You’re Selling Wrong, Here’s How to Make More Money | Jeremy Miner

Jeremy Miner began selling home-security systems door to door while still in school, under strong financial pressure from an impending marriage and a child on the way. He said his first two or three months were difficult because he had not been taught an effective sales method, and the need to support his family left him feeling that there was no practical “Plan B.”

Miner studied behavioral science and human psychology while learning sales, and he began applying what he learned about decision-making directly to selling. His central question became why people say yes rather than no and how a salesperson’s words, questions and delivery affect that decision.

He grew up on a cattle ranch outside a Missouri town of fewer than 800 people and rejects the idea that he was naturally born with sales ability. He presents his background as evidence for his broader argument that sales competence is learned rather than innate.

Miner argues that there is no such thing as a naturally born salesperson in the meaningful professional sense. Advanced questioning, tonality, objection prevention and objection handling are acquired skills, just as technical ability in a sport must be learned and practiced.

He distinguishes elite salespeople from stereotypically talkative salespeople by their ability to ask effective questions. In his view, strong sellers get prospects to think more deeply, discover problems they had not fully recognized and visualize what life or business could look like after those problems are solved.

Miner attributes his rise to very high commission earnings primarily to obsessive refinement of his craft. After losing a sale, he said he would analyze what he said, what he failed to ask and what might have triggered the prospect’s resistance, then continually adjust his approach.

His behavioral-science background led him to focus heavily on how prospects react when they detect a conventional sales pitch. He argues that familiar “salesperson” language and vocal patterns can trigger defensiveness before the prospect has meaningfully processed the actual words.

Tonality became one of Miner’s core tools for interrupting that defensive response. Rather than merely changing a script, he learned to change how questions and statements sounded so that the interaction felt less like a conventional pitch.

Miner rejects the traditional idea that people primarily “buy from people they like.” His updated formulation is that people buy from the person they trust can produce the best result; personal likability helps, but he does not regard it as the decisive factor.

He says modern buyers are unusually defensive because they are exposed to sales messages almost constantly. Advertising on phones, television, radio, billboards and social media contributes, in his view, to prospects developing automatic defenses against anything that feels like a pitch.

That defensiveness often appears as vague, surface-level answers rather than outright rejection. Miner interprets those answers as a protective response: the prospect does not yet feel comfortable enough to reveal the deeper issues influencing the decision.

Miner calls his response to this problem “Always Be Disarming,” contrasting it with the traditional “Always Be Closing.” The objective is to lower resistance throughout the conversation instead of creating pressure and then attempting to force a close at the end.

Playfulness is one way he tries to disarm a prospect early in a conversation. Instead of routine small talk, he may make a mildly self-deprecating or playful remark, using the tone itself to invite the prospect to relax and engage.

He stresses that wording alone does not produce the effect; delivery changes the meaning. The same sentence delivered with the wrong tone can feel awkward, confrontational or manipulative, while a playful or concerned delivery can produce a very different reaction.

Miner says the quality and pacing of questions determine how deeply a prospect thinks about an issue. Salespeople who fire questions too quickly often produce equally quick, superficial answers because the prospect has not been given time to internalize what is being asked.

He recommends slowing down consequential questions so the prospect has time to confront the implications of the current situation. In a life-insurance example, he deliberately paced a question about losing a spouse’s income and paying for a house and children’s schooling rather than rushing through it.

Miner believes a prospect who remains at the surface level is less likely to buy and more likely to raise objections. Even when such a prospect does buy, he argues that externally pressured persuasion can lead to second thoughts and later cancellation because the prospect never fully persuaded themselves.

He teaches five major tonalities—curious, confused, challenging, playful and concerned—with additional variations beneath them. The appropriate tone changes according to what the salesperson is trying to accomplish and how much trust has already been established.

A curious tone is used to investigate the prospect’s actual situation without sounding accusatory or predetermined. Miner’s example is asking a company to walk through how it currently generates leads and clients so that the salesperson can understand the existing process.

A confused tone is designed to make the prospect expand on emotionally important statements. If someone says a problem is causing “stress,” Miner may gently ask what they mean by stress, prompting the prospect to explain the experience rather than allowing an emotionally important word to pass unexplored.

Miner treats facial expression as closely connected to tonality, calling the face effectively a remote control for the voice. He argues that an authentically confused, curious or concerned delivery is difficult to produce while the salesperson’s facial expression communicates something different.

He identifies present pain and fear of future pain as major emotional drivers of change. His sales method therefore tries to help the prospect examine the consequences of the current situation rather than merely presenting features and benefits.

A challenging tone should generally come later, after some trust and credibility have been established. Miner may then ask what happens if nothing changes and the problem becomes worse, encouraging the prospect to defend—in their own words—why change is necessary.

A concerned tone is used when the salesperson needs to uncover a hidden obstacle without making the prospect defensive. Instead of aggressively demanding to know what is stopping the deal, Miner recommends a softer, empathetic question about what is really holding the person back.

