The other day I was out in my garden checking on my tomato plants. They
are coming along just fine, but while I was in the garden I was thinking
back to my earlier years in sales and thought about making some tomato
juice.
In my earlier years, if you were in sales and your boss asked you to make
some tomato juice (sales) you would say "sure, can you give me some
tomatoes (accounts)?" Most companies had plenty of tomatoes
(some large and some small) so making more juice was fun and easy. If
you can make a lot of juice from the tomatoes you have (especially big red
ripe tomatoes), you can end up breaking a lot of sales records.
When this happens, usually the next thing to occur is that the company takes
away your large tomatoes and sometimes all of your tomatoes and gives them
to someone else. After all, they are the company's tomatoes. What's
ironic is that the same company will then ask you to continue to make tomato
juice (more than before - raise your quota) without any tomatoes. As
we all know it is kind of hard to make tomato juice without any tomatoes. So
what should you do? You got it. Start planting those
seeds. If you are lucky you may get some starter tomato plants
(sales leads).
What a lot of people don't understand is that it takes about 4-6 months to
make some good, large, red, ripe tomatoes from seed and it takes no time at
all to turn those fancies into juice (new sales). Now to get
those new tomatoes you must first plant the seeds, nurture them, fertilize
them, water them, hope and pray that all the weather conditions (economy)
remain good. In about 6 months you will have some new tomatoes ready for
juice.
Some people call this a New Sales Cycle. I call it Garden
Season, and the best time to start planting is in the spring, which is
hypothetically NOW! If you are lucky, before the end of the year you
will have a bumper crop of tomatoes ready for juice plus you will break all
sales records for this year or next year or maybe even both depending on
your sales plan. By the way, if you find any rotten or wormy
tomatoes, throw them out. They don't make good juice, only the
best quality tomatoes do.
