Ag Sales Professional's Podcast by Greg Martinelli

How to navigate the risks and opportunities when selling to farmers and Ag buyers Volatility is great for Ag salespeople, If they recognize the opportunity. If they can sort through the noise. Volatility is bad for Ag salespeople, If they fail to recognize the risk. If they ignore it and don’t get in front of it. As salespeople, we love selling into a booming market.  However, in 35 years in agribusiness, there may have been maybe six years of this type of booming Ag economy.  The rest of those years, I would consider to be “volatile”.  Odds are high that you will spend the majority of your agribusiness career selling to customers who are having difficult times.  That’s why you need to look at volatility through a different lens than your customers and, more importantly, differently than your competition.  Listen in as we discuss how you can learn to look at volatility differently and become more effective for your customers.

Recently, in a sales training workshop, we were working on a cold call/prospecting role play.  Walking around and listening to the salespeople’s intro/rapport-building discussions, I kept hearing a similar comment from them.  In almost every role-play group, the person in the farmer role would complain about the weather, Ag politics, or profitability.  The salesperson would reply with, “I know what you mean” or something similar.  It made me wonder.  How do they “know what the producer means?”  Do they really know, or is that just their quick way to connect with the farmer?  Their response did not seem genuine or confident to me.  In other words, they didn’t seem old enough or experienced enough to really know what the farmer was actually going through.  Listen in as we discuss how oversharing your farm experience may actually be a negative or neutral rapport-building discussion

I spend a lot of time training salespeople on how to ask questions.  Good questions, great questions, high-value questions, open-ended questions, and so on.It is the top-selling skill needed to accomplish everything when selling, when cold calling, to determine a customer’s needs, to close a sale, to develop relationships, to solve customer problems, etc.  However, I have failed to spend enough time on the selling skill of answering questions.  When your prospect or customer asks a question, all of your senses should set off an alarm.  That alarm should be telling you to stop thinking of whatever it is you are thinking about.  Focus all your attention on the question that you were asked.  Listen in as we dig deeper into a planned approach to several critical questions your customers might ask!

Part 3 How to build Emotion Value An old sales adage says, “Every purchase is an emotional decision justified with logic”.  It implies that humans are emotional and are driven to purchase based on their emotions.  They want to feel like they are making the most rational decision based on financial/business factors.  However, emotions are the underlying factor in their purchases. In parts 1 and 2 of “Selling Value in agribusiness”, we discussed the financial and time value that we bring to our customers.  I guess that most often, you sell on these two value factors.  More specifically, you focus on the financial value that you bring.  That is, until a competitor comes along with a lower price.  My experience tells me a competitor will always come along with a better price. That’s when the experienced salesperson brings in the emotional value of their products, services, and most importantly, the emotional value of buying specifically from them as their salesperson. The struggle is that money and time values can be quantified much more easily than emotional value.  Don’t misunderstand today’s discussion on emotional value.  Time and money are essential values that have to be met.  They keep the business running.  However, the emotional values are always there in the minds of our customers.  They lie just under the surface of every decision they make.  With so many different emotions that influence customers, we have to narrow them down to effectively sell based on them. In sales training workshops, I get some skepticism on the topic of selling on emotion.  That is, until I put the list of basic emotions up on the screen: Basic Emotions Fear Anger-Frustration Pride Trust Confusion Joy Surprise Anticipation Then I ask them to think about their customers.  In crop and livestock production, which emotions do their customers have a lot of?  Which emotion dominates every sales discussion?  If you are out there building relationships, you should know which emotion is most commonly expressed by producers. When training salespeople to sell on emotional value, it’s important for them to establish a priority of which emotions to work on.  In today’s agribusiness market, fear and trust seem to be the most important emotions in the sales relationship.  Fear – Trust Connection Without hesitation, most audiences mention “Fear”.  And on the other side of fear, they realize it is “Trust”.  Trust is the counter emotion to fear.  Trust in products and services.  Maybe more importantly, trust in you as their salesperson becomes a big part of their decision process.  Think about their business model.  They are affected greatly by local basis prices for supplies and selling their crops/livestock.  These prices are set by someone else in the commodity market.  Those local markets are all affected by national and international events.  These events change on a daily basis.  This brings a tremendous amount of volatility and fear to our customers.  To reduce that fear, producers are looking to do business with companies and people they can trust.  Digging deeper, we need to understand more about what they fear and how trusted suppliers help reduce that fear.  Then, as their salesperson, understand what that is worth to them. What do they fear? Volatile cost of supplies:  crop inputs, feed, vet supplies, etc. Volatile price of selling products: grain markets, hog/poultry/beef market prices. Weather Making the best decision with so many unknowns Fear of missing out:  $8 corn, locking in costs at the high and selling prices at the low Reliability of their vendors:Ability to provide and deliverQuality of their products and services Will they be there when times are tough? Credibility of their vendors:Is their technology aligned with my business?Are they the best choice for me and my operation?Are they interested in helping me or helping themselves? Do they have my best interest at heart? Are they flexible to adjust as market conditions change through the year and from year to year? These are some of the most common fears I have heard from producers and heard from sales teams in training workshops.  Let’s switch gears to our sales approach in light of these fears.  How do we establish trust in some of these areas?  Then, how do we use that trust?  By that, I mean, do we charge more for it?  Do we view certain customers differently based on their trust in us?  How do we build trust? One of the most interesting moments in a sales training session is when I ask two questions of the sales audience.  First, I ask, “Do you feel like trust is important in your selling process?” “Yes!” is the quick and unanimous response.  My second question is then, “If I asked you to go out tomorrow and build trust in your market with customers and prospects, what would you do?” The room typically goes quiet as they think about my question.  If no one responds, then I ask, “What specific action would you take…. what would you physically do or say to build trust?”  Slowly, with lower levels of confidence, the group will come up with some answers.  Let’s answer this question in the three components of trust: Credibility action steps:  Customers want you to know what you’re doing You don’t have to know it all, but they want you to continuously improve your technical ability with your products. They want you to be extremely honest in your technical abilities.  They fear working with someone who fakes their abilities or worse, focuses all technology on promoting the products they sell. Reliability action steps: Rule #1: Do what you say you will do. If something happens where you can’t follow rule #1, then over-communicate immediately and often. Your customer’s best interest action steps: This is sometimes called self-interest versus others. The products and services that you recommend must be in the best interest of your customer.  The best way to make sure you are acting in your customer’s best interest is to do a great job during the discovery phase of your selling process.  You must ask extensive questions to determine the best solution before presenting any of your products or services. Now, what do you do with emotional value? Do you charge more for it?  Do you expect a higher level of loyalty from those customers who you have built more emotional value?  Is this emotional value something you provide to every customer or just for your top customers? Or only the loyal customers? For example.  Suppose you are a great communicator and provide instant support for your products.  Day or night, weekday or weekend, you are right there to support your customers.  This is something your competition does not do so well.  What happens if you find out one of your medium-large customers switched to your competitor for a moderately lower price?  Maybe it was $5/ton on feed, $15/ton on fertilizer, or $2500 on a tractor. Now you are doubting your value as a salesperson.  Am I not worth these small price differences?  Don’t I provide far more value than these dollar amounts?  Should I continue to provide my higher level of value to this customer to win them back, or did they just show their true colors? The answers to those questions have no exact answer.  It depends on many factors.  I’ll discuss the answers a bit further in the podcast version of this article.  Feel free to click on the link or look it up on Apple or Spotify to listen.

