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Sprout!

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Sprout!

Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden - Four Steps to

Berrett-Koehler,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

Use planning, seeding, nurturing and harvesting to make your sales career like your garden: a long-lasting pleasure.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

The notion of growing your business like a garden may not seem particularly original, but the direction these authors take their sales advice in is quite fresh. In an unusual and welcome act of focus, they dwell on one aspect of the sales professional’s life: how to prolong your career and stick with it, despite the weeds and rocks hurled continually at today’s selling professional. Their advice is practical and couched in colorful anecdotes and garden metaphors. Sales advice blooms throughout the story of an imaginary sales professional, Marsha Molloy, who is struggling to get her professional groove back. Since burnout is an epidemic in the sales profession, this book is a valuable addition to the topic. It offers solid advice, or "sales seeds," in a colorful and engaging way. getAbstract strongly recommends it to all those who seek to do more than make a sale - and, rather, aim to build a sales career.

Summary

Growing Your Garden

To be a successful sales professional, you must close one sale over and over again, each and every day. You have to sell yourself on staying in the profession. One hit wonders are a dime a dozen in sales, because it is easy to reach a plateau, stagnate, burn out and, finally, drop out altogether. Sales managers witness this everyday. So how do you create a successful sales career for the long haul?

Consider for example the case of Marsha Molloy. This is her story. Marsha was eight years into a sales career that was starting to prove again the notion that what goes up must, sooner or later, crash back to earth. You might say Ms. Molloy was on the downside. In her salad days, her nickname in the industry was "Marsha Money." She once had a knack for closing a sale.

Marsha embraced her role as a medical-supplies representative right out of high school. Once a red meat eating, hungry sales professional, Marsha lost her edge. She grew bored with a sales culture that thrived more on e-mails and faxes than on face-to-face contact. Her passion for her work was gone, and she knew it. The worst thing was that she lost sight of the reasons that she entered...

About the Authors

Alan Vengel, a partner in Vengel Lash Associates, Inc., is the author of The Influence Edge. He works as an educator, speaker and consultant for businesses of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies. Greg Wright has accumulated 27 years in "the selling game." He founded his own consulting practice, C.G. Wright and Associates, at age 27, and today spends most of his time with sales professionals, helping them to sell more products and services. His clients include medical, high tech and energy companies.

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