Don't Get Caught In a Tie With the Competition

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In This Issue:

• Early Orders: Don’t Get Caught In a Tie

• Boogeyman: Not Selling What’s Available

• Sales Objection: How to Open a New Territory

EARLY ORDERS
Don’t Get Caught In a Tie

Farmers are becoming more sophisticated every year.

Their understanding of the seed marketplace and methods companies use to get them to buy has grown tremendously.

In fact, many farmers’ marketplace IQ has achieved a level high enough to recognize parity among products and services from different suppliers. In addition, their keen eye for value coupled with an inherent need for value, has caused them to become very discerning when deciding who to buy from.

Most farmers have come to believe that virtually all seed products, technologies and services are the same. And once that thought gets into their mind, it becomes a tie between you and your competitor as to who they should buy from.

But seed sellers know the only one who gets the sale is the one who breaks the tie.

In sports, a tie is often broken by overtime or sudden death play whereby one of the teams scores and wins. It works the same way when selling seed to farmers except too often farmers are the ones who do the scoring and break the tie. It’s seldom based on the value one company offers over the other like it should be.

Remember, the prospect has already tied the game based on parity in the offerings so his logical thought is, if everything else is the same, the difference is simply price.

Modern day growers are right when they believe there’s a high level of parity among products in the seed marketplace. No one has a genetic advantage so big they don’t need salespeople to sell their products. So the only real difference, the only tie breaker on every sale must be the salesperson. But if the seller doesn’t become the tiebreaker the farmer does and he loves the control it gives him. He creates the only difference between company offerings he believes is left and that’s price.

But price is never a differentiator unless you’re selling a commodity. Seed is not a commodity and neither is the person selling the seed.

When’s the last time you made yourself the tiebreaker, the only reason a farmer bought your products or services instead of buying from your competitor?

When you do that, the differences between you and your competitor becomes so great no one else can come close to what you offer.

Seed sellers ask me all of the time how they can separate their company from competitors. I tell them, start with making yourself the difference, because you are the only value farmers get. They can get seed anywhere they want at any price they want but they can’t get you.

Don’t get caught in a tie.

Take your game to a new level this year. 

Selling seed requires special training, it’s called Seed Sales Training, how to sell seed to farmers. After all, what other group of salespeople sells customers a living organism, of which 80% of the performance is out of their control?

What other group of salespeople sells customers a product that determines their entire livelihood?

To understand how to do that you need to be special. And when you’re special, you become the only reason customers buy.

And when the only reason customers buy is you, you will never, ever again be caught in a tie. 

BOOGEYMAN
Not Selling What’s Available

It’s believed the idea of the boogeyman was created years ago to teach kids to be cautious when going places they shouldn’t such as into dark woods at night.

The boogeyman is perceived as being a dark figure who hides in places to frighten unsuspecting victims. Kids are often afraid of the dark because of fear of the boogeyman, but he’s totally fictious, of no danger and is more of a nuisance.

His power to scare anyone is totally neutralized when the lights go on.

But in the seed marketplace, the boogeyman is not fictious, harmless or so easily neutralized. He is real and is the reason for a lot of sales issues from loss of sales to the imbalance of inventories.

That original definition of a boogeyman is outdated and doesn’t describe the one we are far too familiar with in the seed business. Our boogeyman is a real event that can cause measurable damage when his coming is not prepared for in advance.

I’ve always said, there’s only one way to control the boogeyman or keep him totally away, regardless of what he looks like and that is to prepare for him to come.

In this issue of SeedSeller Coach I’m going to discuss a very destructive boogeyman that’s often ignored by sales reps until it’s too late and he’s already done his damage.

It’s called, “Not Selling What’s Available.”

We were starting our third year in business and our entire company of ten people, including six salespeople were sitting around our conference table discussing ways to increase sales across our eight-state market area.

Us salespeople were stretched thin and needed every unit of sales we could get, wherever we could get them. It was late summer and we were selling hard. But since seed harvest had not yet begun, all of the orders we’d been writing were based on projected inventories from our soon to be harvested seed fields, plus what we had left in the warehouse.

We had a very popular variety called KS99 that produced a lot of very large round seeds and a small percentage of flat seeds. Farmers didn’t like to plant the rounds since there were fewer in a unit and they had been led to believe flats had more vigor and emerged better than rounds.

Our inventory sheet showed we were totally out of flats in KS99 but had a lot of rounds in the warehouse. One of the sales reps piped up during the discussion and said, “I could sell a lot more KS99 if I had flats.”

