Liar's Uno

2025 was a year. I’m glad to see it gone, though I hope I never forget it.

Most people look to make “top-line” changes to themselves during a calendar year. For me, last year’s results felt like “bottom-line” changes. They weren’t sexy; they were foundational, and I really believe there will be an impact for years to come.

Liar’s Uno

Santa put Liar’s Uno in my stocking this year, and at our last family Christmas gathering, I played with my brother, a couple of my nieces, and my daughter.

It’s a great spin on the classic game, and not nearly as complex or over-the-top as some of the others. The gist is that some cards are played face down, and you are supposed to tell the rest of the table what they are instead of showing them. You can tell the truth or lie, and there are consequences for calling a bluff. It’s fun.

At one point early in the game, my brother said, in front of all these kids, something to the effect of, "You know, you can't trust Uncle Jeff. He's in sales."

It was a joke. Kind of.

I come from a place where there's an inherent mistrust of salespeople, and honestly, I get it. The stereotype exists for a reason. Bad actors earned it, and some keep doing so.

As someone who has spent their entire career trying to be the opposite of that stereotype, there are still many people, including some in my own family, who don't quite reconcile what I do and who I am.

That's a strange thing to sit with.

For as much as you hear me and so many others talk about our profession as a force for good in the world, and as much as we and so many others continue to prove it, some tropes just refuse to go away.

I think it’s important for us to remember that as we go out into the world and do our thing. The bubbles we live in, no matter how big they appear, are still bubbles. What’s old hat to us is still suspicious to everyone else, and that may never change.

Selling is Our Humanity

Pardon the slight pun on Dan Pink’s bestseller… Here's what I've come to believe about sales:

It's way more than closing deals, and most of those deals have nothing to do with money.

Brian Tracy said that selling is a transfer of enthusiasm from one party to another.

When I heard that (on a CD in my early 2000’s sedan), I started to think about my profession more broadly, and I didn’t stop there.

Any time you ask someone to do something, it's a sales call. When they do it, you've made a sale.

Think about that. Every request. Every conversation. Every relationship.

Everybody is someone's best customer, and could be yours too.

What if we all treated each other that way?

✧ We'd listen more.
✧ We'd have more empathy.
✧ We'd understand each other better.

We wouldn't necessarily agree on everything; that’s not what this is all about, but we'd get along a whole lot better.

I talked about this on a podcast not too long ago.

When you open the aperture wide enough, selling stops being transactional and starts being a real force for good, if we can stop being so cynical about it.

That's the transformation I'm after.

Not just better pipelines (though that happens), but better thinking. Better relationships. Better outcomes.

That's what I'm building toward in 2026. Not just helping companies sell more, but helping them sell better. In a way that earns trust instead of eroding it.

In a way that makes "he's in sales" sound like a compliment, not a warning.

Welcome to 2026

I've got a lot planned for 2026.

✧ A series on doing the hard work up front that makes selling easier.
✧ New ways to help teams figure out what's actually working and why.
✧ More conversations with people who are rethinking the way they sell.
✧ Updates to the website and service offerings that you’ll hear more about next week. Here’s a sneak peek if you want it.
✧ Continuing my #ThankfulThursday posts
✧ Playing around with a YouTube series I’m tentatively calling Candid Conversations
✧ Doing a deep dive on several apps this year so I can come closer to maximizing their benefit (instead of just searching for my favorite artists on Spotify every time I open it).

It’s kinda weird doing all of this out in the open, but it all starts here, with the belief that sales can be something better than its reputation.

Happy New Year. Let's make it a good one.

Cheers,
JB