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Sprout!: Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden - Hardcover

Vengel, Alan; Wright, Greg

 
9781576752074: Sprout!: Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576752070 ISBN 13: 9781576752074
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Marsha Molloy has had it. Once a top medical products sales representative so crackerjack her nickname was Marsha Money, she’s been laid low by a tough economy and just plain exhaustion. The former top producer has seemingly lost her touch and grown indifferent to a sales culture that appears to value faxes, e-mails, and cell phone chats instead of the relationship building that had been her forte.

Enter Bob Rawlings, the owner of Marsha’s local gardening store. In Bob’s 30 plus years as a successful sales professional, he experienced the same career frustrations, but found that if he treated his business like his garden, his business grew—and a happier, more relaxed salesman appeared. Bob teaches Marsha the secrets of his sales garden, helping her to recharge her career.

The clever sales garden metaphor will change you the way you think about sales. By adhering to the easy, practical steps outlined in Sprout!, you, too, can beat career blues, increase your sales, and sustain yourself for the long term.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Vengel is a founding partner of Vengel Lash Associates, Inc. and a strategic partner with Beverly Kaye & Associates/Career Systems International. He is a consultant, speaker, and educator in the subjects of influence, negotiation, sales, and talent development.
In addition to providing training and consulting services to more than three hundred of America’s largest corporations, he has been a featured speaker at American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) national conferences and the Linkage Leadership Conference.
Alan has an undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and a master’s degree from the University of Arizona. His last book, The Influence Edge: How to Persuade Others to Help You Achieve Your Goals (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000), was nominated for a California Book Award.
Over the past twenty-seven years, Greg Wright has worked with business leaders and sales professionals from some of the best-performing companies in the world. His work on leadership and sales success has been implemented in a range of industries on six continents.
Greg is an Annapolis graduate with an advanced degree from the University of Arkansas. He served during the Vietnam War before starting his training and consulting business, C.G. Wright & Associates (CGWA), in San Diego, California. CGWA continues to provide performance solutions to corporate America.
A Mississippi native, Greg lives in the Florida Keys with his wife. Their garden yields bananas, mangoes, and key limes.

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The Sales Garden
Tired.
Flat-out, bone-weary tired.
That’s how Marsha Molloy was feeling, eight years into a sales career that was losing steam fast.
A successful medical-supply sales representative whose nickname in her salad days was “Marsha Money,” she had hit hard times, laid low by a tough economy and a declining interest in the profession she had embraced since starting out as a catalog sales rep right out of high school. The once-hungry top producer had seemingly lost her touch and grown indifferent to a sales culture that appeared to value faxes, e-mails, and cell phone chats instead of the relationship building that had been her forte. Worse, she’d lost her passion for the sales business and forgotten the reasons why she’d entered the business in the first place: the face-to-face interaction, the thrill of closing a deal, the satisfaction of building long-term relationships.
It was a strange feeling for someone who had always felt at home in the sales world, Marsha thought.
After all, she had the classic sales background, didn’t she? She had started in grade school, selling candies door-to-door, buying them for a quarter and selling them for 50 cents to kids who had allowance money that was burning a hole in their pockets. She became more involved in sales in high school, where she took a part-time job after school selling baby pictures to proud parents—especially mothers—in her town. She learned, through trial and error, that she could package the pictures in such a way that people usually purchased the set she wanted them to buy. By asking a proud mom whether she wanted the bargain package or the value package, she found that the mom would usually opt for the more expensive value package. Nobody wanted to skimp on her baby pictures, and Marsha learned that people buy on emotions.
Sales Seeds