A familiar tone can be used even during cold outreach to reduce the instinctive distance between caller and prospect. Miner demonstrated introducing himself in a way that sounds as though there may already be familiarity, which he says briefly interrupts the prospect’s normal cold-call defense pattern.

Miner considers listening essential, but he does not advocate passive listening. A salesperson who lets a prospect wander through irrelevant tangents for several minutes can lose direction and eventually surrender control of the conversation.

His preferred approach is active listening combined with selective interruption and reframing. When a prospect wanders, the salesperson can acknowledge the tangent and then return to an earlier meaningful statement with a clarifying question.

The goal is to make the prospect feel important without allowing the meeting to become directionless. The interviewer noted Miner’s ability to speak very little in some conversations while making the other person feel highly engaged; Miner said this still requires deliberate conversational leadership.

Miner warns that some sales coaches and mentors exaggerate their own records. He recommends investigating what a trainer actually achieved in sales before relying on them, especially when the student is trying to reach an income or performance level the trainer never reached personally.

His standard for mentorship is demonstrated performance rather than branding or credentials alone. He argues that someone seeking a particular result should learn from people who have actually produced that result, noting that reputation eventually exposes people who repeatedly fail to deliver.

Miner developed a methodology called NEPQ—Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning—over roughly 18 years in sales. Its basic premise is to shift much of the persuasive work from the salesperson to the prospect.

NEPQ is designed to make prospects articulate why they need a solution rather than forcing the salesperson to convince them. Miner wants prospects to identify their problems, examine their consequences, confront their concerns and effectively “sell themselves.”

He also wants the prospect to qualify themselves to the seller rather than the seller constantly proving their worth to the prospect. He distinguishes this from artificial scarcity tactics in which a salesperson theatrically suggests that a willing buyer may not be “a fit”; he considers that transparent and ineffective.

Miner’s preferred sales dynamic is pull rather than push. He wants prospects moving toward the seller because they have reached their own conclusions, rather than being chased, pressured or repeatedly persuaded by the salesperson.

In multi-call sales, Miner cautions against treating polite interest as a genuine opportunity. A prospect saying they will review a proposal and “get back next week” does not necessarily indicate progress; without a specific next meeting scheduled, he often interprets that response as a polite dismissal.

He says prospects frequently conceal their real concerns, partly because traditional sales behavior has trained buyers to protect themselves. He places significant responsibility on salespeople for creating the defensive environment in which buyers give evasive answers.

Miner says the negative social image of sales largely comes from generations of high-pressure and manipulative selling methods. One of his stated reasons for building Seventh Level was to change how salespeople are perceived by replacing that dynamic with a trusted-adviser relationship.

He does not consider “closing” a single event at the end of the presentation. If a buyer chooses between two options at the end, he argues that the actual buying decision was already formed through the earlier conversation.

His sales process attempts to create a visible gap between the prospect’s “current state” and “objective state.” Questioning is used to uncover previously underappreciated problems, making the difference between the present situation and desired future sufficiently clear that change becomes internally justified.

The ideal salesperson, in Miner’s description, becomes a trusted authority rather than someone trying to force a product on the buyer. He says the strongest interactions can leave prospects feeling that they persuaded the salesperson to help them, rather than feeling that a salesperson persuaded them to buy.

Miner said the transition from highly successful salesperson to company owner was substantially harder than simply selling more. Even after serving in senior sales positions such as vice president of sales and chief sales officer, he struggled during roughly the first year and a half of running his own organization.

Ownership changed the stakes because his own capital was at risk and employees’ livelihoods depended on his decisions. He described organizational leadership, hiring, operations and capital allocation as a fundamentally different skill set from personal selling.

Miner concluded that founders should deliberately hire people who are stronger in areas where the founder is weak. He does not want to run day-to-day business operations himself; he prefers sales training and recruiting while experienced executives handle functions such as operations and revenue management.

He rejects the assumption that excellence in one business discipline automatically creates a strong CEO. A gifted marketer, for example, may still be weak at decision-making, operations or scaling, so technical excellence and company leadership should not be treated as interchangeable abilities.

His preferred business partner is complementary rather than similar. He warns that partners possessing essentially the same strengths and weaknesses can leave major organizational needs uncovered.

Shared vision matters in addition to complementary ability. When choosing partners and executives, Miner wants people aligned with the longer-term direction of Seventh Level rather than merely capable operators.

Seventh Level intended to expand beyond its core sales-training business into staffing and recruiting. Miner said the company planned a 2025 launch built around connecting employers with salespeople trained and certified through its programs.

The recruiting opportunity was based on assets Seventh Level already possessed: a very large salesperson audience, a large email list and employers already approaching the company for trained talent. Miner believed this created a natural adjacent business rather than requiring the company to build demand from scratch.

Miner said the company could potentially have increased revenue dramatically by launching the recruiting operation immediately, but believed the infrastructure was not ready. He preferred delaying growth until experienced people and systems were in place rather than risking operational failure.

Protecting reputation was explicitly prioritized above maximizing short-term revenue. Miner said he would rather accept slower growth and lower near-term revenue than scale rapidly for several years, produce poor client results and permanently damage the brand.

