The F* Word Makes a Difference
Sarah Cortez · RizeX Monthly Mastermind · Eastern Idaho
Most salespeople know they’re not hitting their goals — they just don’t know exactly why. Sarah Cortez, business development professional and creator of the F Word Platform, brought the room back to sales fundamentals with a twist: four numbers, a little discipline, and a healthy dose of humor. She’s been in sales for 20-plus years and is still in the trenches, which means everything she shared came with real receipts.
Sales slumps don’t come from bad luck. According to the research Sarah pulled from, 99% of sales slumps trace directly back to a failure to prospect. For Eastern Idaho business owners building their pipelines heading into a new year, that’s both a diagnosis and a direction.
What Sarah covered
The Formula — four numbers that run your sales life. Your formula is built from four inputs: the number of active sales opportunities you’re working each month, your average deal value, your closing ratio, and your average length of sales cycle. When you know those four numbers, you can calculate exactly what it takes to hit your desired annual income — and stop guessing. Sarah shared a free sales velocity calculator on her website where you can plug in your own numbers and play with the variables until they match your goals.
What counts as an “active” opportunity. Not everyone in your outreach pile is active. An active sales opportunity is someone you’ve reached out to who has reached back — there’s an open dialogue. Everyone else is just a prospect. Keeping that distinction clean tightens your funnel and gives you an honest picture of where you actually stand.
Working the formula with urgency. Knowing your numbers isn’t enough — you also have to bring your prospects to your level of urgency. Sarah told the story of her brother in medical device sales, spending months trying to reach the top spine surgeon in San Diego. After every conventional approach failed, he asked the surgeon point-blank if he took a bathroom break every day — and told him the seven peer-reviewed papers he’d sent were each worth one read. The surgeon called back three days later. The point: sometimes you have to be genuinely different to get someone off the sidelines.
Working the formula with discipline — the Triple FX. Sarah’s morning practice since 2017: 15 minutes, 15 things. Five things she’s grateful for. Five things she has to accomplish that day. And the one that matters most — five things she loves about herself. She called it FLY: First, Love Yourself. When you’re in a role that means hearing no regularly, how you show up for yourself before you ever pick up the phone shapes everything that comes after.
The Law of Replacement. From Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount — a book Sarah credits with changing how she thinks about her funnel. If your closing ratio is 20%, and two out of ten prospects say yes, you don’t replace those two closings with two new prospects. You replace them with ten. That’s the math that keeps your pipeline from quietly running dry.
What the room walked away with
A free F Word Calculator — a web-based tool where you enter your desired annual income, average commission rate, average sale, and the calculator tells you how many clients you need to close this month and this week to get there. Sarah also offered a free five-day challenge for anyone who wants more time to work through the framework. Both were shared in the chat during the session.
A moment that landed
Sarah’s husband is a realtor. During Snowmageddon 2017, he had an open house scheduled on Boise’s bench neighborhood — two feet of snow, no water on the shelves at Fred Meyer, and most people had already mentally checked out. He shoveled his way into the house and sat the open house anyway. One woman walked in, said she needed to sell her house and buy on the bench, and he made both deals happen — because he showed up on a day when no one else did. Sarah’s takeaway for the room: sometimes the formula isn’t complicated. Sometimes you just have to be the person who shows up.
“99% of sales slumps can be linked directly to a failure to prospect.” — Sarah Cortez
“If we work the formula with urgency and discipline, that is when things are gonna happen.” — Sarah Cortez
About Sarah
Sarah Cortez has spent 20-plus years in sales and sales management, currently working in business development at Alliance Title and Escrow in the Boise Valley. She created the F Word Platform to give salespeople a practical, numbers-grounded way to hit their income goals year in and year out — and she built it while actively selling, not from the sidelines. Her company, Business and Belly Laughs, reflects the philosophy she brings to every room: if selling isn’t fun, you’re probably not building the right relationships.
[Connect with Sarah ?]
Join us next month
The RizeX Monthly Mastermind meets every month in Eastern Idaho — an intimate gathering of local business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals committed to real growth. Every event features a speaker who’s in the trenches alongside you, plus time for meaningful conversation and connection.