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How to Balance Prospecting and Customer Service | Ask Jeb Blount
Sales Gravy26 Aug 2026
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And I go, welcome to the sales world. If it was easy, everybody be doing it. And so the issue is you have to be able to do all three of those things. It's not a cost of doing business. It's a cost of priorities. So if you choose to prioritize serving existing customers over prospecting, then you're going “to serve existing customers and you're going to have an empty pipeline.” If you choose to allow balls to drop because you're taking care of customer fires that are coming at you. So you miss a meeting or you miss getting a proposal in, or you miss doing follow-up or you didn't prep as well as you could for a presentation or do enough discovery because you are existing customers. That's just a choice, right?
So the key is when you're in those situations and there's a customer problem and you've already created the system, the person who's calling you for the problem, you call them and go, you coach, where could you find the information? How could you find the information? What could you do there? So then that person goes and finds it. And all you say is, when are you going to help this customer? “And then you follow up.” Yeah, I have this mantra, in God we trust, everybody else we follow up on. My support staff, I'm going to give them an opportunity to help the customer. But here's the thing, you have to follow up before the deadline for helping the customer because I don't want to let them fail my customer. I want to hold them accountable.
it's all taken care of, but that didn't help you sell any more business. And it certainly doesn't allow you to scale yourself. If you're the help desk and you're the salesperson, I know this is a concept that a lot of people like, sometimes it gets sticky, but you own the customer, not the problem. Someone else “owns the problem and your job is to hold them accountable.” you on, because most salespeople don't have this, you actually created the system and put the information in there. So it's available to them. I mean, so many salespeople don't even do that. And if you do that, then you'll be able to build this balance because that's the thing.