What are the key takeaways from this Sales Gravy episode?

Key insights include: **Bottom-Up Intelligence Gathering:** Contact claims adjusters and lower-level staff to discover specific organizational problems before approaching executives. Ask questions like how much money sits uncollected past forty-five days. Use these concrete numbers, such as five million dollars in aged receivables, to build compelling stories for CFOs who care about profit and loss statements rather than generic industry insights.; **The Ledge Technique for Objection Handling:** When prospects say they already have billing, respond with agreement first by saying that all your customers have internal billing departments. This ledge statement settles your brain and lowers tension. Then disrupt their assumption by explaining you complement existing departments rather than replace them, focusing on aged claims that conflict with current workload priorities.; **Stakeholder-Specific Messaging:** Billing directors protect their jobs and fear disintermediation, especially with AI threats. CFOs evaluate whether conversations merit their time. Claims adjusters provide information without defensive barriers. Tailor your approach by understanding each person's primary concern. Directors need reassurance about augmentation, CFOs need profit impact data, adjusters need simple questions about operational challenges they face daily.

What did Rick van Ness discuss on Sales Gravy?

Jeb Blount coaches Rick Van Ness, who runs a healthcare claims collection company, on overcoming the immediate objection that prospects already have billing departments. The episode demonstrates the Ledge technique for reframing objections and explores multi-level prospecting strategies to reach decision makers while gathering organizational intelligence from lower-level employees. Key topics include: **Bottom-Up Intelligence Gathering:** Contact claims adjusters and lower-level staff to discover specific organizational problems before approaching executives. Ask questions like how much money sits uncollected past forty-five days. Use these concrete numbers, such as five million dollars in aged receivables, to build compelling stories for CFOs who care about profit and loss statements rather than generic industry insights.; **The Ledge Technique for Objection Handling:** When prospects say they already have billing, respond with agreement first by saying that all your customers have internal billing departments. This ledge statement settles your brain and lowers tension. Then disrupt their assumption by explaining you complement existing departments rather than replace them, focusing on aged claims that conflict with current workload priorities..

Sales Gravy

How to Use the Ledge Technique for Sales Objection Handling (Ask Jeb)

February 17, 2026·

Rick van Ness

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Productivity, Health & Wellness

AI-Generated Summary

Published Feb 18, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Bottom-Up Intelligence Gathering: Contact claims adjusters and lower-level staff to discover specific organizational problems before approaching executives. Ask questions like how much money sits uncollected past forty-five days. Use these concrete numbers, such as five million dollars in aged receivables, to build compelling stories for CFOs who care about profit and loss statements rather than generic industry insights.
✓The Ledge Technique for Objection Handling: When prospects say they already have billing, respond with agreement first by saying that all your customers have internal billing departments. This ledge statement settles your brain and lowers tension. Then disrupt their assumption by explaining you complement existing departments rather than replace them, focusing on aged claims that conflict with current workload priorities.
✓Stakeholder-Specific Messaging: Billing directors protect their jobs and fear disintermediation, especially with AI threats. CFOs evaluate whether conversations merit their time. Claims adjusters provide information without defensive barriers. Tailor your approach by understanding each person's primary concern. Directors need reassurance about augmentation, CFOs need profit impact data, adjusters need simple questions about operational challenges they face daily.
✓Problem-Focused Positioning Over Pricing: Lead conversations with the specific gap you fill, such as collecting insurance claims sitting forty-five to ninety days, rather than opening with no-risk pricing models. Save performance-based fee discussions for negotiation stages. Upfront pricing creates skepticism and sounds too good to be true, while problem articulation demonstrates understanding and creates urgency for meetings.
✓Multi-Channel Top-Down Bottom-Up Strategy: Simultaneously pursue CFOs through LinkedIn messages and voicemails with organizational insights, billing directors through problem-focused conversations, and claims adjusters for intelligence gathering. This approach prevents stepping on toes while maximizing pathways to decision makers. If CFOs push you down with endorsement or lower staff provide ammunition, both routes advance the sale.

