25 years in sales taught me one thing: you don't lose deals because your service or product's bad. You lose them because you haven't practiced the presentation, pitch, the room, or the close. That's the whole premise behind The Dealmaker League — a free, practice-driven community for small business owners, sales leaders, consultants, and dealmakers who want real reps: pitching, presenting, negotiating, closing — live, with real feedback, not theory. It’s Free for the first 100 founding members so if you’re reading this right now as a member that means you🙂 The benefits of being a member include < A Weekly live Zoom practice call, Thursdays 12:30pm CST | Starting the 2nd week of October, 2026. You also get: < Free 1-on-1 Ai Strategy Call with Jeff < Business Automation Blueprint < AI Bottleneck Finder < Custom Ai Marketing Playbook We only have 100 spots. After that, it's paid, permanently. Feel free to share this Community with any that may benefit🙂

I find it fascinating to discover that most small business owners still aren’t using AI… They’re using a very expensive version of Google. Ask Claude a question. Get an answer. Copy it. Paste it somewhere else. Repeat 47 times. Congratulations. You’ve successfully hired yourself as the unpaid intern for your AI. The real opportunity isn’t learning how to write better prompts. It’s learning how to build a business where AI actually removes work from your plate. There’s a progression I’m seeing with the businesses getting this right: First, you use AI to answer questions. Then you give it context about your business so it stops starting from zero. Then you connect it to the tools where your work actually happens. Then you build repeatable workflows. Then those workflows begin handling pieces of the business without you constantly pushing the next button. Eventually, you’re not just using AI. You’re building leverage. That’s the difference. Because if every lead still needs you to remember the follow-up… Every meeting requires you to manually update the CRM… Every proposal starts with a blank document… And every customer question lands on your desk… You don’t have an AI problem. You have a systems problem. And adding another shiny AI subscription probably isn’t going to fix it. This is exactly what we’re working on inside The Dealmaker League, my free Skool community. We’re bringing together business owners, consultants, executives and sales professionals who want to get better at practical AI adoption, modern sales, business development, networking, follow-up, communication and dealmaking. Not AI theory. Not 97 new tools you’ll forget you subscribed to next month. Practical systems you can actually use to save time, create opportunities and close more business. Because the goal isn’t to become an AI expert. The goal is to build a business that needs less of you to operate and creates more opportunities because of it. If that sounds like the kind of room you should be in,

I’ve discovered over the past 25 years in Sales and Business, that th The best deals rarely start with a pitch… Yesterday I was reminded why… Fast boat. Beautiful day. Great friend. Music cranked up. And yours truly somehow got promoted to DJ. 🎧😂 We spent the day cruising the water aboard Really Really Nice Thing— which might be the most accurately named boat I’ve ever been on. No sales pitch. No networking agenda. No trying to “get” something from somebody. Just good conversation, great energy, a ridiculous amount of fun, and a sunset that made everyone stop for a second and take it in. 🌅 And it reminded me of something I think we forget in business: Relationships compound. The strongest opportunities I’ve had in my career rarely came from collecting another 500 connections. They came from actually connecting with people. Sharing experiences. Helping each other. Making introductions. Having real conversations. And occasionally blasting music on a boat. 😎 That’s a big part of why I created The Dealmaker League. It’s a FREE community for business owners, executives, consultants, sales professionals, and ambitious people who want to get better at the skills that actually move careers and businesses forward: Relationships. Communication. Sales. Dealmaking. AI. And creating opportunities together. Because your next opportunity probably isn’t hiding inside another cold pitch. It might be one relationship away. Share our New Dealmaker League with a friend and if they join I will send you a special bonus (valued at $97) Let them join The Dealmaker League for FREE and if you have not already posted your intro to our members please do so today🙂 Have a great week and drop a comment on what you would like us to cover regarding Sales or Dealmaking topics for this week.

After 25 years in my Sales Career I’ve discovered that most business owners don’t have a sales problem. They have a “talking about themselves too much” problem. I spent decades in sales learning this the hard way. We’re taught to explain the product. Present the features. Handle objections. And convince people why they should buy. But great selling works almost completely backwards. Dan Martell recently shared the attached infographic below and is a great reminder to remember the following key points: 1. Forget your product. Find the pain. Don’t pitch. Diagnose. 2. Press the pain. Then sell the dream. What is the problem actually costing them? Money? Time? Stress? Missed opportunity? Then show them what life looks like on the other side. 3. Give the price. Then shut up. This one is painful for salespeople. Say the number. Then resist the overwhelming biological urge to spend the next 90 seconds negotiating against yourself. 4. If there’s doubt, go back to the pain. Don’t immediately defend your features. Ask better questions. Because objections often mean the gap between where they are and where they want to be isn’t clear enough yet. And there’s a bigger lesson here: The best salespeople aren’t professional persuaders. They’re professional diagnosticians. They understand the problem so well that the solution becomes the logical next step. That’s exactly the kind of skill we’re going to practice inside my Skool Community called… “The Dealmaker League.” It’s a new FREE online community for business owners, consultants, executives and sales professionals who want to get better at: → Selling → Negotiating → Presenting → Networking → Dealmaking → Using AI to become more effective at all of the above Not by watching another 47 hours of content. By getting reps in. Because you don’t become a better dealmaker by knowing more. You become one by practicing more. Repost this if someone in your network needs the reminder.

**Ryan Serhant just did $6B in sales. 🤑 Here's the one line that actually matters.** Real estate mogul Ryan Serhant — the guy who's met 100+ billionaires — got asked for his best networking advice. His answer wasn't a tactic, a script, or a follow-up hack. It was this: **networking isn't about collecting contacts. It's about creating relationships.** Most people treat networking like a numbers game — more DMs, more coffee chats, more LinkedIn adds. Serhant's point cuts the other way: the people who win long-term aren't the ones with the biggest Rolodex. They're the ones who actually invested in the people in it. That's the whole game in this League. So let's put it into reps. **This week's reps:** 1. **The zero-ask check-in.** Message 3 people you haven't talked to in 3+ months. No pitch, no ask — just genuinely check in. Notice how different that feels from your usual outreach. 2. **Relationship before pitch.** In your next sales or discovery call, spend the first 5 minutes on *them* — their business, their week, their actual problem — before you say one word about what you're selling. 3. **Value-first follow-up.** Instead of "just checking in," send a follow-up with something useful attached: an article, an intro, a resource. Make the follow-up worth getting. 4. **Revive one dormant relationship. ** Pick one contact who went cold. Figure out why you let it lapse, and fix it this week. Relationships compound. Contacts don't. **Drop a comment:** which relationship have you been meaning to invest in but keep putting off? https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19L93SzxfC/?mibextid=wwXIfr