The Art of Sales with Art Sobczak · 2026-10-29 · 15 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
32 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Art Sobczak dismantles the popular "just make a thousand calls" advice by drawing parallels to learning any other skill - you wouldn't become a great pianist by randomly tapping keys a thousand times. The core issue is that repetition alone creates permanent habits, whether good or bad; doing the wrong thing repeatedly just makes you exceptionally bad at it while potentially conditioning your brain to associate prospecting with pain and rejection. Sobczak uses his own barbecue competition experience to illustrate how real mastery emerges from a structured loop: learning the underlying principle (not just memorizing words), observing skilled practitioners, deliberate practice with feedback and adjustment, then real-world application with review. He contrasts this with both extremes - pure information consumption without practice, and mindless reps without coaching. The practical takeaway is to pick one specific element (opening, objection response, transition question) and cycle through intentional practice with recording, feedback, and single-variable adjustments before taking it live. Sobczak positions AI coaching as a solution to the expense and rarity of traditional sales practice, enabling salespeople to rehearse difficult scenarios with immediate feedback before risking real prospect conversations.
Hosted by Art Sobczak, cold calling and sales trainer. The show scores 63.0/100 on substance across its analysed episodes. See the full show profile.
Because if you're using bad techniques, each repetition reinforces those poor habits and conditions your brain to associate calling with rejection and discomfort, making you exceptionally skilled at being bad rather than improving your actual selling ability.
Deliberate practice isolates one specific skill element, uses recording and feedback to identify what's working, adjusts one variable at a time, and cycles through realistic scenarios with pushback - versus mindless repetition of the same flawed approach.
Sobczak suggests using AI coaching tools (which he is developing), role-playing with recorded feedback, practicing different responses to objections, and working with managers or colleagues who understand the underlying sales principles to provide qualified feedback.
The immediate goal is breaking the freeze by picking up the phone without telling yourself false stories about rejection, which Sobczak addresses separately from the broader skill-building process in his rejection-focused newsletter.
Pick one specific element (your opening, objection response, transition, or a particular question you ask) rather than trying to overhaul your entire process - then cycle through learning, recording, feedback, adjustment, and real-world application on just that one piece.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode makes one genuinely useful point - that mindless repetition without correct technique reinforces bad habits and conditions salespeople to associate prospecting with pain - but the core idea is the well-known deliberate practice concept repackaged. Much of the runtime is consumed by analogies (piano, brisket, golf slice) and an outro promoting the host's products, leaving only modest net insight.
If you're doing the wrong things a thousand times, you're not developing skill. You're reinforcing bad habits. You're getting really good at at being bad.
They're certainly practicing their words, but they're also training their brain to believe something like this. Calls equal discomfort. Prospecting equals rejection.
The deliberate-practice argument is Ericsson-adjacent and well-trodden; the episode adds the psychological conditioning angle (phone-aversion from repeated failure) which is mildly fresh, but the AI coaching pivot is teased without any substantive new framework. No contrarian or first-principles thinking emerges.
Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So be darn careful what you're making permanent.
How can AI help salespeople actually become better at selling?
This is a solo monologue by the host, a long-tenured sales trainer and author, so there is no guest to evaluate. Art Sobczak has real practitioner roots but operates squarely in the sales-trainer content space, which limits the ceiling here; the absence of an external practitioner voice is a structural gap.
When I first got into, uh, competition, uh, barbecue in the 90s, way before all the barbecue shows and the YouTube videos, I read what little was available at the time about smoking great brisket.
And as I record this, we're not quite ready to avail yet, but I expect to have a lot more to share with you before the end of, uh, 2026.
The episode is almost entirely analogy-driven (piano, brisket, golf) and relies on attributed quotes from Lombardi and Wooden rather than real sales data, named companies, conversion metrics, or concrete outcomes. The one book cited (Samler's) is itself a metaphor rather than empirical evidence.
David Samler famously wrote a book titled, you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar.
Vince Lombardi, um, said, practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
The episode is a scripted solo monologue with no guest and no actual conversation to probe or challenge. The host does construct and then rebut imagined objections, which shows some structural awareness, but there is no interviewing craft, no follow-up pressure, and the final third drifts into product promotion.
Now of course I know people will be saying, oh, art, but you're in the training business.
someone listening to this right now is saying I should use the, uh, definition of insanity quote. Okay, there I did.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Some of the worst sales advice I've seen lately is, " Just make 1,000 calls." Because if you're doing the wrong things 1,000 times, you're not developing skill. You're getting really good at being bad. And you might actually be training yourself to dread picking up the phone. In this episode of The Art of Sales , I explain why repetition alone doesn't create mastery, why consuming endless sales training doesn't work either, and what actually DOES make someone better. I'll also share how I went from turning expensive briskets into something resembling roofing material to producing competition-quality barbecue. Turns out, learning to smoke a brisket and mastering sales have quite a bit in common. You'll hear how to use deliberate practice, feedback, and repetition to improve your opening statements, questions, responses to resistance, and overall sales conversations. Plus, I'll explain why one of the most exciting applications of AI in sales isn't having AI do the selling for you. It's using AI to help you become a better salesperson. Coming soon: I'm developing a new Smart Calling AI coaching tool designed to help you practice, improve, and master the human side of selling.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: You are listening to the art of sales. Everyone sells every day and this is your source for conversational real world sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results you'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Sobchak.
