Customer Reviews

Sprout!: Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

SPROUT! is a well-written, easy-to-read, inspiring book. The long-term sales skills of planning, seeding, and nurturing are often overlooked by even the best salespeople. I love the concept that cultivating mutual trust and respect allows both the salesperson and their customers to win. This book will help you keep your sales skills honed over the long-term and remind you that selling is fun!

A great book that uses a gardening analogy to teach how to improve your sales ability. Even though I'm not a sales professional, this book gave me excellent ideas how to go about improving customer relationships in my consulting business. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to build relationships with other people.

In Sprout!: Everything I Need To Know About Sales I Learned From My Garden, Alan Vengel (consultant, speaker, and educator in management training and organizational development) and Greg Wright (San Diego based business consult) collaborative in using the garden and gardening as a model to illustrate easy and practical ways for sales professionals and managers to generate peer support and motivation. Job burnout rates in professional sales is very high, as a result, the loss of employee talent, experience, and the consequent expenditures for rehiring and re-training replacements is a corrosively expensive drain on the corporate bottom line -- not to mention the emotional toll burnout represents in devastating so many men and women in their careers as sales professionals. By adhering to the "user friendly" steps outlined, explained, and illustrated in Sprout!, salespeople can beat "career blues" and successfully continue in their chosen profession with renewed vigor and appreciation. Very highly recommended reading!

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. We strongly recommend it to all those who seek to do more than make a sale - and, rather, aim to build a sales career.

I enjoyed this book! SPROUT! will become part of my personal sales book library. I like sales books that don't give me 101 things to remember, in fact I found that I could use the concepts the next day at a sales call with a potential new client.

My wife also read the book because she was attracted to the title, and she said she found it helpful for her own job. She is always trying to sell new ideas to her boss and colleagues at her corporate office. She found the ideas from the book very usable in promoting her more innovative ideas. I give the book a thumbs up!

What a wonderful idea - A "Sales Garden" metaphor that can only energize you, increase your sales and your income, and you will have fun at the same time!! Vengel and Wright have created one of the most delightfully new outlooks on sales I have read in a long time. For all those interested in emjoying their sales career, I would highly recommend this book!

Greg & Alan hit the nail on the head with this one....a wonderful analogy that catches your interest and pulls you into the characters. The simple, back to basic teachings resonate through this quick read. Will be helpful for those folks new to sales or those looking for new inspiration.

Sprout is a fairly good book, but I would only recommend it if you are in big ticket sales
or sales that require you to build long term relationships with customers. I kind of regret
the purchase myself, as the information in this book is only helpful to a certain number of
Sales professionals. If you have been in sales for any length of time at all, you will have already
heard or read most of the ideas presented. I am a bit appalled at all of the positive reviews.
Kind of makes me wonder if the author has 25 willing friends!

Top sales performers are rare. They consistently exceed plan year after year. The secrets of consistent overachievement are clearly laid out in SPROUT! Having personally nutured some some of the top sales overachievers in the Medical Industry, I see those key success factors in this easy-to-read book. Sometimes the most simple things are the most powerful. SPROUT! is one of those things.

I read Sprout! in a couple of hours. Once I started I couldn't put it down. I loved the gardening methaphor, the simple elegance of the model and the meaningful insights from the discussions between the key characters. Already, I have reaped the benefits of implementing some of the actions recommended in my own job -- and I'm not even a sales person!