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What Good Looks Like: How to Build a Sales Playbook From Your Top Performers | Sales Gravy Podcast
Sales Gravy24 Jul 2026
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heard this, Jeb, but there was a funeral procession recently for the phone. The phone is dead. It has been dead actually for quite some time and people keep proclaiming it dead. It keeps going. There are a lot of people who will say that's absolutely true. No one picks up the phone anymore. And we see it in the data. Pickup rates are plummeting, “response rates, returns to voicemails, things like that. They're falling through the floor” because people are bombarded by messaging from a lot of different places. Now, if you sit in an office or even at home and you sit in front of your computer all day and you would rather react with your fingers on a keyboard and ignore the phone, the phone
8 o'clock in the morning. Do we make sundowners or is that the worst time to make calls in this organization? Because the last thing that people want to do at the end of an already long day is get stuck at the office a little bit more. I knew people to call on because they were wasting time staying at the office because they didn't want to go wherever they had to go next. “So understanding not just make one more call, but how, why, where, when, those are the things” that you start to measure inside your organization. And the thing that I go to first is, I work with a lot of companies that they may have a team of 10 or 12. If they have 12 people on a team, three of them are carrying probably 40% of the revenue, maybe more.
We can put it on the whiteboard over there. We can talk about it. And we can talk about whether or not the same way Bob built relationships 20 years ago is transferable to today. Most of the time, it's not. So my job as a leader is to pull out the stuff that's made Bob successful. “It's to codify it, document it, and update it, modernize it.” So that Sally or Sarah or Emily, I just did a recent look at naming conventions and popular names from certain generations. So Emily is a very popular name for someone who was born in the 2000s where Sarah wasn't.
What else should leaders be aware of and how might you frame this conversation up if you walked in as a VP of sales tomorrow with a CEO or you know an executive board forecasting when you understand what successful sales processes have looked like in the past and “Then we can get closer to that model for the way things get done most effectively here” What good looks like here it helps with forecasting because there's just a higher level of certainty What we're talking about here is standardization without any single rep giving up any of their autonomy or integrity I'm not here to tell you how to do this
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