How to Create Appreciation
APPRECIATION is at root of sustained success and enjoyment in any relationship and work is a relationship. The universe will divvy out a fair share of gratitude for everyone. How much appreciation you feel is in direct proportion to how much you give. Sales is no different as appreciation is the key ingredient to personal empowerment and overall happiness in a sales career.
Appreciate what you sell.
You must believe in your product in order to sell it consistently over a sustained period of time. Imagine beyond the actual sale and envision the experience. If you sell a mini-van, sell the incredible family adventures sure to come. If you sell burial lots, recognize the peace that you bring to your clients enabling them to better enjoy their lives. If you sell refrigerators, sell time saved for the family with better organization and the improved health of your customers. The point, you can create your own narrative of what happened after the sale and thus increase the value you place on each sale you help manifest.
If people don’t appreciate your product, don’t blame the product. It’s an easy target. Our poor defenseless product! Sadly, the way we’re wired first and foremost for safety and preservation we tend to hold onto bad experiences and dwell on them more than we appreciate and build from the more favorable outcomes. Then, over time, negatives build up. The percentage of problems or negative experiences doesn’t actually change, but our perception of them does. We might think the product has gotten harder to sell. The situation has gotten worse. Reality check — the product nor the situation haven’t really changed! Usually, the reason things feel different (harder) is that our enthusiasm for the product or the situation has waned. New things are exciting. When they’re not new, we can be less enthusiastic. Lower enthusiasm in most all sales will increase resistance. If you’ve fallen into this trap, you have to fall back in love with your product!
Appreciate who you sell it to.
When you make it a point to appreciate who you sell to and to admire your customers the thrill and enjoyment of the work of selling is at max. Appreciating your customers better enables you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and to understand what’s important to them! It makes you more relatable and the selling process a mutually beneficial experience. Every sale is a deposit, not in your bank account, but in your acumen account. Ask yourself, “What can I learn from my customer(s) or from this experience?”
My customers are ________! What word first pops into your mind? Savvy? Hard-working? Budget-minded? Busy? Use empathy. Understand your audience. Always sell to help.
Appreciate those who helped you sell it.
Sales is a solo sport because you are solely responsible for your results. That said, the best and happiest sales professionals appreciate the team of people around them that help them sustain success. The more credit you give, the more you get. The people who best ask for help, tend to get it. People who choose to suffer in silence will always feel underappreciated. People who build strong positive relationships find more enjoyment and less stress at work. If you’re not building new relationships and appreciating your network, chances are you’re instead pulling away and isolating yourself which will turn to a sense of not being appreciated. The world didn’t really change, you did!
What about people outside of work who enables us to do our work? Yep, that team deserves their fair share of appreciation too. Share your successes so that their sacrifices and their work is connected to your work. There’s a huge danger that we consistently share problems with our support network and don’t enable them to share as much in the successes. This creates a cognitive bias about your work from friends and family that will feed into a world of under appreciation.
How long has it been since you’ve thanked mom/dad or best boss or favorite teacher? Send them a letter of appreciation and you will feel there’s appreciation floating around in the universe. Why? Because you created it!
Appreciate yourself for making it happen.
Lastly, appreciate yourself! Reward yourself. Feed your brain positive information and your body good fuel. We cannot neglect ourselves and have to make sure that our work is filling our own bucket.
Sustained success is challenging in any endeavor. Early success is whatever we pursue is often attributed to raw enthusiasm for something new. Positive progress is easy to see and to feel. The preponderance of experiences are net good. Our bucket is full! In many cases though, there’s a hole in that bucket. It’s a huge life trap that we don’t replenish the bucket fast enough to compensate for what’s lost. Heck, we might have to give more when some negative influence sitting on our shoulder is telling us we should be able to give less!
The only way to consistently create more appreciation in your universe is to be the source. Don’t wait, create.
