Are Sacred Cows Holding Back Sales?

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In This Issue:

• Early Orders: Are Sacred Cows Holding Back Sales?

• Boogeyman: The Boogeyman Has Bitten Many of Your Customers

• Role Play: The No.1 Source of Sales Success

EARLY ORDERS
Are Sacred Cows Holding Back Sales?

Albert Einstein said, “The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”

Do you know what you should change on your road to success and what you should NEVER change?

Do you know when you should start walking alone and leave the crowd behind, even when it’s not popular? That’s not easy, especially when everyone around you is doing the so-called, right things.

How many of you have found yourself in a hole you dug for yourself, only because you followed a crowd of people who were digging the same holes for themselves?

That’s what happens when you follow a crowd. You often find yourself in a hole with nowhere to go. It’s too easy to follow the crowd than take a whole new route and go that route alone.

So many sales reps are crowd followers. I know I was a crowd follower when I first started selling seed. I did what everyone else was doing, mostly because I didn’t know any better.

For example, I had more test plots and show plots than I could handle because I was told it was the way seed was sold. The concept of, “They’ll believe it when they see it” was everyone’s mantra and every other company was using plots and lots of them.

I spent most of my time talking to farmers about putting a plot on their farm, gathering the seed for it, planting it, grooming it, signing it, organizing a field for it, setting up a time when the farmer could harvest it for me and run the entire plot through a weigh wagon so I could then get the data, analyze it and summarize it put it in a plot book. I would then spend time addressing the envelopes and mailing the plot book to as many dealers and customers as possible.

Whew!

I’m tired just thinking about it. It’s a good thing I was young. Today that process would be too hard on this old Cogger. 

In my early days of learning to sell seed, plots were my sacred cow. I began to believe in them so strongly that anyone who talked against them was to me, a heretic and didn’t know what they were talking about. It became a topic most naysayers dare not broach or challenge unless they were prepared to be viewed and spoken of with disdain by the majority.

But it only took me 2 years of putting 140,000 miles a year on my pickup, half of them pulling a weigh wagon across 3 states, to weaken my belief in the effectiveness of my sacred plot cow. I quickly realized that all of the time, work and expense going into the strategy showed me little or no progress. I wasn’t getting me the sales I needed and wanted. I also figured out I was going to die a young man if I kept up this ridiculous pace. I didn’t lose many plot contests, in fact, my varieties won the majority of the time.

But when I won, no one would buy because I was with a new company so they always wanted me to do it again while they continued to buy from their favorite seed supplier. When I DID lose, my dealers and customers had plenty of reasons why they should not sell or buy my seed. So when I won I lost, and when I lost I lost. I just didn’t have the seed sales to justify all of my effort, expense and stress I was bearing, so I quit following the crowd and went out on my own.

I decided to break from the herd and do something totally different. I stopped doing test plots all together and only had a few show plots that would never see a weigh scale. I never used the weigh wagon again and started riding combines with customers instead. Not only was it a lot cheaper, it was easier and a heck of a lot more fun and customers loved it. Sales skyrocketed because I was with customers and not in a test plot gathering worthless data no one believed in anyway. I had a new life. 

Because of my sales increases I was soon promoted to VP in charge of Sales for the entire company. I will admit I couldn’t get every single sales rep to give up THEIR sacred plot cow right away, but most of them finally did when they saw the results others were having and started falling behind everyone else.

What sacred cows do you still protect?

• Do you still think you’re wasting a farmer’s time visiting his planter?

• Do you still think farmers don’t want to plan and order their seed before harvest or that they don’t want you to ride their harvester?

• Do you still believe farmers buy seed on price?

• Do you still believe you need to use test plots to screen varieties before you sell them?

If you do, you are wrong on all points. Those are all sacred cows that I sent to slaughters many years ago. Unfortunately, many salespeople still hold on to them and believe they have value to themselves and the farmer. 

As Albert Einstein said, Don’t follow the crowd if you want to keep going further.”

Crowd belief will only hold you back. I wasted 2 years of my life following a crowd that allowed me to keep failing. Had I not broken away and done my own thing I would never have achieved my potential. And better yet, more reps are finally seeing the light, breaking away and generating real value for themselves and their customers.

Maybe it’s time you go it alone too.

BOOGEYMAN
The Boogeyman Has Bitten Many of Your Customers 

I can’t believe what some farmers are talking about right now.  Well, I guess I SHOULD believe it, because what they’re saying these days means we aren’t getting the right messages to them.

And when we aren’t getting the right messages to farmers, they’re left alone, unable to defend themselves against “stinkin thinkin” caused by the Boogeyman. 

