--- title: "Must-Read for Salespeople: How a Vegetable Vendor Uses \"Selling Vegetables\" as Marketing!" description: "A vegetable vendor, like all salespeople, sells products—vegetables instead of goods—but the nature is the same. They earn a monthly income equivalent to a white-collar worker through unique marketing methods. One female vendor locks in customers by offering points and rebates, earning 5,000-6,000 yuan per month, and reveals a new marketing concept: shifting from single-transaction profit to customer lifetime value." author: "New Distribution" publisher: "New Distribution" email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com" telephone: "+8615854817671" published: "2014-05-16" language: "en" canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/must-read-for-salespeople-how-a-vegetable-vendor-uses-selling-vegetables-97df2e9e/" markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/must-read-for-salespeople-how-a-vegetable-vendor-uses-selling-vegetables-97df2e9e.md" original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/XMtW1HW6C1-yBUNpXRBI6g" translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E9%94%80%E5%94%AE%E4%BA%BA%E5%91%98%E5%BF%85%E7%9C%8B-%E8%8F%9C%E8%B4%A9%E6%80%8E%E6%A0%B7%E4%BB%A5-%E5%8D%96%E8%8F%9C-%E5%81%9A%E8%90%A5%E9%94%80%E7%9A%84-97df2e9e.md" attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/must-read-for-salespeople-how-a-vegetable-vendor-uses-selling-vegetables-97df2e9e/" usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt" --- # Must-Read for Salespeople: How a Vegetable Vendor Uses "Selling Vegetables" as Marketing! > A vegetable vendor, like all salespeople, sells products—vegetables instead of goods—but the nature is the same. They earn a monthly income equivalent to a white-collar worker through unique marketing methods. One female vendor locks in customers by offering points and rebates, earning 5,000-6,000 yuan per month, and reveals a new marketing concept: shifting from single-transaction profit to customer lifetime value. A vegetable vendor, like all salespeople, sells things. The difference is that the vegetable vendor sells vegetables, while salespeople sell products. The items differ, but the nature is the same. They use unique methods to earn a monthly income equivalent to a white-collar worker's salary. So how does a vegetable vendor do marketing? Lock in Customers: Earn from Customers for a Lifetime A female vegetable vendor in a certain area earns over 5,000-6,000 yuan per month. She borrowed the supermarket membership card approach: customers accumulate points when buying vegetables, and at the end of the month, based on the amount spent, they enjoy different discounts. For example, if Zhang San buys 500 yuan worth of vegetables this month, she gives a 5% rebate, and at the end of the month, she gives Zhang San 25 yuan worth of vegetables. If Li Si buys 400 yuan worth, she gives a 4% rebate, and at the end of the month, Li Si can get 16 yuan worth of vegetables without paying. This method attracts many housewives to habitually queue at her stall every day. The success of this vendor cannot be simply attributed to borrowing supermarket promotional methods. The more important value is that she reveals a new marketing concept to salespeople: shifting from pursuing profit from a single customer purchase to pursuing customer lifetime value. The Essence of Sales Is Cultivating Customers Some people think sales is about selling products, so they think every day about how to sell more products to more customers. They focus on bargaining with customers, trying to persuade them to make up their minds, overcome difficulties, and pay quickly. As a result, few customers are willing to buy from them, and their business naturally struggles. In fact, the essence of sales is cultivating customers. Customers are the people who give you money. With customers, you can make money. Customers are the foundation of business and the source of profit. Coca-Cola dares to boast that if all its factories worldwide were burned down overnight, the next day's headlines would be about banks rushing to lend money to Coca-Cola. Why does Coca-Cola have such confidence? The reason is simple: Coca-Cola's most important wealth is not its factories, not its equipment, not even its products, but the millions of loyal customers who feel something is missing if they don't drink Coca-Cola every day. The key difference between excellent and ordinary merchants is that excellent merchants see customers in their eyes and hearts, and they do business around customers; ordinary merchants see only products, and they focus on how to sell products. Merchants who have customers in mind think every day about how to build and maintain relationships with customers. They cultivate a group of people willing to deal with them and buy products from them. As a result, customers queue up to buy, and they never worry about no one buying their products. Those who only have products in mind are good at bargaining, but the problem is that not many people are willing to buy from them. On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin's last words to Putin before resigning were: "Take care of Russia." Today's advice to