When Customer Relationships are Buried, It Isn’t Always the Seed Rep’s Fault!

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In This Issue:

• Early Orders: When Customer Relationships are Buried, It Isn’t Always the Seed Rep’s Fault

• Handling Objections: The Secret: Repeating Yourself

• Boogeyman: If You Want Exercise, Get a Gym Membership

Early Orders
When Customer Relationships are Buried, It Isn’t Always the Seed Rep’s Fault!

For too many farmers, fall harvest season spells the end of their relationship with a seed supplier.

It could have been a first-time association with the rep or it may have been a relationship based on years of socializing, trusting, negotiating, joking and ultimately buying.

The longer term the relationship the more enjoyable it usually is, but the more devastating it can be for the grower and the seed seller when it ends. In long term relationships farmers have not only learned to trust their seed guy, they’ve also found him/her fun to deal with.

But so many relationships will be lost this year following a highly variable harvest season which should actually be called the “Funeral Season.” In many cases it will become a time for “mourning the loss of thousands of relationships” and their interment into the “crypt of low perceptions”.

Why is fall a time of year when farmers often lose relationships with their sales reps, especially ones as important as the one with their seed rep?

It’s mostly because farmers don’t understand the real value of a seed relationship.

They don’t realize a relationship with a seed rep is not about yield or product and it’s not about price. If a grower takes the time necessary to develop a trusting relationship with his seed supplier, (which takes more than one season) he will have all of those things and more.

But instead, he puts every one of his relationships on the line every year by looking at his “side by side” trial or his “on farm test plot” or his “yield monitor” and shoots himself in the foot by “burying” the relationships of those seed reps whose products did not perform to expectations, despite all of the other things the relationship was built on.

What 21st century farmers need more than ever is someone they can rely on 24/7 for things they need or don’t even know they need. They need a seed leader, someone to tell them when to buy, what to buy, when to pay, how to pay, where to use it, how to use it and how to measure it’s performance. They need to learn the value of having a relationship with every seed seller they work with.

And when they get upset with the performance of a certain brand from a certain sales rep, they should not be asking that rep to leave their farms, they should instead be asking for more help managing the 1000 variables that affected the performance of that product on their farm. Too often they sever a relationship that has the potential to bring them a lot more than just bushels in the field. And that’s what they don’t understand.

When most farmers harvest their crops in the fall, they recklessly put their relationships on the line. So unless seed sellers have positioned both themselves and their products in the right way, performance at harvest could mean the end of their relationship with growers.

That’s why seed sellers must spend a lot more time, learning how to create strong, trusting relationships that will not be “harvest dependent” but will instead act as safety nets for both them and the growers they work with whether things go right or wrong.

Harvest season should not turn into a funeral season.

Instead, it should be a time when both the farmer and the seller rejoice in all of the things they learned throughout the past year. This is not a funeral year nor is it a funeral marketplace. Instead, it’s time to learn how to help customers see the real value of relationships so we can go back to the joys of “harvest season” and avoid the dirges of the funeral season.

Handling Objections
The Secret to Handling Objections: Repeating Yourself

The job of all sales reps is to contact prospects and customers and convince them to buy their products. 

Along with the sales approach often comes questions and objections from prospects prior to them making a purchase. Any seller who has consistent customer contact is confronted with all kinds of objections throughout the selling season. In fact, the more customer contact they have, the greater the number of objections they’re confronted with.

They may be common objections like, “your price is too high, I’ve never heard of you, it’s too early to order or I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. Or they may be the kinds of objections sellers seldom get that stops sellers in their tracks. Prospects may say things like “why are you here, how did you get my name, your products can’t compete or I don’t like salespeople”.

I’ve witnessed many of those unexpected comments by prospects that throw reps off the sales trail with no idea of how to get back on. 

It’s been documented that farmers are contacted an average of four times per week or 220 times throughout the year by field sellers trying to sell them something.  No wonder growers become so good at objecting. They practice a lot more than most field sellers. Show me a field seller who makes four sales call a week on farmers year-round and I’ll show a field seller who is one of kind and real two-percenter.

The best piece of advice I can give all sales reps when it comes to handling objections is to make repetition practice part of their daily training regimen. Make a list of all of the objections that can possibly come up on a sales call.  Beside each objection, list all of the ways you would handle it if it came up.

