Strokes

Where the word comes from

When we're born — little babies — we need to be held. Picked up, touched, stroked. You've heard about orphanages where the kids don't get enough physical contact and they literally fail to thrive. Babies die without strokes. It's that fundamental.

As we get older, the physical strokes mostly go away. But the need for recognition doesn't. It just shifts. Now we need somebody to walk into the office and say "morning, Monica." We need our boss to notice we handled something well. We need our spouse to see the thing we did. That's a stroke. The modern, grown-up version of being held.

Here's the part that matters for sales: everybody's walking around under-stroked. Every PM, every estimator, every dispatcher, every owner. Every customer on your bid list. They're busy, they're stressed, they're getting yelled at about late trucks and bad pours, and nobody — nobody — is giving them the recognition they actually need. That's the universal condition of adult human beings.

And that's your opening.

Industry terms this page covers

The four kinds of strokes

There are four, and they're not equal.

Counterintuitive truth: bad job and loser strokes are still strokes. That's why some people keep getting yelled at at home, keep getting chewed out at work, keep finding drama — because any stroke is better than no stroke. Humans would rather be criticized than ignored. Kids act out to get the negative attention because the positive attention isn't available.

So when I say "feed strokes" in sales — I mean the top two: Winner and Good job. The big, nutritious kind. Because your customer is not getting those anywhere else. Not from their boss. Not often from their team. Maybe from their mom on Sundays.

How to tell you're dealing with a stroke-deprived person

Watch for these:

• Crabbiness for no reason. They're irritated and can't say why. Often it's just — nobody told them they were doing well lately.
• Seeking attention. They start telling you stories. They draw out the phone call. They want to just be with another human for a minute longer than the transaction requires.
• Starting fights. Creating drama. Picking at small stuff. That's stroke-seeking in negative-attention form.
• Over-delivering on the thing they just got praised for. That's a person who got a rare stroke and is working to earn the next one.

Most of your customers are showing one of these on any given day. You're not therapists — you're sellers. But if you notice it, you can be the one who drops a good stroke into their day. And they will remember it.

The customer-service secret weapon

Here's the move that changes sales relationships:

"Customer service secret weapon is to give strokes to people."

Not fake compliments. Not smarmy "you're the best!" filler. Real, noticed, specific strokes for things you actually see.

• "Hey — the way you walked that last pour through the change order? That was sharp. Most PMs would've panicked."
• "Your team did amazing on the Tuesday job. I've been doing this a long time and that was clean."
• "I saw your name on a job over in Pleasanton. You've got a big one going on — that's a lot to juggle."
• "Thanks for getting back to me on that — I know you're slammed."

Notice the pattern. Specific. Noticed. Real. You're not telling them they're great in general. You're telling them you saw a specific thing they did and it mattered. That's the nutritious kind.

Sellers who do this genuinely — not performatively — become the people their customers want to pick up the phone for. Not because of the strokes alone. Because of what the strokes signal: this person actually pays attention to me. That's rare. Rare is valuable.

Stroke yourself first

Here's a subtle one that changes your entire selling life.

Most sellers are going into customer calls stroke-deprived themselves. Their boss didn't acknowledge them this morning. Their last deal got shopped. They're running on empty. And when a seller is empty — they start fishing for strokes from their customers. Looking for the compliment. Lighting up when the customer is nice. Disproportionately hurt when the customer is short with them.

That's a losing posture. Because stroke-fishing customers smell it immediately, and they either (a) pull back because it feels needy or (b) weaponize it — they learn that flattering you a little gets them a discount.

The fix: fill your own damn glass first. Before the customer call, stroke yourself internally. Acknowledge what you handled today. Remind yourself of the wins. Do whatever you have to do. And then walk into the customer conversation with overflow — and that overflow is what you give to them.

"I make sure I fill up my own damn glass and don't have to have any of my customers tell me that I'm good. I try and fill it up as much as possible. And then what happens is, as I start filling it up, I notice that I have extra. So I start dropping it into other people's buckets."

You can only give strokes away generously when you have enough yourself. Otherwise you're running on fumes and the customer can feel it.

Strokes when strokes are hard

Some customers make it tough. Grumpy contractors. Short-fused dispatchers. Owners who don't make eye contact. Your instinct is to skip the stroke because "this guy doesn't seem like a stroke guy."

Wrong read. Grumpy guys are the most stroke-deprived. They've built the crust because nobody has given them the good kind in years. They're not stroke-resistant — they're stroke-starved.

The move with a tough one: notice something small and real and stroke it on the way out. Not opening — that feels sycophantic. On the way out, walking toward the door, almost as an afterthought:

"Hey — I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're not easy to catch. Thanks for being straight with me."

Watch the shoulders drop a little. You just gave the nutritious kind to someone whose glass has been empty for a long time. They'll remember.

What strokes are NOT

A warning, because this gets misused.

• Not "hey you're amazing!" filler. Generic flattery doesn't feed. It actively repels. The human brain has a flattery-filter; it screens out the fake stuff. Real, specific, noticed — or don't bother.
• Not manipulation. If you're stroking people to trick them, they'll feel it eventually, and you'll lose more than you gained. The stroke has to come from actually noticing something real. If you're not actually noticing, the problem isn't your technique — it's your attention.
• Not bribery. A gift card is not a stroke. A donut box is not a stroke. Tangible stuff is nice but it doesn't meet the recognition need. The recognition need is met by words, from a human, noticed and specific.
• Not one-way. If you only ever give strokes and never receive them in return, the relationship is out of balance. You should also be able to receive strokes gracefully when they come your way — without deflecting or brushing off. "Thanks, that means a lot" is the right response. Not "oh, it was nothing."

Strokes in a team — the store-staff example

Strokes don't just matter with customers. Watch what happens when a team doesn't stroke each other.

"A person walks into the store, and my employee says, 'hi, welcome in, anything you're looking for today?' They go, 'oh, no, thanks.' He goes, 'okay, let me know if I can help' and runs back to his spot. It gets very task-oriented pretty quickly. It feels a little bit like trying to hustle. Not a lot of acknowledging the stroke."

When a team is stroke-dry internally, they can't produce the warmth for customers externally. You can't pour from an empty cup. If you run a team, the single highest-leverage thing you can do is stroke your team daily — so they can turn around and stroke the customer. Culture is just strokes flowing downhill.

Homework — the stroke audit

This week:

1. Notice three people in your life — one customer, one coworker, one person at home — and write down one specific thing each of them is doing well that you probably haven't acknowledged in a long time.
2. Give them the stroke. In person, on the phone, or in a short note. Real and specific.
3. Watch what happens — in their face, their voice, their next behavior. Write it down.
4. At the end of the week, count how many strokes you received. If it was fewer than five, that's your own deficit — start filling your own glass.

Most sellers who run this exercise for a month find their customer relationships shift measurably. It's the cheapest, highest-ROI move in sales.

Where to go next

• Clark Kent — the posture that makes your strokes land genuinely
• The Partner Bucket — partners are built on a decade of strokes, not a pitch
• Communication Pie — how you stroke matters more than the words you use
• Transactional Analysis — Eric Berne's framework that strokes come from (Parent/Adult/Child ego states)
• 3 Buckets of Questions — bucket 2 (bonding) is where strokes live naturally

Source: drawn from 146 moments across the live-coaching corpus — including the winner/good-job/bad-job/loser taxonomy, the "fill your own glass" mantra, the orphanage origin, and the store-staff stroke-dryness example. Voice preserved.