Speaker B: So I saw this ridiculous LinkedIn post that said this. The only way to get better at cold calling is to do a lot of cold calling. Make a thousand calls and you're going to get better than you ever could by taking a course. Um, no, not if you have no clue about what you're doing. If you're doing the wrong things a thousand times, you're not developing skill. You're reinforcing bad habits. You're getting really good at at being bad. And depending on how your brain works, you might also be building up resistance to calling itself because you're repeatedly doing something poorly, getting crappy results, feeling rejection, and associating all of those negative things with picking up the phone. So think about how ridiculous the just do it a thousand times advice sounds when we apply it to almost anything else in life. I don't know how to play the piano. Oh, I'd love to be able to. And I greatly admire people, um, who do and are great at it. But I never took lessons. And if I sat down and tried tapping away at it a thousand times, I wouldn't sound like Billy Joel. I'd sound more annoying than the guy talking loudly on his iPhone at the coffee shop. Education alone is not the answer here. Now, of course I know people will be saying, oh, art, but you're in the training business. Hey, I get it. But education alone is not the answer either. Here's the other side to this. You can't learn a skill simply by consuming information about it. David Samler famously wrote a book titled, you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar. That could be applied to reading a book, too, but I'll overlook the irony here. When I first got into, uh, competition, uh, barbecue in the 90s, way before all the barbecue shows and the YouTube videos, I read what little was available at the time about smoking great brisket. Then I tried it, and I turned many beautiful pieces of beef into inedible shoe leather like substances. And reading more articles wouldn't magically make me a great Pitmaster, but neither would smoking another hundred briskets exactly the same way. And someone listening to this right now is saying I should use the, uh, definition of insanity quote. Okay, there I did. So what ultimately made the Difference was more learning. Watching people who knew what they were doing. Asking questions at competitions, taking courses, buying VHS videos. Kids, you can Google what that means. Getting coaching, practicing, evaluating what happened, making adjustments, and doing it again and again. Many briskets were harmed in the process, and today I produce Texas pitmaster level melt in your mouth brisket. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. At least that's what friends and family and guests tell me. So what does brisket have to do with prospecting and sales and learning and mastery? Ah, a lot. Because repetition alone does not create skill and mastery. Repetition creates habits. And whether those habits are good or bad depends on what what you're repeating. Just make more calls, get your reps in as a numbers game. Okay, I admit, sure, you got to have reps. But reps of what? If a salesperson uses a gimmicky self centered opening a thousand times, they'll probably get very good at delivering a gimmicky self centered opening. If they immediately launch into a pitch every time someone answers, they'll reinforce that behavior. If they panic at the first hint of resistance and start defending themselves, a, uh, thousand repetitions can make that reaction almost automatic. Vince Lombardi, um, said, practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. Another variation I like is even better. Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So be darn careful what you're making permanent. Now there's another problem with bad repetition, and this one might even be more damaging. Imagine someone who's already uncomfortable with prospecting. They've been told that the cure is simple. Make more calls. So what do they do? They make more calls and their opening creates resistance. They hear, not interested, they get brushed off. They get kicked in the head. Their mind goes blank, and they awkwardly stutter and stammer. They feel awful. Then they do it again and again and again. So what exactly are they training? They're certainly practicing their words, but they're also training their brain to believe something like this. Calls equal discomfort. Prospecting equals rejection. Picking up the phone equals hurts like hell. And then we're surprised when they start finding other things to do instead of calling. CRM cleanup becomes urgent and fascinating. That's why telling someone who's struggling to just make more calls can be like telling a terrible golfer to fix his slice by. I'll just go buy another bucket of balls. More swings aren't the answer, by the way. Ask me how I know that better swings are the answer. Now, one caveat here for anyone who's frozen solid by this. If you're so paralyzed by the fear of rejection that you can't get your hand to pick up the phone at all. The very first hurdle isn't quality, it's just dialing without telling yourself a false story. Now that's not the same thing as make a thousand calls. That advice is about reps of a script. This is about breaking the freeze before even trying to be good. I wrote an entire newsletter issue on why that rejection feeling is almost entirely self inflicted and how to make that stop. If you haven't read that, go to the archives@smartcallingreport.com Smart M calling report.com and just do a search on rejection. It's worth five minutes before you go any further here. Okay, but learning without doing uh doesn't work either. And this is where the other extreme fails. You can read every sales book ever written, watch hundreds of training videos, attend the webinars, listen to podcasts, collect every shiny new AI prompt promising answers to all objections, and become the world's foremost authority on what you should say. Then you could have your brain give you a 404 not found error as you completely