An invaluable collection of sales veterans’ wisdom.
A series of firsthand accounts describing various facets of the sales world.
Ingram (Making Rain with Events, 2014), the host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast, collects dozens of personal accounts from sales managers, agents, and executives describing key moments and memories from their sales experiences. Along the way, the storytellers provide tips on such things as building relationships with clients and achieving the right mindset for a particular sales job. The author shows a keen knack for editorial balance, as the tales flow naturally from one teller to the next. Professionals tell of clients with operations in total chaos and of salespeople who put up brick walls to learning new sales approaches, among others. The tone varies throughout, but a low-key sarcasm runs through most entries; “If you don’t believe it, neither will your customer. I believe Yoda said that,” quips Dayna Leaman, for example, who leads account manager training at publishing company John Wiley & Sons. Several stories move easily from humor to a more personal register, as when consultant Trong Nguyen writes about building a great relationship with a new client in “I’m 6’4” and Devilishly Handsome” or business-sales professional Jelle den Dunnen reminds readers of the human cost of the sales profession: “People mostly remember how loud we are when we win a deal, but they often forget that we take a whole lot of beating along the way.” The skill of Ingram’s organizational approach is also evident in how seldom the tips and principles contradict one another; all these professionals seem to have learned variations on the same bits of wisdom and strategy over the courses of very different careers. It all results in a remarkable advice manual that also offers a portrait of a profession—with a refrain of “fortune favors the bold.”
An invaluable collection of sales veterans’ wisdom.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9906059-3-5
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Top 1% Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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