Prices matter, but what it really comes down to is emotions and relationships. They are the currencies of healthy sales.
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SALES
She dabbled in sales all through college, selling tiedyed shirts to fellow students on the campus concourse at the University of Massachusetts and later marketing “Florida Break” spring vacations for a local travel agent, who gave Marsha 50 percent of the cut for bringing her the business.
After college she went right to work selling ad time for a big-city radio station and later switched to medical-supply sales when a key customer moved to that field and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. There she learned the art of sales—the importance of developing a network of contacts that could, like her travel agent boss, bring her business. She learned how to keep herself sharp with cold calls, but cold calls proved inefficient compared with building a network of trusted customers over time. She trained herself to focus on developing healthy, long-lasting customer relationships. After all, those accounts made up 85 percent of her sales. Marsha found that even in tough times when customers were buying less, it was the sales representative with the best contacts and the best relationships—and not the quick-hit artist— who survived and thrived.
Before long, Marsha had forged for herself a six-figure annual income, was taking plenty of trips to exotic ports of call for exceeding her quotas, and even found time to have a reasonable home and social life. For the next several years, she was on cloud nine.
But that was then and this is now, she thought. Fatigue, restlessness, and a vague sense of unhappiness had slowly enveloped her in recent months. She’d tried to talk to her husband, and then her boss, about her fatigue. She told both that she was burned out: she dreaded going to work in the morning, and making her calls and traveling through her territory— a weekly practice she’d always found enjoyable— now felt like drudgery. She had even begun feeling cynical about her boss and her company, something she dared not tell anybody. Boxed in, Marsha started to feel as if there was no hope—that she was in it for the money and couldn’t make nearly as much doing anything else.
Sales Seeds

You can’t sell when you’re tired, frustrated, depressed, or unhappy. You’ve got to make a change.
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SALES
Frustrated and confused, Marsha thought about her future as she drove to her favorite garden store on a brisk Saturday morning in early April. A gardening buff on weekends, Marsha couldn’t wait to pick out some seeds, buy some new gloves, and get back to the small patch of land behind her house, where every spring she’d planted something different. Working in her garden calmed her and gave her peace of mind—and she missed it during those barren wintry months when she couldn’t get out there. Driving up the road to the nursery, tires crunching on the gravel, Marsha forgot about her career woes for the moment and headed into the parking lot.
Gently maneuvering her old Ford pickup truck into a space, she noticed something odd. Instead of “Wayland Nurseries,” the sign out front read in bold blue letters, “Rawlings Garden Supply.”
Confused and a tad agitated that her favorite nursery had apparently changed hands, Marsha stepped out of the truck and jogged up the cobblestone walk to the entrance in her brand-new Reeboks, an impulse purchase she’d made earlier in the week to brighten her mood. It hadn’t.
She opened the door and stepped inside.
She immediately noticed that the store had changed. Instead of narrow paths between cluttered rows of seed racks, pots, plants, and garden utensils, there were wide aisles on a shiny hardwood floor. The walls had been knocked down and replaced with huge picture windows that gave the refurbished store a calm aura. Huge shafts of sunlight streamed into the store, bathing the room in warm, golden tones. Marsha didn’t know who the new proprietor was, but she was impressed by what he—or she—had done to the place.
“Can I help you, Miss?”
Marsha turned around to see a tall, affable-looking man with a head of closely cropped silver hair and a bronzed, weathered face. He leaned over the counter, absentmindedly brushing some dust off the cash register.
“Mmm, yes,” Marsha answered. “Planting time, you know. Going to need some seeds, some compost, and maybe a new trowel. That time of year again.” She paused, fidgeting a bit. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
The man suppressed a grin. “You want to know who this newcomer is who’s running your favorite garden shop—am I right?”
Marsha relaxed a bit. “Well, I was kind of wondering.”
The man extended a big, strong hand. “The name’s Rawlings. Bob Rawlings. Three years retired from Pharson International. Been a salesman my whole life. Been a gardener my whole life, too—just like you, I bet. When Wayland Nurseries’ owners put the place up for sale, I grabbed it. It’s always been a dream of mine to run my own garden shop. And now … here I am.”
Marsha shook his hand.“ Marsha Molloy—a pleasure to meet you. Sales, you say?”
“Yep,” replied Rawlings. “Thirty-five years in medical supplies. Lots of ups and downs, but mostly ups. I still do a little consulting on the side for the company, but only about three or four days a quarter. You know—working the shows and seminars, things like that.”
Almost immediately, Marsha felt more relaxed in Rawlings’ presence. Funny that he had been in sales— medical sales, no less—and loved gardening, too, she thought. “Yes, I...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576752070
ISBN 13 
9781576752074
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
168
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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