7 Immediate Quick Tips for the Ag Sales Professional

Employ one or all of these quick action items today!

Quick tips to get organized, stand out from the competition & sell more!

1. Talk Less and Sell More:
   • Who’s talking more in the sales process? You or the customer?  Most of the time, it should be the customer.  Observe yourself today.  If it’s you, Stop it!  Ask questions to get your customer/prospect talking.
   • Once you get the sale, quit selling. I didn’t say run from the farm or stop talking.  I mean stop selling the product or service that the customer just agreed to buy.  That’s over.  Either move on to another product or another topic.  If appropriate, call the order in right in front of the customer.  This puts that subject to rest.

2. Say Less with Pictures:
   • The old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” holds true
   • So is my old saying “A video is worth a thousand pictures”
   • If you have a video, use it. If not, use pictures.  If not, draw them a picture.  If not, I guess you can go ahead with your thousand words.  Just remember to wake them up when you are done talking.

3. “Never tell, what you can ask”
   • I heard this quote the other day and think it’s a valuable quick tip.
   • It certainly is quicker to just tell your customer something.
   • However, by slowing down and drawing the conclusion from the customer in their words, it is much more impactful and memorable for them.

4. Trust will make your job faster and easier:
   • People buy from people they trust
   • Sometimes they have to buy before they develop complete trust, but there are ways to develop it.
   • Work on trust early and often with your prospect and customer relationships:
     • How can you remove the risk (of your product) for the customer?
     • How can I improve my trust with this person?
     • Use the trust model to understand how.

5. Trust Model

6. When in doubt about what you should do next, go prospect!

If you work from your home office as many salespeople in Agribusiness do, then you know you have to be disciplined in setting appointments and staying productive.  However, there come those moments in your daily or weekly routine when you are at a crossroads.  You are at a loss for what to do next.  While you are trying to figure it out, I recommend something a highly successful person once told me.  “When in doubt, go prospect”.

7. Downtime?

Agribusiness can be very seasonal.  With this seasonality comes downtime for the salesperson.  Customers can’t or don’t want to see you.  What to do?

• Fix your funnel – Your prospect funnel. we can always go back through it and make adjustments as to who is closer to signing and who is further out or maybe who we need to drop off.
• Think – During the busy times, you struggled over things. Now that it’s slower, you have time to think about how you can get better at those struggles.
• Evaluate your territory:
  • Do a SWOT analysis
  • Am I spending my time on customers in relation to revenue? Or am I spending a lot of time with low revenue prospects/customers?
• Network – times are slow for your peers. Use it to catch up with them.  Learn from them.
• Organize & Automate: this can be the time to get your “act together”.  What administrative tasks burn up your time?  How can you automate them for ease and efficiency?

Quick Story:  I once bragged/whined at how many miles I was driving every year, as many salespeople do.  My manager overheard this and said, “Why don’t you stop once in a while and sell something!”  A true story that created a lot of laughter with him at the time and I have used it over the years as a sales manager myself