. It builds momentum without requiring a complete schedule overhaul. When you consistently hit 8,000 steps, you prove to yourself that you can follow through on a commitment without sacrificing your work performance.

Movement improves cognitive function, reduces stress hormones, and helps with sleep quality—all critical for sales performance.

Make it automatic. Take calls while walking. Park farther away from the office. Walk to get coffee instead of ordering delivery. Use a standing desk and pace during internal meetings. Build movement into what you are already doing rather than treating it as another task.

Once 8,000 steps become effortless, you can layer in strength training or other activities. But walking is the foundation. It’s the one exercise habit that compounds without breaking you.

Pillar Two: Nutrition

Sales professionals tend to fall into two nutrition traps. The first is eating like garbage because they’re too busy to care. The second is attempting some extreme diet overhaul that lasts nine days before they’re back to their old patterns.

The solution isn’t meal plans or macro tracking or cutting entire food groups. It’s having a system that works when you’re slammed.

Start here: don’t skip meals. When you’re running between meetings and surviving on coffee, your blood sugar crashes. That kills your cognitive performance and drives you toward quick fixes that leave you feeling worse an hour later.

Keep protein-rich foods accessible. Greek yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, protein bars that aren’t candy in disguise, rotisserie chicken, nuts. These don’t require cooking or planning. They stabilize your energy and keep you sharp during long stretches between meals.

Meal prep doesn’t need to be complicated. Pick one day, cook a large batch of something simple—grilled chicken, ground turkey, rice, roasted vegetables—and portion it out. Now you have real food available when your schedule gets chaotic.

Hydration matters more than most people realize. Dehydration mimics fatigue. Keep water at your desk. Drink it between calls. If you’re consuming coffee all day, match it with water. You’ll notice the difference in your afternoon energy levels.

Pillar Three: Sleep

Sleep deprivation destroys sales performance. You get paid to think. When you run on five or six hours of sleep, decision-making suffers. Decision-making suffers. Emotional regulation weakens. Your ability to read prospects and handle objections declines.

You can’t always control how many hours you sleep, especially during high-pressure periods. But you can improve sleep quality.

Start with a simple nighttime routine that signals to your body it’s time to wind down. Turn off screens thirty minutes before bed. Keep your bedroom cool. If your mind races when you lie down, acknowledge the thoughts without engaging with them. Notice they’re there, then redirect your focus to your breathing.

If you wake up in the middle of the night with work thoughts, write them down or set a reminder for the next day. This closes the mental loop and allows your brain to let go.

Pillar Four: Stress Management

Sales is a pressure environment. Constant decision-making. Emotional labor. Rejection. Urgency. You move from call to meeting to fire drill to another call with almost no downtime. Over time, your nervous system stays stuck in high alert.

That chronic stress does not just affect your mood. It impacts your sleep, your focus, your patience with prospects, and your ability to think clearly in complex conversations. If you do not manage it, it will manage you.

Controlled breathing is one of the fastest ways to regulate your nervous system.

Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four.

This is box breathing. You can do it between calls. Before a tough conversation. While waiting for a prospect to answer. It does not draw attention. It just brings your system back into balance.

When stress is regulated, sleep improves. When sleep improves, thinking becomes clearer. Clearer thinking leads to better sales performance.

It is a small habit. The impact compounds.

Building Fitness Goals That Actually Stick

If you’re surviving on five hours of sleep, start there. If you’re skipping meals and running on caffeine, fix your nutrition first. If you haven’t moved your body in weeks, commit to 8,000 steps.

Don’t try to overhaul all four pillars simultaneously. That’s the all-or-nothing trap that killed Steve’s momentum in ten days.

When you take care of your physical and mental health, you show up sharper for your prospects, your team, and your numbers. Your body is the vehicle for your career. You can’t hit quota consistently if you’re running on empty.

Start with one pillar. Build one habit. Give it time to take root before you add the next one. That’s how you win in Q1 and beyond.

If you are serious about building fitness habits that actually fit the realities of sales, go deeper with Josh Hulsebosch’s performance-focused courses on Sales Gravy University. His programs are built specifically for sales professionals who are operating at full capacity and still want to win on health, energy, and longevity.