What Sales/Customer-facing Professionals Can Learn from Braiding Sweetgrass
Priya sold enterprise software and thought of a client relationship the way her sales training described it: identify the need, close the deal, move to the next account. One long-time client called her, not about a renewal, but to ask how her father's surgery had gone, something she had mentioned once, months earlier, in passing. She realized her own notes on that client tracked contract value and renewal dates but nothing about what she actually knew of him, or what she had given him beyond a working product. She started a different kind of note after each call, something the client shared that had nothing to do with the deal, and found herself checking in on those things unprompted. Renewals did not change overnight. Clients started calling her back before a competitor even got the chance to pitch.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The gift economy Kimmerer describes
Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a trained botanist, describes plants and land in her own tradition as gift-givers whose gifts create a responsibility to give something back, not resources for the taking. She offers this as her own inherited perspective, not a universal sales philosophy. For a sales professional, the useful translation is treating a customer's trust as a gift that depletes if only drawn from, not a renewable resource to pitch at indefinitely.
Quota pressure pushes toward whichever pitch closes fastest, regardless of what the relationship actually needs. Practice: before your next customer call, note one thing you can give that customer that has nothing to do with closing the deal.
Before your next customer call, note one thing you can give that customer that has nothing to do with closing the deal.
Where this shows up in daily life
Kimmerer's chapters return often to how rarely modern life notices what is taken and whether anything is given back, whether water, food, or the labor behind an object. In sales, this shows up in how a customer relationship gets logged purely as pipeline value, contract size, renewal date, without any record of what was given back over time.
CRM systems are built to track revenue extracted from a relationship, not value given back to it. Practice: add one field to your own notes tracking what you have given each key customer, separate from what they have bought.
Add one field to your own notes tracking what you have given each key customer, separate from what they have bought.
Practical self-application
Kimmerer's own teaching favors small, repeatable practices, gratitude before using something the earth provides, tending even one plant with attention, using fully what is taken rather than wasting it. Translated into customer-facing work, inspired by rather than copied from her tradition, this might mean a standing habit of following up on something personal a client mentioned, unrelated to the sale, before the next pitch.
A packed calendar of calls leaves little room for anything beyond the transactional script. Practice: pick one long-term account and reach out this week with something of value that is not an ask.
Pick one long-term account and reach out this week with something of value that is not an ask.
The larger debate
Kimmerer's book also sits inside a live, unresolved conversation about land stewardship, the place of Indigenous knowledge within environmental science, and land rights and sovereignty. These are real, evolving debates the book engages with rather than settles, and reasonable people disagree on specifics. A sales professional reading this book meets that debate as background for its reciprocity ideas, not a position to bring into a client conversation.
A salesperson trying to notice, appreciate, and reciprocate with every account runs directly into the quota: time spent tending a relationship without an immediate ask is time not spent on the next pitch in the pipeline. The honest tension is that reciprocity builds trust slowly while commission structures reward speed. Most professionals will manage this well with a handful of key accounts, not the entire book of business, and that is a realistic tradeoff worth making deliberately.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which client relationship have you tracked purely by revenue, with no record of what you have given back? - Where has quota pressure pushed you toward the fastest close rather than the most honest one? - What would change if reciprocity, not just renewal rate, showed up on your own scorecard?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Pick one long-term account and reach out this week with something of value that is not an ask.