marketers is: take care of your customers. The Value of Customers Customer value is the profit customers contribute by buying your products. The value a customer brings to a business is far beyond your imagination. In a pizza shop, when a waiter sees a customer enter, he thinks to himself, "Another person who will give me $8,000 is coming. I must serve him well." The $8,000 refers to the lifetime value of a pizza customer. Marketers should not measure customer value only by the profit from this purchase. Look forward to see how much profit customers can contribute in the future. Customer value includes three parts: historical value (how much profit they contributed in the past), present value (how much profit they can contribute now), and future value (how much profit they can contribute in the future). This is customer lifetime value. Sales work should not focus only on closing a deal, but also on mining customer lifetime value. During a training session for a milk powder distributor, I calculated an account for the distributor. His product is suitable for children aged 0-4. If each child consumes 8 bags of milk powder per month, over 4 years they consume nearly 400 bags. This is the sales goal: to get customers to buy our milk powder for 4 years. Customer lifetime value embodies a spirit: the completion of a single transaction is not the end of the relationship, but rather a beginning. Companies should focus on developing long-term relationships with existing customers because loyal customers are less price-sensitive, more likely to repurchase, and can bring word-of-mouth effects to attract new customers. The cost of retaining existing customers is usually lower than acquiring new ones, and increasing the retention rate of existing customers often brings more profit than attracting new customers. Customer lifetime value tells us that the longer a company maintains a relationship with a customer, the more profit the customer contributes. A US survey shows that for industrial goods, the profit from a customer is $45 in the first year, $99 in the second, $121 in the third, $144 in the fourth, and $168 in the fifth. The customer lifetime value theory proposes new standards for evaluating sales work: customer retention rate and customer share. The quality of sales work is not only measured by how many products you sell and how much sales volume you achieve, but also by customer retention rate—the length of time you maintain business relationships with customers. From Market Share to Customer Share Pursuing market share has always been a marketing goal for companies. To achieve higher market share, companies use price wars and advertising as weapons, engaging in fierce competition with rivals. Excessive obsession and improper pursuit of market share have led some companies to fall into the "market share trap" of no profit or negative profit growth. The reality of sales without profit has made some companies doubt the value of market share. Therefore, in 1995, marketing experts proposed the concept of customer share, based on the idea of pursuing market share. Customer share refers to the percentage of a customer's total spending on a certain type of product or service that a company's products or services account for. Market share is based on the entire customer group, pursuing a larger proportion in the whole customer group; customer share is based on individual customers, pursuing the proportion of one's own products in a single customer's purchases of similar products. Some people vividly call it "wallet share." Selling more products to the same customer is not only efficient but also more profitable. Research has found that customer share is a more important determinant of profit than market share. In some industries, a 5% increase in customer share can increase company profits by 25% to 85%. Experts conclude that the quality of market share, measured by customer loyalty, is as important as the quantity of market share. Simply put, pursuing market share brings sales volume, while pursuing customer share brings profit. Market share is a rearview mirror for measuring business performance; it only shows past performance, not future performance. Customer share is a telescope, reminding salespeople to pay attention to customer lifetime value, requiring marketers to look forward, not backward, to see how many products customers have bought and how much profit they have contributed, but to consider how much profit potential customers have in the future, maximize customer value, and adjust marketing strategies accordingly. Some people pursue profit from single purchases. A single purchase may yield considerable profit, but without cultivating customers as a prerequisite, the marketing path will be difficult. Therefore, to avoid the risks of single-transaction customers, it is better to be guided by customer lifetime value, cultivate long-term customers, and focus on customer lifetime value. \-------------------------------------- More knowledgeable about distributors than manufacturers, more understanding of internal management than distributors. \-------------------------------------- **Like this article? 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