Quote:
Originally Posted by Dee8go
How many salesmen do we have here? What do you sell? How's business for you these days?
I have sold photographic equipment, construction products, and most recently industrial laundry equipment.
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I do inside sales and play sales manager in my spare time selling all sorts of seed, fertilizer, golf and sports turf maintenance products (ie pesticides-herbi-, fungi-, insecti-), soil conditioners, garden and turf related hardware.
As one might imagine garden seed is hot these days. Plus we're gradually expanding west and south as the big boys continue to piss off the independent garden centers and hardware stores with their crappy service and willingness to sell to the big box stores for far less. I'm sold out of stuff already that I usually carry over for next year and it's not like you can fire up the seed making machine to spit out some more. That said, I've secured contracts for 2010 crops before the growers even came out with price lists.
Golf and sports turf is quiet. We're about 15% off from last year on the early order programs. A couple positives are the organic and all natural fertilizer products to the golf market and grass seed to municipalities (they can't use any pesticides around elementary and junior high schools any more -or any adjoining sports fields- so they are just going to continuously overseed the hell out of them all year long). Better profit margin but the dollar volume is less.
Wetland, wildflower and native mixes in general seem to be on an upward trend although they aren't high volume items for us just yet.