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Is Sales a People Skill or a Process Skill? Jeb Blount Explains | Ask Jeb
Sales Gravy29 Jul 2026
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And so whenever I'm working with clients and I'm working in their sales process, there's always a money ball. Like there's that one metric that if you focus on that has a tendency to drive everything else. Yours is probably different than mine, but mine is first time appointments. So prospecting, outreach, the activity, I count all that. “We track all that.” It all matters. But what matters more is how many brand new first time appointments, FTAs is what we call them. Do you have every day that are qualified for most people on my team? And we're in a business services because we sell training to businesses and consulting to businesses.
we'll have closed two of those. So every 10, we typically close two. Now, some of my sales reps only close one, right? Some of my sales reps only close a half. That's when we start working on the art, right? So if they're getting the first time appointments, but they're not closing them, then it's either the appointments weren't qualified in the first place, “which that means we get to go back and look at what's our targeting” in the sales process and the client doesn't like them or they're not asking the right questions or the business case they're building is not relevant to the customer's business because we didn't really connect on a business acumen level with them, like we didn't understand how their business worked or what they were trying to accomplish or the outcomes that they were trying to deliver.