Greg Martinelli, Ag Sales Professionals
The Evolution of Your Sales Team How will you position your sales team to be successful and profitable for the company?
• Generational Changes: The Baby Boomers (57-76 years old) are in their prime from a farm ownership standpoint. Yet, in their 70’s, many will make the transfer to the next generation. —Employees: Quality of work life, diversity, health and opportunity are winning in importance over career advancement and total lifelong devotion. In every generation, there is that moment when life will never be the same. These cataclysmic moments change us forever. We will refer to life before and life after these events. The pandemic will be that moment for our generation; just as the Great Depression and WWII were for our parents/grandparents. These world events don’t necessarily cause evolution, but they speed it up. They bring focused efforts to solve problems or create new ways of operating. The effects of the pandemic have reached into every life in every industry. The most impactful being the devastation to human life. From there, we get into the impact on medical treatment, travel, food consumption, and public gatherings of any kind. In agribusiness, we have to consider a whole new set of concerns in almost every activity we do. Employee health has to be protected while honoring their health choices. We have to provide multiple options for how employees work and participate in activities. Customers need to know we are doing everything possible to develop safe ways for them to buy our products and use our services.
Go-To-Market Evolution: Sales Team How have we changed as a sales force in the last 14 months? We all learned how to Zoom, unmute and turn our camera on. We got more done by phone, text, email. Much has been written about the changes to on-farm selling during the pandemic. See “On Farm Selling During Covid” in the last issue. However, little has been written about how your go-to-market strategy will change as a result of Covid.
Market Forces: Before digging into the evolution of your sales team, let’s examine a few market forces that have been going on. Some of the market forces are not specific to agribusiness. However, we need to keep our eyes on the rest of the business world as many of these market forces will move into agribusiness in time. Some may not affect your business at all. While others can completely change how you approach your marketplace, especially your sales team structure.
30 SUMMER 2021
• Where we Shop: Shopping is not buying. Shopping is looking, evaluating, and learning. Producers go to Farm Progress, Husker Harvest Days, and the National Machinery Show to shop and dream of the top end products. With these shows cancelled and many of our locations closed, the internet became the source of information. A recent study on tractor equipment and parts buyers showed the importance of your website, high quality pictures, schematics, and YouTube videos. Our customers want to learn about us online and then come into our location to buy. • Where we Buy: Obviously, this is also shifting to more online purchasing. No, it won’t replace all in-person customers in our lifetime. Yet, we have to consider it as a very strong trend. Several large agribusinesses focus on this method as their primary go-to-market strategy. • Loyalty & Expectations: With increased information sources, customers are naturally going to learn more about us and our competition. Our customers are being targeted hourly, through multiple media outlets. That targeting is becoming more and more specific to the exact buyers of our products. As any vendor does, we stumble from time to time. We make mistakes. With multiple options at the touch of their smart phone, customers have a reduced tolerance for these mistakes. They expect us to deliver on what we promise. Often, that promise is not from a salesperson or local retail location. Often, it’s from an advertisement, an email or professionally made video. Imagine if every time you went to McDonalds and expected the experience to be like the commercial or expected the burger to look like the picture on the display. Your loyalty to eating there would suffer. To test this in your company, pull together the sales, marketing and customer service teams. Review your online presence. Then ask your sales and customer service teams to verify that it matches the real world customer experience.
