You may have heard of his popular podcast, Sales Gravy, or read one of his 10+ books on sales and leadership. But here, Jeb Blount brings his years of sales experience to help instill valuable habits and progress your pipeline.

Drawing from his decades as a top sales acceleration specialist and advisor to Fortune 500 leaders, Jeb Blount sat down with Badger Maps CEO Steve Benson to unpack how ultra-high performers master time management. Far from endless excuses about “not having enough time,” Blount’s strategies front-load impact, protect golden hours, and turn every day into a streamlined sales machine through disciplined prospecting, pipeline velocity, and correct prioritization.

From this interview, I’ve distilled eight key actionable insights that field salespeople can implement right away to maximize their time and boost results - though you can dive into the complete conversation by listening to the full Outside Sales Talk episode: How Ultra-High Performers Use Time Management. 

Jeb Blount Insight #1 - How to Make Wise Time Choices for Sales Success

Time management for salespeople boils down to choices: “every moment of the day, there are three choices they make with time.” Salespeople can opt for trivial activities, important tasks, or impactful actions like prospecting and advancing deals, but unfortunately, most default to important over impactful, leading to excuses and inefficiency.

- Identify Your Choices: Recognize trivial pursuits like watching cat videos or checking fantasy football, important duties such as CRM updates and proposals, and impactful efforts like “putting something new in the pipe - that’s number one - and number two, to advance something through the pipe.”

- Eliminate Excuses: Avoid blaming administrative work, meetings, or conference calls; instead, pack your schedule with prospect and customer meetings because “nobody’s going to pull you out of the field for that.”

- Focus on Impact: Prioritize “hard, challenging, difficult things that people don’t want to do, which is typically prospecting,” as these fill commission checks. Oftentimes, complaints about lacking time is “just BS we make up in our heads.”

Why It Works: Choosing high impact activities over less important tasks or triviality transforms the efficiency of every salesperson. As Blount says, “the pipe is life - it is everything,” and every salesperson needs to ensure a full pipeline (and bigger commissions!) while avoiding fabricated time shortages.

Jeb Blount Insight #2 - How to Front-Load Your Day with Prospecting

“The secret to getting yourself focused on impact is to start front-loading your day with impact,” avoiding the trap of starting with CRM maintenance or email - “there’s no good news in email.”, says Blount.

- Begin with a Prospecting Block: “Instead of coming in and opening up your computer and getting into the CRM or, worse, getting into email,” kick off your day with prospecting to build the habit of tackling impactful tasks.

- Avoid Delays: Don’t push prospecting to the end of the day, as “it will never happen - you’ll move it to the next day and the next day and the next day.”

- Use Tools for Efficiency: For field sales, integrate prospecting and mapping tools to set up territories and routes, ensuring that you make “yourself more efficient as you go through the day.

Why It Works: Front-loading ensures hard tasks get done, as “when you concentrate your focus in a small part of time, you get more done in less time with greater outcomes,” leading to a vibrant pipeline and reduced windshield time.

Your pipeline is full of prospects… now find their pain points with this guide for sales pros!

Jeb Blount Insight #3 - How to Block Your Time for Maximum Productivity

“Break your day into small chunks. You time block!,” assigning specific periods for prospecting, emails, CRM, social media networking, and proposals to transform your sales life.

- Create Dedicated Blocks: Allocate time for each activity, like “time for prospecting, time for follow-up on emails, time for customer service, time for CRM, time for social media.”

- Leverage Platinum Hours: Handle planning, social media, and email prospecting early or late, as “I can send an email anytime, I can schedule an email anytime - I don’t need to do that during my prime time.”

- Protect Golden Hours: Reserve prime selling time - typically 7 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. - for interactions. As Blount says, “100% of your time should be focused on getting face-to-face or having conversations or interacting with prospects.”

Why It Works: Time blocking concentrates focus, per Parkinson’s Law and Horstman’s corollary, where “time tends to contract into the time allotted for it,” allowing more efficiency and freeing time for life outside work.

Jeb Blount Insight #4 - How to Manage Your Pipeline to Save Time

“One of the biggest wastes of time for salespeople is just checking in.” leading to stalled deals. Instead, always secure next steps to maintain velocity.

- Set Tangible Next Steps: “Never, ever, ever - write this down - ever, ever, ever leave a meeting with a prospect if you haven’t defined and set a next step,” scheduling it on calendars within five days.