freeze when an actual human being answers the phone. Ever been there? I have. So knowing isn't doing. That's why real skill development requires a loop. Learn what to do and why it works. Observe what good and what good looks and sounds like, and then practice somewhere where it's okay to screw up and give feedback on, uh, what worked and what didn't. Then adjust and then take it into real conversations. Then review what actually happened and repeat. That's how I stopped making brisket that could have been used as roofing material. And it's how salespeople actually become better sales professionals. And now here's where AI can help us solve a problem we've always had with sales training. Most of the conversation about AI and sales today focuses on having AI do more things for salespeople. Write the email, research the prospect, summarize the call, create the follow up, automate the outreach. All potentially useful in the right context, sure. But I'm much more interested in another question. How can AI help salespeople actually become better at selling? Think about the traditional problem with sales practice. You need someone to practice with, preferably someone who understands selling well enough to react realistically. Which, by the way, is not saying, okay, Kyle, you be a prospect and Sarah, hey, you be the salesperson. Go. Then you need someone qualified to listen, identify what you're doing wrong, explain why, suggest an improvement, and let you try it again that's expensive, that's time consuming. And no shocker here, most salespeople don't do much of it. Am I right there? So instead, they practice on humans. Actual prospects. Paying prospects, potentially, which is a pretty expensive place to learn, right? What if medical students did the same thing before they became surgeons? Now, imagine being able to practice an opening before making the call. The prospect responds, you react, you get immediate coaching. Here's where you created resistance. You tried to answer the objection with your rebuttal, but you never questioned the premise behind it. Or you started talking about your company before giving them any reason to care. Then try it again and again. Not mindlessly, not a thousand times, but intentionally. It's a very different kind of repetition. And you can use this right now even without an AI coach, which we are building to do that, by the way. More on that soon. But here's what you do right now. Take one part of your sales conversation where you know you could be better. Not your entire sales process. One thing. Your opening. Your response to, we're already happy with our supplier. Your transition into questions. A question you routinely ask. How you respond when someone says, uh, just send me something. Then use this process. Here we go. Learn the principle. Don't just memorize words. Understand what you're trying to accomplish and why. Then listen to yourself record yourself saying it. You'll hear things you never notice when you're actually speaking. Next, practice different responses. Don't rehearse. Only the perfect conversation. Practice what happens when the other person pushes back or when they misunderstand you, when they challenge you or give you an answer that you weren't expecting. That happens, right? Get feedback from a manager, coach, colleague, or technology that actually understands the skill that you're trying to appear. Then change one thing. Don't try to repair seven things simultaneously. That's not going to work. Then try it again. Then, uh, take it into the real world and pay attention to what happens. That's deliberate, intentional practice. And it's very different from simply going through the motions. There's no prize for making a thousand lousy calls. And it hurts. The goal isn't to become someone who makes more calls. How about becoming someone who's better on every single call when they make them? And this guy says, that's one of the most exciting uses of AI in sales. Not replacing the salesperson, developing the salesperson. And that isn't just a good quote from me. It's what I'm working on right now. Using AI not simply to do more sales tasks, but to coach salespeople to become better at the human part of selling. And as I record this, we're not quite ready to avail yet, but I expect to have a lot more to share with you before the end of, uh, 2026. And you don't need to wait to start getting this type of smart calling training, by the way, and coaching. You can get it right now with my smart calling, prospecting and sales app for B2B professionals. And there is an AI uh component. Don't get me wrong, it's going to be different than the AI coach. This is actually daily accountability and training and coaching. So you can see more on this at. Here's the URL studio.com art uh, and this is going to give you the training, examples, practice and guidance to help you get better at the conversations that actually matter. Because the goal is not a thousand more reps of something that's bad. It's making the next rep and you better than you were on the last one. All right, hey, you know what time it is? Your attitude
Speaker C: will be I am everywhere. The art of the sails.
Speaker B: That's right. It's time for the quote of the day. Today's quote ties directly into what I just talked about here, and it comes from John Wooden, the legendary ucla, uh, basketball coach, who said, don't mistake activity for achievement. Don't mistake activity for achievement. And he wasn't talking about it, but applies directly to just go make a thousand calls. All right, so again, the URL for that, uh, daily coaching and training where you go through at your own pace and it's like having me in your pocket sounds kind of funny, but it will greatly help you improve and repeat the right things. And that is studio.comartstudio.com Art, thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with me today. Until next time, go out and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Subcheck.
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