By: Natalie Johnson
Aaron Jacobs runs a sales training company, Scorecard Sales, in York, Pennsylvania, and teaches people how to sell for a living. A surprising share of his time goes to something else. “I would tell you that at least 50% of my time in coaching and training is spent on confidence, not how to sell,” he says. “It’s how to build people’s confidence.”
That priority stands out in a field whose reputation Jacobs knows well. For many people, the phrase “sales training” brings to mind scripts to memorize, rigid systems to follow, and techniques designed to press a buyer toward a decision. Jacobs spent more than 20 years in sales and held senior roles including CEO, COO, and sales manager before launching Scorecard in 2020. He built the company around a different starting point: the person doing the selling.
Confidence Comes Before Technique
The focus on confidence is practical. A sales process only works if the person using it has the conviction to follow it in a live conversation, and a salesperson who doubts themselves tends to show it.
Jacobs approaches that work by meeting people where they are rather than forcing everyone through a single method. He is quick to point out that there is more than one right way to sell. “People do not have to do things my way,” he says. That flexibility carries into how the company delivers its work. “Scorecard comes to you,” Jacobs says, meaning clients do not travel to a training facility; the training is brought to their team, in person or live online.
The same view explains why he resists a label common in his field. “I do not want to be known as a consultant,” he says. “To me, that’s somebody who you pay to tell them what they want to hear.” He would rather be something simpler: “I like being the person that people find relatable.”
Why He Won’t Sell on Pain
A widely taught idea in sales holds that people buy only to relieve a problem that hurts, so the salesperson’s job is to find that pain and press on it. Jacobs rejects the premise and explains why with a medical comparison.
“How do you fix pain? You take medicine. What happens when the pain goes away? You stop taking the medicine, and it’s a weak connection,” he says. “But if you sell on value and experience, people get addicted. And what happens if they get addicted? They just keep buying from you over and over again.”
Scorecard teaches selling built on value proposition and customer experience instead. For the organizations Jacobs works with, most of them in insurance, construction, and manufacturing across South-Central Pennsylvania, the difference can show up in how long customers stay as much as in how often deals close. In a business where accounts renew year after year, a buyer who returns because the experience was worth it is more valuable than one who bought to make a single problem disappear.
Jacobs holds his own work to the same test. His core values are to be honest, be fair, be responsible, be valuable, and commit to success, and he singles out the last two as the ones clients most need to understand. “If I’m not being valuable, we should stop,” he says. He is equally direct about what a client is not paying for: “They don’t need an expensive friend, and I don’t need that either.”
A Workshop Designed to Be Used, Not Memorized
Whenever Jacobs trains, he makes the same three promises. “Number one, I will not train you to be a pushy salesperson. That is not what we do at Scorecard. Number two, nothing I teach people will ever be complicated. And number three, you don’t have to memorize anything.”
The company offers Sales Methods of Mastery, a two-day workshop. Day one is Simple and Effective Selling. Day two, Sales Objections Overdrive, is devoted to handling objections, the point in a conversation where a salesperson’s confidence is often tested.
Scorecard also offers Power Hours, a catalog of live, hour-long webinars that organizations can choose individually or as a series and schedule around their team’s day. For individuals and teams who want ongoing support, Jacobs provides biweekly one-on-one coaching built around a defined annual program.
Beneath all of it sits the tool that gives the company its name. Scorecard is a web and mobile app Jacobs developed to handle activity tracking, plan building, and goal setting, designed to make the work easier for salespeople as well as the managers and owners responsible for their results. In keeping with his promise that nothing he teaches will be complicated, the goal is to give people tools that simplify selling, not a formula they must follow.
The Confidence to Call It Selling
Scorecard’s stated mission is “to make the world a better place through sales. We love salespeople and want to help them succeed.” It is a plain statement, and it connects the pieces of Jacobs’s approach: a workshop built so nothing has to be memorized, a philosophy that favors value over pressure, and coaching that starts with the person before the process.
Confidence ties those pieces together, and in Jacobs’s practice it is matched by the last of his core values: commit to success. “We will find a way to make sure you have success,” he says.
More information about Scorecard Sales and its training programs is available at scorecardsales.com.
