A helpful guidebook for sales career candidates, delivered with humor and swagger.
A veteran of the world of corporate sales offers an engaging guidebook for readers looking for a change of career.
Debut author Needham promises new horizons and untold riches for those willing to leave their cubicles behind for an exciting job in sales. He establishes his credentials early by flashing the passport by which most successful salesmen are measured––his W-2s, which show average earnings of $400,000 annually over 10 years. Readers will easily forgive this hint of pirate swagger, however, as he quickly assumes a friendly, breezy and self-deprecating tone: “It’s important to note there is nothing truly special or remarkable about me. I have no Harvard degree, no rich uncle to get me started, no George Clooney looks, and no connections.” Having set the lure of success, Needham closes the deal, as skilled salesmen do, with five simple reasons readers may want to consider sales. He asserts that readers will achieve a better work-life balance, make more money, see the world, lower their stress, and “[d]iscover every company in the world is looking for good salespeople….[Y]ou will always have a job somewhere. Even in a bad economy.” As Needham dispenses advice like a wizened sea captain, hooked readers will be drawn in. He peppers the book with humorous tales from his Irish-American, South Boston neighborhood, as well as stories from his own career as a salesman. Best of all, he offers sound tips for sales success, such as finding a company that already “has a strong brand, good products and great people,” and determining the difference between the art and the science of selling.
A helpful guidebook for sales career candidates, delivered with humor and swagger.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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