What It Covers

Jeb Blount coaches Rick Van Ness, who runs a healthcare claims collection company, on overcoming the immediate objection that prospects already have billing departments. The episode demonstrates the Ledge technique for reframing objections and explores multi-level prospecting strategies to reach decision makers while gathering organizational intelligence from lower-level employees.

Key Questions Answered

•Bottom-Up Intelligence Gathering: Contact claims adjusters and lower-level staff to discover specific organizational problems before approaching executives. Ask questions like how much money sits uncollected past forty-five days. Use these concrete numbers, such as five million dollars in aged receivables, to build compelling stories for CFOs who care about profit and loss statements rather than generic industry insights.
•The Ledge Technique for Objection Handling: When prospects say they already have billing, respond with agreement first by saying that all your customers have internal billing departments. This ledge statement settles your brain and lowers tension. Then disrupt their assumption by explaining you complement existing departments rather than replace them, focusing on aged claims that conflict with current workload priorities.
•Stakeholder-Specific Messaging: Billing directors protect their jobs and fear disintermediation, especially with AI threats. CFOs evaluate whether conversations merit their time. Claims adjusters provide information without defensive barriers. Tailor your approach by understanding each person's primary concern. Directors need reassurance about augmentation, CFOs need profit impact data, adjusters need simple questions about operational challenges they face daily.
•Problem-Focused Positioning Over Pricing: Lead conversations with the specific gap you fill, such as collecting insurance claims sitting forty-five to ninety days, rather than opening with no-risk pricing models. Save performance-based fee discussions for negotiation stages. Upfront pricing creates skepticism and sounds too good to be true, while problem articulation demonstrates understanding and creates urgency for meetings.
•Multi-Channel Top-Down Bottom-Up Strategy: Simultaneously pursue CFOs through LinkedIn messages and voicemails with organizational insights, billing directors through problem-focused conversations, and claims adjusters for intelligence gathering. This approach prevents stepping on toes while maximizing pathways to decision makers. If CFOs push you down with endorsement or lower staff provide ammunition, both routes advance the sale.

Notable Moment

Blount reframes the entire sales approach by pointing out that Rick's instinct to pitch zero-risk pricing upfront actually creates objections rather than resolving them. The counterintuitive advice reveals that leading with what sounds like an advantage, no cost until collection, triggers skepticism instead of interest, while focusing relentlessly on the uncollected money problem opens doors more effectively.

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Episode Transcript

Join us for the fanatical prospecting boot camp that will help your team five x their pipeline in ninety days or less. We'll be hosting it on March in Atlanta, Georgia. Go to salesgravy.com/live. That's salesgravy.com/live and use the code podcast to save a $100. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt Junior, and this is AskJeb where you ask your toughest sales questions, and Jeb Blunt, he gives his best answers. And those answers, they come straight from the trenches because Jeb's not just teaching sales, he's out there prospecting, closing, and leading sales teams every single day. So let's take that next caller. Alright. Next up on the show is Rick Van Ness from one of my favorite places, Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's where my wife is from. Tell me what's going on in your world, Rick. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for having me. I cofounded a company that works in health care claim filings. We primarily focus in the older claims, so where providers would have difficulty getting payment, we try and help them. But our goal is to augment their operations, not replace. And there's a polarizing view of replacement in the health care industry with the term outsourcing. And so the majority of people that have outsourced are either trying to get out of it or had a bad experience and don't want anything to do with it. So when I do a cold call, when I try to introduce myself, I'm immediately stereotyped within five seconds into that. And so I'm kinda curious on your thoughts on how do I do better job at trying to convey what we do by communicating augmentation not replacement. So I'm I'm reading some notes that I got about your business, like you're calling up and they're immediately think that you're an outsource billing company and what you're really doing if I get this right is there's claims that set out for too long. So you build the claim but you're not getting paid for it. You've got a system and a process that helps a practice go in and collect that money that's sitting out there that they otherwise might not get to because their billing function just bills but it doesn't actually know how to go out and pull that money in from the insurance company. Did I get that right? Yeah. Okay. So you call up, you're doing a cold call and they're immediately, hey, we already got billing. We don't need that. Okay. So start me off with for the cold call, who are you calling specifically? Usually like a billing director or manager. Okay. So start off with the the first of all, you're calling a billing director. The billing director antennas are …

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