Start by practicing handling an objection before it comes up. This is the easiest way to address them without losing control of the conversation. For example, you know price is always on the forefront of prospects’ minds, get rid of it early by saying, “ Since we don’t yet know if we’ll be a fit for your operation, we won’t get into specifics like products, technologies or price today. Today will be about getting to know each other better to make sure we’re a good fit.“ 

Next, practice handling objections after they come up. For example, a prospect says to you, “I’m currently buying my seed from your competitor and I’m happy with what I’m doing.”  Your response is to acknowledge it, take care of it, then move on. You say, “Isn’t it great to have a  trusting relationship with your seed supplier? Let me show what we do for farmers then I’ll be on my way.  Once you show the farmer how different you are and how much you help farmers increase yields and profit, the grower will want to know more and will want to buy from you.

Finally, practice handling the objection by acknowledging it then dismissing it until later. For example,  A prospect asks, “Where are you guys priced?”  Your response, “We’ll get to that later once we decide if we’re a fit.”   

The secret to successful selling is practice.

That means practicing the entire sales call over and over again as well as practicing individual components of the call like handling objections.  Anyone who has been to my sales training sessions has seen me role play the entire sales call step by step. I always remain in control which means I handle objections, most of the time, before they ever come up. 

That takes a lot of repetition practice.   

Field sellers continue to struggle with their ability to manage objections. The problem is they hear them more often than they practice them.  Farmers end up practicing more often than the salespeople who call on them. And when they find an objection that works, they use it on every unpracticed rep who stops by.   

Success is all about repetition. But repetition is not just about practicing a sales call until it feels good. True practice means repeating everything you learn and know, until it becomes part of your subconscious and fully automatic. Perfect practice gets perfect results and salespeople who constantly repeat themselves during practice, repeat themselves when it comes to getting sales increases every year.  

You’d think that after many years of being exposed to objections, modern day field sellers would have learned from their predecessors how to handle every objection that comes their way.

But in most cases it’s almost as if they’re hearing those objections for the first time. They never seem to be well enough prepared to handle them.

They need to do more reps in the gym  practicing making sales calls.  

Boogeyman
If You Want Exercise, Get a Gym Membership

I can predict how successful every seed seller will be, long before they start a new selling season.

I’m not extra smart.

For me that ability comes from more than 50 years of watching seed sellers go about their daily activities. It’s a simple act of observation. The ones who win, like writing orders better than exercising. 

You’d think the seed industry owned a series of health clubs across the U.S. After all, the most common thing I see seed sellers doing is working out. Their days are filled with activities that mimic exercise a lot more than they mimic their job description that says their job is to write orders.

Planting plots, orchestrating side by sides, weeding the plot, putting up signs, holding field days, pulling weigh wagons, harvesting plots and taking down signs are great workouts but they don’t sell a single bag or bulk box of seed.

The most common event that generates the most sales, is the least common event done by salespeople, contacting prospects and giving them the opportunity to buy. Most reps are too busy exercising non-order writing activities instead of doing the one thing that generates sales, contacting prospective buyers.

So many sales reps don’t understand their success is based on doing the right things not just doing things. 

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it doesn’t matter what programs you have and it doesn’t matter what your price is. The only thing that matters is how you use your time. Sellers who get the increases they want are more efficient at creating sales opportunities and not seeing how much product information they can gather. They end up selling more in less time than their competitors. What better way is there to demonstrate an efficient use of time than making more money than anyone else with the same amount of time.

Do you want to know what kind of sales year you’re going to have? Look at what you have planned every day for the next 90 days. Look at how much of your calendar is filled with exercise and how much is filled with opportunities to write orders. If you’re part of the 98% of seed sellers consumed with getting exercise instead of contacting customers, you’re future is already determined.

If you aren’t prospecting four farmers a day, one to two days a week for 12 weeks you’re not serious about increasing sales. If you’re not at customers’ planters in the spring, doing post planting report card visits 4-6 weeks after planting, walking fields in the summer to determine bushels per 1000 so you know what to expect at harvest and if you’re not riding harvesters in the fall to finalize next year’s plan, you’re wasting most of your time. Those are all customer contacts that increase customer retention, enhance your product’s performance and increase sales. 

Have you ever wanted to join a gym but didn’t have the money?

Stop getting your workouts on the job and start creating sales opportunities. You will have more than enough money to join the best gym around along with the added benefit of being a winner.

There’s no better feeling in the world than knowing you’re doing everything you need to do to keep both your body and your sales report in shape.  

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