One of Seventh Level’s early management mistakes was putting available employees into roles for which they lacked experience. Miner gave the example of seeing an analytical salesperson and deciding that person might run operations despite having never run operations before.

As revenue increased, the company spent roughly the preceding year and a half replacing that improvised staffing approach with experienced specialists. Miner regards that shift toward proven operators as one of the most important lessons from his early years as an entrepreneur.

He considers team quality more important to scaling than the quality of the product alone. In his view, even an exceptional product or service will hit a ceiling without capable people running the organization around it.

Miner reported a little over 63,000 customers or client accounts in Seventh Level’s paid training programs. Because some of those accounts are corporations training 20,000–30,000 representatives apiece, he said he did not know the true number of individual salespeople the company had trained, but believed it reached into the hundreds of thousands.

He also said the company’s social content was receiving about 30 million views per month. He did not claim that every viewer was a salesperson or training customer, so he avoided converting that audience figure into a total number of people trained.

Miner believes beginning salespeople consistently underestimate how much deliberate practice mastery requires. Reading a few books or completing a training course once is not enough; he compares serious sales development to professions that require years of repeated study and practice.

He describes his own advantage as having “out-learned” competitors rather than having possessed exceptional natural talent. He invested significant time and money into improving specific abilities instead of treating sales as something learned casually on the job.

Miner said he spent tens of thousands of dollars learning tonality and expression from Hollywood acting coaches. He specifically sought people who trained prominent actors so he could understand how voice and facial expression communicate different emotional meanings.

Rehearsal is a central part of his model of sales development. He compares a high-performing salesperson with a professional actor: superior results come from repeatedly practicing the craft rather than merely knowing the theory.

He advises people to build competence before aggressively building a personal brand. Public visibility without proven skill or career credibility can expose weakness rather than create lasting authority.

Miner thinks personal brands become weaker when their owners repeatedly jump between fashionable subjects. Someone who presents themselves as a sales expert, then rapidly pivots among crypto, NFTs, AI, fitness or unrelated topics can leave the audience unsure what the person actually represents.

His own branding strategy is deliberately narrow: audiences should immediately associate him with sales training. He regards consistent subject-matter positioning as a way of preserving authority over time.

Miner predicts that AI will replace a meaningful portion of low-ticket sales but not complex, high-value human selling. He contrasted purchases worth roughly $50–$200 with enterprise transactions such as cybersecurity contracts that can range from about $500,000 to $2 million.

He expects regulation to limit how far autonomous AI selling can go, particularly when larger purchases are involved. He speculated that consumer complaints about being manipulated by AI could draw scrutiny from agencies such as the FTC and state attorneys general.

Miner further predicts that some buyers may eventually prefer human salespeople because they will feel more control over a human interaction than an automated persuasion system. This is his forecast rather than an established development.

Seventh Level was preparing commercially for AI-driven selling by positioning its methodology for corporate licensing. Miner anticipated companies using sales AI might license structured sales processes such as NEPQ for lower-ticket automated interactions.

Miner argues that virtually every sales objection reflects insufficient certainty in the buyer’s mind. The salesperson influences that certainty through questioning, tone, emotional openness and whether the prospect genuinely believes the proposed solution can produce the desired result.

He interprets common phrases such as “I need to think about it,” “I need to talk to my spouse,” “I need more research,” “I need more quotes” or “I need to compare prices” as symptoms rather than necessarily the real objection. In his view, the buyer often uses these statements because the underlying concern has not been uncovered.

His priority is objection prevention rather than becoming exceptionally skilled at fighting objections after they appear. Miner claimed that better questioning and emotional engagement can eliminate roughly 50%–70% of objections before the end of the sales process.

He explicitly rejects the sales-training cliché that more objections indicate greater buyer interest. His opposite interpretation is that more objections generally mean the salesperson has created more uncertainty, making the purchase less likely.

Looking back on his career, Miner recommends that new salespeople begin in demanding outbound environments such as door-to-door sales, cold calling or an SDR role. These situations force people to read reactions quickly, respond to resistance immediately and learn how to lower defenses under pressure.

He believes starting with difficult outbound selling makes later inbound and enterprise sales feel slower and more manageable. After moving from rapid consumer selling into B2B situations involving large companies and seven or eight decision-makers, he found he had substantially more time to think through responses.

Cold outreach therefore serves, in Miner’s model, as a form of accelerated sales training rather than merely a lead-generation job. Someone who becomes comfortable responding rapidly to “not interested,” reframing resistance and continuing the conversation develops skills transferable to more strategic sales environments.

Miner’s final message is that durable confidence comes from competence rather than motivational intensity. Temporary enthusiasm can lift confidence briefly, but repeated weak results pull confidence back toward the salesperson’s actual skill level.

His recommended path to greater confidence is therefore straightforward: acquire more skill, produce better results and allow confidence to rise as evidence of competence accumulates. He applies the same principle beyond sales, arguing that younger people should focus on building the skills required for whatever field they want to pursue.