Part 3 How to build Emotion Value An old sales adage says, “Every purchase is an emotional decision justified with logic”.  It implies that humans are emotional and are driven to purchase based on their emotions.  They want to feel like they are making the most rational decision based on financial/business factors.  However, emotions are the underlying factor in their purchases. In parts 1 and 2 of “Selling Value in agribusiness”, we discussed the financial and time value that we bring to our customers.  I guess that most often, you sell on these two value factors.  More specifically, you focus on the financial value that you bring.  That is, until a competitor comes along with a lower price.  My experience tells me a competitor will always come along with a better price. That’s when the experienced salesperson brings in the emotional value of their products, services, and most importantly, the emotional value of buying specifically from them as their salesperson. Listen in as we discuss how to build emotional value and what to do with it!

Time Value Have you ever heard: “Time is money”? Do you believe it?  Have you ever stopped to consider how much your time is worth in real dollars?  What about your customer?  What dollar value do they put on their time? Well, if you haven’t thought about these questions before, you might be missing out on an untapped value that you and your products provide to customers. Listen in as we discuss how you can uncover the time value that you, your products, and your services bring to your customer!

The three components of value in every sale: Dollars-Time-Emotion Have you ever had someone tell you to: “Quit selling on price and sell the value of our products!” As salespeople, we’ve all heard this advice from sales managers, sales trainers, product managers, or social media sales gurus.  It’s so easy to flip that comment out there, but much more challenging to get into the details with a salesperson on how to actually do that. But what does that actually mean to “Go sell the value of our products?”  Listen in to this week as we cover the first component of selling value – Money Value

When selling, don’t forget the one person more important than your customer As Ag sales professionals, we wake up every day, jump in the pickup and head out to the farm, ranch or Ag retail store to focus all our efforts on improving the lives of our customers.  Here is the interesting part.  So does your customer.  They wake up every day, jump in their pickup, and focus all of their efforts on their customer.  Listen in as we discuss how to change your sales approach with your customer to be more effective

They want you to do a good job at selling to them Here’s a bold thought for today:  Your customer wants you to be a successful salesperson.  They want you to do a good job of selling to them.  They may not act like it, but they truly want you to do well when you call on them. As salespeople, we often get the feeling that customers are not on our side because we are trying to sell them something.  Even if we use a highly relationship style of selling, we still get that feeling.  It’s not that we feel like the enemy, but more like an adversary.  Listen in as we discuss how to change your view of your sales call audience!

How to overcome the fear of rejection and keep the sale alive Farmers (really, all customers) shop harder during tough times.  This week, I want to also remind salespeople that in tough times, producers will reduce all expenses with their vendors.  You are going to experience more “No” responses in your closing questions than you did previously. That fear of rejection (no) is still one of the strongest emotions that salespeople have.  So fearful, many salespeople will find any excuse not to cold call or prospect.  Just the act of turning the steering wheel and driving down the farmer’s driveway seems impossible.  7 of the most common No’s: No for now No to you No to your company No to that product or service No to changing No to the risk/reward No to the price Listen in as we uncover some ways to overcome these objections

The seven stations on every customer’s journey Are you helping, hurting, or ignoring them? Over the last ten years of weekly blog articles and podcast episodes, the focus has mostly been on improving your selling process.  I think it’s important to spend a few minutes discussing the buying process that your customers go through.  It’s […]

How to be persistent to get the sale versus being pushy Every salesperson knows they have to be persistent to gain a customer, to get a prospect appointment, or to make a follow-up appointment again and again.  However, not one single salesperson in the world wants to be known as pushy.  This is even more […]