- Gauge Engagement: Use micro-commitments to test interest. If they won’t commit to something small, “they’re just not into you,” allowing you to “let that go and move on.”

- Replace Stalled Deals: With consistent prospecting, “those deals that move out naturally because they’re not going to advance get replaced with better opportunities.”

Why It Works: This advances deals efficiently, avoiding the “call-me-maybe vortex,” and keeps the pipeline “vibrant, moving, and dynamic,” freeing time for high-value activities.

Check out these hacks for even more time management growth!

Jeb Blount Insight #5 - How to Optimize Territory and Routes for Efficiency

“The greatest waste of time for sales professionals is what? Looking at a windshield,” therefore, a savvy salesperson should grid territories, optimize routes, and group calls to minimize driving.

- Grid and Group: “One of the things that I think every sales leader should do is sit down with their salespeople on a regular basis and look at the territory they’re working in, mapping that territory out, gridding it out, and making sure that their salespeople are grouping their appointments.”

- Research and Route: Pull prospects by zip code around appointments, do advance research, adopt a route optimizer tool, and “plug it in, create a route so that when you get to your appointment, you go to your appointment, you walk out, you know exactly where you’re going.”

- Add Spontaneous Calls or Visits: Prospects can come from anywhere! “Look to the left, look to the right, look behind you, and walk in some doors that you didn’t know.”

Why It Works: This solves the “incredibly complex math problem to optimize time over a geographic space,” as Blount puts it, ensuring “you can get to your appointments and to your in-person prospecting calls in the most efficient way possible,” boosting output without extra hours.

Jeb Blount Insight #6 - How to Balance Sales Activities Effectively

“Prospecting always comes first - the pipe is life; there is nothing more important than putting new stuff in your pipeline.” Therefore, a savvy salesperson prioritizes high-probability deals.

Why It Works: This ensures a full pipeline and focuses on wins, as “the way you choose to use time is just that - it’s a choice,” differentiating top earners who make $1 million from those at $80,000 despite similar talent.

Jeb Blount Insight #7 - The Five Traits of Ultra-High Performers

Ultra-high performers have five disciplines: prospecting discipline, time discipline, probability discipline, people discipline, and emotional discipline.

- Fanatical Prospecting Discipline: “They are constantly focusing on the activities that keep the pipeline full,” outgunning others even if average at closing.

- Time and Probability Discipline: Choose high-impact use of time and “spend their time on the highest-probability activities.”

- People and Emotional Discipline: Build EQ for influence and practice self-control, “giving up what you want now for what you want most.”

Why It Works: These traits define the top 5-10% of salespeople, and luckily “for leaders—this is all coachable, completely coachable - you can’t coach persistence, you can’t coach drive, you can’t coach motivation, you can’t coach any of those things - but you can work with your people on all five of those disciplines and advance your entire sales team.”

Jeb Blount Insight #8 - How to Achieve Sustainable Work-Life Balance

“Sales is not a nine-to-five job, never has been, never will be,” but efficiency allows completing work in the roughly 30 golden hours that salespeople get weekly, all without burning out.

- Use Time Wisely: During prime selling time, or golden hours, maximize every moment - for example, says Blount, “if I was eating lunch, I’m eating lunch in the parking lot of my next appointment.”

- Plan Outside Prime Time: Prepare your upcoming week on Sunday nights and weekends, like “between six and seven-thirty, I would take about an hour and a half and sit down and think about how my week was going to go.”

- Own Inefficiencies: Poor balance often comes from daytime waste like “three hours of your day sitting on email,” not company or client demands.

Why It Works: Concentrated blocks let you “outgun everybody - I was always the number one salesperson on the team because of it,” freeing time for family while sustaining high performance sales performance long-term.

Check out these 5 uniques tips for maintaining a solid work-life balance in sales!

Final Takeaway: Prioritize Impact, Master Your Time

Jeb Blount’s core advice for salespeople? Start progressing today by choosing one time management strategy: front-load your day with a prospecting block, secure tangible next steps in every meeting, or block your calendar for focused tasks. Implement it consistently, watch your pipeline grow, and then add another technique. As Blount emphasizes, “the pipe is life - it is everything,” and mastering how you choose to use their time ensures you focus on impactful activities that drive commissions and success.

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