Keith “Doc” Keltgen, the President of the company, looked at him, paused and said:

“We have thousands of bags of cash sitting in the warehouse right now that are labeled variety KS99, large rounds. Even if when we get flats in KS99 at harvest, you won’t be selling any of them until we are sold out rounds. We’re not going to dump those bags of cash because we think we can’t sell the rounds. We can sell the rounds if we want to and we need to. Seed in the warehouse is cash, not just seed.”

The room got quiet, everyone stared down at the inventory sheet in front of them.

That was a wake-up call that told us the “Not Selling What’s Available” boogeyman was in our meeting room in the form of unbalanced inventory and we as salespeople were the ones responsible for killing him.

But Doc was smart.

He didn’t lose the momentum he had just created. He said, “We also aren’t going to take any chances that we have any of those same rounds left over at the end of the season. We’re going to make sure we sell all of them. So I’m going to go around the room and ask each one of you salespeople how many units of those rounds you’re going to commit to selling as your part of getting rid of them.”

Each one of us committed ourselves to a number which we all knew reaching was not an option, it was essential for the company. It worked and not only did it sell the inventory, but it also got us more accustomed to selling what was available and not just what was easy.

You may not get involved in seed size issues much anymore, but the availability of popular varieties and the issue of unbalanced inventories is present in every growing company. We had that problem when it came to varieties too. That’s why I figured out a way to overcome that boogeyman so he never bothered me again.

I called my counterattack, “Selling Balanced Portfolios.”

Selling a balanced portfolio is selling equal amounts of at least three different varieties to every grower with each variety being assigned to its own field. In addition, the same portfolio is never sold to every farmer. At least some of the varieties in the portfolio are different.

This strategy will not only reduce your chances of having inventory issues but will increase your chances of winning on every farm.

SALES OBSTACLE
How to Open a New Territory  

This obstacle is from Harrison, he says:

I’m starting my career in selling seed and was wondering what might be some unique approaches when finding new prospective customers. For me, all of my customers will be new and I want to know how I can keep my brand in the back of their head as they already have established seed networks.

Great question Harrison.

Opening a new territory is a process that requires more than just going out and prospecting new buyers. It’s a system’s approach and not just an event you perform when you decide you need customers. The process is based on marketing your company and yourself before ever contacting a new prospect. After all, today’s farmers are very discerning and harder to convince without them knowing more about who the salesperson is before they buy.

Seed is such an important purchase that they can’t afford to make any mistakes.

That’s why sales reps opening new areas should never be asked to prospect for new business until the system is in place, the territory has been heated and the rep is properly trained. There should be no contact with potential buyers until the Heating process is well underway.

Harrison, heating is a process we use to raise perceptions of you and your company prior to meeting a prospective buyer. Prospects know nothing about you or your company so why would they consider buying from you just because you stopped by? So we use Heating to prepare the prospect, to raise perceptions of you and your company prior to meeting them face to face. Heating involves sending three pieces of company literature to prospects, each a unique piece sent every five days that grabs the grower’s attention while telling him more about you and your company. Each Heater carries a picture and bio of you the rep and what you do for farmers.

The first Heater can be as simple as an over-sized postcard with a powerful statement on one side, such as, “Why Aren’t You Raising 300-bushel corn, or Why aren’t you raising 150-bushel soybeans, or Why aren’t you raising 100-bushel canola, or Why aren’t you raising 4000 lb. cotton? The other side would say, “We can help you get on that road to success, you just need to follow the Top 5 Factors to Maximizing Yield.”
They will be very curious because no one else is going to send them that kind of information.

The second Heater which would arrive 5 days later will be an 8.5 x 5.5, four-page, full color brochure with the 3 key questions every farmer needs to be able to answer. 1. “Where do you want to take your yields next year?” 2. “What’s your plan to get there?” 3. “What’s keeping you from getting there?” It will contain blanks after each question so they can answer the questions.

The third Heater is a larger piece that demonstrates how you work with farmers and the results you get. It begins to challenge them by telling them the rules they need to follow when working with you like, doing a high yield cropping plan, creating that field by field plan before harvest, stop setting yield goals and set bushels per 1000 plant goals and so on. Once the third piece hits the mail, you can begin calling on prospects who have received the Heaters and use the Heaters to introduce yourself.

Obviously, you need to have a well-prepared, well-practiced sales story and a completed story book prior to making prospecting calls. I will talk about that in another issue.

If you have any doubt about the effectiveness of Heating, think about how many telemarketing calls you get that you either try to avoid or don’t answer. That’s the same kind of feeling today’s farmers get when they see strange salespeople drive into their place of business unannounced. Telemarketing would be far more successful if the people they were calling on were informed ahead of time they would be calling and why.

Don’t consider making cold calls or prospecting in a new territory without Heating it first. It will be a total waste of time, money, energy and will seldom result in a sale.

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