It’s nothing new of course.

Like many of us, farmers have always been, at certain times, easy prey for the Boogeyman. When market prices and other factors put pressure on profitability, they search for ways to save money in attempts to make a profit. And when they’re offered a cheaper price for inputs as the best option to increasing profit many farmers take the bait.   

But this past week took the cake.

One of my best clients, a highly successful seed seller who has trained his ass off with me, attended all of my sessions multiple times and executes like a real pro, sent me a quote from an on-line conversation farmers were having. He also just happens to be one of the best farmers in his state.

Seeing the conversation he sent me clearly showed me how far we HAVE NOT COME in the last 50 years.  

The conversation was about a major seed company that was making 25-year-old genetics available at rock bottom prices to farmers to help them compensate for low market prices. The price of the old genetics was almost equivalent for what farmers would have paid for that variety 25 years ago.

The  particular variety one farmer was talking about was hot when I first started selling seed. But that variety eventually, as my client put it, became a disease magnet.

In fact, the company supplying it lost a huge portion of sales due to its horrendous performance and farmers lost a lot of money. Apparently the farmer who was seeing it as good wasn’t alive at the time. He said, “Even though they’re telling us the yield will be 20 or more bushels less than everything else,” and here’s where I blew my stack, “it would be an attractive option at these market prices.” 

I almost choked. What the hell are they thinking?

Have farmers like him just given up on the reason why they farm in the first place? Farmers are producers. Their job is and always will be to produce as much as possible. THAT’S how they make money and lower the cost of every bushel they produce.

The sheer mentality of wanting to go backward is mind-boggling. At a time when farmers really need profit, some are thinking of ways to totally take away their ability to make a profit.

Unfortunately, many ag reps won’t know how to tell them to get their thinking back on point and start planning to produce the best crop possible next year. After all, what are those same famers going to do when next year is a banner crop year, producing over-the-top yields while their old, obsolete varieties are not just 20 bushels behind, they’re as much as 100 bushels short of the latest genetics and are flat on the ground?

Will Rogers was right when he said, and I paraphrase, when farmers find themselves in a hole they need to stop digging and not get themselves in deeper.

Farmers who swing for the fences every year, focused on maximizing production instead of saving money, not only out guess every cost saving strategy, they out guess mother nature too. 9.5 out of 10 years they are the big winners.

Role Play
The No.1 Source of Sales Success 

When I ask a group of salespeople to tell me the no.1 sign that indicates a company is successful, I usually get one of two answers: sales or profits.

But neither one of those is correct.

Of the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with over the passed 50 years, neither the amount of sales or profits a business was getting, indicated their true level of success.

The real indicator was how well every employee defended their strict standards of doing business.  The real indicator was how much everyone loved being part of a Team that defended those standards on a daily basis. 

As Jim Collins said in his excellent book, Built to Last, “The most successful companies grew only as fast as they could find people who would uphold their standards.” Employees who would never compromise their company’s business standards were the No.1 reason for the company’s success.  

My success when selling seed was a direct result of the owners of our company never compromising the standards they developed as a start-up seed company. They vowed to hire only the best people, put higher quality seed in the bag than anyone in the industry, and support all of that with a pledge that made everyone else’s service look half-ass. When the six founders of this new company hired me as their first employee, they gave me what I equate to a “blood transfusion” of commitment. 

They sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that they hired me to be a defender of the castle. They needed people who believed so strongly in what they were doing for farmers that no competitor could penetrate our armor and take away our advantage in people, quality and service.

Once I witnessed our CEO’s dedication and determination to protect our exceptional standards, I was a believer. Therefore, the old adage of “I’ll believe it when I see it”, was replaced with, “I’ll see it, when I believe it.”

Does your company have standards you truly believe in and would base your reputation on?

Most don’t. Quality and service are standards every company brags about but are seldom held up. They both often become generic terms and have no value to farmers because they remain undefined.

For example, how high is your quality?

When the seed corn industry germination standard is 92-95% and your company is selling 98% and 99% labeled on the bag, can you get a farmer to believe it?

I had clients that dominated their marketplace because of that kind of standard their people believed in and delivered to farmers. 

When you tell a farmer your service is so good that if he orders extra seed to meet his needs during planting you’ll have it to him within an hour or the seed is free, could you back it up? I had clients that did just that and exploded their sales because of it. 

Great employees who are defenders of the company’s standard are the reason for the success of every business. But the company has an obligation to give its employees standards that bring so much added value they’re worth defending.

That gives those great employees the backbone to defend the castle regardless of how tough things get in the marketplace.    

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