Using Authentic Appreciation to Drive Sales Team Success
Episode
35 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Small moment reframing: Transform daily frustrations into gratitude by reframing mundane tasks. When facing a sink full of dishes, shift from resentment to appreciation for having dishes, food, a dishwasher, and family to feed. This micro-practice of finding gratitude in visible, tangible moments builds momentum better than attempting profound journaling sessions that feel overwhelming or performative.
- ✓Handwritten notes retention: Physical handwritten notes create lasting impact compared to digital messages. Print emails and rewrite them by hand to display on office walls as visual reminders during difficult days. The human brain processes handwritten words as more meaningful than texts or emails, making recipients pause and reflect rather than quickly scrolling past digital acknowledgments.
- ✓Client appreciation timing: Schedule major client appreciation efforts in February instead of December to stand out from holiday clutter. Design customized gift boxes with unique items and hand-deliver when possible to express specific value the client brings. This off-season approach ensures your gratitude gets noticed and remembered rather than lost in year-end noise.
- ✓Weekly feedback as gratitude: Implement weekly check-ins to catch 5% performance deviations before they compound into major issues over months or quarters. One colleague's uncomfortable but honest feedback about poor conflict handling became a career-defining moment. Coaching up through direct feedback represents a profound form of gratitude that enables growth and prevents small problems from becoming large failures.
- ✓Team recognition cards: Distribute cards at monthly staff meetings for team members to write praise tied to core values, then read them aloud publicly. One CEO handwrites birthday and anniversary cards for all employees despite company size, resulting in staff wallpapering his office with return cards on his birthday, demonstrating how consistent small gestures compound into cultural transformation.
What It Covers
Jeb Blunt Jr. and Ashley Blunt explore authentic gratitude practices for sales professionals and leaders during the holiday season. They share specific strategies for expressing appreciation to team members and clients, discuss the psychological impact of gratitude on performance, and highlight the Sales Gravy team members who produce their content behind the scenes.
Key Questions Answered
- •Small moment reframing: Transform daily frustrations into gratitude by reframing mundane tasks. When facing a sink full of dishes, shift from resentment to appreciation for having dishes, food, a dishwasher, and family to feed. This micro-practice of finding gratitude in visible, tangible moments builds momentum better than attempting profound journaling sessions that feel overwhelming or performative.
- •Handwritten notes retention: Physical handwritten notes create lasting impact compared to digital messages. Print emails and rewrite them by hand to display on office walls as visual reminders during difficult days. The human brain processes handwritten words as more meaningful than texts or emails, making recipients pause and reflect rather than quickly scrolling past digital acknowledgments.
- •Client appreciation timing: Schedule major client appreciation efforts in February instead of December to stand out from holiday clutter. Design customized gift boxes with unique items and hand-deliver when possible to express specific value the client brings. This off-season approach ensures your gratitude gets noticed and remembered rather than lost in year-end noise.
- •Weekly feedback as gratitude: Implement weekly check-ins to catch 5% performance deviations before they compound into major issues over months or quarters. One colleague's uncomfortable but honest feedback about poor conflict handling became a career-defining moment. Coaching up through direct feedback represents a profound form of gratitude that enables growth and prevents small problems from becoming large failures.
- •Team recognition cards: Distribute cards at monthly staff meetings for team members to write praise tied to core values, then read them aloud publicly. One CEO handwrites birthday and anniversary cards for all employees despite company size, resulting in staff wallpapering his office with return cards on his birthday, demonstrating how consistent small gestures compound into cultural transformation.
Notable Moment
Ashley Blunt shares how a 24-year-old manager mishandled a confrontation with a senior sales rep in her seventies. A colleague courageously entered her office to deliver direct feedback about the poor handling, which became a pivotal career moment. Without that uncomfortable conversation, she would not have developed the leadership skills she uses today.
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. Are you having a tough time growing your sales? Is your sales growth hitting a brick wall? Then, look, you need to get hot sales leads. Infofree.com is the number one sales leads provider. You get unlimited sales leads, email lists, cell phone numbers, and even executive and person search. With these hot sales leads, your sales will skyrocket and you will make more money than ever before. And not only that, you can get a free trial. You don't even need a credit card. This isn't a scam because their founder uses his own sales leads, and he sold his company for millions of dollars. So what are you waiting for? Go to infofree.com/gravy. That's infofree.com/gravy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I find that gratitude is sort of a boomerang. When you start to throw that boomerang out, it eventually comes back to you. And then you get to have that elation of somebody sees me. Somebody said thank you for running a podcast that I thought no one listened to until I get all the messages. Because I sit in the studio and I record a podcast, I get the messages from people who say thank you, and it makes me feel incredible. And it's like two messages. It doesn't it's not a million. I'm not bragging on the thousands of messages I get. It's two. One person a week says thank you, and it keeps me going. And if I can give that feeling to somebody else, I'm grateful for that opportunity. 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 Group podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt Junior. And today, I have Ashley Blunt with me, and it's a special podcast because we are sitting in a special set. If you're a long time listener, head over to YouTube. We have got an awesome set that our team put together. They went to the store yesterday and did some great creative thinking about how we could build something special for our YouTube audience. So go over to YouTube, give us a like. Use that alarm bell that'll let you know when we post new videos to our YouTube. That way, you can keep up with all of the podcast that we have over here. And I want to start with the holiday season going into Thanksgiving, being grateful and thankful. And first, I wanted to highlight some of the people on our team that you all don't get to hear from or see very often, …
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