Sprout!: Everything I Need to Know about Sales I Learned from My Garden
By Alan Vengel and Greg Wright
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About this ebook
SPROUT! was written by two long-time sales veterans to help their fellow professionals rediscover enthusiasm for their chosen profession and to help sales organizations retain top talent. Vengel and Wright use a page-turning story to outline a new strategy for sales, one that will make salespeople better able to cope with the inevitable ups and downs and take a more effective, long-term approach.
As the book begins, Marsha Molloy has had it. Once a top pharmaceutical sales representative so crackerjack her nickname was Marsha Money, she's been laid low by a tough economy and just plain exhaustion. The once-hungry top producer has seemingly lost her touch and grown indifferent to a sales culture that appears to value faxes, emails, and cell phone chats instead of the relationship building that had been her forte. An avid gardener on a visit to her local nursery, Marsha runs into Bob Rawlings, the store's new owner and an ex-sales professional himself. They begin to chat, and Marsha mentions her career frustrations. Bob replies that he'd had the same problem, but found that the more he began treating his business like his garden, the better his business grew - and a happier, more relaxed salesman appeared. Marsha is intrigued but puzzled - how could sales be like gardening? Bob takes Marsha under his wing and, with the assistance of several other salespeople he's mentored, teaches her the secrets of his sales garden.
By using the authors' sales garden metaphor to change their whole way of thinking about sales, and by adhering to the easy, practical steps outlined in SPROUT! salespeople can beat the career blues, increase their sales, and sustain themselves for the long term.
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Book preview
Sprout! - Alan Vengel
SPROUT!
SPROUT!
Everything I Need
to Know about
Sales
I Learned from
My Garden
Alan Vengel & Greg Wright
Sprout!
Copyright © 2004 by Alan Vengel and Greg Wright
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator,
at the address below.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650
San Francisco, California 94104-2916
Tel: (415) 288-0260, Fax: (415) 362-2512
www.bkconnection.com
Ordering information for print editions
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First Edition
Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-57675-207-4
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-283-6
IDPF ISBN: 978-1-60994-392-9
2008-1
Designer: Dianne Platner
Copyeditor: Elissa Rabellino
Illustrations: Copyright © 2004 by Iskra Johnson
Cover design: Richard Adelson
Preface
sprout, vb.: to spring up; to send out new growth
Why a book relating sales success to gardening?
Because we believe that there is more than one way to look at the challenge of getting the most out of your sales career. Our book offers a new way of looking at sales that you’re not likely to have encountered.
We have had the privilege of building sales careers that have been fun as well as profitable. We’ve also enjoyed working with thousands of successful salespeople in all different stages of their careers, and we’ve learned a lot from them in the process. Through the sales professionals we’ve met, we’ve become aware of the importance of two themes in particular: the stages of career satisfaction, or happiness, with what they have accomplished; and their level of optimism about their future.
Specifically, we’ve noticed distinct plateaus in the energy of the salespeople with whom we have worked. Although all career choices present challenges for sustaining success, it is evident to us that sales professionals in particular are constantly measured against rigid, economically driven barometers and exposed to constant internal and external competition.
Consequently, feelings of frustration and harmful stress run very high in the sales industry. The cost to sales organizations in lost talent, rehiring, and retraining hurts the corporate bottom line. Unfortunately, the emotional toll of high stress can be devastating to any sales professional’s career.
In our experience, sales professionals don’t always acknowledge that pressure. Or if they do, they internalize it. That’s a big mistake. While most salespeople are well schooled in the nuts and bolts of the selling process, the feeling that there seems to be something missing can cause a loss of optimism and premature burnout.
That’s where SPROUT! comes in handy. We have found that using a metaphor we call the Sales Garden and its accompanying mind-set can help relieve some harmful stress and put more fun and passion into the selling process.
By absorbing our simple Sales Garden concept and following the user-friendly steps outlined in this book, salespeople can beat the career blues and sustain themselves for the long term, regaining their passion for sales in the process. But that’s not all. Our simple formula also enables organizations to better retain precious talent by applying a philosophy that supports their sales professionals throughout the inevitable ups and downs that mark a selling career— and that creates a healthy sales framework as well.
All this from seeds sowed in our Sales Garden.
From Alan Vengel
A brief note of gratitude to some of the people who have helped me grow during this fun project: Kathleen, my wife; David, my son; Judy, my business partner; Carol and Shawn at Vengel Lash Associates; Steven Piersanti, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, Kristen Frantz, Michael Crowley, María Jesús Aguiló, and the rest of the gang at Berrett-Koehler, with special thanks to Brenda Frink, who came up with the title for this book; Vicki Webster, our gardening consultant; Elissa Rabellino, our copyeditor; and Beverly Kaye. Thank you all for encouraging me to SPROUT!
From Greg Wright
My thanks to all the sales professionals I have had the privilege to work with over the past thirty years. Their candor in relating their experiences, and their openness to developing new selling skills, have given me the seeds
that grew into this book.
Alan Vengel and Greg Wright
December 2003
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