Abundance Through Buying and Selling

“Abundance” is an ample, or very large quantity of something.  What types of abundance do you have or would you like to have more of?  Happiness, joy, wealth, income, love, pleasure, good health?  Emotional abundance?  Spiritual abundance?  Professional abundance?  Financial abundance?

Have you ever considered that abundance comes from effectively selling and astutely buying?

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, once said, “Everybody lives by selling something.” Perhaps a more modern version would be that everybody lives and creates abundance by selling something. 

Similarly buying.  In the late middle ages, the expression “don’t buy a pig in a poke” came from people being duped into buying what they believed to be a pig, a good source of meat but scarce at the time, in a bag (“poke”) when, in reality, inside the bag was a cat or dog, which were plentiful and not good meat. It’s interesting to note that the expression “let the cat out of the bag” came from the same practice.

If we add abundance and the meaning of “don’t buy a pig in the poke” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s quote it would be “everyone lives and creates abundance by selling and buying something.” 

What products are others selling to you and might you buy to create abundance?  Themselves, a date, a relationship of some kind, ideas, opinions, career opportunities, causes, cars, houses, clothes, makeup, jewelry, vacations, entertainment, elective surgery, weight-loss programs, club memberships, tickets to concerts or sporting events, among other things.  Who is doing that selling and from whom will you buy?  The long list includes people you just met, your family, friends, car salespeople, real estate agents, your boss, peers and subordinates at work, doctors, lawyers, neighbors, ubiquitous—and I mean ubiquitous—advertising on social media, billboards, TV, radio, celebrities, professional athletes, etc.

Are you in sales?  If you answered no, you’re wrong.  You are always selling at least one product and that’s YOU.  Regardless of what other product you are selling, cars, houses, a relationship, whatever, you are first and foremost selling YOU.  Same is true for your buying.  First and foremost you are buying the salesperson doing the selling.  In order to effectively buy and sell your way to abundance you therefore have to effectively sell yourself, and be an astute buyer of the sales people trying to sell you things.

So let’s take a look at your buying process and the traits of the people who recently sold you products.  Any product.  Themselves, a relationship of some kind, a car, a home, etc.  One that created abundance and one that did not.

1. Did the person doing the selling ask you detailed questions about the product you were looking for?  If so, they were no doubt trying to understand and get you to understand your wants and needs so they could sell you and you could sell yourself their product.  The most effective sales tool for any specific customer is that customer’s own words and actions.
2. Did you understand the motivations of the person doing the selling?  In other words, what was in it for them?
3. Did the person doing the selling know their product and the competitive products?
4. Did the person doing the selling not only sell their product’s features that satisfied your wants and needs, but did they also point out which of your wants and needs their product didn’t satisfy? In other words did they sell what their product was and what it wasn’t as a way to manage your expectations to ensure that your expectations would be met and their product would create abundance for you?
5. Did the person doing the selling answer all your questions and if they didn’t know the answers did they admit they didn’t know and go get the answers to your questions from others?  Or did they pay lip service to your questions and give you canned answers to the five questions to which they knew the answer?
6. Did the person doing the selling seem to be in a hurry or did they seem committed to helping you become a fully informed buyer and customer?
7. Did you make a fully informed decision or do you wish that you had been better informed in certain ways?  Did the product you bought add to your abundance?  If so how?

Let’s now switch gears and examine recent situations in which you were doing the selling and you either created or failed to create abundance for yourself.  If you ask yourself the same questions from above with you as the person doing the selling, you will no doubt find that when you were selling and created abundance, you followed the same process and did exactly what the salesperson who was doing the selling in the situations in which your buying created abundance.

Specifically, in order to create abundance:

1. Both seller and buyer understood the buyer’s wants and needs.
2. Both seller and buyer understood the seller’s motivations.
3. The seller knew their product and the competitive products.
4. The seller sold both what the product was and what the product wasn’t to manage the buyer’s expectations, and create abundance for the buyer.
5. The seller answered all the buyers questions, including admitting when they didn’t and getting the answer elsewhere.
6. The seller avoided the hard sell and instead seemed committed to helping the buyer make a fully informed decision, and
7. The buyer made a fully informed decision which maximized the probability that the buyer’s expectations would be met and abundance would be created for both buyer and seller.

The message being that if you want to create abundance sell the same way you buy and buy the same way you sell.

For more specific information including more examples of the importance to abundance creation of being a fully informed buyer and creating fully informed buyers when you’re doing the selling, read Chapter 13, “Selling and Buying Your Way to Abundance” of my book, “Mastering You from the Inside Out.”  Or go to my website www.skipcummins.com.