How to Milk a Sales Cow?

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In This Issue:

• Early Orders: Grafting Is Not The Answer

• Boogeyman: Does Size Matter?

• Prospecting: How to Milk a Sales Cow?

• Sales Objection: Putting on Your Farmer’s Hat Too Early

EARLY ORDERS
Grafting Is Not The Answer

Grafting is a botanical term to describe the process of vegetatively propagating plants by physically attaching part of one plant to the main stalk of another in an attempt to get the two to grow together permanently.

The desired result is to allow that main stalk to exceed its original mission and achieve even greater potential producing additional types and colors of leaves, flowers, and fruits through the grafts.

Grafting in plants is very popular and successful, as long as the primary stalk has the ability to assimilate the new graft, creating a synergistic effect.   

Unfortunately, the concept of grafting has also been misused and applied to areas where it doesn’t belong.  Not all systems have the ability to support grafts or use them to augment the end result.

That’s especially true when it comes to grafting programs onto marketing strategies.

One of the best examples of an unsuccessful graft in the seed business is an attempt to graft a marketing program to the idea of writing earlier orders. 

Almost every company manager has at one time tried to attach a program to that strategy. In fact, numerous managers have asked me to help them develop programs that would ensure success in that area. They were willing to offer aggressive early order discounts, hefty early pay incentives tied to early orders and even free trips if their customers would order their seed by a certain time of the year. Those programs were intended be grafted onto the strategy of getting customers to order earlier but none of the programs ever worked.

Unlike botanical grafting where the main stalk can support numerous kinds of grafts, you can’t graft a program to strategy when the program is totally incompatible with the strategy. Here’s an example of that kind of miss match.  

One day a company manager called me and said that he needed a program that would help their company get customers to order their seed much earlier. The program he wanted to graft to that strategy was a free trip for anyone who ordered their seed by September 30.

I told him I had one just one question. I asked him if his salespeople visited planters in the spring.

He said no.

I told him that no program could be designed and grafted to his strategy of getting early orders because the graft didn’t match the strategy.

He said, “What do you mean?” 

I said, “The first thing you have to do is change your strategy, you have the wrong strategy.”

Again, he asked me what I meant. 

I told him that his strategy needed to be to get everyone of his sales reps to visit every single one of his customers planters during planting season. I said one of their purposes for being there is to get customers out of their ag cycles or habit of writing orders late in the season. That means getting them to stop doing the same things they have always done, when they have always done it.

So, it's at the planter when your salespeople take the lead and give your customers the date when they will be coming by to start each customer’s cropping plan for the next season. You don’t need to graft a program on to your strategy because you have the wrong strategy so neither the program nor the strategy will work. That’s because when you take the program away, customers will revert back to their original behavior of ordering late.

You did not change their behavior.

But if you get them out of the Ag Cycle, they change their thinking which means they change their behavior.

Now you have a permanent solution.

In plants you can’t successfully graft together plants of different families such as citrus trees herbs such as basil.  

It doesn’t work.

Grafting is used at some level in almost every marketing strategy in the seed industry today.  Unfortunately, it isn’t the graft that’s the problem, it is the marketing strategy itself.

BOOGEYMAN
Does Size Matter?

Where did your mind just go?

An attitude that hinders so many seed sellers is that size matters. 

That’s right, they believe the size of the company they represent has a big impact on whether farmers buy from them.

If you carry the same belief that the size of your company, large or small matters, the Boogeyman is already controlling you.

I’ve always wondered why reps feel the need to classify their company according to size, location or degree of autonomy.

Farmers don’t care if you’re large, small, local, independent, new or old, all they care about is what values do you have to offer and how would I benefit buying from you?

But many salespeople who represent local or independent companies believe telling a farmers their company is local or independent somehow gives them an advantage over companies that aren’t. 

They actually believe that makes them somehow better and more desirable than large, non-local companies. Well farmers have shown that it doesn’t matter whether a seed company is large, small, local, or foreign. They will buy from the one that delivers the most value. 

Regardless of the size, location or degree of autonomy of the company, it’s all about the rep.

Every rep has the same job to do.

The make-up of the company has no impact on farmers at all. The sales rep delivers the impact of the offering regardless of the size of their company. Some of the most loved seed sellers represent the largest companies, while some of the most hated sales reps also represent the largest companies.

The same is true with companies of any size.  

So for all of the negatives large companies are supposed to possess, like, not being as nimble, not as personal, slower to react, poorer service and so on.

They are all perceptions created by those who wish they were larger too.

So instead of criticizing companies for their size or location, seed sellers should be criticizing sales rep from any company, large or small for not getting it done.

PROSPECTING
How to Milk a Sales Cow 

How many of you have ever milked a cow?

When I was young, my dad milked a small herd of Holsteins twice a day. When I went off to college, he sold the herd. One day, when I was home from college, our neighbor who was in the dairy business, came to our place and asked if I would be interested in milking his cows on the weekends.

The money he was offering was very attractive.

Dairy farmers paid well when you did a good job. I said sure and came home almost every weekend to milk our neighbor’s cows…

Click to play the full video 

SALES OBSTACLE
Putting Your “Farmer Hat” On  

This obstacle is from Don, he says:

In my mind, the #1 challenge we have as sellers is we put our “farmer” hat on too early and too often. We don’t value the knowledge and information we have as sellers thus, give it away without getting paid for it. Everyone has good seed, today.

What everyone doesn’t have, is the talent that rests on our shoulders! Getting paid for that talent is what’s missing in today’s seed (and Ag world). 

Don hit the nail on the head.

Several others have sent me obstacles talking about how focused farmers are on price and that even the least talented sellers are getting sales by being the cheapest. That’s what happens when salespeople allow themselves to become commodities.

In fact, farmers keep turning seed sellers into commodities because they can’t find any who have an approach that shows farmers what they’re losing by just trying to save money.

The solution is pretty simple. Ask yourself if you’ve become a member of the SeedSeller Academy and learned what kinds of values you can offer farmers outside of product, price, and programs.

Next, access the scripts inside the Academy that give you word for word ideas on how to handle almost any objection farmers have. Then, write your own script, word for word. Practice that script, put it into story book form and role play it at least 20 times before making a sales call.

NOTE: When prospecting, you’re not trying to sell the farmer anything. You’re only goal is to raise perceptions of you and your company and show prospects how you help growers increase yields and profits.

(There is never mention of products on the first call)

The entire focus is on the only 3 questions that matter to every farmer.

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?

When you discover he has no real plan beyond changing population and so on, tell him your next step is to take the grower to the fields and talk about putting together a high yield cropping plan for each one.

That’s done on the second call.

After looking at 3 key fields, tell him you will come back in two days with a completed high yield cropping plan designed to raise his yields to entirely new levels.

On call number three you’re going to go for 3 fields, with one variety per field. Those three fields need to make up about 1/3 of his acres. 

It takes preparation and practice to be successful when selling seed to today’s farmers. But few reps are prepared enough to offer farmers what they need and want most, more yield and profit.

The goal of every seed seller needs to be to help farmers increase profitability by increasing production, not save money. He can save money without a sales rep but he’s proven he can’t raise yields by himself.

That’s All For This Issue

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